webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

SPN2

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see State Policy Network for main and older info

MERRI OK

SEE ALEC

SEE DARK $

see tracy sharpe

see 2019 conf

interesting variation /anomaly on bigger trend?

html : maneuverable

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coordination: koch, etc

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‘Man who killed offshore wind’ now pushing fossil fuels and nuclear for Koch-funded Mackinac Center in Michigan - Energy and Policy Institute

EPI LEGIT

‘Man who killed offshore wind’ now pushing fossil fuels and nuclear for Koch-funded Mackinac Center in Michigan - Energy and Policy Institute

David Stevenson, who led a national campaign against offshore wind power for the Delaware-based Caesar Rodney Institute, is now fighting land-based solar and wind farms and promoting fossil fuels and nuclear power with the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a group funded by the donor network of petrochemical billionaires Charles and Chase Koch.

The Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) and Mackinac Center are both affiliated with the State Policy Network (SPN), which serves as the central hub of a 50-state network of right-leaning think tanks. SPN has long sought to derail state clean energy and climate change policies, and is funded by right-wing and corporate donors that include fossil fuel interests.

“The free-market policy approach employed by affiliated state think tanks helps to identify policies that are focused on helping all people to flourish,” SPN states in the FAQ section of its website.

SPN’s approach to energy policy contradicts its claim to promote policies based on free market principles. In 2024, SPN identified preventing states from adopting wind and solar power as one of the network’s legislative priorities. SPN further encourages politicians to pick winners and losers in the electricity sector by favoring coal, natural gas, and nuclear power.

Last year, SPN credited years of work by CRI and SPN’s Offshore Wind Working Group with laying the groundwork for the Trump administration’s efforts to halt the nation’s offshore wind boom.

Stevenson has said he resigned from his position at CRI in October over a salary dispute, after spending 14 years as Director of CRI’s Center for Energy & Environmental Policy. Stevenson landed his new job as the Mackinac Center’s Director of Energy and Environmental Policy by December. He replaced Jason Hayes, who left the Mackinac Center for the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute.

During his first few months in Michigan, Stevenson has supported the Mackinac Center’s efforts to derail Michigan’s Healthy Climate Plan and 100% by 2040 clean energy standard, and enable fossil fuels and nuclear power to supplant renewable energy sources like wind and solar power as the Great Lakes State’s primary power sources for the future.

At the Mackinac Center, Stevenson will have at his disposal the resources of an SPN group with significantly more funding than CRI and that, unlike CRI, has received hundreds of thousands of dollars in publicly reported funding annually from Koch-led groups in recent years.

CRI reported revenue of $463,000 for 2024 in its most recent annual report to the IRS. The Mackinac Center reported revenue of over $11 million for 2024, and its lobbying arm, Mackinac Center Action, reported nearly $1.5 million in revenue.

The Kochs’ Stand Together Trust and Stand Together Fellowship organizations reported contributing close to $1.7 million to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy between 2020 and 2024.* The Koch group Americans for Prosperity contributed $550,000 to Mackinac Center Action in 2023 and 2024.

Stevenson and the Mackinac Center use their opposition to wind and solar power as leverage to push for propping up uneconomic coal plants and increasing gas and nuclear power

“Two news outlets, including Bloomberg News, declared him [Stevenson] to be the man who killed offshore wind,” Jarrett Skorup, the Mackinac Center’s Vice President for Marketing and Communications, said in an article earlier this year announcing Stevenson’s hiring.

The Bloomberg story Skorup referenced was the first to report on a policy proposal prepared by Stevenson that showed how CRI’s anti-offshore wind campaign fit into a broader policy agenda that included using the promise of emerging small modular reactor technology (SMR) as leverage for delaying the planned closure of the coal-fired Indian River power plant in Delaware.

In early January of last year, Stevenson emailedcopies of a “SMR Nuclear proposal” he’d prepared for Delaware’s Governor Matt Meyer to Natalie Magdeburger, the mayor of Fenwick Island, along with a copy of a draft anti-offshore wind executive order intended for then president-elect Donald Trump. The Energy and Policy Institute obtained a copy of Stevenson’s email and the attachments through a records request to the Town of Fenwick Island.

[MANY DOCS]

Under Magdeburger’s leadership, the Town of Fenwick Island contributed $10,000 in taxpayer money to the CRI’s anti-offshore litigation fund, as requested by Stevenson.

“CRI is funded entirely from the voluntary contributions of individuals, foundations and corporations,” CRI says on the FAQ section of its website. “CRI neither solicits nor accepts government funding.”

State think tank affiliates of SPN must “not accept government funding,” according to SPN’s website.

The “SMR Nuclear proposal” Stevenson shared recommended that Meyer initiate a dialogue with Exelon and Delmarva Power about purchasing the Indian River coal-fired power plant in Delaware, which would close the following month. Stevenson’s proposal pointed to “headwinds” facing offshore wind, including from the incoming Trump administration, and recommended Exelon purchase the Indian River plant and eventually convert it to SMR.

“Since there is a long lead time to build SMR’s Exelon would need to operate with coal until the replacement becomes available,” Stevenson said in the proposal, which called for Exelon to sell the power from the plant to Delmarva Power, which is owned by Exelon.

Stevenson’s proposal said Delaware would also need to waive Indian Point’s compliance with the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) for the extended period when the plant would continue to burn coal. CRI has long opposed RGGI, the multi-state cap-and-trade program that’s helped reduce power sector greenhouse gas emissions in the Northeast and generated funding for energy efficiency and clean energy programs that have saved utility customers $2.7 billion as of 2023.

In 2017, Stevenson acknowledged that his consulting firm, Alternative Strategies Consulting, had worked for “utilities and large energy users” while under examination in a lawsuit where he challenged Delaware’s implementation of RGGI. Stevenson said at the time that he was required to keep the names of all of his clients confidential.

Republican state lawmakers in Delaware have since picked up on the idea of restarting the Indian River coal plant, and potentially converting it to SMR or gas. The plant’s owner, NRG, has said it closed the Indian River plant for economic reasons after two straight years of financial losses for the plant.

Earlier this year, Stevenson contributed to a report where the Mackinac Center laid out its 2026 energy policy recommendations for state lawmakers in Michigan, and called for replacing aging coal plants with nuclear, not wind and solar, power.

“… both the JH Campbell and Monroe coal-fired plants may be suitable locations for either large scale or small modular reactor units,” the Mackinac Center report said.

The report claimed that state lawmakers could save millions by delaying power plant closures, and linked to a December blog post by Stevenson defending the Trump administration’s controversial orders delaying the planned closure of the J.H. Campbell coal plant originally scheduled for May of last year. In the blog post, Stevenson pointed to a 2025 report where the Mackinac Center called for keeping the J.H. Campbell and Monroe plants running until 2040, long past their planned closure dates.

Consumers Energy, which owns the J.H. Campbell plant, has reported that the cost of complying with the Trump administration’s orders has reached $400 million. Consumers Energy is passing those costs on to electric utility customers throughout the 15-state Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) regional power grid that includes Michigan. Consumers Energy had previously expected that replacing the J.H. Campbell plant with solar power and energy storage would save Michigan customers $600 million by 2040.

In March, Trump appointees at the U.S. Department of Energy and the Department of Justice cited Stevenson’s blog post in a legal brief defending the J.H. Campbell plant orders against a legal challenge by Michigan’s Attorney General Dana Nessel. Trump’s Secretary of Energy Chris Wright has issued multiple orders over the past year requiring Consumers Energy to delay closing the J.H. Campbell plant using emergency powers under Section 202(c) of the Federal Power Act.

“The Trump Administration is crying wolf over a non-existent energy emergency, while at the same time undermining every effort made to increase the efficiency, affordability, and reliability of domestic energy markets,” Nessel said last month, after Wright issued his fifth order targeting the plant for continued operation.

In his blog post, Stevenson argued that the J.H. Campbell plant should remain open at least until the Michigan Public Service Commission approves a new generation plan for Consumers Energy, and that state utility regulators should consider nuclear and natural gas as options for replacing Campbell.

The Mackinac Center wants to keep a DTE coal plant that buys petroleum coke from Koch Carbon running until 2040, rather than closing it by 2032

The Monroe coal plant is owned by DTE, which currently plans to close two of the plant’s four coal-burning units in 2028, and the remainder in 2032. DTE expects to save customers $1.4 billion by closing the plant.

Fuel receipt data compiled by the Energy Information Administration through Form 923 shows the Monroe plant buys petroleum coke from Koch Carbon, a subsidiary of Koch Industries, where Charles Koch is chairman and CEO and his son Chase is an executive vice president. Koch Carbon’s piling of petroleum coke in Detroit drew public scrutiny and protest in 2013, prompting the company to move the piles to Ohio. DTE was listed as one of the recipients of the pet coke stored at the Detroit location in Koch Carbon’s response to a request for information from the EPA’s Air Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Branch.

Stevenson and the Mackinac Center want to repeal Michigan’s landmark clean energy laws

In March, Stevenson delivered testimony in support of Michigan House Energy Committee Chair Pauline Wendzel’s “Project Lighthouse” legislation, House Bills 5710 and 5711, which would repeal Michigan’s landmark [2023 clean energy laws](https://www.michigan.gov/mpsc/commission/workgroups/2023-energy-legislation#::text=The%20laws%20also%20include%20three%20one-time%20proceedings:,Increases%20the%20cap%20from%201%25%20to%li%25).

The legislation approved by Republicans in the Michigan House would slow down the “build-out of the cheapest, fastest energy, limiting Michigan’s ability to leverage federal investments and pushing the state toward more expensive, long-term fossil fuel infrastructure” if it becomes law, according to the Michigan League of Conservation Voters (LCV).

It would also remove “basic planning and reporting requirements, allowing pollution to go unreported and increasing costs as energy demand grows,” Michigan LCV said.

In his testimony in support of the legislation, Stevenson again pointed to a 2025 report prepared for the Mackinac Center by the Center for the American Experiment, a Minnesota-based SPN affiliate, and Always on Energy Research, a SPN partner. The Lignite Energy Council, a coal industry group that’s opposed 100% clean energy legislation in neighboring Minnesota, paid the Center of the American Experiment $115,000 for electrical grid and reliability modeling in 2023.

The 2025 reportclaimed that powering Michigan with coal, gas, large-scale nuclear, and SMR would be cheaper than transitioning to a mix of wind, solar, nuclear, and energy storage. In addition to postponing the closures of the J.H. Campbell and Monroe plants until 2040, the report called for outfitting the state’s existing coal and gas plants with carbon capture and storage (CCS). The report also claimed relying on wind, solar, and energy storage “could lead to numerous blackouts throughout the year.”

“Our study might be contested,” Stevenson acknowledged in his testimony.

SMR projects in the U.S. and globally have run into cost overruns, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. Multiple high-profile utility projects aimed at demonstrating the commercial viability of CCS for coal plants have devolved into costly economic boondoggles mired in public scandal.

Always on Energy Research has churned out similar reports for other SPN groups, including two reports focused on New England’s power grid prepared for the Americans for Prosperity Foundation and SPN groups based in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The Acadia Center, an environmental group working to halve carbon emissions in the Northeast by 2030, has published rebuttals of Always on Energy Research reports on New England.

“Misleading analysis grossly inflates the cost of clean energy, selectively ignores fuel savings, and proposes highly unrealistic alternative scenarios,” the Acadia Center said of Always on Energy Research’s methodology in its latest rebuttalin January.

Stevenson received funding from SPN to lead a nuclear waste discussion group with nuclear industry contacts

Isaac Orr of Always on Energy Research noted in a presentation to state lawmakers in North Dakota in September that Stevenson had joined Always on Energy Research as the group’s Director of Nuclear Development. The presentation included a slide that listed Stevenson’s nuclear industry contacts:

INDUSTRY CONTcts gfx always on

Orr’s presentation also said that Stevenson “currently chairs a discussion team to end the used nuclear fuel problem with key members of the nuclear industry, and states that may host recycling and storage through federal legislation.”

Stevenson said in an article last summer that he received a grant from SPN to form the discussion group, in which he described SPN affiliates’ work with supportive lawmakers to identify potential host-states for nuclear waste.

DonorsTrust contributed $50,000 to Always on Energy Research, $200,000 to CRI, nearly $2.9 million to the Mackinac Center, and over $9.8 million to the State Policy Network in 2024. DonorsTrust does not publicly disclose the names of its donors, but tax-exempt foundations that donate to Donor Trust are required to report those contributions publicly in their annual reports to the IRS.

Right-wing tech investor Peter Thiel’s foundation contributed $426,775 to DonorsTrust in 2024, and $1,276,111 in 2023. Thiel has backed major advanced nuclear and SMR start-ups like Oklo, Helion, and General Matters.

Stoking opposition to wind and solar farms

Last year, Stevenson sent President Trump’s political appointees to the U.S. Department of Interior a barrage of messages recommending actions the agencies could take to fulfill Trump’s campaign pledge to halt offshore wind development. EPI obtained copies of the communications through a FOIA request.

Stevenson served on Trump’s first Environmental Protection Agency transition team in 2016. The Mackinac Center has credited Stevenson’s earlier research as having “played a role” in killing the Clean Power Plan, the Obama-era EPA’s attempt to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants nationally for the first time.

“Hi, I have been actively opposing offshore wind for both economic and environmental reasons since 2017, and formed a national coalition, the American Coalition for Ocean Protection, assisting a number of beach community groups organize and grow,” Stevenson said in one email sent to multiple Trump administration officials at DOI in mid-April of 2025.

Stevenson’s anti-offshore wind campaign began in Delaware with the launch of CRI’s Save Our Beach View campaign, which stoked local opposition to offshore wind projects planned off the coasts of Maryland and Delaware.

In 2021, Stevenson and CRI announced the launch of the American Coalition for Ocean Protection (ACOP) to raise money for anti-offshore wind litigation through the Ocean Environment Legal Defense Fund. Membership in ACOP included anti-offshore wind groups and SPN think tanks based along the East Coast, plus the Mackinac Center in Michigan.

The Mackinac Center has a history of opposing offshore wind power development in the Great Lakes region, but supports continued operation of Enbridge’s Line 5 oil and gas pipeline. Tribes, environmentalists, and the State of Michigan have fought for years to shut down Line 5, which runs below the Straits of Mackinac that connects Lake Michigan and Lake Huron, due the risk of a catastrophic spill.

CRI initially served as a fiscal sponsor for the anti-offshore wind group Protect Our Coast NJ.

CRI also offered to serve as a conduit to raise money for anti-offshore wind “Save the Horseshoe Crabs” ads in response to an email from Dianna Harris of Protect Our Coast Delmarva obtained from the Town of Fenwick Island.

“We are planning a zoom call next week with a wider group of about 50 people that have been paying close attention so we may raise some money then,” Stevenson said in one email to Harris.

In 2025, Stevenson and David Wojiick of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow served as the lead signers on a letter that called on Trump’s Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum to revoke federal approvals for eleven offshore wind projects, including four that were already under construction. Cosigners included anti-offshore wind activists from the East and West Coasts, the Great Lakes region, and representatives of multiple SPN affiliate and partner groups.

Stevenson emailed the letter to Burgum to Trump appointees at DOI and BOEM. Laura Keehner Rigas, a White House Liaison to DOI, received a copy of the letter from Stevenson, and forwarded Stevenson’s email to four other political appointees.

“Thank you!” Deidre Kohlrus, a Senior Advisor to Burgum, responded to Rigas.

While operating out of Delaware, Stevenson signaled openness to solar and had solar panels on his roof. Upon arriving at the Mackinac Center, Stevenson quickly got to work attacking solar farms in Michigan.

“The future of electric generation is clearly nuclear, not solar, and state legislation needs to change in recognition of this reality,” Stevenson said in a January blog post for the Mackinac Center.

The Mackinac Center has for years served as a platform for promoting the views of anti-wind and anti-solar activists in Michigan, including Kevon Martis. In 2024, Martis was the public face of the Citizens for Local Choice ballot committee, which aimed to repeal a 2023 Michigan law that streamlined siting of wind and solar farms. Citizens for Local Choice failed to gather enough signatures to get the issue on the ballot, but received a $10,000 contribution from Tom Rastin, a retired gas industry executive who has bankrolled opposition to solar farms in neighboring Ohio.

“Solar projects often face resistance from local governments,” Stevenson wrote in his blog post in January.

“Recognizing local opposition, the Legislature gave the Michigan Public Service Commission authority to override local permit bans,” Stevenson said in the same blog. “Opponents to this law are attempting to repeal it through a ballot initiative.”

Citizens for Local Choice appears to be inactive, but Republican lawmakers in Michigan targeted the 2023 siting law this year as part of Project Lighthouse, as the Mackinac Center noted in another blog post.

Michigan ranked among the top 10 states for new solar additions during the first quarter of this year, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Stand Together Trust reported contributions to the Mackinac Center for Public Policy that totaled $525,000 in 2022 and $400,000 in 2023, both for general operating support, and $421,400 for 2024 for “KAP” (the Koch Associate Program). Stand Together Fellowship contributed $350,000to the Mackinac Center for education in 2020.*}:

Top photo is a screenshot from a Michigan House video of David Stevenson’s testimony before the Energy Committee on April 14, 2026*

Always On Energy ResearchAmerican Coalition for Ocean ProtectionCharles KochChase Kochcitizens for local choiceCommittee for a Constructive TomorrowDavid StevensonDavid WojiickDeidre KohlrusDepartment of InteriorDonald TrumpDoug BurgumEnbridgekevon martisKoch CarbonLaura Keehner RigasLignite Energy CouncilOcean Environment Legal Defense FundProtect Our Coast DelmarvaProtect Our Coast New JerseyStand Together Trusttom rastin

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ref report

Fueling the Opposition: How Fossil Fuel Interests Are Fighting to Kill Wind and Solar Farms Before They Are Built

Fueling the Opposition

How fossil fuel interests are fighting to kill wind and solar farms before they are built

Click here to download the full report as a PDF

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) has been working for more than ten years to research and document how fossil fuel interests are fighting to block new wind and solar farms by spreading disinformation about clean energy to try to undermine the strong, bipartisan support for renewable energy that exists among the public.

In this report, EPI reviews and summarizes key findings from this research in one place for the first time. We identify some of the major players involved in disinformation campaigns targeting renewable energy projects and technologies, including:

This report helps to answer frequently asked questions about the role the fossil fuel industry has played in stoking opposition to renewable energy projects and comes at a time when many of these same opponents are escalating their attacks and seeking to derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic investment in renewables.

INTRODUCTION

A national political network that’s funded by fossil fuel interests is fighting to block renewable energy projects

The State Policy Network (SPN), a nonprofit that sits atop a 50-state network of think tanks and associated advocacy groups, recently announced that it will focus on working with state lawmakers in 2024 to prevent states from adopting renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. SPN organizations frequently receive funding from fossil fuel interests, right-wing donors, and donor-advised funds that help conceal the origins of a considerable amount of the money that flows into the network.

The announcement came after SPN think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation had already spent years fighting to block the deployment of renewable energy resources like offshore wind. Still, the move marks a surprisingly public shift in legislative priorities for a network that traditionally framed its opposition to renewable energy mandates and subsidies as being based on principles of limited government.

The move may be sparking dissension within SPN’s ranks. The Show-Me Institute, a SPN think tank in Missouri, came out against a bill that would impose new siting limits on solar farms in the state, albeit while criticizing solar.

“Nonetheless, interfering in the free market and banning the sale of land for solar energy projects seems like a step too far,” Avery Frank, a policy analyst for the Show Me Institute, said of the anti-solar siting bill in a blog post. “While there are ample concerns with solar energy, why is the state government limiting property rights and picking winners and losers in the energy market?”

EPI previously documented SPN’s campaigns against state renewable energy standards for electric utilities and net metering policies that support the growth of rooftop solar in in-depth reports that covered 2013-14 and 2015.

Following the money from the fossil fuel industry

The latest analysis of annual tax reports filed by the network of nonprofits controlled by Charles Koch by the Center for Media & Democracy continues to show millions of dollars going to SPN groups and other organizations involved in anti-renewable energy campaigns. Koch is the billionaire CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, which profits from multiple sectors of the fossil fuel industry, but Koch Industries is just one part of the story.

EPI’s research exposed longtime gas industry executives Karen Buchwald Wright and Tom Rastin, whose family owns the gas compressor manufacturer Ariel Corporation, as the backers of multiple entities involved in anti-renewables efforts in states like Ohio and Michigan. An unredacted list of SPN donors obtained by EPI shows Wright also contributed $700,000 to SPN in 2019 alone, making Wright one of SPN’s four largest listed donors that year. The couple did not respond to an email from EPI seeking comment on the funding.

EPI found $750,000 in contributions to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in annual IRS Form 990s filed by the foundation of Joseph Craft, the CEO and chairman of fossil fuel producer Alliance Resource Partners, for the years 2020-2022.

TPPF also received just over $2 million since 2011 from the Brigham Family Foundation, which is led by Ben “Bud” Brigham of the Brigham Exploration Company, an oil and gas company based in Texas. $837,000 of that money has been earmarked for TPPF’s Life:Powered Initiative, a pro-fossil fuels and anti-renewable energy campaign, in the Brigham Family Foundation’s annual tax filings since 2017.

Joseph Craft and Bud Brigham did not respond to emails from EPI seeking comment on their foundations’ funding of TPPF.

In a sign that some fossil fuel companies are feeling more emboldened in their opposition to renewables in today’s polarized political environment, Consol Energy is now publicly sponsoring the “Not So Fast” campaign resisting the rapid transition from coal and gas to renewables. The new campaign features a website with the blunt name thecoalhardtruth.com and related social media channels.

Earlier research by EPI helped to reveal how Cloud Peak Energy, Murray Energy, and Peabody Energy secretly funded multiple groups that deny established climate science and spread disinformation about renewables, based on mandatory disclosures these major coal producers had to make in their bankruptcy case. EPI also uncovered over $1 million in Murray Energy payments to an Ohio law firm involved in opposing multiple renewable energy projects.

We showed how ExxonMobil, Kinder Morgan, and Occidental Petroleum quietly backed the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers opposition to American Electric Power’s plan to bring power from its North Central Wind Energy project to Texas before the Texas Public Utilities Commission. While that project moved forward without Texas’s support, TIEC had previously helped to kill AEP’s major Wind Catcher project on behalf of U.S. Steel, which has several subsidiaries involved in the coal industry.

EPI was the first to begin to expose the secret money trail between the coal-burning utility FirstEnergy and Samuel Randazzo, a longtime attorney and lobbyist for the Industrial Energy Users-Ohio and anti-renewables activists in the Buckeye State. Randazzo was later indicted on multiple state and federal criminal charges in connection with millions of dollars he secretly received from FirstEnergy before his appointment as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and Ohio Power Siting Board in 2019. New evidence continues to emerge in ongoing court cases and related regulatory investigations following Randazzo’s recent suicide.

Front groups for the fossil fuel industry have been coordinating with anti-renewables activists for well over a decade

Many of the arguments espoused today by anti-renewables activists can be traced back to the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns against climate science and global action to limit greenhouse gas emissions during the 1990s.

One example is a 1997 paper, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green,’” authored by Institute for Energy Research (IER) president Robert L. Bradley and published by the Cato Institute. Both IER and Cato have deep ties to the Koch network. Lisa Linowes, today a top anti-renewables activist, described Bradley’s work as a “seminal policy paper” a decade later in 2007 on her website windaction.org.

Tom Tanton, an energy consultant who worked with fossil fuel industry front groups like IER, the Heartland Institute, and American Tradition Institute began to cultivate relationships with anti-wind activists by the 2000s.

What emerged was a tight-knit network of anti-renewables diehards who can’t exactly be described as Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) activists because they oppose all wind farms, regardless of location.

One Ohio-based anti-wind activist, Tom Stacy, eventually became a paid consultant for IER and the coal industry. Tanton still lists “friend” of Save Western Ohio (Stacy’s old anti-wind group) as his professional experience for 2009 on his LinkedIn profile. Stacy co-founded the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions and currently sits on the board of directors for the National Wind Watch, both clearinghouses for information utilized by anti-renewables activists nationally.

Other anti-renewables activists claim to be unpaid for their efforts, but have not been shy about publicly partnering with groups that do receive fossil fuel money:

These anti-renewables activists and the fossil fuel industry funded groups with whom they’ve teamed up represent some of the most prolific sources of information and strategies used by NIMBY activists in fights against wind and solar farms all over the country.

Opponents allied with the fossil fuel industry seek to use a mix of disinformation, litigation, exclusionary siting and zoning laws and ordinances, and moratoria and bans to block deployment of renewables. Opposition to renewable energy is also being fueled by the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories online.

Local residents who choose to lease their land for wind and solar farms are often villainized by project opponents. In South Carolina, state law enforcement officials are investigating death threats received by members of the York County Council for supporting the construction of a solar panel factory.

People who are skeptical of renewable development, but independent of the fossil fuel industry – who may have legitimate concerns about how a wind or solar farm may impact views, wildlife, agricultural lands, and other aspects of their communities – may be more open to public education, dialogue, and reasonable compromises that allow projects to move forward. Public input can even result in improvements to project plans, such as the addition of innovative agrivoltaics approaches that enable dual use of land for agriculture and solar power generation.

Foes of renewables allied with the fossil fuel industry tend to support the expansion of coal, gas, and oil extraction and infrastructure, and oppose what they call government mandates aimed at limiting the environmental and public health impacts of fossil fuels. Local residents whose concerns about a particular renewable energy project are based on values like conservation, by contrast, often support wind and solar power in general and may be concerned about problems like climate change that are caused by fossil fuels.

Renewables opponents who are paid by the fossil fuel industry sometimes pose as NIMBY activists. For example, a media outlet owned by Metric Media, which is known for its right-wing bias, reported that the emcee of an anti-solar town hall meeting in Ohio was a local farmer. A local journalist soon revealed that the emcee was actually a chief strategist for a political consulting firm that worked for a front group for the gas industry.

Public opinion research has long shown deep distrust of the oil and gas industry among the public. A new national labs survey shows that people living near solar farms trust project neighbors, nonprofit and community organizations, and universities more than other sources for information about energy projects. Exposing the money behind fossil fuel industry front groups and political operatives who pose as NIMBY activists, think tanks, and experts is a critical step to helping the public know disinformation when they see it.

The forces aligned against renewables are powerful but not immune to public scrutiny and accountability, which is why fossil fuel interests generally seek to hide their support. For example, a spokesperson for The Empowerment Alliance once told a reporter that the pro-gas and anti-renewables group won’t disclose its funders because its donors don’t want to face public protests.

NIMBY activists have also retreated from formal alliances with SPN think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) when the funding those groups have received from the fossil fuel industry creates controversy. For instance, a Nantucket-based group recently publicly disassociated itself from the CRI-backed anti-offshore American Coalition for Ocean Protection after research and reporting followed the money trail from CRI and ACOP back to the fossil fuel industry.

A WHO’S WHO OF RENEWABLE ENERGY OPPONENTS

Fossil Fuel Industry Funders:

Alliance Resource Partners: ....

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CORP ROLE

12 22 kpfa

17 (so gop) states pass laws to prot dark $

eg 1

in a state with a reputation for political scandal, Florida’s 2020 elections saw a particularly brazen scheme to swing three state Senate races.A “dark money” group sent out mailers promoting the campaigns of three “sham” candidates—in one case, diverting enough votes to a candidate with thesame last nameas former Democratic Sen. José Javier Rodríguez to defeat him. Rodríguez lost by just 32 votes, and Democratic candidates in the other two districts were defeated as well.

The Orlando Sentinel reported that the group behind the misleading mailers, which has renamed itself as Grow United, received a $1.15 million donation from an organization closely tied to the business trade association Associated Industries of Florida. A Dec. 2 Sentinel investigation detailed the group’s consultants’ close coordination withelectric monopoly Florida Power & Light, as well as the power utility’s ties to state Republican leaders, who control the chamber and can block bills like one that would empower solar electricity generators.

Florida organizations supporting Democrats also donated $700,000 to Grow United to obscure the funding source behind expenses like election mailers,a revelation that led to the resignation of a senior House adviser.

Last month, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs launched an investigation into one of Grow United’s donors. The “sham” candidate in Rodriguez’s race pled guilty last August and is cooperating in testimony against the consultant who allegedly put him up to it, former Republican state Sen. Frank Artiles. Artiles has pled not guilty in the case.

With dark money rampant in the state, especially in state Democratic primaries, a Florida Republican is seeking to make it a crime for public officials to request or release information about the sources of money behind election spending by groups that are not required to reveal their donors.

In January, Republican Florida Rep. Toby Overdorf introduced the Personal Information Protection Act (H.B. 1547), which would prohibit public agencies from requesting that any individual, corporation, or other entity release personal information besides what is already required by campaign finance and other laws, or when they have a lawful warrant to seek the information. The bill would also prohibit agencies from publishing such information they may have in their possession. Florida Senator Joe Gruters introduced a similar bill in the Senate (S.B. 1848) that would do the same thing, but only for personal information of donors and other individuals affiliated with 501(c)(3) organizations, though its sponsor says he’s willing to broaden it to cover other types of groups. Each bill would allow for the right of civil action and violators could face possible prison time of up to 90 days.

The House version would prevent campaign finance regulators from trying to force non-disclosing organizations like (c)(4) nonprofits to reveal their donors when they spend money to influence elections in the state.

The new Florida bill is modeled after a policy propagated by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a nonprofit that brings together corporate lobbyists with conservative lawmakers to advance legislation that favors business interests. Rep. Overdorf is one of about 31 Florida elected officials listed as ALEC members as of April 2021, according to a state public records request from the nonprofit Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). Gruters is the chair of the Florida Republican Party, re-elected to that position last month, and is a close ally of former President Trump, having co-chaired his 2016 state campaign.

In recent years, such bills criminalizing the disclosure of politically-active nonprofits’ donors have spread to a number of states, passing into law in 2021 in Arkansas, Iowa, South Dakota, and Tennessee.

“These types of bills are unnecessary—there are already constitutional protections for donors that would actually face threats, harassment, or reprisal from public identification—and their only true achievement may be to simply impede transparency for politically active nonprofits and make dark money darker,” said Aaron McKean, legal counsel for state and local reform at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, which works to increase transparency in democracy.

“Voters have a right to know which wealthy special interests are spending big money to influence their vote and rig the political system in their favor,” said McKean. “Florida’s legislators should be focused on ensuring voters know the true sources of money used to influence elections.”

A poll commissioned by the Campaign Legal Center previously found strong bipartisan support for “publicly disclosing contributions to organizations involved in elections” so that wealthy special interests cannot operate with impunity and politicians can be held accountable.

florida has led the nation in public corruption convictions for much of the past couple decades. From 1976 to 2018, Florida was among the top 10 states in federal corruption convictions per 10,000 residents, according to a report from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

A longtime state ethics watchdog tells Sludge that the practice of routing funds through dark money groups will proliferate in the state until the Legislature has the political will to stop it.

“I don’t think there will be any reduction in dark money in elections, it’s just going to increase,” said Ben Wilcox, research director of the nonprofit Integrity Florida. “The campaign finance system in Florida is so dysfunctional, it makes this sort of activity so easy to do, and easy to hide the source of campaign donations. There are all sorts of loopholes.”

With the end of Florida’s legislative session coming next month and the bills not gathering co-sponsors, Wilcox thinks that the state’s investigation into the Grow United case has likely chilled their support this year. But Wilcox tells Sludge, “The fact that they filed the bills this year, to further protect the sources of dark money, it tells you whether or not the bills pass this year, they probably will come next year. The powers that be are intent on keeping dark money dark.”

Wilcox also pointed to a loophole in state campaign finance law that allows unlimited donations to state political committees controlled by politicians. “It’s a form of legal corruption,” he said.

“When you look at Florida Power & Light, they give the maximum to various candidates, and then all the big money goes into the political committees, donations of $100,000 and more.” State campaign finance records show that in recent years, the committee Friends of Ron DeSantis has received donations of over $10 million total from Citadel hedge fund manager and GOP megadonor Ken Griffin, $850,000 from investment company Spring Bay Capital, $200,000 from Kane Financial Services, and nearly $125,000 from the Florida Home Builders Association, among many others. 

Last May, Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law S.B. 1890, a bill sponsored by Republican State Sen. Ray Rodrigues, that would have set a $3,000 cap on contributions to political committees supporting or opposing constitutional amendments until the measure obtains enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. Florida lawmakers left untouched the ability for donors to make unlimited donations to candidates’ political committees. The law was blocked in federal court on July 1, the day it was slated to take effect, and in August Florida’s Attorney General did not appeal, leaving the injunction in place.

The Tampa Bay Times reported last month that lobbyist Jorge Chamizo provided the bill language to staff of Senate sponsor Gruters, working on behalf of two groups: People United for Privacy and Opportunity Solutions Project.According to CMD, which tracks dark money groups, People United for Privacy was formed by the State Policy Network, an umbrella organization of right-wing causes. Opportunity Solutions Project is the advocacy arm of the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, a State Policy Network member.

This year, Jorge Chamizo is registered to lobby for a long list of business clients, including Associated Industries of Florida and Duke Energy, which was an ALEC member as recently as 2020. Other clients of Chamizo this year include Peoples Gas System, Tampa Electric Company, health insurer Anthem, health care provider Centene, and Uber.

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spn 2019

Wednesday October 30, 2019

General, Wednesday

Forecasting the Future of Pension Reform in the States (Sponsored byReason Foundation)

Come enjoy complimentary cocktails and discuss the future of pension reform in the states with experts from the Pension Integrity Project at Reason Foundation. Learn about trends gleaned from their technical consulting work with reformers in the field in states like Michigan, Colorado, and Arizona, and explore the latest on howunderfunded teacher pensions are undermining school budgets and fiscal health. The session will also offer a practical and achievable vision for the future of public sector retirement benefits and pension solvency.

Speakers

Zachary Christensen

Senior Policy Analyst, Reason Foundation

Zachary Christensen is a senior policy analyst for Reason Foundation's Pension Integrity Project,which develops advanced pension analyses and advises stakeholders so they can build more secure retirement plans for public workers. Christensen's public policy research has primarily... Read More →

Ryan Frost

Policy Analyst, Pension Integrity Project, Reason Foundation

Ryan Frost is a policy analyst with the Pension Integrity Project at Reason Foundation. Prior to joining Reason, Ryan was a senior research and policy manager for the Washington state law enforcement officers’ and firefighters’ pension plan board. Ryan’s focus during his seven... Read More →

Steven Gassenberger

Policy Analyst, Reason Foundation

Steven Gassenberger is a policy analyst with Reason Foundation's Pension Integrity Project. Prior to joining Reason, Steven worked as a consumer advocacy manager for Xerox Corporation specializing in financial consumer regulation and compliance. He also worked as a senior associate... Read More →

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https://inthesetimes.com/features/janus_supreme_court_unions_investigation.html

no lnx grafs

Behind Janus: Documents Reveal Decade-Long Plot to Kill Public-Sector Unions

The Supreme Court case Janus v. AFSCME is poised to decimate public-sector unions—and it’s been made possible by a network of right-wing billionaires, think tanks and corporations.

MARY BOTTARI

FEBRUARY 22 | MARCH ISSUE

THE ROMAN GOD JANUS WAS KNOWN FOR HAVING TWO FACES. It is a fitting name for the U.S. Supreme Court case scheduled for oral arguments February 26, Janus v. American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Council 31, that could deal a devastating blow to public-sector unions and workers nationwide.

In the past decade, a small group of people working for deep-pocketed corporate interests, conservative think tanks and right-wing foundations have bankrolled a series of lawsuits to end what they call “forced unionization.” They say they fight in the name of “free speech,” “worker rights” and “workplace freedom.” In briefs before the court, they present their public face: carefully selected and appealing plaintiffs like Illinois child-support worker Mark Janus and California schoolteacher Rebecca Friedrichs. The language they use is relentlessly pro-worker.

From the March 2018 issue

Behind closed doors, a different face is revealed. Those same people cheer “defunding” and “bankrupting” unions to deal a “mortal blow” to progressive politics in America.

A key director of this charade is the State Policy Network (SPN), whose game plan is revealed in a union-busting toolkit uncovered by the Center for Media and Democracy. The first rule of the national network of right-wing think tanks that are pushing to dismantle unions? “Rule #1: Be pro-worker, not anti-union. … Don’t rant against unions. … Using phrases like ‘union fat cats’ and ‘corrupt union bosses’ and other negative language reduces support for reform.”

And yet, SPN groups have systematically spearheaded attacks on unions and workers in statehouses and courtrooms nationwide. The Janus case, and its precursor, Friedrichs v. the California Teachers Association, represent SPN’s most audacious move yet, an effort to kneecap the unions of public-sector workers—including teachers, nurses, sanitation workers, park rangers, prison guards, police and firefighters—in a single blow.

“TRUST TEACHERS!”

On Jan. 11, 2016, about 100 people bundled in coats and mittens mill around the Supreme Court steps. They hold signs with little red apples that read, “Trust Teachers!” and “Respect Teachers? Then respect their First Amendment rights!”

From a distance, it looks like a teachers’ rally. A closer look reveals an odd array of participants. Grover Norquist, the man who wanted to drown government in a bathtub, cheerfully declines an interview as he breezes by.Daniel Turner, who worked for the education reform task force of the far-right American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), waves a “Trust Teachers!” sign from behind the podium. Near him stands Chantal Lovell from SPN’s Mackinac Center for Public Policy, a group credited with jamming a union-busting bill through Michigan’s lame duck legislature in 2012. A representative from SPN’s Arizona-based Goldwater Institute is present, as is a fellow from the Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity (who also declines an interview).

The night before, SPN organized a dinner for representatives of its member groups who had flown in for the oral arguments. Among its members were the lawyers representing the plaintiffs in Friedrichs and 12 groups that had filed supporting amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) briefs. The suit was filed on behalf of Rebecca Friedrichs and nine other California teachers who wanted to stop paying their “fair share fees”—money paid by non-union members to cover the costs of collective bargaining.

On the courthouse steps, a woman with a bullhorn tries to rev up the audience. “Who do we trust?” she asks. “Teachers,” murmurs the crowd. “Who?” she yells. “Teachers!” Now they have the hang of it. The podium is emblazoned with the hashtag #IStandWithRebecca.

Friedrichs deadlocked the Court 4-4 after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, leaving the status quo of union fees in place. Expect a repeat of this courthouse scene February 26. SPN is once again rallying the troops and a #StandWithMark hashtag is already circulating.

Janus has its origins in a lawsuit filed by billionaire Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner. Rauner issued an executive order in 2015 instructing Illinois to stop collecting fair share fees. At the same time, he filed a federal lawsuit to speed the issue to the U.S. Supreme Court. Two SPN member groups—the Illinois Policy Institute and the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation—joined the suit with plaintiff Mark Janus, who makes a much more sympathetic poster child than a billionaire venture capitalist. When Rauner was found not to have standing, Janus was allowed to pursue the suit.

Janus is a child-support worker employed by the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services. “The union voice is not my voice,” Janus wrote in a Chicago Tribune op-ed. “The union’s fight is not my fight. But a piece of my paycheck every week still goes to the union.”His lawyers will argue before the Court that if “money is speech” in a post-Citizens United world, then fair share fees are unconstitutional “forced” or “coerced” speech.

The Court decided 40 years ago in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education that fair share fees are constitutional.The decision tried to balance the right of a union to exist against the rights of any workers who don’t want to be members. Since unions must represent all employees in contract negotiations, the Court held that nonmembers could be assessed a fee to cover the costs associated with this representation. But, the Court said, nonmembers could not be charged for costs associated with political activities. Today, fair share fees and political fees are separated. The Abood decision is not a good enough compromise for the Janus lawyers, who argue everything a public-sector union does is political.

Overturning Abood would be “a right to a free ride, nothing more, nothing less,” says Joel Rogers, a University of Wisconsin law professor. “There’s no question that it’ll have a devastating financial effect on public-sector unions, at least in the short tem.”

THE TROIKA

Media coverage has focused almost uniformly on the personal stories of Mark Janus and Rebecca Friedrichs, and the complex legalities of their cases. That coverage obscures the bigger picture.

“It’s a mistake to focus on the individual plaintiffs,” says Alexander Hertel-Fernandez, an assistant professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. “Instead, the focus should be on the conservative advocacy groups. … ALEC, SPN and the Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity have all worked hand in glove over the past several years to cut back the strength of public-sector unions. The effects of this case will be felt far beyond the plaintiffs.” 

Infographic ]

ALEC was founded in 1973 as a venue for politicians and corporate lobbyists to meet behind closed doors and draft cookie-cutter legislation, known as “model bills,” that promote corporate interests. The Center for Media and Democracy published ALEC’s library of secret bills in 2011. One stack of model bills aims to privatize public services and public schools; another stack aims to break unions.

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) is a right-wing political advocacy group founded by billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch, owners of Koch Industries. AFP, fueled by a large network of millionaire and billionaire funders, spends millions on TV ads in election cycles and serves as the Kochs’ “grassroots” lobbying arm. AFP representatives participate in both ALEC and SPN.

SPNis the least well-known of the three groups, in part because it is made up of dozens of innocuous-sounding “institutes” and “centers” like the Illinois Policy Institute and the Mackinac Center. Yet SPN’s 66 think tanks and 87 associated groups take in more than $80 million annually, eight times the budget of ALEC.

SPN’s predecessor, the Madison Group, was launched by ALEC in the 1980s to be a Heritage Foundation in each of the states, at the suggestion of President Ronald Reagan to millionaire Thomas Roe. Today, SPN members provide the local presence needed to make ALEC proposals appear homegrown.

In red states, SPN groups provide the cookie-cutter studies, the “expert” legislative testimony and the media commentary to back ALEC’s union-busting bills, school voucher programs and other Koch political priorities. In blue states, these think tanks use door-knocking campaigns to solicit workers to quit their unions, “recertification” efforts to force unions to vote annually on whether to exist, and lawsuits aimed at demobilizing organized labor.

“This form of ultra-conservatism is geared toward making sure that there is no organized power outside of big business and wealthy, organized donors,” says Theda Skocpol, a Harvard professor of government and sociology. For that reason, pulling back the curtain on how this machine operates and is funded is vital to workers’ interests.

The work of this “troika,” as Skocpol and Hertel-Fernandez call it, is underwritten by corporations, right-wing foundations and a handful of billionaires. Most corporate donors have managed to keep their identities secret, but ALEC’s industry advisory board, which helps fund the organization, has included representatives of Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, Pfizer, State Farm and other giant firms. Known past funders of AFP include the American Petroleum Institute and Reynolds American. SPN’s past donors include Altria/Phillip Morris, AT&T and Time Warner.

Another big chunk of the funding for the troika—tens of millions over the past decade—flows from Donors Trust and Donors Capital, two donor-advised funds connected to the Koch brothers’ network. These funds help donors cloak their identities.

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee, with more than $900 million in assets, is another major operational funder. Harry Bradley started the foundation in 1942, shortly after the death of his brother, Lynde, with profits from their electronics parts manufacturing company. Like the Koch brothers’ father, Fred Koch, Harry was a big supporter of the far-right, anti-civil rights John Birch Society. He frequently hosted its founder, Robert Welch, for public presentations at the company’s Milwaukee headquarters. Today, Bradley is one of the SPN network’s biggest benefactors, funneling $133 million to network groups since the 1980s. Bradley has also funded ALEC and AFP.

Across the country, in statehouses and in court, the troika has transmuted this flood of money into a two-pronged attack on unions. But, Skocpol says, “This is not what the public wants. It is entirely a political effort to destroy the most significant, organized political counterweight to the extreme Right.” In fact, the popularity of unions is on the rise. A 2017 Gallup poll found that the percentage of Americans who approve of unions had risen 5 points in a single year, to 61 percent, the highest since 2003.

IN THE STATEHOUSE

A trove of Bradley Foundation documents were leaked in 2016 by a sophisticated group of international hackers. The documents reveal the inner workings of a 15-year effort to build infrastructure in battleground states to support the Republican Party and tear down unions.

In 2003, Bradley launched its disingenuously named Working Group on Employee Rights at a private meeting in Washington, D.C. The group includedGrover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform (an SPN member) and Paul Kersey, who has worked for the National Right to Work Committee, the Illinois Policy Institute and the Mackinac Center, three of the nation’s premier union-busting operations. A later meeting would bring in ALEC, SPN and the anti-union front group Center for Union Facts. What emerged is a stream of underwriting for think tanks, anti-union litigation efforts, anti-union media groups, opposition research shops and even an anti-union alternative to teachers unions (the Association of American Educators).

[pix Bradley Foundation board chair and multimillionare James Arthur “Art” Pope (L) and Bradley board member and billionaire Diane M. Hendricks

In 2009, Bradley CEO Michael Grebe, once an attorney for the Republican National Committee, backed a little-known county executive, Scott Walker. Grebe took a highly unusual step for a “philanthropist,” becoming the chair of the Walker campaign for governor.

As a result of the financial crisis, Democrats were swept out of office in 2010 and a wave of Republicans took control of 26 state legislatures (up from 14) and six new governors’ mansions. This was the opportunity the groups had been waiting for.

Bradley suddenly ramped up its annual giving to AFP from $20,000 to $520,000. The head of AFP, Tim Phillips, visited Walker before he was sworn in, urging him to provoke a showdown with public-employee unions. The group was working on a similar strategy in Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Weeks after taking office, Walker declared that Wisconsin was facing a dire financial crisis and introduced his Act 10 “budget repair bill,” which would slash $900 million in school spending and gut the state’s collective bargaining law. Walker justified the bill by declaring repeatedly that the state was “broke.”[2 SANTAS]  But in a Congressional grilling a month later, when pressed by Ohio Rep. Dennis Kucinich on how much money the measure would save, Walker admitted, “It doesn’t save any.” (Similarly, when Rauner issued his executive order to block fair share fees, he claimed budget deficits forced his hand, but in front of a friendly audience at the Hoover Institute in California, he admitted that the executive order had “nothing to do with any of the budget.”)

The Wisconsin gambit has been repeated in red state after red state. All told, 15 states have passed bills restricting collective bargaining by public workers, and six states—Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Kentucky and West Virginia—passed ALEC union-busting right-to-work bills despite mass protests. In some states, the public has taken to the ballot to turn back the attack: Voters in Ohio reversed the measure with a veto referendum in 2011; Missouri has a referendum on the ballot for 2018.

IN THE COURTS

States under Democratic control required different strategies. A blitzkrieg of lawsuits against unions were unleashed, including the 2012 Knox v. SEIU in California,  the 2014 Parrish v. Dayton in Minnesota, the 2014 Harris v. Quinn in Illinois, the 2015 D’Agostino v. Patrick in Massachusetts, the 2015 Bain v. California Teachers Association and the 2016 Friedrichs. These cases did not originate with public workers, critics claim, but were instead initiated by right-wing lawyers who sought out clients to advance a union-busting agenda.

The National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF) [DARK MONEY DOC? ATI?] supplied attorneys for most of these cases and is the lead attorney in Janus. Founded in 1968 with a mission to “eliminate coercive union power,” the foundation (along with its advocacy arm) is an SPN member with $14 million in annual revenue. NRTWLDF is funded by the usual suspects: Donors Trust and Donors Capital, the Bradley Foundation, and the anti-public-school Walton Foundation, run by Walmart’s founding family.

A long list of amicus curiae briefs from a variety of think tanks may make it seem as if the Janus side has broad national support. In fact, 13 of 19 briefs filed by organizations (rather than governments or individuals) for the plaintiff come from current or former members of SPN. Seventeen were filed by groups that have received funding from Bradley, Donors Capital and Donors Trust.

Infographic]

Another funder of this work is the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), a trade association affiliated with ALEC and SPN that filed anti-union briefs in Friedrichs and Janus. Why should private-sector NFIB care about public-sector unions at all? In his book The One Percent Solution: How Corporations Are Remaking America, One State at a Time, political economist Gordon Laferquotes a 2015 NFIB blog post: “Because ... if unions are dealt a blow in the public sector, private sector businesses might see decreased pressure from pro-labor forces on issues ranging from the minimum wage to paid sick leave and other employee benefits.”

Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon’s Labor Education and Research Center, insists the corporate money behind these institutions should not be overlooked. “Who are the most serious opponents to the corporate agenda on the minimum wage, paid sick leave, health insurance and NAFTA free trade?” Lafer asks. “[Corporations] think they will get rid of their best-funded opponents on a whole range of issues.”

DEFUNDING THE DEMOCRATS

Grover Norquist is excited about a potential Janus victory for another reason. “Seven million public-sector employees who pay between $4 billion and $8 billion a year in dues—a third of them will quit [paying],” he told The Atlantic. “Now try funding the modern Democratic Party without union dues—good luck.”

While fair share fees do not directly fund union political activity, any loss of funding could weaken a union’s organizational capacity, ultimately undercutting electoral clout. According to FollowTheMoney.org,unions contributed an estimated $602 million to state and federal races and ballot initiatives in 2016. Slightly more than half of that ($319 million) came from public-sector unions. In 2016, labor was the largest contributor to state-level Democratic candidates, accounting for at least 18 percent ($128.7 million) of their total fundraising. Unions also mobilize their workers as persuasive door knockers at election time who can explain who they are and what they fight for.

Research by academics like Columbia’s Hertel-Fernandez suggests that the erosion of public-sector union membership by ALEC bills has also dampened political participation. His most recent study, based on data from 1980 to 2016, shows thatright-to-work laws decrease Democratic presidential vote share by 3.5 percent and depress overall turnout.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS

It would be imprudent for Bradley or SPN to be as blunt as Norquist in public (given their tax-exempt status as charitable organizations), but internal Bradley and SPN documents are clear about their goal of bleeding the Democratic Party of funding.

Norquist has long described unions, public-sector workers and trial lawyers as the funding “pillars” of the Democratic Party. In internal documents prepared for its board of directors, Bradley staff channels Norquist and recommends continued funding for the NRTDLF because “big Labor and trial attorneys … are the two principal funding pillars of the Left.” Bradley has gifted the anti-affirmative action Center for Individual Rights, which represented the Friedrichs plaintiffs, with more than $1.5 million.

Materials prepared for the Bradley board track Friedrichs and the cases leading up to it. A map from the pro-worker Economic Policy Institute is included to show states that allow fair share fees, annotated to show the potential monetary losses for unions at $500 million to $1 billion per year. Bradley staff quote “the leftist In These Times,” which characterizedFriedrichs as a case “that could decimate public-sector unions.”

Another case leading up to Janus was Bain v. California Teachers Association, which attacked the way the union processed political fees. Bradley staff called Bain and Friedrichs combined a “powerful ‘one-two’ punch” against unions, predicting that “all that would remain to fund the unions’ political apparatus would be the hardcore teacher members.”

For Bradley, the anti-union work was a twofer. Bradley has long been a proponent of the privatization of America’s schools; America’s public school teachers and powerful teachers unions stand in the way. Internal documents show Bradley staff bluntly advocating projects to “defund teachers unions and achieve real education reform” at the same time.

“Teachers unions are at the heart of all this,” says Harvard’s Theda Skocpol. “Teachers exist in every community across the country. They are educated, they speak up, and they care about public schools. Break the teachers unions and you break the organizational power that exists in and around the Democratic Party at the state and local level.”

In an April 2016 fundraising letter obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and published in the Guardian, SPN CEO Tracie Sharpe asks her readers to help strike “a major blow to the Left’s ability to control government.”

I am writing you today to share with you our bold plans to permanently break the power of unions this year. ... I am talking about the kind of dramatic reforms we’ve seen in recent years in Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan and now West Virginia—freeing teachers and other government workers from coercive unionism—and spreading them across the nation. … I’m talking about permanently depriving the Left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle.

SPN’s secret union-busting toolkit even celebrates this February 2016 quote from a Wisconsin AFSCME leader talking about the devastating impact of Walker’s Act 10 bill: “Do we have less boots on the ground? Yeah. Do we give the same amount of money to candidates? No.”

The Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Wash.—a featured and feted SPN member—has been equally explicit in its fundraising letters. One 2014 letter obtained by the Guardian reads, “The Freedom Foundation has a proven plan for bankrupting and defeating government unions through education, litigation, legislation and community activation.”

A Freedom Foundation-produced brochure, titled “Undue Influence: Public Unions’ Cycle of Power, Electioneering,” shows multiple charts and graphs on union spending in campaigns and elections. The graph “Democrats’ Dependence on Union Funds” lists 31 Washington state Democratic legislators and their union campaign contributions. The accompanying text argues that “the problem associated with union electioneering” could be solved by weakening unions and eliminating fair share fees.

SPN member groups have also cited their union-busting efforts as key to electing Trump. The Wall Street Journal profiled Tracie Sharpe in a post-election puff piece on its editorial page, titled “The Spoils of the Republican State Conquest.” She tells the paper that Wisconsin and Michigan were only “thinly blue” and that the destruction of the states’ unions has put the GOP on better footing.“When you chip away at one of the power sources, that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote,” Sharpe chirped. “I think that helps—for sure.”

Unions lost 136,000 members in Wisconsin; Trump won by 23,000 votes. “Did the labor reforms enacted in Wisconsin and neighboring Michigan help Donald Trump win those states?” asks Norquist associate Matt Patterson in the Daily Signal. “No question in my mind. Hard to fight when your bazooka’s been replaced by a squirt gun.”

Most of the groups pursuing this agenda, including Bradley and SPN, are tax-exempt charitable groups. After Citizens United ushered in a surge of dark money groups, the Obama administration’s IRS attempted to distinguish real charitable organizations from false ones, only to have the effort shut down by tremendous blowback from the Right. Ever since, the IRS has been reluctant to take action on these kinds of issues.

“There is simply no basis in law to find that defunding or attacking unions is a tax-exempt charitable activity,” says attorney Marcus Owen, former director of the IRS’s exempt organizations division. “On the contrary, such actions are deeply infused with private benefit to employer interests and political party interests—but not with community or public benefit, which is required under the law.”

DEGRADATION OF CRITICAL SERVICES

The Democratic Party is not the only loser in this scenario; real harm will be done to U.S. workers and their families. Following World War II, unions expanded dramatically, representing 35 percent of the workforce at their peak in the mid-1950s and helping to usher in an era of shared prosperity. According to the Economic Policy Institute, unionized workers make 20 percent more, on average, than other workers, but their ranks have shrunk to 6.5 percent of private-sector workers and 34.4 percent of public-sector workers in 2017.This decline has exactly tracked the decline of the American middle class.

The attack on public-sector workers is also an attack on women and African Americans, groups disproportionally represented in public-sector unions. According to a National Women’s Law Center analysis, women make up 55 percent of union-represented public-sector workers, and a 2010 analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research shows that African Americans are 30 percent more likely than the overall workforce to hold public-sector jobs.

One silver-lining argument contends that an adverse Janus ruling presents an opportunity for unions to simply do their job better: Talk to every member, innovate on services and benefits, and do the kind of “deep organizing” needed to outmaneuver wealthier opponents. The data from Wisconsin, however, is not encouraging. Five years after Walker’s draconian Act 10 bill, Wisconsin’s union membership rate had dropped from 14.2 percent to 8.3 percent of the workforce. The impact of Janus would be less immediate but would snowball over time: Weaker, less effective unions have a harder time attracting members.

“If fair share fees are struck down, it simply won’t be possible to provide the expertise to bargain with employers to increase wages and benefits,” says John Matthews, the retired executive director of Madison Teachers Inc., a National Education Association affiliate in Wisconsin.

The erosion of public-sector unions means that public-sector jobs will pay less and become less attractive, degrading not just a source of good jobs but the critical public functions these workers serve. [THE COMMONS] The average annual salary and benefits for teachers in Wisconsin dropped by $10,843 after Act 10 was passed, a 12.6 percent reduction. The result has been a staggering shortage of teachers, including an “extreme” shortage in math and science,forcing the state’s independent Department of Education to reluctantly issue “emergency” teacher’s licenses.

For the most part, the right-wing machine’s deeply financed, organized and focused attack on workers has rolled its agenda through without meaningful resistance from Democrats. To be sure, in Wisconsin, the union-busting plan was met with one of the largest sustained mass protests in labor history and a 16-day occupation of the Capitol. Fourteen Democratic state senators even fled to Illinois to block a vote on Act 10. But too often, the Democratic Party has been asleep at the switch. First Jimmy Carter, then Bill Clinton, then Barack Obama failed to pass a national “card check” program—a measure that would have made forming a union as easy as signing a postcard—while their party controlled both houses of Congress.

If the Janus verdict goes against public-sector unions, the great challenge for Democrats will not merely be one of funding, but one of leadership. Who will step up to push for the renewal of trade unions, not just for the party’s political future, but for a country that cannot progress toward economic and social justice without a prosperous and muscular labor movement?

MARY BOTTARI is the deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). She helped launch CMD’s award-winning ALEC Exposed investigation in 2011 and is a recipient of the Hillman Prize for investigative journalism.

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2019/05/28/corporate-funded-groups-continue-campaign-cripple-public-sector-unions

don weiner

519

The same corporate-funded groups that bankrolled a successful ten-year campaign to cripple public employee unions by having the U.S. Supreme Court strike down “fair share” fees for nonmembers in Janus v. AFSCME last year are now suing to retroactively recover fees paid before the Court’s ruling.

This is the latest move in the right-wing’s quest to “defund and defang” public sector unions with a goal of delivering a “mortal blow” to progressive politics, and mirrors similar “clawback” suits filed across the country over the past year.

Two groups that spearheaded the Janus case, the Liberty Justice Center (LJC) and National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation (NRTWLDF), have now filed a federal lawsuit in Illinois seeking repayment of $2 million in fair share fees paid by 2,700 Illinois public employees to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) between May 1, 2017 and June 27, 2018.

Public employee unions are required to represent all workers, whether they join the union or not, so unions have collected “fair share” fees, also known as agency fees, for many decades to cover the basic costs of bargaining for higher wages and benefits. That practice was upheld by the Supreme Court unanimously in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education in 1977, but the Court turned its back on that precedent in the *Janus* case and struck them down on First Amendment grounds.

A similar lawsuit by the two groups filed in a different federal district court was thrown out earlier this year when the judge ruled that AFSCME had collected the dues “in good faith.”

“That ruling echoes what more than a dozen other federal and state courts have decided in similar cases,” AFSCME spokesman Anders Lindall told the Chicago Tribune. “The anti-worker, corporate-funded front groups prolonging this failed litigation want to use the courts to further their political attack on working people and our union. Their repeated lawsuits are nothing but a greedy grab for more.”

In its Janus decision, the Court’s majority acknowledged that public sector unions would now have to represent nonunion members even without their agency fees, creating an entire class of free-riders.

With respect to both lawsuits and the earlier Janus case, public sector unions note that the plaintiffs never complained about receiving the wage increases, health insurance coverage, vacation time, and other benefits that the union negotiated for on their behalf.

In addition to the new lawsuit, LJC and NRTWLDF have appealed the original case to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit.

Lawsuits Bankrolled by Corporate Foundations and a Megadonor

Richard Uihlein, an Illinois businessman and GOP megadonor, the Koch brothers’ donor network, and the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation have bankrolled much of the groups’ legal war on public sector unions.

The LJC, part of the right-wing Illinois Policy Institute at the time of the Janus ruling, has received $1.7 million since 2010 from the Koch donor network’s funding vehicles, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, and $320,000 since 2009 from the Bradley Foundation, which the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) exposed in a series of articles in 2017.

Uihlein has given over $8.6 million to Illinois Policy Institute since 2009 and at least another $800,000 since 2014 to LJC. Uihlein is notoriously anti-union and spent millions to support the gubernatorial campaigns of the anti-worker governors Scott Walker and Bruce Rauner.

Uihlein has also given $300,000 since 2014 to NRTWLDF, which has received $1.3 million since 2003 from Bradley and $833,000 since 2010 from DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, according to IRS filings.

LJC’s most recent IRS 990 filing shows that its revenue jumped from $494,000 in its fiscal year 2016 to $692,000 in 2017, a 40 percent increase, while it was working on the Janus case. LJC’s chair, John Tillman, was paid over $400,000 in 2017 from affiliated nonprofits, principally the Illinois Policy Institute.

LJC is a member of the State Policy Network (SPN). In the states, SPN groups peddle cookie-cutter “studies” to back the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) agenda.

Bradley Foundation grants to SPN “affiliate” and “associate” members stretch back decades and amount to approximately $133 million, according to Bradley grant summary documents tallied by CMD.

A 2016 Bradley internal file on SPN notes that SPN’s focus in recent years has been on “catalyzing further efforts to curb public-sector unions’ excesses” and “mobilizing nonprofits, donors and citizens to uphold the principles of donor privacy and freedom of speech.” The right-wing effort is part of a concerted campaign to bankrupt unions in order to cripple the Democratic Party and, more broadly, the progressive movement.

The new wave of legal assaults on public employee unions as we head into the 2020 elections appears to be the latest stage of that campaign.

David Armiak contributed research to this report.

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net neutrality:

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see alec 5 NOLA conf

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alec 5 nola 2018 campus watch

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/08/08/common-cause-exposes-alec-influence-louisiana

ALEC is registered as a tax-exempt charitable organization and claims not to spend any money on lobbying. But according to a new report from Common Cause, a national nonpartisan government reform group, a number of ALEC-backed and -drafted bills have been introduced and enacted by ALEC-affiliated legislators in Baton Rouge in recent years.

“ALEC in Louisiana” uncovers the power that “the secretive special interest lobbying group” has already utilized in the southern state. According to the report, nearly 50 members of the Louisiana Senate and House of Representatives have ties to ALEC.[ now gov john bel edwards ?] Common Cause found that legislative language in Louisiana is commonly copied and pasted from the ALEC “model bills,” making the group’s influence “extremely prominent.”

“Shining a light on ALEC’s undemocratic and secretive operations helps voters know who is really calling the shots in their state legislature,” said Karen Hobert Flynn, president of Common Cause. “ALEC’s history of rigging the rules against everyday Louisianans on behalf of their corporate funders is not how democracy is supposed to work.”

ALEC is a powerful corporate-funded pay-to-play organization that brings lawmakers, lobbyists, and other groups in the Koch’s influence machine together to vote side-by-side on bills that legislators then take back and introduce in their home states, usually without any public disclosure of their source. The Center for Media and Democracy teamed up with Common Cause in 2012 to file an IRS whistleblower complaint against ALEC, charging the group with tax fraud and massively underreporting its lobbying activity.

This week’s ALEC annual meeting is chock full of union-busting, gerrymandering, fossil fuel promoting, and school privatizing legislation that benefits the economic interests of ALEC’s patrons.

While the exact issues the Louisiana bills address are varied, the bills fulfill ALEC’s admitted purpose, “to strengthen relationships between ‘business leaders’ and legislators” and “satisfy corporate needs,” according to Common Cause.

For instance, HB 727, was introduced by dues-paying ALEC member, Sen. Joseph H. Major Thibaut, Jr. Thibaut’s bill shares text with an ALEC model bill, “The Critical Infrastructure Protection Act.” It was signed into law in May of this year amidst growing local opposition to the construction of the Bayou Bridge pipeline, which will bring fracked oil from North Dakota to Louisiana’s Gulf Coast.

Senate Bill 364, intended to deal with recent conflicts over controversial speakers on college campuses, is based on ALEC’s “Forming Open And Robust University Minds (Forum) Act.”In June, Louisiana Governor John Bel Edwards signed the act into law, after vetoing a similar bill last year.

With ALEC’s assistance, similar bills have been pushed and enacted around the country at the behest of the right-wing Goldwater Institute and State Policy Network.  The American Association of University Professors has criticized the legislation’s approach as “a political agenda masquerading behind ‘free speech'” and objects to its “preference for punishment as a means for ending protests and disruptions that obstruct free speech.”

Meg Logue, a 350 New Orleans activist, told Common Cause that, through ALEC, “our legislators jeopardize our democracy by bending toward the priorities of corporations while undermining the peoples’ right to self-determination and justice.”

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cmd portal

also alec

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Portal:State_Policy_Network

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ref

https://YYYtheguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/rightwing-alliance-unions-defund-defang

no linx MANY docs

Rightwing alliance plots assault to 'defund and defang' America's unions

Conservative campaign aims to strike ‘mortal blow’ on government unions

‘A once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left’

Ed Pilkington in New York

@edpilkington

Wed 30 Aug 201705.00 EDT Last modified on Wed 30 Aug 2017 12.11 EDT

Teachers in California protest against a Wisconsin law affecting public-sector collective bargaining. Union membership among public-sector workers is about 35%.

]

Rightwing activists across the US have launched a nationwide campaign to undermine progressive politicians by depriving them of a major source of support and funding – public sector unions.

A network of conservative thinktanks with outposts in all 50 states has embarked on a “breakthrough” campaign designed to strike a “mortal blow” against the American left. The aim is to “defund and defang” unions representing government employees as the first step towards ensuring the permanent collapse of progressive politics.

The campaign carries a powerful echo of the populist creed espoused by Donald Trump. The president was propelled into the White House last November after unexpected victories in several previously Democratic rust belt states including Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which have endured withering attacks on trade unions in recent years.

The new assault is being spearheaded by the State Policy Network (SPN), an alliance of 66 state-based thinktanks, or “ideas factories” as it calls them, with a combined annual budget of $80m. As suggested by its slogan – “State solutions. National impact” – the group outlines an aim to construct a rightwing hegemony throughout the US, working from the bottom up.

To do that, it first has to sweep aside the public sector unions and their historic ties to Democratic and progressive politicians. In a 10-page fundraising letter, part of a set of documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and published by the Guardian today for the first time, SPN sets out its mission in frank language that does not disguise its partisan ambitions.

The author of the letter, SPN’s president and CEO Tracie Sharp,describes the $8m “breakthrough” campaign as a “once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left … We are primed, right now, to deliver the mortal blow to permanently break its stranglehold on our society.”

Sharp pitches the battle against unions as the start of a war on progressive politics, with the ultimate goal of winning elections for rightwing candidates. “Big government unions are the biggest sources of funding and political muscle for the left – and a major obstacle to the ability of voters to reclaim control of American government. To win the battle for freedom, we must take the fight to the unions, state by state.”

The target of such union-bashing, she openly admits, is to “defund and defang one of our freedom movement’s most powerful opponents, the government unions”. The long-term objective is to “deal a major blow to the left’s ability to control government at the state and national levels. I’m talking about permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle” (emphasis in original).

SPN will be discussing its anti-union and anti-left agenda on Wednesday at its annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Its morning session will look at how “labor reform” can be pursued with renewed vigor under the Trump administration.

The discussion will feature some of the key architects of SPN’s political strategy, including Vincent Vernuccio who pioneered anti-union legislation in Michigan, and Tom McCabe of the Freedom Foundation, who has sent his foot soldiers on an aggressive offensive against collective bargaining in the US north-west.

Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) which tracks the rise of rightwing groups in America, said the fundraising letter and other SPN documents published by the Guardian cast light on the conservative game plan. “It’s very rare to catch conservative thinktanks talking so openly and blatantly about their long-term political aims. These documents reveal to us that SPN’s goals are entirely political – they have no concern for workers or union members, their only goal is winning elections to advance rightwing causes.”

Bottari added: “An $80m campaign to ‘defund and defang’ public sector unions is remarkable, both in its size and in its ambition.”

Public sector unions have come under growing fire from conservatives in recent years. While unions operating in private companies have been diminished since the 1980s – their membership  from about 17% of the workforce in 1983 to just 6% today – their equivalents in the public sector such as teacher, local government, police and fire officer unions have remained relatively stable, at around 35%.

But in 2010, Scott Walker, the newly elected governor of Wisconsin, opened a new front in America’s partisan war when he passed Act 10, stripping public sector unions of the power to bargain collectively and forcing them to re-certify themselves every year with electoral backing from more than 50% of all workers, not just those voting. The move has spawned a rash of imitations across Republican-controlled states, with Iowa and Indiana passing similar laws, and a further 15 states introducing legislation – encouraged by SPN, which has framed a model bill to make it easier for Republican legislators to adopt the changes.

A total of 28 states have also passed “right to work” laws that allow workers in private companies to refuse to join unions despite enjoying the fruits of collective bargaining.

Though the long-term consequences of such union restrictions have yet to be fully understood, there are early indications that the impact could be profound even at presidential level. Since Act 10 came into effect in Wisconsin, public sector union membership has slumped by 40%, or about 136,000 people.

Trump won Wisconsin last November by just 23,000 votes.

A similar pattern can be seen in Michigan where unions have shrunk steadily since a right-to-work law came into effect in 2013, with a loss of at least 30,000 members. Trump took Michigan, to the shock of Hillary Clinton and her supporters, by just 11,000 votes.

When asked whether anti-union laws in Michigan and Wisconsin had affected the outcome of the presidential race, Matt Patterson of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform said: “No question in my mind. Hard to fight when your bazooka’s been replaced by a squirt gun.”

Carrie Conko, SPN’s vice president of communications, said that the network does not involve itself in political campaigns. “Labor reform is an issue where SPN has been clearly on the side of workers who are against forced unionization and the use of their hard-earned wages to support causes they don’t believe in. If workers choose to support their unions agenda that is fine – but, right now, in many states they don’t have a choice or a voice.”

Conko’s statement echoed the language used in an SPN “toolkit”, also published here for the first time,that advises Republican policymakers on how to campaign for anti-union legislation. “Be pro-worker, not anti-union,” the pamphlet says. “Frame union reform from the point of view of the members and how the reform helps them have a greater voice in their union. Don’t rant against unions. We’ve all been frustrated by the actions of public sector unions to block pro-freedom reforms, but publicly venting these feelings is counterproductive.”

SPN’s disclosure of its political and partisan objectives in the new documents could arouse the interest of investigators from the Internal Revenue Service. The group is constituted as a 501(c)(3) organisation, which renders it exempt as a charity from taxation.

Marc Owens, a partner with Loeb & Loeb who worked as an IRS lawyer specializing in charitable tax exemptions, said that the provision was designed for charitable purposes, not for lobbying against public sector unions or for activities to influence the outcome of elections. “A charity that does those things is not engaging in charitable activities and that puts its tax exempt status in jeopardy,” he said.

Conko told the Guardian that SPN takes “great care to be fully in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations”.

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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/billionaire-wolves-think-they-can-fool-us-wearing-workers-clothing

gerard prz steelworkers

Hundred millionaireBruce Rauner just couldn’t wait to tell Illinois state workers that the U.S. Supreme Court had given them what he considered a gift.

Within hours of the court’s ruling in the Janus case last week, Rauner, the Republican governor of Illinois, emailed state workers to tell them the decision meant they no longer needed to pay either dues or fair share fees to their labor union but the union would still be required to represent them.

What a deal! Free service! And it was b**rought to them by Rauner! The governor had filed the lawsuit that led to the Janus decision.When a court tossed him as plaintiff, the right-wing foundations whose billionaire donors paid for the lawsuit drummed up replacement plaintiffs including Mark Janus. He’s an Illinois child support worker who refused to join the union and pay dues and who didn’t even want to pay the smaller fair share fee of $45 a month charged to non-members to cover the union’s costs of bargaining for the

...it was that fee that the Supreme Court said government workers had a free speech right not to pay. The court said unions do not have a corresponding free speech right to refuse to represent non-members.

While Rauner was sending his email urging Illinois workers to bankrupt their unions, right-wing “foundations” across the country started spending the tens of millions they’d received from billionaires like the Walton family and giant corporations like AT&T to do the same thing. These groups are emailing, calling and visiting the homes of government workers.

Of course, right-wing billionaires couldn’t be expected to do this work themselves. Work up a sweat walking door-to-door? No way!  So they set up these “foundations” to hire stand-ins, people who look like regular Joes and who are trained to mouth billionaire propaganda. These “regular Joes” will tell state and local government workers that they can give themselves a raise by starving their labor union of funds and still get first-rate union representation. These are wolves in workers’ clothing.

The Guardian newspaper[linx xxx] revealed in May that the State Policy Network, a group devoted to causes favoring right-wing billionaires and corporations, had raised $80 million and organized 66 similarly radical “foundations” across the country to destroy labor unions. They prepared an anti-union toolkit to personally target government workers as soon as the court handed down the Janus decision.

The toolkit includes advice for anti-union canvassers, including: when talking to union members, dumb down language and pretend to care about them. It says canvassers should say to union members, “the best interest of union leaders should never be placed above the best interest of union members.”

Wisconsin is right-wing union haters’ touchstone. There, an extremist Republican governor and legislature adopted draconian anti-union measures, restricting issues that government workers could raise in collective bargaining, forbidding fair share fees and requiring unions to recertify every year by receiving affirmative votes from more than half of members and assuming those who did not participate had voted against the union.Of course, it neglects to urge the canvassers to say, “the best interests of billionaires should never be placed above the best interest of workers.”

One Wisconsin labor organization representing teachers lost 60 percent of its members. Overall in Wisconsin, the percentage of union members in the workforce declined from 14.1 percent in 2011 to 9 percent in 2016. Simultaneously, pay and benefits declined. For teachers, salaries sank 2.6 percent and benefits dropped 18.6 percent.

Losing the power of collective bargaining didn’t work out so well for these workers. But right-wingers believe workers are stupid and must be talked down to, so persuading them to quit their labor organizations and ultimately bankrupt them will be easy.

This is more than an effort by billionaires to slash workers’ income. It’s also a campaign to steal workers’ political power, to silence them. The more unions that billionaires can bankrupt, the less money available to support candidates and causes that help workers.

It was, after all, a Democratic president and Democratic Congresses that created a clear legal path for workers to form labor unions and that created Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and the Affordable Care Act requiring insurance companies to cover people with pre-existing conditions.None of nonmembers’ fair share fees can be used on politics. But unions spend a small portion of members’ dues money to support issues important to workers and on political candidates who pledge to secure programs like Social Security and Medicare. That is almost always Democratic candidates.

Tom McCabe, the millionaire CEO of the Freedom Foundation, one of the State Policy Network anti-union groups, told the Guardian,[v lnx] “Our goal is to help people who we believe are being held in bondage against their will.” The State Policy Network wrote its donors that it would “rescue” government workers from unions.

Right. That’s billionaires riding in on their white stallions to “free” working people from their bonds to labor unions, the organizations workers created to secure better wages and working conditions for themselves.

Economic self-interest could prompt some workers to drop out of unions if they think they can get the benefits of being in a union for free.

But workers may not like being talked down to by flunkies for billionaires. And despite what the State Policy Network thinks, workers are not stupid. They know if their unions have less money, they’ll be weaker in negotiations and politics. They know that what happened to workers in Wisconsin could happen to them.

They know that massive strikes this year by ill-paid teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and Kentucky – states that forbid teachers to strike – won raises for them and other state employees.

The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) added 1,250 members in West Virginia after the teacher walk out there, and the National Education Association (NEA) signed 2.2 percent more members in states where teachers struck.

Though membership had been declining for decades, unions added 262,000 members last year. And now they’ve got the support of 61 percent of Americans, up from a low of 48 percent in 2009.

Also, union members are talking to union members about the value of sticking with the union. Members of the AFT are meeting one-on-one with teachers in 10 states, asking them to sign cards recommitting themselves to the union. They’ve got 530,000 so far, and are working toward the full 1.7 million members.

So that knock at the door might be a fellow union member and not a billionaire’s flunky after all.

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ref

https://XXXtheguardian.com/us-news/2018/may/15/rightwing-thinktanks-secret-plot-against-unions

Rightwing activists are launching a nationwide drive to persuade public-sector trade union members to tear up their membership cards and stop paying dues, posing a direct threat to the progressive movement in America.

Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal that a network of radical conservative thinktanks spanning all 50 states is planning direct marketing campaigns targeted personally at union members to encourage them to quit. The secret push, the group hopes, could cost unions up to a fifth of their 7 million members, lead to the loss of millions of dollars in income and undermine a cornerstone of US progressive politics.

“Well run opt-out campaigns can cause public-sector unions to experience 5 to 20% declines in membership,costing hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in dues money. This can affect the resources and attention available for union leaders to devote to political action campaigns,” the internal documents say.

The anti-union marketing drive is the brainchild of the State Policy Network (SPN), a coast-to-coast alliance of 66 rightwing thinktanks that has an $80m war chest to promote Donald Trump-friendly regressive policies such as low taxes and small government. The group is funded by such billionaire conservative donors as the Koch brothers and the Walton Family Foundation that stems from the Walmart fortune. ...exposed by the Guardian has revealed the political motives behind the network’s attacks on unions. It aims to “defund and defang” public sector unions as a means to “reverse the failed policies of the American left”.

The goal, the group said, was “permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle”.

The Guardian has now obtained what SPN is calling a “toolkit” of advice to its followers on how to go about fomenting “union reform” – a euphemism for draining unions of members and cash. The “toolkit” sets out four “tactics” for depleting their power – “effective union reform”, in its language.

“To get employees to opt-out of their union,” the documents say, “they first need to know they have a choice. A direct marketing campaign to union represented public employees that combines mail and digital outreach helps raise awareness and raise opt-out rates.”One of those tactics is the opt-out campaign.

The SPN blueprint sets out how to acquire the private details of union members through state freedom of information laws so that opt-out propaganda can be targeted directly at them. It says: “Access to lists of union members is essential to this project. The most common means of obtaining lists is through requests made under state public records laws.”

The toolkit is being circulated at a vital moment for public sector trade unions. The wave of school teachers’ strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arizona, Colorado and elsewhere has reinvigorated the labor movement as a key part of the resistance to stagnating wages, waning resources and a hostile White House.

More perilously, the US supreme court is poised to deliver its ruling any day in Janus v AFSCME, one of the most important trade union cases in recent times. If the five conservative justices on the highest court vote in favor of the anti-union plaintiff, as many expect, they would deal a severe blow to organized labor by giving employees the right to opt-out of paying their share of the costs of collective bargaining even though they benefit from negotiated higher wages and improved conditions.

That in turn would give the green light to conservative groups like SPN to step up their efforts to encourage mass resignations of union members. As a clear statement of intent, SPN invited Mark Janus, a child support worker in Illinois who is the named plaintiff at the center of the supreme court case, to speak at its annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas, last August.

Carrie Conko, SPN’s vice president of communications, said that “workers should be able to decide for themselves if payment of union dues and fees is a good use of their hard-earned money or if their money is better spent elsewhere”. SPN’s aim was not political, rather it was “simply about protecting free speech”.

Public-sector unions had created a problem for themselves, Conko said, by leaving some workers to feel they were being used. The Janus case might actually help government unions improve their standing with members as “they will need to prove their worth by providing better representation to earn the voluntary dues”.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said the Guardian documents revealed the extent of secret planning by rightwing groups in advance of the supreme court’s Janus ruling. “These documents make clear that Janus v AFSCME is not a case brought by individuals trying to have a voice, it’s a case brought by wealthy forces to eliminate worker voice and power.”

She added that rightwing billionaires such as the Kochs “know working families only have power through their unity as a union, and they will stop at nothing to destroy that. But we have seen unprecedented support for our unions and the opportunities they enable for a better life – when the Janus decision day comes, we will stand united, ready to act and fight back against the forces that want to silence workers.”

One of the SPN thinktanks, the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Washington state,has already begun campaigning and fundraising on the back of a Janus ruling that goes against the unions. It has been mailing out to supporters in which it says “we are gearing up in a major way to launch an extensive education and activation campaign to take full advantage of a favorable ruling in this historic case”.

The foundation goes on to say: “The consequences of a favorable ruling are huge. Imagine tens, even hundreds, of millions of dollars currently used to push damaging leftwing causes and candidates … vanishing.”

In 2016 the Freedom Foundation ran a brazen campaign in Washington and Oregon in which it went knocking on the doors of more than 10,000 childcare and home care workers telling them that under a previous US supreme court ruling they could opt out of paying union dues. In the document obtained by the Guardian, SPN boasts that the foundation’s operation cost the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in those states $8.8m in lost dues and legal fees.

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Hurricane Harvey was still generating devastation -- and countless public workers worked night and day on search and rescue -- a little known ally of theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council was meeting a short distance away planning an attack on public sector workers nationwide.

The $80 million network of state “think tanks” and other right-wing organizations known as the  State Policy Network (SPN) held a closed-door confab with Koch operatives, corporate donors, and ALEC staff to coordinate an assault on public sector unions to advance political control by right wing politicians in state houses nationwide.

While these groups say they are advancing “worker rights,” documents obtained by CMD and featured in the Guardian lay bare their true political agenda.

“A network of conservative think tanks with outposts in all 50 states has embarked on a ‘breakthrough’ campaign designed to strike a ‘mortal blow’ against the American left. The aim is to ‘defund and defang’ unions representing government employees as the first step towards ensuring the permanent collapse of progressive politics,” wrote the  Guardian.

You can read the Guardian expose here and access the documents at ExposedbyCMD.org.

https://www.theXXXguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/30/rightwing-alliance-unions-defund-defang

long doc no link

Rightwing activists across the US have launched a nationwide campaign to undermine progressive politicians by depriving them of a major source of support and funding – public sector unions.

A network of conservative thinktanks with outposts in all 50 states has embarked on a “breakthrough” campaign designed to strike a “mortal blow” against the American left. The aim is to “defund and defang” unions representing government employees as the first step towards ensuring the permanent collapse of progressive politics.

The campaign carries a powerful echo of the populist creed espoused by Donald Trump. The president was propelled into the White House last November after unexpected victories in several previously Democratic rust belt states including Michigan and Wisconsin, both of which have endured withering attacks on trade unions in recent years.

The new assault is being spearheaded by the State Policy Network (SPN), an alliance of 66 state-based thinktanks, or “ideas factories” as it calls them, with a combined annual budget of $80m. As suggested by its slogan – “State solutions. National impact” – the group outlines an aim to construct a rightwing hegemony throughout the US, working from the bottom up.

To do that, it first has to sweep aside the public sector unions and their historic ties to Democratic and progressive politicians. In a 10-page fundraising letter, part of a set of documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy and published by the Guardian today for the first time, SPN sets out its mission in frank language that does not disguise its partisan ambitions.

[doc]

e author of the letter, SPN’s president and CEO Tracie Sharp,describes the $8m “breakthrough” campaign as a “once-in-a-lifetime chance to reverse the failed policies of the American left … We are primed, right now, to deliver the mortal blow to permanently break its stranglehold on our society.”

Sharp pitches the battle against unions as the start of a war on progressive politics, with the ultimate goal of winning elections for rightwing candidates. “Big government unions are the biggest sources of funding and political muscle for the left – and a major obstacle to the ability of voters to reclaim control of American government. To win the battle for freedom, we must take the fight to the unions, state by state.”

The target of such union-bashing, she openly admits, is to “defund and defang one of our freedom movement’s most powerful opponents, the government unions”. The long-term objective is to “deal a major blow to the left’s ability to control government at the state and national levels. I’m talking about permanently depriving the left from access to millions of dollars in dues extracted from unwilling union members every election cycle” (emphasis in original).

SPN will be discussing its anti-union and anti-left agenda on Wednesday at its annual meeting in San Antonio, Texas. Its morning session will look at how “labor reform” can be pursued with renewed vigor under the Trump administration.

The discussion will feature some of the key architects of SPN’s political strategy, including Vincent Vernuccio who pioneered anti-union legislation in Michigan, and Tom McCabe of the Freedom Foundation, who has sent his foot soldiers on an aggressive offensive against collective bargaining in the US north-west.

Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) which tracks the rise of rightwing groups in America, said the fundraising letter and other SPN documents published by the Guardian cast light on the conservative game plan. “It’s very rare to catch conservative thinktanks talking so openly and blatantly about their long-term political aims. These documents reveal to us that SPN’s goals are entirely political – they have no concern for workers or union members, their only goal is winning elections to advance rightwing causes.”

Bottari added: “An $80m campaign to ‘defund and defang’ public sector unions is remarkable, both in its size and in its ambition.”

Public sector unions have come under growing fire from conservatives in recent years. While unions operating in private companies have been diminished since the 1980s – their membership plummeting from about 17% of the workforce in 1983 to just 6% today – their equivalents in the public sector such as teacher, local government, police and fire officer unions have remained relatively stable, at around 35%.

But in2010, Scott Walker, the newly elected governor of Wisconsin, opened a new front in America’s partisan war when he passed Act 10, stripping public sector unions of the power to bargain collectively and forcing them to re-certify themselves every year with electoral backing from more than 50% of all workers, not just those voting. The move has spawned a rash of imitations across Republican-controlled states, with Iowa and Indiana passing similar laws, and a further 15 states introducing legislation – encouraged by SPN, which has framed a model bill to make it easier for Republican legislators to adopt the changes.

A total of 28 states have also passed “right to work” laws that allow workers in private companies to refuse to join unions despite enjoying the fruits of collective bargaining.

Though the long-term consequences of such union restrictions have yet to be fully understood, there are early indications that the impact could be profound even at presidential level. Since Act 10 came into effect in Wisconsin, public sector union membership has slumped by 40%, or about 136,000 people.

Trump won Wisconsin last November by just 23,000 votes.

A similar pattern can be seen in Michigan where unions have shrunk steadily since a right-to-work law came into effect in 2013, with a loss of at least 30,000 members. Trump took Michigan, to the shock of Hillary Clinton and her supporters, by just 11,000 votes.

When asked whether anti-union laws in Michigan and Wisconsin had affected the outcome of the presidential race, Matt Patterson of the conservative group Americans for Tax Reform said: “No question in my mind. Hard to fight when your bazooka’s been replaced by a squirt gun.”

Carrie Conko, SPN’s vice president of communications, said that the network does not involve itself in political campaigns. “Labor reform is an issue where SPN has been clearly on the side of workers who are against forced unionization and the use of their hard-earned wages to support causes they don’t believe in. If workers choose to support their unions agenda that is fine – but, right now, in many states they don’t have a choice or a voice.”

Conko’s statement echoed the language used in an SPN “toolkit”, also published here for the first time, that advises Republican policymakers on how to campaign for anti-union legislation. “Be pro-worker, not anti-union,” the pamphlet says. “Frame union reform from the point of view of the members and how the reform helps them have a greater voice in their union. Don’t rant against unions. We’ve all been frustrated by the actions of public sector unions to block pro-freedom reforms, but publicly venting these feelings is counterproductive.”

SPN’s disclosure of its political and partisan objectives in the new documents could arouse the interest of investigators from the Internal Revenue Service. The group is constituted as a 501(c)(3) organisation, which renders it exempt as a charity from taxation.

Marc Owens, a partner with Loeb & Loeb who worked as an IRS lawyer specializing in charitable tax exemptions, said that the provision was designed for charitable purposes, not for lobbying against public sector unions or for activities to influence the outcome of elections. “A charity that does those things is not engaging in charitable activities and that puts its tax exempt status in jeopardy,” he said.

Conko told the Guardian that SPN takes “great care to be fully in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations”.

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===

mike davis says tee'd up trump win:

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}:

In the Midwest the2010 Tea Party victories brought a new generation of feral Republicans to power, many of them groomed by far-rightthink tanks such as Indiana’s Policy Review Foundation (once headed by Mike Pence), Michigan’s Mackinac Center, Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute, and Minnesota’s Center of the American Experiment, all of them spoiling for a fight to the death with the region’s public-sector unions and progressive big-city governments. Coordinating through the State Policy Network(sixty-five conservative think tanks) and the American Legislative Exchange Council,they launched campaigns to destroy public-sector bargaining rights, defund unions through right-to-work laws, and privatize public education through vouchers.

They focused in other words on increasing their structural and legal advantages in ways that Democrats would find difficult, even impossible to roll back. Unions and students, of course, conducted an epic resistance in Wisconsin but were unable to recall Scott Walker, in large part because of the lackluster character of the Democratic candidate. In Ohio the unions were more successful and repealed right-to-work by referendum, but in Indiana, Michigan and West Virginia, Republican majorities rammed through right-to-work and in Michigan, a Mackinac Center-inspired receivership for Detroit’s schools.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/02/the-great-god-trump-and-the-white-working-class

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fang machine 2013 on origins

ch 5 states

big loss 2008 fed so shift to state level; already had fair no of gov and legis, plus bunch of rw fronts built over decades; ~ BO, and his win fuelled 197; no new ideas, but footsoldiers for rw agenda; would localize msg ~ eg ACA

muscle to go on offense: immigration AZ, unions 198

SPN 1992 (BC) planned by defunct Madison group:Th Roe (heritage) So Caro Policy Cncl eg vouchers, ~ grn regs; go between local conserv eg Family Policy Cncl // Dobson evangelicals and nat'l rw ctrs 199/

mid 90's 37 spn, // Heritage Mandate (plan plus staffers) so new gov or legislature (often part time latter) had ready made plan and ppl 200 really gop but kinda look nonpart; have boilerplate to ward off pseudo/stinktank charge: IRS bless, we don't take bribes, advance "civil society" 201 so ironically confirms rubberstamp

DCI entwines

SPN funded Pelican, ~ dem 4k$ conf of mayors and inaug, burt silent on jindal 45K$ tax for helo campaign trips 202; Laffer, Vitter, james o'keefe

now 58 tanks, every state: CA official pac res, but affiliate Claremont, horowitz, indep inst oakland, Reason, prometheus 203

SPN media savvy, so connect to local media, (90's colo independent inst had cable news show, and VT ethan a inst had regular npr op ed) has radio shows (web? sirius?), bogs, podcast 205.

now oppos res masked as jrnl: Jason Stverak, pres frkln ctr, ex N Dak gop honcho), stealth camp for SAM (erick O'k w/ h rich $) 206

Bill McMorris invest jrnl at fkl ctr, Robt Novak fellowship from Phillips 2 L to pay him 206

spn put up 75K for alaska reporter gig; Wayne Hoffman ID challenged to find bias 207

Illinois Statehouse News denied creds b/c wd not disclose $, couple others states deny also;

scam phantom district on stimulus zip code error; but drudge, politico then ABC 208 (then weeks on Fox)

rep Mary fallin denounced; // fnk ctr w/ McCain and Coburn did report, but either not stim, or mischaracterized eg WNBA facility was tribal community ctr w/ no for-profit anything 208.

b/c real reporters laid off, easy to grab for cred; eg Mackinac created mich Transparency Cter [fe] then hired local nbc kathy hoekstra eg on film tax credit for m moore 209; OC reg --? pac res CalWatchDog; pres soc prof jrnl --> tenn ctr pol res [gore hit?]; assoc of am phys and surgeons ~ ACA but not shown nuts: BO covert hypnosis to get ppl to rally, medicare ~ const; cited alex jones VBO cia spy 209

local news desperate: in WI 18 pprs syndicates the franklin front 210

FC pledge to build out; partner w/ Nat Rev on battlegnd elections (in 2014?); expand training.

70's lobbyists from 100 co/trade gps State Gov Affairs Cncl, funded Cncl state gov, pro biz but not radical enough, so ALEC, fdr Weyrich, differs from spn in that it actually writes legis; 2k members; corps pay up to 50K/yr; into 1/k/yr, 20% pass 212

min wage, net neutral; big funder of climate/ grn pwr; PIC: Laurie Shanblum CCA, mtg w/ Russell Pearce AZ state sen, wrote SB 1070 (show yr papers; but you can tell by shoes 214; AZ has 3 CCA jails, want to grow more;

Pershing Sq cp investor; Jan Brewer hired CCA top lobbyist and camp chr; dep COS; 2/3 1070 co-spon either alec member or at conf where written; 30 got $ during debate; Mgt & Training Corp; clone 1070 tried in penn, ok, tenn, colo, fla; TP boost.

gop wants rx care across state lines, so biz can flee to least consumer protection (//credit card [utah?] 216

ban lawsuit of hmo

10 states w/ gop gain 2010, voter restrictions 217

2010 gerrymander (had org/strategy custom made?]

rove and gillespie polled, found ppl receptive to overpaid teachers arg "new fed bureaucratic elite" 219  SPN?SAM posted public worker salaries (foia bomb where not easy to get); helped kasich gut collective barg; // Koch fight Back WI, walker 40K koch $, tim phillips stumped; spn/mciver bogus studies support gt unions, NYT oped; claimed tcher got 2z avg pvt wage or 100K actually 50 222

3 ez fix for budget, but walker cut taxes; public empl had already offered concessions, so goal was to kill union 223; mciver had war room ~ union; partnered w. Franklin news bur; hired local reporter and gop staffer; made VNR; Drew Ryun opps res bloggers: said bbq union in ret for votes; local da said bogus 224.

2012 looked like big demo win, but gerrymander so only 10 of 23 seats needed to have any power 226; conv wisdom is that gop $ wasted, but actually prevented dem sweep 227; big GOTV TP ginned eg by AFP (telemkt mogl lend infra?); right after election, went after Kay hagen for 2014 by oil co;

2012 record corp profits; ceo 3500x avg worker; avg family lost 40% wealth in Gt Rec; foreclosures, domestic vil etc riples

occupy ridiculed in press and smashed by cops and survelll state; 230 endit

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WEDNESDAY, NOV. 27, 2013

Masters of Manipulation

Right-wing billionaires, corporations and the Bradley Foundation pay for junk studies that prop up their agenda

By Lisa Kaiser

A clearer picture is emerging of a well-funded network of right-wing experts and think tanks that promote corporate interests in the media and state legislatures around the country.

According to a new study by the Madison-based watchdog group Center for Media and Democracy, the 63 think tank members of State Policy Network (SPN) have worked hand in hand with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to craft pro-corporate, anti-democratic legislation that boosts their donors’ bottom line.

The allegedly independent, nonpartisan think tanks in SPN—including the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy—provide and share the ideologically skewed data and analyses that form the justification for bills to sabotage Obamacare, gut workers’ rights and ban unions, reform the tax code to benefit the wealthy and corporations, roll back environmental protections, expand school vouchers and privatization, abolish Common Core standards and more.

ALEC then uses SPN studies when drafting the cookie-cutter bills that conservative legislators introduce in statehouses around the country.

“They call themselves independent policy think tanks,” Nick Surgey, Center for Media and Democracy’s research director, told the Shepherd. “But the reality is that they are often corporate-funded groups that are entirely focused on a legislative agenda that benefits the corporations that fund them.”

Dark Money and Tax Deductions

Although these entities claim to be independent, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) found that SPN and ALEC have overlapping deep-pocketed donors, interests and personnel.

But despite its relatively low profile, SPN is a magnet for far more right-wing funding than ALEC. In 2011 alone, CMD found, right-wing individuals, major corporations and tax-exempt foundations poured an astounding $83 million into the State Policy Network (SPN) and its affiliates. That dwarfs ALEC’s $7 million in funding that year.

Not surprisingly, a vast number of the donors are tied to the billionaire Koch brothers—and they get a nice tax break for donating to a nonpartisan educational organization.

CMD found that major donors of this SPN-ALEC echo chamber are secretive funds tied to the Koch brothers, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, organizations that Mother Joneshas called the “dark-money ATM of the conservative movement.” These tax-exempt foundations are required to report the groups they fund, but they don’t have to reveal their own donors. In fact, that seems to be the point of Donors Trust and Donor Capital Fund, CMD found.

“Very, very wealthy individuals have increasingly been using nonprofits to hide their fingerprints on these donations,” Surgey said. “Donors Trust and Donors Capital are organizations that allow high-dollar donors to pool their donations and fund these organizations to a very significant degree.”

In addition to benefiting from the cloak of anonymity that these organizations provide, the billionaire and corporate donors get to write off their donations on their taxes.

“They want to be able to get the advantage of a tax deduction without people being aware that they are giving the money,” Surgey said. “It’s a way of hiding the identity of the donors.”

Coordinating With ALEC

The State Policy Network argues that its member think tanks are independent truth-tellers. But a report by Jane Mayer in The New Yorker found that SPN members follow what the network’s president, Tracie Sharp, calls “the IKEA model,” in which the central organization would provide the “raw materials” and “services” while the state-based think tanks would assemble the parts to suit their needs.

Mayer quotes Sharp telling SPN members at its annual meeting in September that “the grants are driven by donor intent” and “the donors have a very specific idea of what they want to happen.”

CMD’s investigation also shows the tight links between SPN and ALEC. SPN spent more than $100,000 to sponsor ALEC’s annual conferences and Sharp is on ALEC’s education task force.

CMD found that SPN think tanks have written many pieces of ALEC’s model legislation, including bills to privatize education and public pensions, create a “right to work” state, withdraw states from regional climate initiatives and implement voter ID.

In addition, Surgey said that SPN held a workshop at ALEC’s meeting this summer called “You Can Too.”

“What ‘you can too’ is reform Medicaid, reduce taxes and enact right-to-work laws,” Surgey said. “It’s pretty clear that what they’re talking about is a legislative agenda.”

Bradley Foundation Outspends Koch Brothers

Besides the Koch-connected Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, a major SPN funder is the Milwaukee-based Bradley Foundation, which is led by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign chair, Michael Grebe.

With more than $550 million in assets, the Bradley Foundation sunk at least $31 million into its voucher studies and programs, according to a report by One Wisconsin Now (OWN). But its funding is sent to other conservative, free-market foundations and think tanks around the country.

“They are the biggest funder of right-wing causes in the nation,” said Mike Browne, OWN’s deputy director. “They spend more money than the Koch brothers.”

The Bradley Foundation is a huge supporter of members of the State Policy Networkin Wisconsin and elsewhere. According to OWN’s research, the Bradley Foundation has given more than $16.5 million to the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute and $635,000 to John K. McIver Institute for Public Policy. The two groups are SPN members that have provided voucher-supporting studies and analysis at the same time they attempt to pass themselves off as independent, straight-shooting think tanks.

WPRI, which bills itself as “Wisconsin’s Free Market Think Tank,” has precious few scholars on staff—none, in fact. Its president is former Journal Sentinelcolumnist Mike Nichols and its lead commentators are WTMJ’s Charlie Sykes (whose current wife works for the Bradley Foundation), political consultant Deb Jordahl and former Department of Administration Secretary George Lightbourn.

WPRI’s board is dominated by the state’s corporate chiefs, including Tom Howatt, chair of Wausau Paper Corp.; Bank Mutual President David Baumgarten; ex-MillerCoors Vice President Michael Jones; former Thompson administration official and We Energies Senior Vice President James Klauser; Milwaukee investor David Lubar; and Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC) President Tim Sheehy.

So it’s no wonder why WPRI has churned out studies supporting the agenda shared by Walker and the Bradley Foundation, including attacks on public schools, climate change, public employee benefits and the state’s renewable energy targets while promoting highway expansion, commercial bail bonds and fracking.

The board of directors of MacIver Institute includes Milwaukee businessman Fred Luber; Michael, Best and Friedrich attorney James Troupis; and former Republican First Lady Laurie McCallum. Its president is Brett Healy, a former aide to disgraced Republican Assembly Speaker Scott Jensen, now a school voucher lobbyist.

Other Wisconsin partners of SPN are the Lucy Burns Institute, Bradley Foundation-funded Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin, the Dick Armey-led FreedomWorks-Wisconsin, the Taxpayers Network Incorporated and the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.

Crossing the Line?

As One Wisconsin Now’s report notes, the MacIver Institute props up Walker’s pro-privatization agenda not just with its studies and news bulletins, but by actively campaigning for it. The nonprofit, tax-exempt institute isn’t allowed to get involved in political activities, elections or lobbying. Yet MacIver Institute, the Koch-funded Astroturf group Americans for Prosperity Foundation and the Heartland Institute—all SPN members—spent $3.7 million on ads and other activities to help Walker in his recall, activities that spurred the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign to file a complaint with the Internal Revenue Service arguing that the groups were “gaming the tax code to play electoral politics while masquerading as charitable organizations.”

More recently, MacIver took credit for providing the groundwork for state Rep. Dale Kooyenga’s (R-Brookfield) $648 million tax cut proposal, which Walker incorporated into his budget. MacIver’s Healy, its communications director and members of Americans for Prosperity-Wisconsin participated in five “tax townhalls” in May to discuss tax reform, which SPN heavily implies influenced Walker’s and Kooyenga’s regressive tax breaks.

Walker seems to be a fan of SPN’s work. According to his official schedule provided to theShepherd, he set aside an hour to tape a video for the State Policy Network on March 4, at the executive residence.

The Bradley Foundation, WPRI and MacIver Institute did not respond to the Shepherd’srequest to comment for this article.

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REBEKAH WILCE on November 22, 2013

SPN: Right-Wing Stink Tanks Pushing the ALEC Agenda in the States

see url for links  http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/04/11909/reporters%E2%80%99-guide-%E2%80%9Cstate-policy-network%E2%80%9D-right-wing-think-tanks-spinning-disinform

New Resource Details "Think Tanks" Tanking Americans' Rights

In this new online resource, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD, the publisher of the award-winning ALECexposed.org investigation) documents the more than $83 million that right-wing billionaires and corporations are spending each year to fuel Tracie Sharp's State Policy Network (SPN) and its 64 state "think tank" members.

CMD's three-month investigation uncloaks some of the major funders of these expanded advocacy and news spinning operations in the states and raises major concerns over whose agenda these groups are advancing in the states:

Mystery Funds. This investigation identifies hundreds of thousands of dollars, and perhaps much more than that, which Sharp distributes to these organizations but that is not disclosed to the IRS as passing through SPN's books. It is possible that Sharp is distributing or designating funds made available via the Koch-connected "DonorsTrust" and "Donors Capital Fund" or some other stream of cash for the state operations she helps grow. However, some of the big bucks at her disposal did not show up in SPN's IRS 990 form in the same year it was distributed to an SPN group. See the SourceWatch article on SPN Funding for more.

Even More Koch Money than Previously Known. This guide also flags that substantial funding for SPN state operations has come from Koch Industries itself and not only the Koch family foundations. That is, hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least, have been spent by the privately held energy conglomerate controlled by two of the richest billionaires in the world, Charles and David Koch. The total amount is secret because it is not passing through the Koch foundations, which are required to disclose their disbursements. The total amount of Koch money spent on SPN-related efforts to change state laws and spin the news is understated by analysis of their foundation spending alone. See the SourceWatch article on SPN Funding for more.

Trying to Change the Law, but Reporting Little or No Lobbying. Like ALEC, SPN and its affiliates seek to change state laws, but report little or no lobbying. That means that corporations and individuals (like Koch Industries and others) that fund their operations can get a tax write-off for funding SPN efforts. See the SourceWatch article on the SPN Agenda for more.

SPN Funders Help Some Interests Get Multiple Votes on ALEC Bills. The relationship between SPN affiliates and ALEC is strong and is funded by some of the same donors. That means that some corporate interests like the Kochs get, in effect, multiple votes to change the law on ALEC task forces, where corporate lobbyists and special interest groups like SPN operations vote as equals with elected officials behind closed doors. A particular ALEC task force may have multiple Koch-funded operations -- including a lobbyist from Koch Companies Public Sector, a special interest representative from an SPN operation like the Goldwater Institute, and reps from national Koch-controlled or fueled groups like David Koch's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) and the Charles Koch-founded Cato Institute, along with the Heritage Foundation, a long-time ally of the Koch agenda. Through ALEC, SPN helps draft templates to change state laws; then ALEC's public sector and private sector members vote in secret for those bills; and then SPN supports the introduction or adoption of those bills as law, sometimes with help from David Koch's AFP echo chamber in a state.

SPN Funders Have Included Some of the Richest and Most Ideological Families in the Country. Fueling SPN-related efforts is a bevy of right-wing billionaires and foundations beyond the Koch brothers and including the Bradley Foundation, DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund (large donor-directed funds), the Olin Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation (the Amway fortune), the Coors-related Castle Rock Foundation and the Adolph Coors Foundation, the McCamish Foundation, the JM Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. SPN-related activities are also funded by the Roe Foundation, the charitable arm that is part of the legacy of Thomas Roe, the man who helped launch SPN over two decades ago, after telling one of his allies, "I'm going to capture the states," just like Ronald Reagan was going to capture the U.S.S.R.

SPN's Legislative Agenda Is Frequently Buttressed by Its Forays as "Press" and the Echoes of Its Allies in the Growing Right-Wing State "Press" Corps. As CMD was one of the first to document, SPN groups like the Goldwater Institute are hiring people to act as reporters, and the legislative agenda of SPN is increasingly echoed by the growing right-wing infrastructure of groups that pose as press. Some even get their stories or "reports" picked up as news and delivered to state newspapers as a "wire" service like the Associated Press, as with the Franklin Center's Watchdog.org groups and the Ryun brothers-allied "American Majority" and "Media Trackers" operations. (The Ryuns are the sons of former Kansas Republican Congressman Jim Ryun, whose entry into office in Koch Industries' home state was aided by a prior Koch-related electoral initiative involving dark money groups, which was known as the "Triad" operation and was the subject of a bipartisan Senate investigation in 1997. CMD has called for a Senate investigation of federal election laws and of the various Koch operations to influence the results of the 2012 elections for both federal and state offices.)

This Reporters' Guide details how SPN works, who funds it, what the network's groups do, and looks at some of their legislative goals, including undermining workers' rights and weakening unions as well as undoing renewable energy laws and expanding ways in which tax dollars are redirected to the private sector, for example through funding so-called "virtual schools." Key resources include:

Documentation that exposes the close funding connections between SPN, its members, and the controversial ALEC.

Highlights of the significant and previously unknown Koch brothers' funding for SPN groups, demonstrating that prior estimates of Koch funding have been understated. (These materials were discovered by CMD and researchers in materials filed with the IRS by two of the SPN groups.)

Entries about every SPN member think tank on CMD's SourceWatch.org.

Introducing One of the Key Echo Chambers of the ALEC Agenda: Tracie Sharp's SPN

Tracie Sharp

Tracie Sharp

The controversial ALEC has a little known but influential partner in its effort to -- in the words of Bill Moyers -- rewrite the nation's laws one state at a time: SPN. Funded by many of the same right-wing billionaires and foundations that also fund ALEC (including the billionaire Koch brothers), SPN and its member think tanks provide the appearance of "independent" intellectual voices advocating for much of the agenda promoted by ALEC. But the reality is that a highly organized and intricately woven network of funders and personnel has been constructed.

SPN officially launched in 1992 with 12 members and money from South Carolina billionaire Thomas Roe to franchise, fund, and foster a growing number of in-state "mini Heritage Foundations" (with the influence of the DC-based Heritage Foundation that Roe helped underwrite). Today, SPN has 64 member think-tank groups, and a presence in every state capitol in the nation. Some of these -- like the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Arizona's Goldwater Institute -- have growing notoriety, but many others, despite their influence, are barely known by those other than state capitol insiders.

Its purpose? To produce reports, create statistics, draft talking points and "expert" testimony in support of bills, and disseminate videos along with a raft of other materials to advance a right-wing legislative agenda in the states, under the guise of being a nonpartisan, nonprofit charitable organization full of neutral scholars and academics.

But these are not academics in an ivory tower. These think tanks actually write legislation; they write materials to support their legislation; and they work closely with legislators and sometimes throw their voice through legislative talking points. They also often take to the airwaves and the Internet to give purportedly objective analysis. Their legislative agenda, often ratified via ALEC, is frequently adopted as law by states controlled by ALEC majorities -- often with little or no disclosure of their role in the process. Some think tanks, like Wisconsin's MacIver Institute, engage in activity that looks an awful like electoral politicking. For example, MacIver engaged in an intensive TV ad campaign and other activities along with David Koch's AFP arm in the state, defending Gov. Scott Walker's budget in the run up to the June 2012 gubernatorial recall election. Walker survived the election with more help from out of state benefactors than any Wisconsin governor in history, as CMD has helped document.

This resource guide includes four main parts: 1) a review of the history, goals, form, and function of the SPN network; 2) a discussion of the overlap between the SPN and ALEC agendas; 3) a review of what is known about the sources of SPN funding, including a stream of Koch money and a recently discovered source of money at the disposal of SPN's leader, for which there is no accounting in her SPN tax filings; and 4) additional research, including an article in SourceWatch on each think tank, a chart of some of their specific ALEC ties, a review of the revenues and expenses of SPN and each think tank in 2009, 2010, and 2011, and a roundup of the connections of each think tank to the conservative media organization that calls itself the "Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity."

The Right-Wing Roots of SPN, ALEC, and Heritage

Quote from Thomas Roe (1996)After a burst of citizen awareness and advocacy in the 1960s led to the Clean Air Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), and other progressive consumer and environmental reforms, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's chief lawyer, Lewis Powell, wrote a now infamous manifesto in 1971 claiming that corporations did not have enough influence on public policy and calling for the creation of a policy infrastructure to reverse these trends and increase corporate power over the law. In essence, Powell's complaint was that not even Republican President Richard M. Nixon was "conservative" enough, in that his administration purportedly did not protect corporations enough.

Powell, however, was chosen by Nixon for a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court, where he went on to concoct the notion that corporations were entitled to "commercial speech" protection under the First Amendment. He wrote the discredited Buckley v. Valeo decision that is known by the popular shorthand phrase "money is speech," a hypothesis that has undermined the protection of the integrity of U.S. elections. The issue of corporations "speaking" through money has been amplified by the recent Citizens United decision, which unleashed more dark money, including corporate money, to influence the 2012 elections than in any election in recent history.

Thomas Roe and Ronald ReaganThe Powell memo spurred corporations and CEOs to fund a series of institutions at the federal and state level, including ALEC and the Heritage Foundation, which were both created by right-wing ideologue and "Moral Majority" activist Paul Weyrich. Heritage, which is literally just steps from the Capitol in DC, is widely considered to be America's most influential "think tank." "No policy shop has more clout than the conservative Heritage Foundation," said the Wall Street Journal -- which has also been actively involved in ALEC through some of its editorial board members, as CMD has helped document.

In the following decade, reportedly at the suggestion of President Ronald Reagan, South Carolina building supply magnate Thomas A. Roe was inspired by the success of the Heritage Foundation to create "mini-Heritage Foundations" across the country to push policy changes at the state level, reinforcing the ALEC corporate and "conservative" agenda to change America's laws.

In a 1996 interview, Roe recounted a conversation he had with Robert Krieble (at a mid-1980's Heritage Foundation trustees' meeting) in which Roe told Krieble, "You capture the Soviet Union -- I'm going to capture the states."

SPN: Form and Function

SPN says its purpose is to "assist in organizing, developing and raising funds for institutes throughout the United States whose purpose is the promotion of authoritative ideas and research studies on state and local public policy issues in the public interest." SPN's founding executive director, Byron S. Lamm, put it more bluntly, calling SPN activities "constructive troublemaking."

Lamm discouraged think tanks from classifying themselves as "state-based Heritage Foundation[s]" because "[t]he labels are misleading, and they cause more harm than good."

From 1992 to 1998, SPN operated in a relatively limited organizational capacity. Then, according to SPN, its "Board of Directors realized the need for a stronger organization that would provide additional services."

The "broader range of services" this change was intended to provide was not publicly set forth by SPN, but below CMD details its efforts to franchise new think tanks, network information, change state laws, train legislative candidates, advance a Republican legislative agenda, create political cover for right-wing candidates, provide public relations plans and assistance, and create litigation centers:

1) FRANCHISING THINK TANKS AND BUILDING THE ECHO CHAMBER

Quote from Gary Palmer, Alabama Policy InstituteLike a fast food corporation, SPN has worked hard to grow and franchise state-based think tanks, expanding that number from 12 to 64 since 1992, with some states now having multiple operations. And they continued to develop new and existing think tanks in 2011, receiving several directed, start-up grants from funders for groups in Florida and Arkansas. It also received a grant of $165,000 from Donors Capital "for 2011 Start-ups," which did not specify in the publicly-discovered spreadsheet which states those funds may have been designated to help.

SPN also facilitates networking and information sharing. One requirement of SPN member think tanks, according to the National Review, is that they share their publications with each other, "We trade information all the time and borrow ideas from each other," says the Alabama Policy Institute's Gary Palmer.

Sometimes this sharing looks like cookie cutter academics frosted with a different think tank's logo. According to the New York Times, Lawrence Reed of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy:

"has a standard speech he calls the 'Seven Principles of Sound Public Policy.' [Christopher J.] Derry [of the Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions] added the words 'for Kentucky' and took it on the fund-raising trail. The Evergreen Freedom Foundation, in Olympia, Wash., is known for its guide to paring state budgets. Mr. Derry distributed it under the Bluegrass name. A Maryland paper on excessive lawsuits, republished in North Carolina, gained a third life as 'Preparing for Tort Reform in Kentucky.'"

SPN groups also coordinate national pushes in particular policy areas. Starting in 2007, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) launched a national effort to change criminal laws in the states. Within four years, at least nine other state think tanks were involved, echoing research and talking points, including in Delaware, South Carolina, Colorado, Georgia, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New Mexico, Ohio, and Nebraska.

2) "APPLIED POLICY" -- WRITING AND PUSHING LEGAL CHANGES

At one point, Darcy Olsen, the highly-paid leader of SPN member think tank the Goldwater Institute, told the National Review, "We're in the business of applied policy." Applied policy appears to translate to changing the law. Although they do not usually register as lobbyists, many SPN members advance legislation through ALEC and outside of ALEC. The SPN groups are in frequent communication with the legislature and have exerted strong influence on state laws.

As CMD documented in March, the Goldwater Institute routinely reports to the IRS that it spends nothing or almost nothing on lobbying, even though emails obtained through open records requests show its staffers urging that bills be introduced or adopted, along with efforts to make what a layperson would consider lobbying comport with a state law loophole for providing "technical" assistance to lawmakers. In that report, CMD also documented how Goldwater's staffers routinely propose legislation through ALEC task forces where "private sector" members, like Goldwater, vote as equals with legislators on templates to change state law and urge those bills to become law. Goldwater has some staff registered as lobbyists, while others who routinely contact state lawmakers about changes to the law are not registered.

Think tanks in Arizona, along with SPN affiliates in Colorado, Illinois, Kentucky, Michigan, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington have all drafted state legislation that hamstrings worker and environmental protections and more, and some were even the "sponsor" of the bill through the process of becoming an ALEC "model" bill for the states (which is discussed in more detail below).

SPN think tanks also push their own model legislation. For example, Arizona's Goldwater Institute has a section of its website devoted to 16 "model" bills "to expand liberty," including three bills to undermine health insurance reforms in the federal Affordable Care Act and a bill to form a compact or contract among states in an attempt to make enforcement of any federal gun control legislation the "equivalent of a federal crime."

(Additional details about some of these efforts are discussed below.)

3) FOLLOW THE MONEY -- A BIG MONEY FUND CONNECTED TO SHARP THAT IS NOT ON SPN'S BOOKS

SPN appears to be a significant source of funding for the SPN member groups, but how much funding SPN or its head, Tracie Sharp, really controls or directs is unknown. SPN gives some of its member think tanks anywhere between $9,000 and $122,000 a year, according to the organization's 2011 IRS filing. But in 2012, a list of 2010 funders of the SPN member the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) became public (it was not "leaked," but was filed publicly and discovered by researchers). That accounting revealed some inconsistencies between what Sharp tells the IRS SPN gives a think tank like TPPF and what TPPF accounts for as coming at the direction of Sharp. It is possible, of course, that the money is from some other enormous pot of funds Sharp has at her disposal, but there is little information about how that is accounted for.

According to SPN's 2010 IRS Form 990, it gave TPPF $19,500 in fiscal year 2010 (which is reported to be the calendar year). But according to Schedule B of TPPF's 2010 IRS Form 990 (which also uses the calendar year), SPN gave TPPF $49,306.90.

Even more eye-opening: that amount was dwarfed by a figure nearly ten times as large that TPPF disclosed came to it by way of SPN's executive director, Sharp. She was listed as the contact person for an additional combined total of $495,000 from two unknown funds in fiscal year 2010 (which is also reported to be the calendar year for TPPF's filings). (Please see below for more details, and additional funders revealed by this document, such as Koch Industries.)

4) NONPARTISAN "SCHOLARS" ADVANCING PARTISAN AGENDAS

SPN members also spend time producing reports, creating statistics, talking points, "expert" testimony, videos, and a raft of other materials to advance what often corresponds with the Republican legislative agenda in the states. Yet SPN and its affiliates are described as "nonpartisan," "charitable" organizations that donors can get a tax write-off for supporting. Time and time again, the mainstream media interviews SPN "experts" as though they are objective scholars and not as the partisan players they sometimes appear to be.

The National Review says that the individual SPN member think tanks "develop many of the ideas that rightward candidates can run on." But this effort goes far beyond generic talking points.

In Wisconsin, for instance, the MacIver Institute ran a joint project that was fueled and funded by the Koch brothers' Americans for Prosperity group in support of Scott Walker's recall election. In a $3 million "It's Working!" TV ad campaign with an accompanying website and townhall-style events, the two organizations touted the successes of Walker's administration, including legal changes harming workers, local governments, public education, and social programs. The website echoed many of the claims on Walker's taxpayer-funded "Reforms and Results" website, which had resulted in a complaint to the state ethics board. Many of these claims were debunked in November 2011 by CMD's PRWatch.

Additionally, in many states there is a revolving door between SPN groups and the Republican establishment. For instance, the staff at the Massachusetts-based Pioneer Institute for Public Policy has extensive ties to Mitt Romney presidential campaign, as CMD has documented here.

5) EDUCATE AND TRAIN (INDOCTRINATE) LEGISLATORS

Through ALEC, SPN think tanks plan and conduct hundreds of "educational" workshops for legislators that often result in legislative push for a specific agenda. For example, Colorado's Independence Institute gave a report on "public pension reform" at ALEC's 2011 annual meeting, which was followed by renewed efforts to privatize and otherwise alter pensions being introduced in 29 states in that year.

Moreover, many SPN think tanks hold "legislative forums," seminars, "policy previews," "policy orientations," etc., when their state's legislature begins a new session. Whether called lobbying or not, these events present state legislators with the policy priorities and bills being pushed by the think tanks for that legislative session. Such events have been held by the Montana Policy Institute, the Idaho Freedom Foundation, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and Oregon's Cascade Policy Institute, the Mississippi Center for Public Policy, Louisiana's Pelican Institute for Public Policy, North Carolina's John William Pope Civitas Institute, New Jersey's Common Sense Institute, the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and the Illinois Policy Foundation, according to "SPN News."

Such events advance corporate interests like privatizing American infrastructure, but are re-framed as "show[ing] lawmakers how to fund transportation infrastructure with private money." Such a framing avoids words like "convince," "persuade," and "lobby."

6) MEDIA MESSAGING AND SUPPORT

Participants in SPN's predecessor organization, the Madison Group, "were active in assisting new state-based think tanks with public relations plans designed to garner press clippings from right-wing publications, along with state, local, and national newspapers and magazines. These state-based think tanks were trained to speak to the media and politicians in populist terms like 'Welfare Reform,' 'Empowerment of the Poor,' 'School Choice,' and now of course 'Paycheck Protection,'" according to a report.

Today, SPN think tanks are hooking up with right-wing media outlets to push out their message. The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity is a national non-profit organization that exploits a void in state capitol reporting caused by the loss of a third of the nation's journalism jobs since 1992. The Franklin Center funds state news websites and wire services in more than 40 states. Despite their non-partisan description, many of these "news" websites have been criticized for their biased claims and unreliable assertions. A majority of SPN think tanks (at least 36) host Franklin "reporters" or publish a Franklin-affiliated publication, according to a review by CMD.

As an example of how these outfits operate, New Hampshire's Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy (JBCPP) runs the Franklin site ''NewHampshire.Watchdog.org''. The think tank's staffer Grant Bosse edits the publication. Not only does he use the platform to spin disinformation -- such as publishing "news articles" on how the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) is "all about money" while the publication and JBCPP strive to repeal it -- but he testifies to the state legislature against policies like RGGI without disclosing his ties to the JBCPP or the Franklin Center, as shown by the video footage obtained by the organization Granite State Progress (at left).

7) LITIGATION

Several SPN members have created "litigation centers."

For example, Clint Bolick, who runs Goldwater's litigation center, told the National Review, "We realized that on some issues we needed to go to court or we wouldn't be able to change anything." (Goldwater is just one of the right-wing enterprises Bolick has aided. He is very involved in efforts that weaken public schools and has connections to the school privatization effort. For example, Bolick defended the Wisconsin school voucher program when he was with the Landmark Legal Foundation, co-founded the "Institute for Justice," and previously led the "Alliance for School Choice.")

Many of the SPN groups also submit amicus curiae briefs. Several, for example, filed briefs challenging the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the Supreme Court case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Litigation is, of course, a tool used by groups across the political spectrum.

SPN's focus includes lawsuits that make it harder to deal with the influence of money that in the view of many Americans, on the right and the left, is corrupting our democracy. For example, as CMD has documented, through Goldwater, Bolick and his colleague Nick Dranias have worked to strike down Arizona's clean election laws. And, then as CMD and Arizona Working Families exposed, Goldwater paid them enormous bonuses, of $35,000 and $50,000 respectively, the year Goldwater got a million dollars in public taxpayer funds for attorneys' fees. Goldwater also raised the salaries of Bolick, Dranias and its executive director in Phoenix to DC-type salaries. (One SPN document reveals that one of the services Sharp provides is a salary review and comparison to help the think tanks set their executive pay; meanwhile, many SPN affiliates are heavily critical of how much public workers are paid, but groups like Goldwater pay their top staff exponentially more, as CMD has shown.)

Goldwater was the first of the SPN member think tank to open a litigation center as a permanent part of its organization. But, as of 2013, the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota and the Nevada Policy Research Institute have litigation programs, as do some of SPN's associate members, like the North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law.

Delaware's Caesar Rodney Institute launched a special fundraising campaign at the beginning of 2012 to pay for a lawsuit against the state of Delaware to challenge its practice of awarding state construction jobs only to contractors paying union scale wages, charging that the methodology used to figure out the prevailing wage rates was flawed. When legislation drafted by the think tank to address the perceived issue failed at the committee level, the group told SPN that it would take to the courts. CMD has also documented the misleading statistics routinely used by Goldwater to peddle its anti-union agenda, which is echoed by other SPN groups.

8) TRAINING A NEW GENERATION OF ACTIVISTS

Together, SPN and the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University sponsor the "Charles G. Koch Summer Fellow Program." This program coordinates internships at SPN member think tanks for an "intensive ten-week program begins in June" that "includes a $1,500 stipend and a housing allowance."

This program trains hundreds of young right-wing political activists each year and connects them to other parts of the right-wing infrastructure that has been created to change American law and society and that the billionaire Koch brothers have helped build. (CMD, in conjunction with the Nation, has detailed the long relationship between the Kochs' ideological agenda and ALEC.)

Together with its ties to ALEC, the Heritage Foundation, and major right-wing funders like the Bradley Foundation, SPN's alliances and "troublemaking" activities enable it to be a major force for privatization and pro-corporate ideology in all 50 states.

9) "A SPECIAL-INTEREST, BIG BUSINESS LOBBING GROUP?"

Although many SPN affiliates do not register key employees who contact legislators about bills as lobbyists, many SPN members advance legislation through ALEC and outside of ALEC. Open records documents obtained from legislatures shows how some SPN-affiliates employees are in regular communication with legislators and have exerted a strong influence on state laws.

The way in which some of these laws do not advance a "socially" conservative agenda but instead push forward a legal agenda consistent with the wish list of some of the biggest corporations in the country has raised concerns among some.

For example, Susan Goldwater, the wife of Barry Goldwater, the namesake of Arizona's Goldwater Institute, expressed concerns it was becoming "a special-interest, big-business lobbying group."

As of 2013, according to CMD's special report on the Institute, "Goldwater has one registered lobbyist, its Executive Vice President Starlee Rhoades, and although senior staffer Nick Dranias is not registered as a lobbyist, many of his communications would strike a layperson as lobbying, but Arizona law has loopholes for providing 'technical' advice about legislation defining that not as lobbying. ... Despite a steady stream of communication with Arizona state legislators about bills, referenced by number or popular name, that it wants to become law, the Goldwater Institute told the IRS that it spent only $184 on grassroots lobbying and $17,445 on direct lobbying, for a total of $17,669 in lobbying expenses in 2011, well below the permissible ceiling for such expenses as a 501(c)(3)."

Furthermore, as detailed below, SPN groups frequently support the corporate-backed agenda of ALEC on numerous legislative items sought by the huge multi-national corporations that fund ALEC.

SPN Works Inside and Outside ALEC to Advance Changes to the Law

Tracie Sharp winning an ALEC award

Tracie Sharp winning an ALEC award

SPN itself is a dues-paying "private sector" ALEC member and has paid an additional premium to be one of the top-billed sponsors of ALEC conventions, as 44 major corporations have dumped ALEC in the wake of controversy over its role in spreading controversial gun bills, union-busting legislation, and bills to suppress voter rights -- after CMD helped reporters and concerned citizens connect the dots between ALEC corporations, bills, and legislators after a whistleblower provided its executive director with the nearly 1,000 bills that were secretly voted on by private sector members voting as equals with state elected officials.

Sharp's role in promoting the ALEC agenda has been recognized by ALEC. It gave her one of its "Private Sector Member of the Year" awards in 2009. Others given the same recognition that year included the ALEC rep from the huge tobacco firm Altria.

In fact, all of SPN's member think tanks push parts of ALEC's agenda in their respective states and, according to a recent review by CMD, 35 of SPN's 64 member think tanks have additional direct ties to ALEC (such as sitting on ALEC task forces, speaking at ALEC conferences, or sharing personnel with ALEC). Legal changes in which SPN affiliates are particularly active include clamoring for expansion of school vouchers, charter schools, and other forms of education privatization; hamstringing labor unions and urging wage suppression; privatizing pensions; pre-empting paid sick leave; fighting health care reform; and repealing renewable energy standards and denying climate change.

Of these 34, at least 19 SPN-connected think tanks are known to have participated in ALEC task forces, where state legislators give an equal vote to corporate lobbyists and other special interests at closed door meetings about templates to change state laws. SPN think tanks have participated in each of ALEC's task forces, including the now-disbanded Public Safety and Elections Task Force, which adopted Florida's NRA-written "Stand Your Ground" law and the "Voter ID Act" as "model" bills.

Additionally, SPN affiliates sponsored at least 41 ALEC "model" bills between the summer of 2010 and the spring of 2012, according to a CMD review of ALEC documents that CMD and/or Common Cause have obtained. For example, Michigan's Mackinac Center sponsored a set of bills strongly resembling sections of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's controversial collective bargaining bill, Act 10, at ALEC's 2011 Spring Task Force Summit.

(A tabulation of SPN ties to ALEC and a list of recent bills known to have been sponsored or spearheaded by SPN think tanks, see the SourceWatch article here.)

SPN's role in ALEC is multi-faceted. It is a member and a funder, and its member think tanks sit on many ALEC task forces and plan ALEC workshops and trainings. SPN members also regularly write bills and bring them to ALEC to be pushed as legislation in the states with great success.

Click here for a list of recent known "model" bills introduced by SPN think tanks.

But it is back in the states where the real synergy happens. When ALEC bills are introduced in state legislatures, the SPN think tanks are often standing by to write the studies, spin the most favorable data, provide the expert talking points, put out the media releases, do the press interviews that give an aura of academia to the efforts -- or they may already have these in the can or in the works before the bill is even introduced in the legislature by an ALEC lawmaker.

Among their various objectives to change state law, SPN think tanks have written, presaged, pushed, and promoted ALEC's effort to:

1) ATTACK UNIONS

ALEC's "Right to Work Act" seeks to limit union rights. SPN member state think tanks have published articles and reports supporting "right to work" legislation in at least Alabama, Kentucky, Ohio, Delaware, Oregon, Minnesota, Indiana, Michigan, Maine, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania.

SPN think tanks have also joined ALEC in pushing a broad agenda to undermine other worker protections including tearing down collective bargaining, prohibiting paid union activity in the form of "release time," and ending the ability to deduct union dues from paychecks for private and public employees (so-called "paycheck protection"). (See, for example, Michigan's Mackinac Center and Arizona's Goldwater Institute.)

2) PRIVATIZE EDUCATION

SPN think tanks have joined ALEC in pushing a broad education agenda to privatize public schools, including pushing for-profit online schools, for-profit charter schools, using taxpayer dollars for vouchers to for-profit schools, and even so-called "parent triggers" to allow a small group of parents to close a public school for current and future students, and turn the school into a charter school or require a voucher system. (Although it appears to be part of the convergence of the SPN-ALEC agenda across the board, recent examples of SPN activity in support of one or more of these changes include Texas, Arizona, California, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, Alaska, Arkansas, Delaware, Georgia, Wisconsin, Hawaii, Maryland, Mississippi, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, and Wyoming.)

3) PRIVATIZE PUBLIC PENSION SYSTEMS

SPN think tanks have joined ALEC in pushing to privatize public employee pension systems, reducing retirement security and changing agreements that many workers negotiated for years ago, by making them 401(k)-style defined contribution type accounts rather than defined benefit plans. Such 401(k)s operate as fee-taking enterprises by the corporations administering them, which can result in reduced retirement income for workers. (See, for example, Connecticut, Wyoming, Washington, and Illinois.)

4) ROLLBACK ENVIRONMENTAL INITIATIVES

ALEC's "State Withdrawal from Regional Climate Initiatives" would allow states to pull out of the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative or the Western Climate Initiative, cap-and-trade programs to cut greenhouse gases and carbon-dioxide emissions, and uses language that denies climate change. SPN state think tanks have published articles and reports supporting states' withdrawals from these regional initiatives in Alabama, Arkansas, Tennessee, Delaware, Oregon, New Jersey, Montana, Virginia, Connecticut, and possibly other states.

5) DISENFRANCHISE PEOPLE OF COLOR, THE ELDERLY, AND STUDENTS THROUGH MAKING IT HARDER FOR AMERICANS TO VOTE

ALEC's "Voter ID Act" makes it more difficult for American citizens to vote. It would change identification rules so that citizens who have been registered to vote for decades must show certain kinds of ID in order to vote. As some courts have found, such legislation can have the effect of disenfranchising college students and many low-income, minority, and elderly Americans who do not have driver's licenses but have typically used other forms of ID, groups often considered to include large numbers of Democratic Party voters. Such legislation could adversely affect more than five million people and such bills are being promoted by Republican legislators based on spurious claims of systemic voter fraud, which is virtually non-existent. SPN state think tanks have published articles and reports supporting voter ID bills in at least Arkansas, Washington state, North Carolina, and Wisconsin.

SPN Member Think Tank Funding Sources Include Koch Money and Mystery Funds

SPN and its member state think tanks do not disclose their donors to the public, but CMD and Common Cause have reviewed donation information from IRS filings of major foundation funders in order to compile a partial list of funders. Among them are some of the most ideological extreme families in the nation. SPN itself has received funding from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation (which is controlled by Charles Koch and his right-hand man, Richard Fink), the Olin Foundation, the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, the Castle Rock Foundation (from the Coors family fortune), the Adolph Coors Foundation, the McCamish Foundation, the JM Foundation, the Smith Richardson Foundation, and the Roe Foundation (Thomas Roe's family foundation), among others.

Funding for SPN has increased rapidly. In 2007, the nearly $40 million in combined revenue of the then-52 SPN member think tanks in 45 states was less than the Heritage Foundation's budget that year of $50 million. SPN president Tracie Sharp announced a plan to expand revenues for SPN's state members by $50 million by 2012. For the calendar/tax year 2011 (the most recent for which information is available for SPN and all its member groups), the total revenue had risen to $83.2 million and the number of state think tanks in SPN to 59, according to a review of the groups' IRS filings. When the Illinois-based Heartland institute is added in, which is not a state think tank but a hybrid state and national one, the total revenue for these related organizations that year was $87.8 million. The total spent in 2012 was likely significantly higher.

HOW THE KOCH FORTUNE FUNDS SPN THINK TANKS: A CASE STUDY

For decades, the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch have financed scores of right-wing groups and causes via their charitable foundations. (Their personal fortune is estimated to be $68 billion.) Grants from foundations are public information, which means the public can know just how much money Koch foundations give to organizations like ALEC ($748,858 between 1998 and 2011; in addition the Kochs approved a nearly $500,000 loan to ALEC in the late 1990s, when ALEC was in financial straits).

However, it has long been believed that the Kochs also bankroll their ideological agenda through personal contributions in addition to via checks from their various corporate interests, like Koch Industries, none of which is required to be publicly disclosed -- unless a check is made out directly to a candidate or a PAC.

Documents discovered by researchers now show how Koch Industries, one of the biggest privately held corporations in the U.S. and the world, use some of its corporate revenue to fund its owners' ideological agenda in the states, and also how the Kochs may use their personal checking accounts to fund their agenda.

The detailed list of funders of two SPN members -- the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in 2010 and the Massachusetts based Pioneer Institute for Public Policy Research (PIPPR) in 2007 -- was included in public materials relating to their annual IRS form 990 filings.

The TPPF list of funders for 2010 included a grant from one of the Koch foundations, the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, for $69,788. But it also included a much larger $159,834 grant from Koch Industries. This grant was the seventh largest TPPF received that year, on a published list of 129 funders giving more than $5,000. This contribution, which dwarfs the publicly disclosed Koch family foundation grant, would have remained secret forever but-for the filing.

Similarly, PIPPR did not receive a publicly disclosed grant from the Koch foundations in 2007, which would mean there were no visible dots to connect back to Koch money for that year. But PIPPR did in fact receive a very large, previously unknown, personal check for $125,000 from David Koch, the largest of any contribution it received that year.

It is possible that these two instances were anomalies, but it seems unlikely given the Kochs' commitment to advancing their ideological agenda through spending money. It is not known if either TPPF or PIPPR received similar unreported money from the Kochs in previous years or since then, and we also do not have any evidence of other SPN think tanks, or of SPN itself, receiving similar personal or corporate cash from the Kochs. The total amount spent by Koch Industries to advance the Koch brothers' personal ideological objectives through donations to tax-exempt groups organized under sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the IRS Code are not known, even though such groups are playing an increasingly influential role in both lobbying and elections.

DIPPING INTO THE "DARK MONEY ATM OF THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT" -- FUNDING FROM DONORS TRUST

SPN also received $10 million between 2006 and 2011 from two closely-related funds -- Donors Trust (DT) and Donors Capital Fund (DCF) -- spin-offs of the Philanthropy Roundtable, run by SPN board member Whitney L. Ball. These entities are also connected to Koch money, and the Philanthropy Roundtable even gave Charles Koch an honorary award last year in the midst of public criticism of the role he and his brother have played in funding the controversial ALEC and attempting to influence elections through an array of groups.

DT and DCF are what are called "donor-advised funds," which means that the funds create separate accounts for individual donors, and the donors then recommend disbursements from the accounts to different non-profits. Very little was known about them, and they had received scant media coverage until late 2012 and early 2013, when the Guardian and others published extensive reports on what Mother Jones called "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement."

Funds like DT and DCF are not uncommon in the non-profit sector, but they do cloak the identity of the original donors because the funds are typically distributed in the name of DT or DCF rather than the original donors.

Thomas A. Roe

Thomas A. Roe

What's more, the two funds exist for "donors dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise[,] ... always with the goal of advancing the philosophy they share with their donors." This echoes the mantra of ALEC and various other enterprises funded by the Koch Brothers, Thomas Roe, and other right-wing CEOs that have cultivated this right-wing infrastructure.

Much of the anonymous billionaires' money funnels through DT and DCF to fund a "vast network of climate denial think tanks," according to The Guardian. "The money flowed to Washington think tanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore."

In 2011, "the nearly $2 million in grants from Donors Trust made up about 40 percent of SPN's revenue for the year," according to CPI. To be clear, that was funding for Sharp's SPN itself, and does not include more direct funding for its member think tanks.

In addition, during the same time period, DT and DCF also gave big sums to SPN member state think tanks -- $1.8 million to Arizona's Goldwater Institute, $1.2 million to Washington State's Evergreen Freedom Foundation, and $1 million to New York State's Manhattan Institute (the SPN member Empire Center for New York State Policy is a project of the Manhattan Institute), for example. This cloaked money has gone to at least 51 of SPN's member think tanks in the past five years, according to CPI.

Fueled by robust funding from right-wing funders like the Koch brothers, the Bradley Foundation, and by large anonymous grants from DonorsTrust, Donors Capital, and others, SPN has grown rapidly in recent years. There were 12 original think tanks when SPN was founded. As of 2013, there are 64 SPN member think tanks in all 50 states.

According Lee Fang's recent article in the The Nation, "Financial support for SPN-affiliated think tanks has increased by tens of millions of dollars over the last four years, disclosures show. In areas with the most concentrated investments, particularly the Midwestern states ... , budgets for state-level political groups have doubled, outpacing their counterparts on the left."

Some of the money SPN receives from DT and DCF is granted specifically for creating new state groups. For example in 2011, DCF provided a $35,000 grant for "start up activities in Florida," a $10,000 grant for "start up activities in Arkansas," and a further $165,000 [to whom?] for "2011 start-ups."

MYSTERY FUNDS: A CASE STUDY ON TRACIE SHARP'S POWER

The TPPF documents reveal an even more intriguing financial connection to Sharp than the direct funding by Koch Industries discussed above.

SPN itself gave TPPF $49,306.90 in 2010, according to its IRS filing, but that's not the only way in which Sharp helped fuel TPPF's agenda.

Three of the top ten largest grants received by TPPF in 2010 -- of a total reported 129 grants that year -- were from mysterious sources: the "State Think Tank Fund", the "Government Transparency Fund" and the "Paul Revere Fund." A fourth mysterious grant was received from something called the "146 Group".

The first two of these -- $300,000 from the "State Think Tank Fund" and $195,000 from the "Government Transparency Fund" -- list SPN President Tracie Sharp as their primary contact, along with the mailing address for SPN. But these grants are not from SPN directly, at least not according to SPN's own IRS filings for that year.

SPN does make grants to member think tanks, as noted elsewhere in this resource, but these grants are typically smaller than these two grants -- for example, SPN gave TPPF $19,500 directly in 2010. The total of all grants from SPN in 2010 amounted to $766,175/$664,250 (there is a discrepancy in SPN's 2010 IRS Form 990). The combined total of these two mysterious grants -- $495,000 -- to a single SPN member, apparently under the control or direction of the SPN president, raises some important questions about the role Tracie Sharp plays in directing funds to SPN members. CMD reached out to SPN for comment, but the organization did not respond by press time.

The only other public reference to the "State Think Tank Fund" is as a partial funder of a 2006 report released by another SPN member, the Yankee Institute, titled "The Coming Crisis in Suburban Schooling." There is no record of these funds as tax-exempt entities on the IRS website, and no records in numerous other searches we conducted.

IS SPN'S PRESIDENT WORKING WITH DONORS CAPITAL FUND TO HELP FUND THE NETWORK?

A close review of all publicly reported grants from the "dark money ATM," Donors Capital Fund, shows that it sent combined grants to TPPF in 2010 totaling $667,508. These grants, however, were not -- nor were any from Donors Capital -- listed in the information TPPF provided to the IRS. This raises the question of whether the Donors Capital grants include the mysterious funds under the control of SPN's President Tracie Sharp. It is inconceivable that grants of this size would be inadvertently omitted by TPPF.

As described above, DCF is a "donor-advised fund," allowing wealthy individuals who want to give $1 million or more to 501(c)(3) organizations (such as SPN think tanks) to have that money invested and distributed for them, even after they die if they choose. DCF gives these high-roller investors a range of options about their account. They can choose to dictate exactly how, when, and to whom their money will be distributed, or they can nominate a DCF board-approved "account advisor" to make these decisions for them. They can also choose from a range of options about how they want the source of the grant to be described, from full disclosure to total anonymity. And if they choose, a grant can be listed as being from an account name instead of from a person. None of these account names are usually made public, and there is no way to trace them back to DCF, let alone the individual high-roller.

There are similarities between the amounts listed by DCF in their IRS filings and the $300,000 from the "State Think Tank Fund" and $195,000 from the "Government Transparency Fund" in TPPF's 2010 list of donors. This might indicate that DCF is the source of the funding. In this case Tracie Sharp (as the contact person) would likely be the fund-designated "account advisor." We asked Tracie Sharp, SPN, Donors Capital Fund, and TPPF each to comment, but all refused even to confirm or deny the funding data that has been uncovered.

Tracie Sharp is the contact person for what appear to be at least two very significant sources of money. These two combined grants were easily the largest source of funding for TPPF in 2010. And, because the other SPN groups did not disclose their IRS form 990 Schedule Bs detailing their donors, the public may never know the full extent of her influence and financial control in any other disbursements of such funds at her disposal.

There is no indication in SPN's own IRS filings, in which re-grants to other organizations are required to be disclosed, that SPN itself gave grants of this size to TPPF. (SPN's 2010 IRS filing lists only a grant of $19,500 to TPPF that year).

As Fang noted in his recent Nation article, SPN's influence is on the rise and Sharp is widely being credited with the right-wing's victories in the states. How much money she will spend or direct this year to advance the Koch brothers' agenda and the agenda of the corporate-fueled ALEC may remain a mystery, but the influence of the state operations she has cultivated will no longer be as secretive as it once was, given the spotlight now being focused on SPN.

CMD's Reporters' Guide on SourceWatch includes the following resources:

State Policy Network Main Portal

SPN Funding

SPN Ties to ALEC

SPN Members

SPN Agenda

SPN History, Founders, and Staff

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guardian:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/05/state-conservative-groups-assault-education-health-tax

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers' compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as "free-market thinktanks", includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

The documents contain 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN's summary of all the proposals to give readers and news outlets full and fair access to state-by-state conservative plans that could have significant impact throughout the US, and to allow the public to reach its own conclusions about whether these activities comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.

Details of the co-ordinated approach come amid growing federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Last week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on those groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.

Most of the "thinktanks" involved in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Service. Though the groups are not involved in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the amount of lobbying they are allowed to perform. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents propose the launch of "media campaigns" aimed at changing state laws and policies, or refer to "advancing model legislation" and "candidate briefings", in ways that arguably cross the line into lobbying.

The documents also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in each of the 50 states and an annual warchest of $83m drawn from major corporate donors that include the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco company Philip Morris, food giant Kraft and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in size from requests of $25,000 to $65,000, the plans were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Trust, a private foundation that in 2011 donated almost $15m to largely rightwing causes.

The trust, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Company empire – now part of Pfizer – which created NutraSweet. The trust is a major donor to such mainstays of the American right and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.

SPN's link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a "top 20" and "bottom 20". It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle's sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman's "commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights".

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• "reforms" to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania;

• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York;

• an education voucher system to promote private and home schooling in Florida;

• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;

• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN's president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that "as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society."

In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a "research and demonstration project" that would "release residents from extreme government dependency". It would turn the state's poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as "a gigantic tax-free zone".

SPN Maine executive summary extract

Dubbed "FreeME", the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county's income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

"[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step," the proposal says, adding that the "missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast" showing how block-granting Medicaid would "bring significant savings" to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.

The Observer describes TPPF as "one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation". One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN's sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).

Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. "Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity that will pare back or repeal RGGI," the funding proposal says.

SPN Maine summary extract

The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. "There is never any lobbying," he told the Guardian. "Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that."

But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. "The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University's mission."

Watchdogs that monitor the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network's members belied a larger purpose. "They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers," she said.

The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. "There's no mystery here," Sharp said. "The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so."

Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt "research and education organization", floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.

"Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition," the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a "research study" which it would call "Busting the Boat Checks" – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.

The institute conceives a "media campaign" with its aim being the "full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts".

"We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used as a brandisher for reform in Trenton," it says.

SPN New Jersey excerpt

CSINJ's president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.

"CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don't represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers," he said.

He said the proposal was focused on the "abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We've seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 years of employment."

The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago's government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that "Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform."

SPN Illinois extract

The institute plans to "leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois." It adds that "friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process."

John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been "an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system." He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.

"We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don't. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly."

---

11/18/13 trms

More of tonight’s citations will be listed here later, but for here, here are the links Rachel pointed to in tonight’s opening block:

Center for Media and Democracy’s report on the State Policy Network

The State Policy Network directory

---

Directory

SPN Members

Advance Arkansas Institute

Phone: 501-588-4245

E-mail: advancearkansas@gmail.com

Web: http://www.advancearkansas.org

Alabama Policy Institute

Phone: (205) 870-9900

E-mail: garyp@alabamapolicy.org

Web: http://www.alabamapolicy.org

Alaska Policy Forum

Phone: (907) 334-5853

E-mail: info@alaskapolicyforum.org

Web: http://www.alaskapolicyforum.org

Arkansas Policy Foundation

Phone: (501) 537-0825

E-mail: kaza@arkansaspolicyfoundation.org

Web: http://www.arkansaspolicyfoundation.org

Beacon Center of Tennessee

Phone: (615) 383-6431

E-mail: justin@beacontn.org

Web: http://www.beacontn.org

Bluegrass Institute for Public Policy Solutions

Phone: (270) 782-2140

E-mail: jwaters@freedomkentucky.com

Web: http://www.bipps.org

Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions

Phone: (614) 224-4422

E-mail: info@buckeyeinstitute.org

Web: http://www.buckeyeinstitute.org

Caesar Rodney Institute

Phone: (302) 734-2700

E-mail: bek@caesarrodney.org

Web: http://www.caesarrodney.org

California Public Policy Center

Phone: 916-961-6770

E-mail: ed@calpolicycenter.org

Web: http://www.calpolicycenter.org

Calvert Institute for Policy Research

Phone: (410) 752-5887

E-mail: info@calvertinstitute.org

Web: http://www.calvertinstitute.org

Cascade Policy Institute

Phone: (503) 242-0900

E-mail: john@cascadepolicy.org

Web: http://www.cascadepolicy.org

Center of the American Experiment

Phone: (612) 338-3605

E-mail: Mitch.Pearlstein@AmericanExperiment.org

Web: http://www.americanexperiment.org

Common Sense Institute

Phone: (973) 927-9860

E-mail: jcantrell@csinj.org

Web: http://www.csinj.org

Commonwealth Foundation

Phone: (717) 671-1901

E-mail: info@commonwealthfoundation.org

Web: http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org

Empire Center for New York State Policy

Phone: (518) 434-3100

E-mail: thoefer@empirecenter.org

Web: http://www.empirecenter.org

Ethan Allen Institute

Phone: (802) 695-1448

E-mail: eai@ethanallen.org

Web: http://www.ethanallen.org

Foundation for Government Accountability

Phone: 239-244-8808

E-mail: tbragdon@FloridaFGA.org

Web: http://www.FloridaFGA.org

Freedom Foundation (formerly Evergreen Freedom Foundation)

Phone: (360) 956-3482 x23

E-mail: jbechtle@myfreedomfoundation.org

Web: http://myfreedomfoundation.com/

Freedom Foundation of Minnesota

Phone: (612) 354-2160

E-mail: annettemeeks@gmail.com

Web: http://www.freedomfoundationofminnesota.com

Georgia Center for Opportunity

Phone: (770) 242-0001

E-mail: randy.hicks@georgiaopportunity.org

Web: http://www.georgiaopportunity.org/

Georgia Public Policy Foundation

Phone: (404) 256-4050

E-mail: kmccutchen@gppf.org

Web: http://www.gppf.org

Grassroot Institute of Hawaii

Phone: (808) 591-9193

E-mail: info@grassrootinstitute.org

Web: http://www.grassrootinstitute.org

Great Plains Public Policy Institute

Phone: (605) 334-9400

E-mail: ron.williamson@greatplainsppi.org

Web: http://www.greatplainsppi.org

Idaho Freedom Foundation

Phone: (208) 258-2280

E-mail: wayne@idahofreedom.net

Web: http://www.idahofreedom.net/

Illinois Policy Institute

Phone: (312) 346-5700

E-mail: jtillman@illinoispolicy.org

Web: http://www.illinoispolicy.org

Independence Institute

Phone: (303) 279-6536

E-mail: jon@i2i.org

Web: http://www.i2i.org

Indiana Policy Review Foundation

Phone: (260) 417-4094

E-mail: cladwig@inpolicy.org

Web: http://www.inpolicy.org

James Madison Institute

Phone: (850) 386-3131

E-mail: bob@jamesmadison.org

Web: http://www.jamesmadison.org

John Locke Foundation

Phone: (919) 828-3876

E-mail: jhood@johnlocke.org

Web: http://www.johnlocke.org

John William Pope Civitas Institute

Phone: (919) 834-2099

E-mail: Francis.DeLuca@nccivitas.org

Web: http://www.nccivitas.org/

Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy

Phone: (603) 224-4450

E-mail: arlinghaus@jbartlett.org

Web: http://www.jbartlett.org

Kansas Policy Institute

Phone: (316) 634-0218

E-mail: dave.trabert@kansaspolicy.org

Web: http://www.kansaspolicy.org

Libertas Institute

E-mail: cboyack@libertasutah.org

Web: http://www.libertasutah.org

MacIver Institute for Public Policy

Phone: (608) 588-6477

E-mail: bhealy@maciverinstitute.com

Web: http://maciverinstitute.com/

Mackinac Center for Public Policy

Phone: (989) 631-0900

E-mail: lehman@mackinac.org

Web: http://www.mackinac.org

Maine Heritage Policy Center

Phone: (207) 321-2550

E-mail: jsmoody@mainepolicy.org

Web: http://www.mainepolicy.org

Maryland Public Policy Institute

Phone: (240) 686-3510

E-mail: csummers@mdpolicy.org

Web: http://www.mdpolicy.org

Mississippi Center for Public Policy

Phone: (601) 969-1300

E-mail: thigpen@mspolicy.org

Web: http://www.mspolicy.org

Montana Policy Institute

Phone: (406) 219-0508

E-mail: cgraham@montanapolicy.org

Web: http://www.montanapolicy.org

Nevada Policy Research Institute

Phone: (702) 222-0642

E-mail: am@npri.org

Web: http://www.npri.org

North Dakota Policy Council

Phone: (701) 223-8155

E-mail: brenarlo@policynd.org

Web: http://www.policynd.org

Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs

Phone: (405) 602-1667

E-mail: Michael@ocpathink.org

Web: http://www.ocpathink.org

Opportunity Ohio

Phone: 614-636-2663

E-mail: contact@opportunityohio.org

Web: http://www.opportunityohio.org

Pacific Research Institute

Phone: (415) 989-0833

E-mail: spipes@pacificresearch.org

Web: http://www.pacificresearch.org

Palmetto Policy Forum

Phone: (803) 708-0673 

E-mail: Ellen@palmettopolicy.org

Web: http://www.palmettopolicy.org/

Pelican Institute for Public Policy

Phone: (504) 267-9404

E-mail: kkane@pelicaninstitute.org

Web: http://www.pelicaninstitute.org/

Pioneer Institute

Phone: (617) 723-2277

E-mail: jstergios@pioneerinstitute.org

Web: http://www.pioneerinstitute.org

Platte Institute for Economic Research

Phone: (402) 452-3737

E-mail: jvokal@platteinstitute.org

Web: http://www.platteinstitute.org

Public Interest Institute

Phone: (319) 385-3462

E-mail: racheter@limitedgovernment.org

Web: http://www.limitedgovernment.org

Public Policy Foundation of West Virginia

Phone: (304) 282-8249

E-mail: jfshaffer@comcast.net

Rhode Island Center for Freedom and Prosperity

E-mail: info@rifreedom.org

Web: http://rifreedom.org

Rio Grande Foundation

Phone: (505) 264-6090

E-mail: pgessing@riograndefoundation.org

Web: http://www.riograndefoundation.org

Show-Me Institute

Phone: (314) 454-0647

E-mail: brenda.talent@showmeinstitute.org

Web: http://www.showmeinstitute.org

South Carolina Policy Council

Phone: (803) 779-5022

E-mail: eal@scpolicycouncil.com

Web: http://www.scpolicycouncil.com

Sutherland Institute

Phone: (801) 355-1272

E-mail: pmero@sutherlandinstitute.org

Web: http://www.sutherlandinstitute.org

Texas Conservative Coalition Research Institute

Phone: (512)474-6042

E-mail: jcolyandro@sbcglobal.net

Web: http://www.txccri.org

Texas Public Policy Foundation

Phone: (512) 472-2700

E-mail: brollins@texaspolicy.com

Web: http://www.texaspolicy.com

Thomas Jefferson Institute

Phone: (703) 440-9447

E-mail: mikethompson@erols.com

Web: http://www.thomasjeffersoninst.org

Virginia Institute for Public Policy

Phone: (703) 753-5900

E-mail: JTaylor@virginiainstitute.org

Web: http://www.virginiainstitute.org

Washington Policy Center

Phone: (206) 937-9691

E-mail: dmeadsmith@washingtonpolicy.org

Web: http://www.washingtonpolicy.org

Wisconsin Policy Research Institute

Phone: (262) 367-9940

E-mail: wpri@wpri.org

Web: http://www.wpri.org

Wyoming Liberty Group

Phone: (307) 632-7020

E-mail: susan.gore@wyliberty.org

Web: http://www.wyliberty.org

Wyoming Policy Institute

Phone: (307) 637-0580

E-mail: janie@wyomingpolicy.org

Web: http://www.wyomingpolicy.org/

Yankee Institute for Public Policy

Phone: (860) 282-0722

E-mail: fergus@yankeeinstitute.org

Web: http://www.yankeeinstitute.org

SPN Associate Members

1851 Center for Constitutional Law

Accuracy In Media

Acton Institute

Advocates for Self-Government

Allegheny Institute for Public Policy

Alliance for School Choice

America's Future Foundation

American Council of Trustees and Alumni

American Enterprise Institute

American Legislative Exchange Council

American Majority

American Principles Project

American Tradition Institute

Americans for Prosperity Foundation

Americans For Tax Reform

Atlantic Legal Foundation

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights

Bastiat Society

Bastiat Society of Charleston

Bastiat Society of Charlotte

Bastiat Society of Cleveland

Bastiat Society of Cleveland

Bastiat Society of Colorado Springs

Bastiat Society of Indianapolis

Bastiat Society of Portland

Bastiat Society of Sacramento

Bastiat Society of San Jose

Bastiat Society of St. Louis

Bastiat Society of Wichita

Bastiat Society of Wilmington

Beacon Hill Institute

Better Government Project

Capital Research Center

Cato Institute

Centennial Institute

Center for Competitive Politics

Center for Education Reform

Citizens Against Government Waste

Citizens Council for Health Freedom

Citizens in Charge Foundation

Claremont Institute

Competitive Enterprise Institute

David Horowitz Freedom Center

DonorsTrust

Education Action Group Foundation

Foundation for Economic Education

Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability

Foundation for Excellence in Education

Foundation for Self-Government

Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity

Fraser Institute

Free State Foundation

Free to Choose Network

FreedomWorks

Friedman Foundation for Educational Choice

Frontier Lab

Fund for American Studies

Galen Institute Inc.

Goldwater Institute

Headspring Group

Heartland Institute

Heritage Foundation

Independent Institute

Independent Women's Forum

Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University

Institute for Justice

Institute for Policy Innovation

Institute for Truth in Accounting

Intellectual Takeout

Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Jesse Helms Center

John William Pope Center for Higher Education

Judicial Watch Inc.

Just Facts

Leadership Institute

Leadership Program of the Rockies

Limited Government Forum

Louisiana Family Forum

Lucy Burns Institute

Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

Mercatus Center at George Mason University

Moving Picture Institute

National Center for Policy Analysis

National Center for Public Policy Research

National Legal and Policy Center

National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation

National Taxpayers Union

National Taxpayers Union Foundation

New Jersey Family Policy Council

North Carolina Institute for Constitutional Law

Oregon Capitol Watch Foundation

Pacific Legal Foundation

Prometheus Institute

R Street Institute

Reason Foundation

Regular Folks United

Sam Adams Alliance

Small Business Hawaii

South Carolinians for Responsible Government

Spark Freedom

State Budget Solutions

Steamboat Institute

Students For Liberty

Tax Foundation

The Liberty Foundation of America

Thomas B. Fordham Foundation

Tuerck Foundation for the Study of Economics, Law and the Humanities

Utah Taxpayers Foundation

Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty, Inc.

Young America's Foundation

Youth Entrepreneurs

Other Organizations

ACCF Center for Policy Research

Accuracy in Academia

Adams Report

Alliance Defense Fund

Alliance for Choice in Education

Alliance for Maine's Future

America's Future

American Association of Small Property Owners

American Center for Law and Justice

American Conservative Union

American Council on Science & Health

American Dream Coalition

American Institute for Full Employment

American Land Rights Association

American Majority

Americans for Fair Taxation

Americans for Free Choice in Medicine

Americans for Limited Government Foundation

Americans for Prosperity - Arizona

Americans for Prosperity - Colorado

Americans for Prosperity - Georgia

Americans for Prosperity - Illinois

Americans for Prosperity - Michigan

Americans for Prosperity - Missouri

Americans for Prosperity - NC

Americans for Prosperity - NJ

Americans for Prosperity - North Dakota

Americans for Prosperity - Oklahoma

Americans for Prosperity - South Carolina

Americans for Prosperity - South Dakota

Americans for Prosperity - Texas

Americans for Prosperity - Topeka, Kansas

Americans for Prosperity - Virginia

Americans for Prosperity - Wichita, Kansas

Americans for Prosperity- Wisconsin

Americans United for Life

Association of American Educators

Bill of Rights Institute

Black Alliance for Educational Options

Broad Foundation

Building Excellent Schools

California Common Sense

CalWatchDog

Center for Civic Renewal

Center for Individual Freedom

Center for Union Facts

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation

Christian Coalition of Alabama

Citizen Outreach Foundation

Citizens Alliance of Pennsylvania

Citizens Equal Rights Alliance

Citizens for Limited Taxation

Civitas Institute

Civitas Institute

Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute

Club for Growth

Concerned Women for America

Congressional Institute

Consumers for Health Care Choices

Cornerstone Policy Research

DC Progress

DCI Group Inc.

Eagle Forum

Educate New Mexico

Education Advancement Fund International

Education Liberty Watch

Ethics and Public Policy Center

Excellent Education for Everyone

Family Action Council of Tennessee

Family Research Council

Federalist Society

Florida TaxWatch

Foundation for Free Enterprise

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Foundation for Research on Economics & the Environment

Freedom Works - California

Freedom Works - Colorado

Freedom Works - Florida

Freedom Works - Michigan

Freedom Works - North Carolina

Freedom Works - Oklahoma

Freedom Works - Oregon

Freedom Works - Texas

Freedom Works - Washington State

Freedom Works - Wisconsin

Future of Freedom Foundation

Houston Property Rights Association

Indiana Family Institute

Innosight Institute

Institute for Health Freedom

Institute of the North

Iowa Taxpayer Association

John Jay Institute

Justice Foundation

Kansas Taxpayers Network

Landmark Legal Foundation

Let Freedom Ring

Lexington Institute

Liberty Fund

Liberty Institute

Liberty on the Rocks

Lincoln Institute of Public Opinion Research, Inc.

Lincoln Legal Foundation

MacIver Institute for Public Policy

MacIver Institute for Public Policy

MacIver Institute for Public Policy

Maryland Taxpayers Association Inc.

Michigan Association of Public School Academies (MAPSA)

Montana Taxpayers Association

Mountain States Legal Foundation

National Institute for Labor Relations Research

National Tax Limitation Committee

National Taxpayers United-Illinois

Nebraska Tax Research Council

Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom

Nevada Taxpayers Association

Open Government Institute of California

Oregonians in Action

Parents In Charge Foundation

Pennsylvania Leadership Conference

Performance Institute

Philanthropy Roundtable

Property & Environment Research Center

Property Rights Foundation of America Inc.

Public Policy Institute of New York

Public Service Research Foundation

REACH

Religious Freedom Coalition

Research Institute for Hawaii

Rocky Mountain Foundation

Sagamore Institute for Policy Research

San Diego Institute for Policy Research

Searle Freedom Trust

Southeastern Legal Foundation

State Policy Network

State Policy Network and Institute for Humane Studies

State Policy Network and Institute for Humane Studies

Students in Free Enterprise

Susan B. Anthony List

Tax Foundation of Hawaii

Taxpayer Association of Oregon

Taxpayer's Federation of Illinois

Taxpayers Network Incorporated

Teach NYS

Tennessee for Tax Reform

Tennessee Tax Revolt

Tennessee Taxpayers Association

Texans for Fiscal Responsibility

The Atlas Society

The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College

The Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism

Victims of the Endangered Species Act (VESA)

We the People Foundation

Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance

Wyoming Heritage Foundation

Young America's Foundation - California

Ok, here are the rest of Monday night’s citations:

Blogging at 38K Feet

Know the Facts Alaska

Don’t Enroll Alaska

Is a Chicago Marketing Firm Behind Misleading Alaska Health Care Websites?

Who’s behind websites aiming to confound Alaska enrollment in Healthcare.gov?

Opt Out

MCPP - ‏@mspolicy - Medicaid expert Christie Herrera speaks to legislators and state officials about Medicaid reform and expansion: pic.twitter.com/nnBhU14rXU

Senate committee seems to like Florida’s Medicaid reform program

NH officials told: Do not expand Medicaid

Visitors from the East bear gifts of Medicaid Reform

Medicaid Innovation and Reform Commission (pdf)

Report: Think tanks tied to Kochs

Commentary: Gov. Deal makes right call on health care reform

Tennessee Governor Hesitates on Medicaid Expansion, Frustrating Many

Va. Medicaid expansion still faces uphill battle, even after McAuliffe win

Parties Continue To Negotiate On Medicaid Expansion

Parnell: Alaska won’t expand Medicaid

Uncover ObamaCare Initiative Launches Interactive Map Tracking Exchange Enrollment vs. Projections

Duck Dynasty: Season 4 Premiere Breaks Ratings Records

A Calculated Push Into Entertainment Lifts ‘Duck Dynasty’ Family’s Fortunes

‘Duck Dynasty’ Premiere Shatters Cable Records With 11.8 Million Viewers

‘Duck Dynasty’ returns to break cable ratings records

Reward Balloon Retrievers Today.

Macy’s breaks tradition, opens stores on Thanksgiving

Kmart ups the ante with Thanksgiving shopping marathon

Black Friday sales move to Thanksgiving

OfficeMax joins the Thanksgiving shopping rush

These Kmart Workers Say They Can’t Even Take Thanksgiving Off

Several Stores Open on Thanksgiving [Updated]

This Store Took Away Workers’ Thanksgivings But Then Decided It Wasn’t Worth It

Seven Stores That Won’t Ruin Their Workers’ Thanksgivings

Is Walmart’s request of associates to help provide Thanksgiving dinner for co-workers proof of low wages?

Alan Simpson: Social Security Is Like a “Milk Cow with 310 Million Tits!”

Alan Simpson: ‘Give them the green weenie’

‘Stupid’: Alan Simpson gores GOP on immigration, Obama on budget

Simpsons respond to ‘shut up’ controversy

Former U.S. senator Alan Simpson says Lynne Cheney told him to ‘shut up’

Mike Enzi Takes on Liz Cheney

Liz - this isn’t just an issue on which we disagree - you’re just wrong - and on the wrong side of history.

Dispute Over Gay Marriage Erupts in Cheney Family

Former VP Cheney weighs in on daughters’ same sex marriage feud

==

stinktank.org DONORS CAPITAL FUND AND DONORS TRUSTSEARLE FREEDOM TRUSTTHE ROE FOUNDATIONTHE JAQUELIN HUME FOUNDATION BRADLEY FOUNDATION KOCH FAMILY FOUNDATIONS

American Legislative Exchange council

The heartland institute

Americans for Prosperity

Franklin Center

The cato Institute

National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation

freedomworks

The Heritage Foundation

American Conservative Union

American enterprise institute

Spn’s Affiliated state think tanks

==

http://www.prwatch.org/files/spn_national_report_final.pdf

Before Texas Senator Ted Cruz did things like faux-filibustering the 

funding of the federal government in order to halt the Affordable Care Act, 

or “Obamacare,” he was a fellow at an influential state political group 

called the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). In 2010, he co-authored 

a report for TPPF that described Obamacare as an “unconstitutional 

federal overreach and violation of 10th Amendment rights.”i

 The paper 

detailed what would later become an American Legislative Exchange 

Council (ALEC) “model” bill to overturn Obamacare – the “Health Care 

Compact”ii

 – as noted recently by the Current.

iii

TPPF is one of 63 state-based groups that have recently been identified as 

members of the State Policy Network (SPN), a web of right-wing “think 

tanks” in every state across the country. Although many of SPN’s member organizations claim to be 

nonpartisan and independent, our in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its member think 

tanks are major drivers of the right-wing, ALEC-backed agenda in state houses nationwide, with 

deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders, all while reporting 

little or no lobbying activities. Acknowledging the groups’ political power and that their activities 

make them into something different than think tanks, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin 

called one SPN member a “do” tank.iv

...

 Giving $1.5 million or more: Donors 

Capital Fund 

 Giving $250,000 to $600,000: 

o DonorsTrust Inc. 

o Northern Trust Charitable Giving 

Program (a donor-advised fund) 

o BMO Harris Bank 

 Giving $100,000 to $249,000: 

o Jaquelin Hume Foundation 

o Karen Wright (member of the 

Kochs’ million-dollar donor clubcvii

and American Petroleum Institute 

boardmembercviii) 

 Giving $25,000 to $99,000: 

o Famsea Corporation 

o RAI Services Company 

(Reynolds American Inc.) 

o Altria Client Services Inc. 

o Microsoft 

o AT&T 

o GlaxoSmithKline 

o White Hat Ventures, LLC 

 Giving $5,000 to $24,000: 

o Kraft Foods 

o Atlantic Trust Company 

o Philip Morris 

o Reynolds American 

o Express Scripts 

o American Legislative Exchange 

Council 

o DCI Group, LLC (top Republican 

lobby and PR firm with ties to the 

Koch brothers, the tobacco 

industry, the Tea Party, and 

billionaire Pete Peterson’s 

“Campaign to Fix the Debt”)cix 

o Verizon Communications, Inc. 

o Comcast 

o Olive Hill, LLC 

o Time Warner Cable Shared 

Service Center

---

In addition, the following corporations, front groups, and various non-profit organizations 

sponsored SPN’s most recent annual meeting in Oklahoma City on September 24 – 27, 2013, for 

undisclosed amounts (bolded funders have also funded ALEC):cx

 Express Scripts 

 Vernon Krieble Foundation 

 The Roe Foundation 

 Alliance for School Choice 

 Atlas Network 

 RAI Services Company 

 The Liberty Foundation 

 Voter Gravity 

 Altria 

 NJOY (electronic cigarettes) 

 Charles Koch Institute 

 National School Choice Week 

 Quick Reliable Printing (QRP) 

 R Street 

 Taxpayers United of America 

 eResources 

 How Money Walks 

 Spark Freedom 

 Franklin Center for Government and 

Public Integrity 

 Facebook 

 Jones Public Relations 

 National Cable & Telecommunications 

Association 

 Reason Foundation 

 Consumer Healthcare Products 

Association 

 American Legislative Exchange Council 

 The Carleson Center Welfare Reform 

Action Fund 

 Stephen Clouse and Associates 

 Comcast 

 A.C. Fitzgerald & Associates 

 ClearWord Communications Group, Inc. 

(donor strategies firm) 

 Time Warner Cable 

 K12 Inc. 

 Competitive Enterprise Institute 

 Frontiers of Freedom 

 Ceterus (virtual office company) 

 Case Consulting Services 

 DonorsTrust 

 The Heritage Foundation 

 National Center for Policy Analysis 

(NCPA) 

 Students for Liberty 

 Right on Crime 

 Tax Foundation 

 ROC Exposed (an anti-labor front group 

run by Berman & Co.)cxi

 Microsoft 

 Mercatus Center at George Mason 

University 

 Mackinac Center for Public Policy 

 Americans for Tax Reform 

 The Independent Institute 

 Americans for Prosperity Foundation 

 MP Plumbing Co. 

 American Enterprise Institute 

 Campaign Marketing Strategies 

 U.S. Chamber of Commerce Global 

Intellectual Property Center 

 Generation Opportunity (a Koch-financed 

group focusing on young voters)cxii

 American Philanthropic 

 Young Americans for Liberty

==

cmd 

==

Twelve new reports released today expose the State Policy Network (SPN), an $83 million web of right-wing "think tanks" in every state across the country. Although SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, an in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its state affiliates are major drivers of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders. The reports show how these groups masquerade as "think tanks," and describe how some of them may be skirting tax laws while really orchestrating extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, all while reporting little or no lobbying activities.

"The 'experts' of State Policy Network groups get quoted on TV, in the papers, or in the legislature as if they were nonpartisan, objective scholars on issues of public policy," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD). "But in reality, SPN is a front for corporate interests with an extreme national policy agenda tied to some of the most retrograde special interests in the country, including the billionaire Koch brothers, the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family."

Denise Cardinal, executive director of Progress Now, added, "The bottom line is these organizations of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich are representing themselves as groups that are looking out for the best interests of everyday, working class Americans and it's just a blatant lie. What we're doing is trying to bring some transparency to the damaging work they're doing on a daily basis. From policies that promote polluting the air and water to the destruction of our public education system and a tax system that benefits their rich donors, what these organizations are doing is shameful and it's time that someone brought this to light."

You can see the reports -- a nationally-focused report written by CMD, entitled "EXPOSED: The State Policy Network -- The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government," and eleven state-focused reports written by Progress Now member groups and CMD -- at www.StinkTanks.org as well as detailed information documented at SourceWatch.org.

Key findings of the report include:

==

---

The Guardian [1] / By Ed Pilkington [2]

Facebook and Microsoft Help Fund Right-Wing Lobby Effort, Report Finds

November 14, 2013 |

Some of America’s largest technology and telecoms companies, including Facebook, Microsoft and AT&T, are backing a network of self-styled “free-market thinktanks” promoting a radical rightwing agenda in states across the nation, according to a new report by a lobbying watchdog.

The Center for Media and Democracy asserts [3] that the State Policy Network (SPN), an umbrella group of 64 thinktanks based in each of the 50 states, is acting as a largely beneath-the-radar lobbying machine for major corporations and rightwing donors.

Its policies include cutting taxes, opposing climate change regulations, advocating reductions in labour protections and the minimum wage, privatising education, restricting voter rights and lobbying for the tobacco industry.

The network’s $83.2m annual warchest comes from major donors. These include the Koch brothers, the energy tycoons who are a mainstay of Tea Party groups and climate change sceptics; the tobacco company Philip Morris and its parent company Altria Group; the food giant Kraft; and the multinational drugs company GlaxoSmithKline.

More surprisingly, backers also include Facebook and Microsoft, as well as the telecoms giants AT&T, Time Warner Cable and Verizon.

The CMD study uncovered a public document that listed SPN’s funders in 2010. They included: AT&T and Microsoft, which each donated up to $99,000; and Time Warner Cable and Verizon, which each contributed up to $24,000. In addition, Facebook, Microsoft and Time Warner each sponsored SPN’s most recent annual meeting in Oklahoma City in September.

Lisa Graves, the director of the Center for Media and Democracy, said it was “disappointing” that Facebook and the other technology and telecoms companies had “put their hat in the ring, given SPN’s extreme agenda that includes climate change denial, making it harder for Americans to vote, and attacking workers’ rights.” She called on the firms to “reconsider their support, as it is at odds with science and common sense.”

Tracie Sharp, the president of SPN, rebutted the charge that it operates as a rightwing lobbying network. In a statement, she said that the network was dedicated to providing “state-based, free-market thinktanks with the academic and management resources required to run a non-profit institution”. Each of its 64 member thinktanks were “fiercely independent, choosing to manage their staff, pick their own research topics and educate the public on those issues they deem most appropriate for their state.”

But she added that “every thinktank, however, rallies around a common belief: the power of free markets and free people to create a healthy, prosperous society.”

The State Policy Network operates a tech/telecom policy exchange [4] in which it campaigns against taxes on internet shopping and against the regulatory activities of the Federal Communications Commission. Though much of that thinking could not reasonably be characterised as what the CMD report calls an “extreme rightwing agenda”, the tech and telecoms companies' inclusion on the list of funders puts them alongside some strange bedfellows.

The Guardian invited the technology and telecoms companies to respond to the allegation that they have sponsored a network devoted to “extreme” rightwing causes, but most either declined to comment or had not responded by the time of publication.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Microsoft said: “As a large company, Microsoft has great interest in the many policy issues discussed across the country. We have a longstanding record of engaging with a broad assortment of groups on a bipartisan basis, both at the national and local level. In regard to State Policy Network, Microsoft has focused our participation on their technology policy work group because it is valuable forum to hear various perspectives about technology challenges and to share potential solutions.”

SPN works in parallel with the American Legislative Exchange Council, Alec, a forum that brings together largely Republican legislators and corporations to devise model bills that are used to attack workers’ rights in various US states.

The Koch brothers have donated directly to the network either personally or through corporate funds from Koch Industries and from family foundations. Two closely-related funds, the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, described by Mother Jones as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement” [5], give at least $1.5m a year – channeling money to the network from individual donors whose identity the funds obscure.

Several prominent rightwing billionaire donors are also involved, including Art Pope, an ally of the Koch brothers; the Walton family of Walmart, which funds SPN members in Arkansas, California, Massachusetts and Washington state; the foundation of billionaire Republican donor Richard Mellon Scaife; and the Searle Freedom Trust, created out of the fortune of the creator of NutraSweet, which funds a number of conservative causes.

Graves said that the individual thinktanks who make up SPN present themselves as “neutral, non-partisan groups, but are in fact part of a national network to project the voices and interests of some of the most powerful corporations and families in the country”.

Gordon Lafer, a professor at the University of Oregon, said that SPN groups were actively targeting the rights of often non-unionised employees. His research had uncovered attempts to expand the use of child labour, cut the minimum wage, reduce unemployment benefit, make it harder to sue employers for sex or race discrimination, or even to police wage theft where companies refused to pay workers over-time or any wages at all.

“These are a very dramatic package of proposals at a time of economic hardship, and they are being rolled out in a cookie-cutter fashion from state to state, and affecting the lives of working people across the country.”

Lafer added: “This looks like scholarship from local organisations, but in fact it is neither – neither scholarship, nor local.”

See more stories tagged with:

facebook [6],

microsoft [7],

State Policy Network [8],

climate change denial [9]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/facebook-and-microsoft-help-fund-right-wing-lobby-effort

Links:

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ed-pilkington

[3] http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12302/reports-expose-extreme-pressure-groups-masquerading-think-tanks

[4] http://www.spn.org/publications/detail/spn-tech-telecom-policy-exchange-august-2013

[5] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos

[6] http://www.alternet.org/tags/facebook-0

[7] http://www.alternet.org/tags/microsoft-0

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/state-policy-network

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/climate-change-denial-0

[10] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

---

AlterNet [1] / By Ronnie Cummins [2]

How Monsanto Is Using Cronies in Congress to Take Away States' Rights to Label Genetically Modified Foods

May 16, 2013 |

Reliable sources in Washington D.C. have informed the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) that Monsanto has begun secretly lobbying its Congressional allies to attach one or more “Monsanto Riders” or amendments to the 2013 Farm Bill that would preempt or prohibit states from requiring labels on genetically engineered (GE) foods.  

In response to this blatant violation of states’ rights to legislate, and consumers’ right to know, the OCA and a nationwide alliance have launched a petition [3] to put every member of Congress on notice: If you support any Farm Bill amendment that would nullify states’ rights to label genetically modified organisms (GMOs), we’ll vote – or throw – you out of office.

On Wednesday, May 15, an amendment (the King Amendment) to the House version of the Farm Bill, inserted under the guise of protecting interstate commerce, passed out of the House Agricultural Committee. If the King Amendment makes it into the final Farm Bill, it would take away states’ rights to pass laws governing the production or manufacture of any agricultural product, including food and animals raised for food, that is involved in interstate commerce. The amendment was proposed by Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), largely in response to a California law stating that by 2015, California will allow only eggs to be sold from hens housed in cages specified by California.  But policy analysts emphasize that the amendment, broadly and ambiguously written, could be used to prohibit or preempt any state GMO labeling or food safety law.

Will the King Amendment survive the Senate? No one can be sure, say analysts. However few doubt that Monsanto will give up. We can expect that more amendments and riders will be introduced into the Farm Bill--even if the King Amendment fails—over the next month in an attempt to stop the wave of state GMO labeling laws and initiatives moving forward in states like Washington, Vermont, Maine, Connecticut and others.

Monsanto and the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) have admitted privately that they’ve “lost the battle” to stop GE food labeling at the state level, now that states are aggressively moving forward on labeling laws. On May 14, Maine’s House Ag Committee passed a GMO labeling law. On May 10, the Vermont House passed a labeling bill, 99-42, despite massive lobbying by Monsanto and threats to sue the state. And though Monsanto won a razor-thin victory (51 percent to 49 percent) in a costly, hard fought California GMO labeling ballot initiative last November, biotech and Big Food now realize that Washington State voters will likely pass I-522, an upcoming ballot initiative to label GE foods, on November 5. 

If Monsanto can’t stop states from passing laws, then the next step is a national preemptive measure.  And all signs point to just such a power grab.  Earlier this year, Monsanto slipped its extremely unpopular “Monsanto Protection Act,” an act that gives biotech immunity from federal prosecution for planting illegally approved GE crops, into the 2013 Federal Appropriations Bill.  During the June 2012 Farm Bill debate, 73 U.S. Senators voted against the right of states to pass mandatory GE food labeling laws. Emboldened by these votes, and now the House Ag Committee’s vote on the King Amendment, Monsanto has every reason to believe Congress would support a potential nullification of states’ rights to label.

The million-strong OCA and its allies in the organic and natural health movement are warning incumbent Senators and House members, Democrats and Republicans alike, that thousands of health and environmental-minded constituents in their Congressional districts or states will work to recall them or drive them out of office if they fail to heed the will of the people and to respect the time-honored traditions of shared state sovereignty over food labels, food safety laws, and consumers’ right to know.

Trouble in Monsanto Nation

Over the past 20 years Monsanto and the biotech industry, aided and abetted by indentured politicians and corporate agribusiness, have begun seizing control over the global food and farming system, including the legislative, patent, trade, judicial and regulatory bodies that are supposed to safeguard the public interest.

In the U.S., despite mounting evidence [4] of the damage GE crops inflict on human health and the environment, approximately 170 million acres of GE crops, including corn, soybeans, cotton, canola, sugar beets, alfalfa, papaya, and squash, are currently under cultivation. These crops, untested and unlabeled, comprise 41 percent of all cultivated cropland, or 17 percent of all cropland and pastureland combined. According to the GMA, at least 70 percent of non-organic grocery store processed foods contain GMOs. And GE grains and mill byproducts now supply the overwhelming majority of animal feed on the factory farms that supply 90 percent to 95 percent of the meat, eggs and dairy products that Americans consume.

Yet despite their marketplace dominance, record profits and enormous political clout in Washington D.C., Monsanto and the biotech industry are in deep trouble. A new peer-reviewed study [5] in the journal Entropy reports that Monstanto’s top-selling herbicide, Roundup, is a deadly poison, destroying important human gut bacteria and likely contributing to the rapid increase of food allergies and serious human diseases including cancer, autism, neurological disorders, Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD), dementia, Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Those most susceptible to poisoning by Monsanto’s Roundup are children and the elderly. 

Scientists aren’t the only ones raising new questions about Roundup. Farmers are complaining that they’re being forced to spray more and more chemicals on crops increasingly under siege from a growing army of herbicide-resistant weeds.  The situation is so bad that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just raised [6] the limits of Roundup residue allowed on grains and vegetables to even more dangerous levels. But just in case the EPA someday stops raising the limits, Monsanto, Dow and the biotech industry are working on a new “solution” to the onslaught of herbicide-resistant Superweeds: They’ve applied  for approval of a new and highly controversial generation of super toxic herbicide-resistant GE crops, including “Agent Orange”  (2,4-D and dicamba-resistant) corn, soybeans and cotton.

As a recent widely-circulated article [7] points out:

The use of 2,4-D is not new; it’s actually one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. What is new is that farmers will now ‘carpet bomb’ staple food crops like soy and corn with this chemical at a previously unprecedented scale—just the way glyphosate has been indiscriminately applied as a result of Roundup Ready crops. In fact, if 2,4-D resistant crops receive approval and eventually come to replace Monsanto's failing Roundup-resistant crops as Dow intends, it is likely that billions of pounds will be needed, on top of the already insane levels of Roundup being used (1.6 billion lbs were used in 2007 in the US alone).

In addition to these Agent Orange crops, an expanded menu of genetically engineered organisms are awaiting approval. Next on the menu?  GE apples, trees, and salmon.

State Labeling Laws: The ‘skull and crossbones’ that terrify Monsanto

Monsanto’s greatest fear isn’t a federal government charged with protecting the health and safety of its citizens.  Congress and the White House seem only too happy to oblige the biotech industry’s unquenchable thirst for growth, power and dominance. No, it’s the massive, unstoppable (so far) grassroots movement of Millions Against Monsanto that strikes fear in the heart of the Biotech Bully. U.S. citizens are waking up. They’re demanding labels on genetically engineered foods, similar to those already required in the European Union. They’re calling for serious independent safety-testing of GE crops and animals, both those already approved (especially Monsanto’s Roundup-resistant crops) and those awaiting approval.

The anti-GMO movement has finally figured out, after 20 years of fruitlessly lobbying Congress, the FDA and the White House, that the federal government is not going to require labels on GE foods. Instead the movement has shifted the battleground on GMO labeling from Monsanto and Big Food’s turf in Washington D.C. to the more favorable terrain of state ballot initiatives and state legislative action—publicizing the fact that a state GMO labeling law will have the same marketplace impact as a national labeling law.

State laws spell doom for Monsanto. Companies like Kellogg’s, General Mills, Coca-Cola, Pepsi/Frito-Lay, Dean Foods, Unilever, Con-Agra, Safeway, Wal-Mart and Smuckers are not going to label in just one or two states.  Monsanto knows that U.S. food companies will go GMO-free in the entire U.S., rather than admit to consumers that their products contain GMOs.

As Monsanto itself has pointed out, labels on genetically engineered foods are like putting a “skull and crossbones” on food packages. This is why Monsanto and their allies poured $46 million into defeating a California ballot initiative last year that would have required labels on GMO foods. This is why Monsanto has lobbied strenuously in 30 states this year to prevent, or at least delay, state mandatory labeling laws from being passed. This is why Monsanto has threatened to file federal lawsuits against Vermont, Connecticut, Maine and Washington if they dare grant citizens the right to know whether or not their food has been genetically engineered or not.

And this is why Monsanto’s minions are trying to insert amendments or riders into the Farm Bill that will make it nearly impossible, even illegal, for states to pass GMO labeling laws. And there’s nothing to stop them when Congress is filled with pro-biotech cheerleaders who could care less that 90 percent of U.S. consumers want mandatory labels and proper safety testing of genetically engineered crops and foods.

Countering Monsanto’s Final Offensive: Throw the Bums Out!

Only a massive grassroots resistance will deter the U.S. Senate and House from stomping on our rights. Only an unprecedented campaign of public education, petition-gathering and grassroots pressure will be able to convince the ever-more corrupt and indentured politicians in Washington D.C. to back off.

Eighteen state constitutions have century-old provisions for state registered voters to collect petitions and recall state and local officials, forcing them to either resign or stand for reelection. But what very few Americans, and even members of Congress, realize is that 11 states have constitutional provisions to recall U.S. Senators and House of Representative members, as well as state elected officials.

It’s time we exercise the full power of direct democracy, not just state and municipal ballot initiatives. We must continue to support efforts like the current state ballot initiative to label GMOs in Washington state, and county ballot initiatives to ban GMOs, factory farms and other corporate crimes, in the 24 states and hundreds of counties and municipalities where these are allowed.  But we also need to use the power we have to recall and throw out of office our out-of-control Congressional Senators and Representatives as well.  

If our elected officials in Congress continue to represent Monsanto and big corporations, rather than their constituents, then let’s throw the bums out! If the Washington political establishment, both Democrats and Republicans, continue to trample on our inalienable constitutional rights and contemptuously disregard the 225-year principle of a shared balance of power between the federal government, the states and local government, then we have no choice but to recall them or throw them out of office.

Please join the nation’s organic consumers and natural health advocates in this strategic battle, the Food Fight of Our Lives. Please join this campaign to save, not only our right to choose what’s in our food, but our basic right to democratic representation and self-determination as well.  Sign the petition [3]. Tell your Congressmen and women, especially the 73 incumbents who voted last year to eliminate states rights’ to legislate on GMO labels, and those in the House this week who voted to support the King Amendment that “enough is enough,” “basta ya.” Power to the People!

See more stories tagged with:

gmo [8],

monsanto [9],

labeling [10],

right to know [11],

food [12],

agriculture [13]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/food/how-monsanto-using-cronies-congress-take-away-states-rights-label-genetically-modified-foods

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/ronnie-cummins

[3] http://petitions.moveon.org/sign/congress-dont-pass-a?source=c.url&r_by=5382364

[4] http://www.earthopensource.org

[5] http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/15/4/1416

[6] http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_27491.cfm

[7] http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2013/05/14/glyphosate.aspx?e_cid=20130514RRG_DNL_art_1&utm_source=dnl&utm_medium=email&utm_content=art1&utm_campaign=20130514RRG

[8] http://www.alternet.org/tags/gmo

[9] http://www.alternet.org/tags/monsanto

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/labeling

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/right-know

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/food-0

[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/agriculture

[14] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

===

The Right Leans In

Lee Fang

March 26, 2013   | ��  This article appeared in the April 15, 2013 edition of The Nation....

Days after Barack Obama took the oath of office for his second term, about 400 GOP donors gathered in a downtown San Francisco hotel to hear Jim DeMint—who had just resigned from the Senate to take a $1-million-a-year job as head of the Heritage Foundation—explain the way forward. 

“This is a battle we can win, and we are winning in many places around the country,” DeMint told the assembled donors confidently. He implored them to look beyond Washington, DC, and see that conservatives were scoring victories in state after state, citing the December move by Michigan Republicans to ram through anti-union legislation, as well as similar laws passed in Wisconsin and Indiana. Some of these victories would influence the Beltway as well. After all, the GOP’s control of state governments guaranteed that congressional districts were drawn in such a way that, in the 2012 elections, Republicans retained a thirty-three-seat majority in the House despite Democrats earning 1.3 million more votes for their candidates. 

“You may not have heard about it,” DeMint continued. “We’ve been cultivating bright ideas, building coalitions and working with others like the State Policy Network to make these things happen.” SPN is a nonprofit that nurtures conservative think tanks in all fifty states; its president, Tracie Sharp, was sitting near the front at the event and was warmly acknowledged by the speakers several times.

By the end of DeMint’s presentation, which was punctuated by roaring applause, the audience—whose members included food processing tycoon Jerry Hume and wealthy Bay Area investor Nersi Nazari—seemed decidedly more cheerful. But DeMint’s pitch about promoting state-based political organs in networking groups like SPN wasn’t just bluster or salesmanship: Sharp is among the leading strategists who have made the right’s under-the-radar resurgence possible. 

Other conservative leaders have spoken even more glowingly of the way that state-level political investments can shape the future of conservatism. “We have, us fellow warriors for liberty, a rendezvous with destiny,” said Henry Olsen, an American Enterprise Institute vice president, at a meeting of conservative think tank leaders last November at the Ritz-Carlton resort on Amelia Island, Florida. “Reagan’s generation did too, and their task was to plant the tree of liberty in the garden of Roosevelt. Our task is to protect that tree against the gales and gusts of Hurricane Barack, and to help nurture that tree so that it grows into a grove and forest.���

At the same event, Grover Norquist proclaimed that with SPN’s support, Republican governors might “turn their states into Texas or Hong Kong”—laboratories of the free market. “It’s a wonderful opportunity,” he added. 

Though Democrats largely outperformed electoral expectations at the federal level last year, Republicans made significant gains in several states. The GOP is using this shift to redistribute wealth by cutting taxes on the rich while raising them on working-class citizens, largely through sales tax increases. What makes this year different from past Republican realignments, however, is the massive increase in funds available to conservative think tanks operating on the state level, as well as how these groups have made the goal of consolidating power through attacking unions and similar tactics central to their agenda. 

These media-savvy organizations—which frequently employ former journalists to churn out position papers, news articles, investigations and social media content with a hard-right slant—bolster the pro-corporate lobbying efforts of the American Legislative Exchange Council. Like ALEC, State Policy Network groups provide an ideological veil for big businesses seeking to advance radical deregulatory policy goals. Interviewed at the San Francisco event this past January, SPN’s Sharp maintained that her organization is loosely connected and has no coordinated agenda. But if the last four years are any guide, conservative think tanks are on the march, working from a similar script to tear down organized labor and promote extreme right-wing policies in state capitols from Alaska to Florida.

Financial support for SPN-affiliated think tanks has increased by tens of millions of dollars over the last four years, disclosures show. In areas with the most concentrated investments, particularly the Midwestern states referred to in DeMint’s speech, budgets for state-level political groups have doubled, outpacing their counterparts on the left. Without control of the White House, corporations anxious to push back against taxes and regulations, along with a cadre of wealthy right-wing donors, have invested in these state-level think tanks, partisan media outlets, training institutes and online advocacy efforts. Some existing organizations have been expanded, and others founded to fill what conservative planners viewed as a tactical void. ..

* * *

Americans for Prosperity, known largely for its affiliation with the billionaire Koch brothers and for organizing Tea Party rallies, is part of this state-focused spending spree. The group has opened new local chapters or more than tripled the funding for existing chapters in key states. This increased spending has helped Americans for Prosperity recruit conservative activists and deploy them during contentious policy debates. Audit reports collected by the New York State Attorney General’s office show that Americans for Prosperity went from spending about $4.9 million on state chapter activities in 2009 to $10.6 million in 2011, the last available disclosure. Those figures do not necessarily account for the television, radio and Internet advertising purchased by the group when lobbying on state policy issues (which has reportedly reached over $4 million in places like Wisconsin), or the ubiquitous bus tours it has sponsored around the country. 

A key area of growth among state-level conservative think tanks involves efforts to develop nonprofit media. Founded in 2009, the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity has partnered with SPN and Americans for Prosperity to hire and train conservative reporters in nearly every state capital. In fact, many Americans for Prosperity officials now lead the center.

As Joe Strupp of Media Matters has reported, the Franklin Center’s stated mission is to take advantage of cutbacks at local papers: “Cash-strapped and under-staffed, local and regional newspapers often can��t provide the real information that voters need to make good decisions.” Strupp, who interviewed several local editors who reluctantly run the center’s syndicated content, noted that some stories covered by the group—including one claiming that a union traded free barbecue for votes in Wisconsin—turned out to be false.

The head of the Franklin Center, a former executive director of the North Dakota Republican Party, boasted that by 2011, the group had hired more than 100 journalists in forty-four states—virtually all of them placed at SPN-affiliated think tanks. In Tennessee, it hired an award-winning journalist, Clint Brewer, for over a year, while in Hawaii and other states, its affiliates ran multiple stories questioning Obama’s birth certificate.

Consultants associated with State Policy Network have also set up supposedly nonpartisan “government transparency” websites. These sites, which neglect the topic of highly paid government contractors while at times exaggerating the pay of public sector employees like teachers—have recently cropped up in almost every state. In Ohio, the Buckeye Institute, an SPN-affiliated think tank, provided the underlying data for a database on public employee pay, which came under criticism after the Associated Press reported that it was “riddled with errors and omissions.”

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This latest project in conservative infrastructure building comes at a time when power is drifting away from political parties and other long-established organizations. The Supreme Courts Citizens Uniteddecision has accelerated this trend, with new Super PACs and attack-ad nonprofits springing up almost as fast as donors can write checks. The upgraded state echo chambers, led by SPN think tanks, seem particularly well-suited for this environment: they are fast-paced, Internet-savvy and dedicated to eliminating their perceived opposition.

Months before Scott Walker took the oath of office as Wisconsin��s forty-fifth governor, the groundwork for his controversial “budget repair bill,” which severely curtailed public sector collective bargaining rights, had already been laid. The John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, founded in 2009 as the second SPN think tank in the state, had—along with the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, an older state affiliate—published several studies calling for government leaders to tackle public sector employee bargaining. Specifically, they targeted teacher pay and benefits as the driver of the state��s budget ills. Unlike the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the MacIver Institute waged its advocacy through YouTube videos and social media, including its own blog.

Brett Healy, president of the MacIver Institute, explained later that it was “critically important” that the state think tanks used “digital media” advocacy and “not the traditional research and analysis…that we’re normally accustomed to doing.”

In January 2011, as Walker began his term, conservatives opened two new reporting outfits in the state. The Franklin Center helped sponsor one called Wisconsin Reporter, while American Majority, a group that helps train conservative activists, started another called MediaTrackers.org. The MacIver Institute bloggers, joined by these new reporting organizations, moved quickly to frame the debate, interviewing protesters who had gathered in Madison to try to stop the bill. The interviewers highlighted the radicals among the group, harshly criticized child participants and sought to rebut union arguments against the budget. 

Meanwhile, the Wisconsin chapter of Americans for Prosperity began a “Stand With Walker” campaign in partnership with the MacIver Institute. The group aired over $342,000 worth of advertising to support the governor’s budget and also began a bus tour crisscrossing the state to drum up support. A turning point came when the MacIver Institute’s bloggers reported that a group of teachers on sick leave were being given fake doctors’ notes by volunteer physicians among the protesters. The story took off, garnering coverage by the local and national media; there was so much Internet traffic to the MacIver Institute’s website that the server crashed. “Tracie [Sharp] probably remembers the panicked phone call that she received from me trying to figure out a patch to fix the situation,�� Healy recalled. 

The Wisconsin groups went on to help re-elect a pro-Walker State Supreme Court judge and successfully fend off the attempt to unseat Walker himself in a recall election. 

The strategy in Wisconsin—with several think tanks and nimble media outlets all coordinating to enact laws to weaken labor unions—also played out in Indiana, where Republicans enacted a right-to-work law, and in Ohio, where a bill to limit collective bargaining was passed (Ohio’s law was subsequently repealed by referendum in 2011). Then, in December 2012, Republicans in Michigan reversed a previous promise and enacted a right-to-work law during the post-election lame- duck session. Happening as it did in the cradle of private-sector union activism, this was perhaps the crowning achievement of the state-based conservative movement. (The Taft-Hartley Act allows states to enact right-to-work laws, which quickly erode unions by allowing workers to benefit from union contracts and negotiations without having to pay dues.)

While many legislators were caught off guard by Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s announcement, space in the front of the capitol had been reserved weeks in advance by Americans for Prosperity’s state chapter to set up a booth in support of the effort. Likewise, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy—the SPN affiliate in Michigan, with two recently opened media outlets, Michigan Capitol Confidential and Watchdog Wire Michigan—produced an array of content, from a Pinterest page to short videos on why the state should change its law governing labor unions. 

Labor unions, on the other hand, spend the majority of their limited resources on member services like bargaining; their political money is mostly spent on candidate donations rather than the kind of rapid-response permanent campaign now embraced by their opposition. The only labor-backed political group that could be compared to the SPN-affiliated Mackinac Center and its allies—an organization called Progress Michigan, which does political research and media outreach—has far fewer resources than its counterparts on the right. In 2010, according to the latest available disclosure for the three groups, the Mackinac Center and Americans for Prosperity’s state chapter outspent Progress Michigan by $4.6 million to a little over $700,000. 

MediaTrackers.org sites and news outlets mirroring Wisconsin Reporter now exist in states across the country, augmenting the advocacy of the expanded Americans for Prosperity and SPN chapters. “There’s no counterweight,” says Lisa Graves, head of the Center for Media and Democracy, a watchdog group in Madison. Graves notes that Wisconsin Reporter, among the other Franklin Center news sites set up in more than two dozen states, has acted as a syndication service, providing right-leaning news coverage to local media. “There’s no progressive wire service,” she adds.

Though many of the conservative groups involved in this strategy have claimed that their interest in promoting right-to-work laws or ending collective bargaining is about creating jobs or cutting spending, there is evidence to suggest that they are really seeking to eliminate unions across the board.

“Freedom is the issue at the core of this debate, and we want to ensure the citizens of Michigan understand this,” said Scott Hagerstrom, Americans for Prosperity’s state leader, in a press release following the passage of the right-to-work law. In a meeting for activists, however, Hagerstrom described his goals differently. “We fight these battles on taxes and regulation,�� he said, “but really, what we would like to see is to take the unions out at the knees so they don’t have the resources to fight these battles.” 

Speaking at a panel discussion in Dallas a year before the right-to-work law’s passage in Michigan, Mackinac Center president Joseph Lehman conceded that his group’s campaign to promote government transparency through hundreds of Freedom of Information Act requests was really an effort to hurt the unions. “The strategic idea we had in mind was defunding unions,” he said. And while it’s too early to predict the result of the Michigan law, new figures released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that Wisconsin and Indiana recorded the sharpest decline in union membership in recent history. Last year, Wisconsin’s union membership rolls dropped by 13 percent. The only state with a higher decrease was Indiana, which reportedly declined by 18 percent. 

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In their aggressive effort take out the opposition, SPN and its allies have at times used unscrupulous tactics. A MediaTrackers.org story late in the campaign last November claimed that the husband of Mark Pocan, a Democratic candidate for Congress, “threatened and harassed” a Republican volunteer named Kyle Wood over text messages. Wood, who also claimed he was beaten in his apartment for not supporting Pocan, later recanted his entire story as a hoax. But the MediaTrackers.org reporter never viewed the alleged text messages before spreading the claim. 

MediaTrackers.org’s founder, Drew Ryun, the son of former Republican Congressman Jim Ryun, calls his group an “attack bloc component.” As he explained at an event with Sharp: “For so long, we as a conservative movement have thought good ideas will win the day. Nothing could be further from the truth.” Ryun added that public opinion could be shaped with technology like “search engine optimization” as well as with ”a little bit of pushing back and punching back.”

Before Ryun started working at MediaTrackers.org, his group American Majority had been training Tea Party activists to manipulate the rating systems on sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Amazon and create lower ratings for left-leaning movies and books. “Literally 80 percent of the books I put a star on, I don’t read,” said a staff member at an American Majority training session. “That’s how you control the online dialogue.���

And before State Policy Network focused its attention in 2011 on eliminating unions, the group helped propel the campaign against the low-income advocacy group ACORN. In 2008, one of its affiliates filed a racketeering suit against ACORN, alleging it was a criminal gang designed to commit voter fraud in Ohio—though no evidence existed of any illicit voting.

After James O’Keefe’s edited tapes of ACORN brought the organization to its knees the following year, the conservative videographer was invited to speak at multiple events held by these state-level think tanks. And when O’Keefe was caught tampering with wires in Senator Mary Landrieu’s office some months later, it was revealed that he’d plotted the idea at the Pelican Institute for Public Policy, SPN’s Louisiana think tank, where he was scheduled to give a talk on “Exposing Truth: Undercover Video, New Media and Creativity.” Indeed, the Pelican Institute’s Robert Flanagan was one of his accomplices, dressing up as a telephone repairman in order to enter Landrieu’s office.

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Consider these organizations as the spokes on a wheel. When a group of for-profit education companies sought legislation allowing online charter schools greater access to taxpayer dollars, it hired dozens of state lobbyists from coast to coast. In addition, however, the virtual-school companies tapped SPN to provide academic studies, talking heads for the local media, flip-cam-equipped journalists to quiz critics, and busloads of activists at state capitols. 

Lobbyists with the school companies—including K12 Inc. and Connections Academy drafted the legislation through ALEC. The State Policy Network groups acted, in essence, as ALEC’s public relations team to promote the laws. And it worked: by the end of 2011, sixteen states had passed laws expanding virtual education. The flow of campaign dollars and closed-door influence peddling still happened, as in any traditional corporate campaign to pass major legislation. The difference in this case, however, was a well-oiled operation that could deliver the appearance of a groundswell in demand for proprietary online charter schools, when little public support existed. Worse, the lobbying by SPN-affiliated think tanks overshadowed serious questions about these charter-school businesses, which despite their soaring profit margins have been roundly criticized for abysmal test scores and high dropout rates. Together, these new state-level groups have remade the political map, providing ideological cover for extreme conservative policies once thought of as politically toxic. 

State Policy Network’s organizations have also operated as fronts for corporations seeking to cloak their business interests under an ideological veneer. The Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy, a Pennsylvania-based affiliate of SPN that is pushing to pass right-to-work legislation, is financed in part by the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, a lobbying group that represents US Steel, Hershey Foods, Sun Oil and many smaller firms. The lobbying group even provides office space for the Commonwealth Foundation and its media outlet, Pennsylvania Independent. The foundation has surged in size, with its budget climbing from $890,000 in 2008 to $1.95 million in 2011, the last available figure. The head of the Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association, Frederick Anton, has pushed right-to-work legislation for years. But this time, he’s being aided by grassroots organizers from Americans for Prosperity, as well as the media work of Pennsylvania Independent. 

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The pattern seen in the online education debate has been duplicated to pass corporate tax cuts, reductions to health and education programs, a rollback in state environmental laws, and other corporate and conservative priorities. In places like Minnesota and Louisiana, the playbook has been deployed to provide telecom companies with a greater monopoly by pushing to outlaw municipal fiber-optic broadband networks, a faster, cheaper alternative for consumers. (Notably, Comcast and Time Warner Cable helped sponsor the last State Policy Network retreat.) 

When the Free State Foundation, a Maryland affiliate of SPN, testified in Congress in opposition to so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent Internet providers from setting discriminatory download and upload speeds based on content, the National Cable and Telecom Association quietly provided the small think tank with a grant of $85,000. 

In 2010, when the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed similar comments to the FCC in opposition to net neutrality, the think tank received $76,500 from AT&T and $34,950 from Verizon, according to a leaked donor list. 

Meanwhile, several family foundations financed by Koch Industries—a firm that produces chemicals and transportation infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) and horizontal drilling for oil and natural gas—have helped with State Policy Network’s expansion. In turn, SPN think tanks from New York to California have attacked bills intended to create state-level regulations over fracking. 

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State Policy Network was founded on March 24, 1992, in South Carolina by Thomas Roe, a wealthy businessman, Reagan adviser and leader of the South Carolina Policy Council, a state think tank modeled after the Heritage Foundation. Now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, SPN began as an effort to mobilize more than twenty state think tanks. Political Research Associates, a left-leaning investigative team, reported that the group quickly became a “government-in-waiting” for the wave of Republican governors elected in 1994. As SPN affiliates proposed broad tax cuts and privatization schemes, the Republican governors frequently hired policy professionals from the think tanks to help enact those ideas. 

Though backed by some of the largest Republican donors in the country, including the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, SPN also thrived in the 1990s by assisting the tobacco industry in packaging its resistance to tobacco taxes and health regulations as part of a “freedom agenda” for conservatives. 

Sharp herself gained experience working at this nexus of influence. Records stored with the University of California, San Francisco, reveal that Philip Morris not only gave generous financial donations to SPN affiliates, but was heavily involved in drafting and disseminating content for the think tanks. Before assuming her current position, Sharp served as executive director of the Cascade Institute, a State Policy Network affiliate in Oregon. The UCSF archive shows that during her tenure, the Cascade Institute corresponded with Philip Morris’s state lobbyist in Salem on promoting opposition to tobacco taxes, including one instance where Cascade published an opinion piece by a doctor. The doctor’s column, which was faxed to the Philip Morris representative, warned that high cigarette taxes could lead to “drive-by shootings and mob-style assassinations—turf wars—over the control of black market cigarette sales.”

At a 2001 meeting for SPN, Sharp invited Joshua Slavitt, Philip Morris’s director of external affairs, to give a talk. “I know that many of you have worked with Philip Morris,” Slavitt said, according to a prepared text, adding: “It won’t surprise you that we believe it is in our enlightened self-interest to be part of the policy discussions that ultimately shape the environment in which we do business.” He ended his speech with specific recommendations for SPN leaders in requesting corporate contributions. 

A look at the donors to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the SPN affiliate in Austin, provides a rare window illustrating how these think tanks operate today. The evidence shows that the Big Tobacco–era strategy has been embraced by other large corporations. 

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose leaders recently stirred up controversy for surreptitiously lobbying on behalf of the government of Malaysia, received the bulk of its money from more than seventy-five business interests, including firms like ConocoPhillips, Boeing, TXU Energy, ExxonMobil, AEP Texas and Devon Energy. The largest company on the donor list, Koch Industries, gave $159,834 through its Austin lobbyist, J. William Oswald, in addition to a $69,788 donation from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, a Koch family foundation run in part by Richard Fink, another executive with Koch’s lobbying operation. As The Texas Observer noted, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has focused much of its advocacy on issues pertaining to its corporate benefactors, including energy deregulation and opposition to Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb mercury, smog and carbon pollution. 

The Texas donor list also reveals that Sharp has played a larger role in directly financing the expansion of her affiliates than was previously known. Public disclosures indicate that SPN distributed only $19,500 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2010. That modest amount, which is similar in size to grants given to other state think tanks, suggests that many of the groups do not rely on a central source of cash. But the leaked document shows Sharp as the contact for a donation of $300,000 from the “State Think Tank Fund,” as well as $195,000 from the “Government Transparency Fund” and $49,306 from SPN itself—a discrepancy of $524,806 compared with the disclosed grant. Neither the State Think Tank Fund nor the Government Transparency Fund appears on Guidestar.com or the Foundation Center, repositories for nonprofit and foundation disclosures. 

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Like many SPN affiliates, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has seen its budget steadily rise. In 2011, the group brought in $5.5 million in contributions, $2.4 million more than it raised in 2008. How the other state think tanks in SPN’s orbit are funded largely remains a mystery, since they, like many overtly political nonprofits, do not disclose their donors. A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity shows that Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that caters to wealthy individuals, has provided much of the funding for the recent expansion in state think tanks backed by the Franklin Center and SPN. 

Under Sharp’s leadership, State Policy Network has grown, opening new think tanks (now numbering fifty-nine) and forging close relations with ALEC, which brings together conservative state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists to draft “model legislation.” In 2009, ALEC gave Sharp an award to thank her for “getting SPN members more involved” with the organization. “This special acknowledgement belongs to those who have put in dedicated time and energy through ALEC,” said Sharp, who accepted the award onstage with lobbyists from Verizon and Altria.

While progressive donors have also sought to fund targeted think tank and state media outlets in certain states—namely Colorado and, reportedly, Texas—there is no comparison in terms of size and scope, or in the underhanded tactics embraced by their ideological opponents. 

Brian Rothenberg, head of ProgressOhio, notes that while family foundations exist on the right and the left, corporate money has flowed almost exclusively to conservative think tanks. “Especially after Citizens United,” he says, the right is inherently better funded than the left.” In 2011, during the effort to repeal Governor John Kasich’s collective bargaining law, unions still provided less than 20 percent of ProgressOhio’s budget.

As far as local labor activists like Brett Banditelli (who also produces the Rick Smith radio show in Harrisburg) are concerned, their side is already overwhelmed. The Franklin Center’s Pennsylvania Independent “doesn’t have much readership, but does an incredible job of setting the tone on attacks on unions before the attacks come,” says Banditelli, who notes the Legislature might first go after union pensions before changing any membership or collective bargaining rules. Banditelli says labor has been slow to adapt to the changing media environment, and teachers and workers now stand defenseless. 

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Also, Republicans who were newly elected in 2012 seem intent on consolidating power. Missouri’s GOP state legislators have contemplated using their supermajority to enact right-to-work legislation. The Advance Arkansas Institute, the SPN affiliate in Little Rock, produced content pushing for the strict voter ID laws recently passed by the legislature—which became Republican this year for the first time since Reconstruction. 

Similarly, the Americans for Prosperity chapter in Kansas has pushed an effort to undercut paycheck dues to public sector unions this year, while the John W. Pope Civitas Institute, a North Carolina think tank, has rolled out attacks against Democratic efforts to reform the state’s infamously gerrymandered congressional lines. 

Tim Phillips, the national head of Americans for Prosperity and a close adviser to David Koch, has been clear about his intention to make the most out of the Republicans’ state-level gains. Speaking at a recent press conference in Indianapolis, he declared: “We see a debate going on at the state level that is really going to define the nation.”

Meanwhile, at another Heritage Foundation gathering, Sharp and her colleagues said that their new strategy had been inspired in part by a Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker called “How David Beats Goliath.” The piece, which details the ways that underdogs can win playing by their own rules, offers anecdotes on how insurgents have defeated well-equipped armies by harassing and weakening their opponents. It also describes how a computer scientist won a naval warfare simulation by spending his fictional trillion-dollar budget almost entirely on PT boats.

Referring to the Gladwell article, Sharp said PT boats are “an apt metaphor” for her network of groups because “they’re fast and maneuverable. A team of PT boats working strategically can defeat much larger and less maneuverable vessels—such as huge chunks of unions.”