DEFUND THE LEFT

Defund the left

SEE RETALIATE DEFUND

SEE TWO

SEE KIRK 5 6 REICHSTAG FIRE ~ SOROS, INDIVISIBLE FORD FDN ACTBLUE

SEE TERROR 3 BS

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NEGLECTED UPDATE: TRUMP XO ACTBLUE; EARLIER ARABELLA 1630

this is a catchall term for RW offensive (see also crytpo-) operations:

find a blueprint?  powell a start?

but also related to RW Big picture long term SYSTEMIC strategy, eg gerry?  -> capture of states --> eco-terror, abortion, voter suppress ...[see below ALEC model grabbed by barton wallbuilders

capt 2/18 bathtub?

no merri

bak capt 9 25

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aka defeat the left

aha:  unions are collective action in the workplace/economic world, but class action is collective use of courts (legal vs economic power). both are under attack, defund the left. kochs undermine democ eg voter fraud BS to deprive we the ppl of political power, trifecta game over.

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AN 10 25

More than a month has passed since the fatal shooting of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk in Utah, and the murder continues to inspire an abundance of discussion on both the left and the right.

A long list of liberals, progressives, moderate Democrats and right-wing Never Trump conservatives are making it abundantly clear that while they had major disagreements with Kirk, they wholeheartedly condemn the killing. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for example, was critical of Kirk's politics but is vehement in condemning the attack and saying that progressives need to debate those they disagree with — not resort to violence.

Many in the MAGA movement, however, are blaming Democrats and Never Trumpers for his murder despite the fact they condemned it in no uncertain terms.

In an article published on October 11, The Guardian's Peter Stone warns that MAGA Republicans are using Kirk's murder as a pretext to silence their political opponents.

"Donald Trump and MAGA allies have capitalized on the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats, and others by tarring many critics as the 'enemy within' and 'radical left' in a move that legal scholars and historians call authoritarian and anti-democratic," Stone warns. "Kirk's killing by a lone gunman spurred Trump and top allies to quickly launch conspiratorial charges against a bevy of political foes and an investigation of billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened legal action against TV network ABC after their late-night star Jimmy Kimmel's suspension over clumsy comments about Kirk ended."

Stone emphasizes that Kirk's murder has "provided cover for a sprawling retribution drive by the president and MAGA world that endangers civil liberties against an array of critics in the media, universities, non-profits and other parts of American civil society, say scholars."

Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts outside Boston and author of the book "How Democracies Die," described MAGA's response to Kirk's murder as an example of "Page 1 in the authoritarian playbook."

Levitsky told The Guardian, "You use political violence as a pretext to go after your political enemies. Some of them have been chomping at the bit to do this. They're going after mainstream opponents and other critics. They're defining unacceptable behavior as broadly as possible….. The goal is to tilt the playing field by going after anybody in civil society who could challenge them. One way to weaken them is to go after the funders using a false pretense by linking them to violence or illegal behavior."

Former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig is highly critical of MAGA's push for a federal racketeering investigation of billionaire Democratic donor George Soros following Kirk's murder.

Rosenzweig told The Guardian, "Trump’s invocation of RICO to investigate Soros is frivolously wrong-headed. It is yet another example of his weaponization of the law to target his enemies."

Russell Muirhead, chairman of the Department of Government at Dartmouth University told The Guardian, "Since Charlie Kirk's murder, President Trump has amplified and extended his penchant for leveling conspiracy charges. The target is 'domestic terrorist organizations,' which seems to include such peaceful pro-democratic anti-communist entities as George Soros' Open Society Foundations. The effect is to describe the entirety of 'the left' as a conspiracy, bent on destroying the country, including the Democratic Party."

Muirhead continued: “The risk here is clear: conspiracy charges convert peaceful political opponents into enemies. Once that is accomplished, they no longer need to be respected or tolerated. They can be folded into shadowy 'domestic terrorism networks' and imprisoned — or worse."

Read Peter Stone's full article for The Guardian at this link.

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// BONDI ON HATE SPEECH

Trump’s AG scrambles to do 'damage control' after conservatives rage against free speech threat

AN 9 25

Senior Trump administration officials on Monday made fresh threats to crack down on a nonexistent left-wing “domestic terror movement” following last week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk—a move that critics called an attempt to exploit the far-right firebrand’s murder to advance an authoritarian agenda targeting nonviolent opposition.

Even as investigators work to determine the motive of Kirk’s killer, members of Trump’s inner circle and supporters have amplified an unfounded narrative of a coordinated leftist movement targeting conservatives.

According to The New York Times:

On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that Cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.

Appearing on the latest episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast—which was guest hosted by US Vice President JD Vance—White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

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“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” Miller vowed.

Vance said during the podcast that he wanted to explore “all of the ways that we’re trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream.”

“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,‘” the vice president said. “We’re going to go after the network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”

Vance, who like Trump and numerous supporters claim to champion free speech, also took aim at “people who are celebrating” Kirk’s killing.

Another unnamed administration official told the Times Monday that government agencies would be investigating people, including those accused of vandalizing Tesla electric vehicles and dealerships and allegedly assaulting federal immigration agents, in an effort to implicate US leftists in political violence.

Vance and Miller’s threats ignored right-wing violence—which statistically outpaces left-wing attacks—including the recent assassinations of Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, who were murdered in June by a right-wing masked gunman disguised as a police officer.

Investigative reporter Jason Paladino reported last week that the US Department of Justice apparently removed an academic study previously published on the National Institute for Justice’s online library showing that “since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives” versus “42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives” committed by “far-left extremists.”

Responding to Miller’s remarks, New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent noted on social media that “Stephen Miller was directly involved in one of the largest acts of organized domestic political violence the United States has seen in modern times, the January 6 [2021] insurrection.”

Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) weighed in Monday on Miller’s attempt to exploit Kirk’s murder, writing on the social media site Bluesky that “it’s never acceptable to kill someone for their political beliefs. But the Trump [administration] exploiting the shooting of Charlie Kirk to follow their authoritarian instincts and crack down on the left is incredibly disturbing.”

“We must end any form of political violence—and reject those who try to exploit it,” she added.

Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom noted Monday on social media that Miller “has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization.”

“This isn’t about crime and safety,” Newsom added. “It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions. We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to threaten tens of millions of Americans.”

The progressive Working Families Party (WFP) said Monday on social media that “JD Vance and Stephen Miller want to use the horrifying murder of Charlie Kirk to target and dismantle pro-democracy groups.”

“Their comments call to mind some of the darkest periods in US history,” WFP continued. “They’re dividing people based on what box we ticked on our voter registration.”

Vance and Miller “want to stoke fear and resentment to justify their un-American crackdowns on free speech, mass abductions of working people, and military takeovers of our cities,” WFP added. “This isn’t going to fly. We’ve survived crises like this before as a country, and we can choose to live in a place where our political freedoms are protected, where we settle disagreements with words not weapons, and where no one has to fear losing a loved one to gun violence.”

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DEFUND LEFT SOROS PAID PROTESTERS

mma

On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response

Written by Matt Gertz

Published 09/12/25

Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.

Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.

Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”

Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.

“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”

“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”

Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.

There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.

Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties

It is not true, as Eric Trump and both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.”

It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attackon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.

It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.

After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.

Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”

For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.

Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.

Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.

Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.

If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.

• ### MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”

While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.

“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”

Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”

MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.

Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”

Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”

“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”

Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.

Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”

Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”

Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.

• ### The elephant in the room

It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.

On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.

Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.

In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.

But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”

Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”

On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”

Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.

That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.

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9 8 25

NIXON PROF = ENEMY

JDV DEFUND THE LEFT

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roughrider pc

In 2019, RPC was part of a 60 group coalition, led by Americans for Tax Reform, that sent a letter to Congress urging them to vote against the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, labor legislation that would functionally repeal the Taft-Hartley Act to increase union coercive power. The coalition claims that the PRO Act would harm American workers by codifying rules that lead to higher unemployment, violate worker privacy, and overturn right-to-work laws, while supporting union bosses and their campaign contributors. Other members of the coalition include Heritage Action for America, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy, and the Public Service Research Council. [14]

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/11/revealed-new-leaders-of-council-for-national-policy-set-extremist-agenda/

david a

at its first meeting of 2022, the secretive Council for National Policy (CNP) laid out its plans for influencing this year’s midterm elections, abolishing abortion rights, defunding the left, limiting China’s influence, and countering a topic of great concern to Republicans: “wokeness.”

According to an agenda obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), the CNP meeting took place the last weekend in February at the posh Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California. The agenda reveals  changes in leadership and current priorities of the influential group, which is closelytied to Trump and the Republican Party.

Kevin Roberts, a CNP board member and president of the Heritage Foundation, kicked the event off with a speech on “how the Conservative Movement can go on the offense to promote America’s founding principles across the country.”

CNP is known for “connecting the manpower and media of the Christian right with the finances of Western plutocrats and the strategy of right-wing Republican political operatives,” as Columbia University Professor Anne Nelson describes the group in her definitive book Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the :(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}::{Secret Hub :(style="background-color:#ff9900ff"):}::{of the Radical Right.

Leadership Changes Elevate Voter Suppression Advocates 

The program for the February meeting offers the first glimpse of the secretive group’s high-level members and leaders since CMDpublished its September 2020 Membership Directory, provided by open source intelligence researcher Brent Allpress.

The group’s Executive Committee is headed by Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton, who has taken over from William Walton as CNP’s president. Judicial Watch’s “Election Integrity Project” has pushed for voter roll purges and promotes the myth that voter fraud is widespread in the U.S.

At the August 2020 CNP meeting, Fitton facilitated two panels on “election integrity,” CMDreported. “We need to stop those [vote-by-mail] ballots from going out, and I want the lawyers here to tell us what to do,” Fitton told meeting attendees, according to videos obtained by The Washington Post.

Another lifelong advocate of voter suppression now serves as CNP’s vice president: J. Kenneth Blackwell, a former secretary of state in Ohio and member of Trump’s failed voter fraud panel, the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. He currently chairs the Center for Election Integrity at the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a nonprofit spin-off of the Trump administration.

In May 2021, Blackwell facilitated an “Action Session” at CNP’s 40th anniversary meeting on how to combat the national voting rights effort, featuring U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL), who voted against certifying the 2020 presidential electoral college results, and GOP lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who has promoted Trump’s Big Lie and advised him on his infamous call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” enough votes for the former president to win the state.

At its February meeting, CNP hosted a screening of the filmCapitol Punishment with director Chris Burgard, which promotes the claim that, “Everything that we are being told [about the insurrection] is a lie and Americans are being persecuted to support that lie.” CNP has extensive ties to #StoptheSteal and the violent insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, CMD reported.

Others joining the CNP executive committee this year include Jerry A. Johnson (treasurer), former president of the National Religious Broadcasters; William G. Boykin, retired Army lieutenant general and executive vice president of theFamily Research Council; Chad Connelly, president of Faith Wins; and Millie Hallow, managing director of executive operations at the National Rifle Association.

Blackwell is also listed as president of the board of directors for CNP Action, and Fitton is a new director of the affiliate.

The Gold Circle Members list is largely similar to the September 2020 directory, with many of the new additions representing shifts from lower membership tiers. Notable new members include Ashland University President Carlos Campo; Lynn Friess, widow of GOP megadonor Foster Friess;and Ryan Helfenbein, executive director of the Standing for Freedom Center and a vice president at Liberty University.

Politicizing Covid

“The pandemic led to unprecedented government mandates, the erosion of civil liberties, and an outright assault on freedom,” CNP’s agenda booklet argues. “Americans have seen and experienced what unchecked government power can do, and they have had enough.”

CNP has been instrumental in the relentless push from the right to ignore public health guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) during the deadly Covid-19 pandemic. It played a leading role in the anti-lockdown coalition known as “Save Our Country,” with members making up half of its leadership counciland organizing weekly conference calls to coordinate response tactics.

In May 2020, CMD also revealed that CNP Action, CNP’s 501(c)(4) affiliate, organized a call to discuss a plan for recruiting “extremely pro-Trump” doctors to campaign against Covid public health restrictions.

CNP’s February meeting featured a general session on the state of the pandemic in the U.S. led byDr. Jay Bhattacharya, a leading advocate for herd immunity who has advised Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) on his controversial anti-mask policies.

Focus on Elections 

Despite being a tax-exempt organization barred from engaging in electoral politics, CNP is focusing heavily on elections this year, according to the agenda for its February meeting.

Dave Bossie, president of Citizens United, led things off at the Gold Circle Dinner with a presentation on “the most pressing political battles in DC and their impact on the Conservative Movement.”

A general session titled “Virginia 2021: Lessons Learned” featured Chad Connelly, founder and president of Faith Wins; Mark Campbell, campaign manager for Glenn Youngkin, the Republican who won the 2021 governor’s race in Virginia; Victoria Cobb, president of The Family Foundation of Virginia; and Chris Wilson, CEO of WPA Intelligence sharing “their analyses of the Virginia race” and “what it means for 2022.”

After not winning a statewide race in more than a decade, in 2021 Republicans in Virginia won the offices of governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general, while also recapturing the majority in the state House.

Former Virginia Secretary of Natural Resources Becky Norton Dunlop, a past president of CNP,  joined the four “Lessons Learned” panelists for a CNP Action session “to chart the course to success nationwide in November.”

In his capacity as CNP Action chairman, Blackwell also hosted “Candidate Introductions” for attendees. While candidates were not listed on the program, CMD obtained a flier for Drew Montez Clark, a Republican candidate for Florida’s 25th district seat in the U.S. House, that was circulated at the meeting.

Clarkreportedly co-organized two buses carrying 100 Floridians to the Jan. 6 rally in DC that led to the violent insurrection at the Capitol. He also spoke at a far-right “America First” rally in April 2021 headlined by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA).

Supreme Court Takes Center Stage

“This term of the Supreme Court could be one of the most consequential ever, and CNP Members have been central to some of the landmark cases being decided,” the CNP’s February meeting program notes. Speakers at a general session on the subject included Alan Sears, founder of the Christian right litigation powerhouse Alliance Defending Freedom; Susan B. Anthony List President Marjorie Dannenfelser; and First Liberty President Kelly Shackelford.

“CNP has been strategizing to dominate the Supreme Court for decades,” CNP expert Anne Nelson told the Associated Press in Oct 2020. “They have worked through the Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation, and the National Rifle Association, all run by members of the CNP.”

Dannenfelserwas among 14 other CNP members to attend the Sept. 26, 2020, Rose Garden ceremony at the White House where Amy Coney Barrett accepted the nomination for the Supreme Court, solidifying the far-right’s hold on the nation’s highest court.

The agenda notes that Dannenfelser “will provide an update on the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that could result in completely gutting or overturning Roe v. Wade,” the 1973 Supreme Court decision guaranteeing women in America the constitutional right to an abortion.

Mississippi’s Speaker of the House Phillip Gunn (R-Miss.), the 2020 chair of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), touted the Dobbs v. Jacksoncase and its prospects for leading to a decision to overturn Roe v. Wade during a panel at the CNP meeting last May, CMD reported.

“We think that’s going to be a landmark case. All of us know that the United States Supreme Court composition has changed… in a way that is more pro-life,” Gunn told meeting attendees last spring. “They say that Amy Coney Barrett is one of the most active, pro-life people in America, so we believe that she brings a new dynamic to that court. We think our case, our law that we passed in 2018, will be transformative in the arena in abortion. We’re proud of that.”

Dannenfelser then led a CNP Action panel “on how the Conservative Movement can be best equipped for the impending Supreme Court decision on Dobbs” and to “strategize on messaging, state legislation, and more with attendees.”

One of the panelists,Mike Thompson, is a senior vice president with CRC Advisors. Leonard Leo,who played an integral role in Trump’s effort to pack the federal judiciary with right-wing judges, founded CRC Advisors in 2020 with Greg Mueller to “funnel big money and expertise across the conservative movement.” As of September 2020, Leo was aBoard of Governors member of CNP....

Pushing Back Against China, the Left, and a “Woke” Military 

Placing China “at the heart of the greatest challenges facing the United States in recent years”—from Covid to currency manipulation, climate policies, and “undue influence over American corporations”—Economic War Room host Kevin Freeman led a discussion titled “The 21st: An American or Chinese Century?”

Freeman was joined in the panel by Beau Brunson, Consumers’ Research Director of Policy and Regulatory Affairs. Consumers’ Research has committed millions in dark money to fight environmental, social, and corporate governance concerns (ESG) and “woke” capitalism, where BlackRock has emerged as a top target of its campaign for its “hypocritical” investments in China.

CMD recently exposed Consumers’ Research as one of the largest sponsors of the State Financial Officers Foundation, a group of Republican treasurers, auditors, and staff from 16 states, which has  also prioritized fighting the ESG movement and “woke” capitalism.

Also on the panel were Pete Hoekstra, former ambassador to the Netherlands under Trump, and Steve Milloy, a FoxNews contributor and paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobil, and other corporations.

The three also participated in a CNP Action panel on “Countering China,” where they collectively worked “on ways to combat the increasing and pervasive threat China poses to the United States and American life.”

Leading an CNP Action panel discussion on “Defunding the Left,”Buckeye Institute President and CEO Robert Alt facilitated a tutorial on how to cut off contributions to “left-wing causes” by targeting public employee unions, trial lawyers, and investment management firms. O.H. Skinner, executive director of Alliance for Consumers, and Bridgett Wagner, vice president of policy promotion at the Heritage Foundation, joined the discussion.

New CNP Executive Member Boykin led a panel discussion focused on the question: “Can a Woke Military Address Future Threats?” with Mike Berry, First Liberty’s general counsel, and Keith Kellogg, retired Army lieutenant general and co-chair of AFPI’s Center for American Security. The three talked about “extreme policies [that] have been implemented through the Department of Defense” and “how woke ideologies have influenced our armed services.”

Two other CNP meetings are scheduled for this year, May 18–20 in McLean, VA, and September 15–17 in Frisco, TX.

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https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/republican-party-funding/

it's time to defund the GOP, and there's precedent and strategy for the effort.

The need to cut the party's access to both private and government money is seen in the reaction by some extremist Republicans to news like a New York State lawmaker's proposal to make vaccination against COVID-19 mandatory. Predictably, the far right is freaking out. "Freedom!" they scream as they run around maskless, assaulting their fellow citizens with potentially virus-laden breath.

Large parts of the Republican base now join conspiracists in the misguided belief that vaccine manufacturers are participating in mind-control experimentsand that public health measures like masks are "un-American," while we're being sickened and dying from the highest rates of COVID-19 infection and death in the developed world.

Republicans on the Supreme Court even say the founders of our republic and the framers of the Constitution would never go along with preventing churches and synagogues from holding superspreader events during a pandemic, but, like so many things GOP, it's a lie.

In 1798, President John Adams signed the first public health care legislation—it was to pay for medical care and hospitalization not just for the Navy but also for civilian sailors. And both he and President George Washington had participated in quarantine events during epidemics in the summers of 1793 and 1798, and both promoted inoculation against smallpox.

From 1790 to 1800, Philadelphia was the nation's capital. When the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 recurred in 1798, that city's board of health, with no objections raised by President John Adams or any member of Congress, ordered a block-by-block evacuation of parts of Philadelphia.

Most signers of the Declaration and Constitution were still alive, and many were in Congress and on the Supreme Court. None opposed the lockdown. Churches not only couldn't meet; a few in the quarantine areas were closed down entirely for much of the year in America's capital city.

From their bans on teaching sex education and evolution in our schools, to denying climate change, to this latest campaign against public health, far-right Republicans' fight against science has damaged America's standing in the world and destroyed the lives of millions.

Thomas Paine, in his time, wrote about "The Age of Reason." Today we have "The Age of Intentional Republican Stupidity." And they don't just embrace it for themselves; they're hell-bent on imposing it on every American, from schoolchildren on up.

They have rigged elections by making it hard to vote, seditiously tried to overturn the 2020 election, promoted racial and religious bigotry and violence, destroyed our public school systems, gutted our unions, and rewritten our tax system to screw the middle class.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan, Republicans have damaged America more in 40 years than our worst enemies could have dreamed of by other means.

These Republicans are not patriots; they're traitors to reason, science, education, human rights, democracy and now, unbelievably, public health. They're traitors to humanity itself.

The only way to deal with a death-dealing cult is to end it; thus, we must embark on a campaign to defund the Republican Party.

Back in 1981, the Republican Party decided to defund the Democratic Party, and actually pulled it off.

While the Republican Party had principally been funded by rich people and big business since the 1920s, the Democrats were largely reliant on the labor unions. So Ronald Reagan, as part of his "Reagan Revolution," figured the best way to destroy the Democratic Party was to destroy America's unions.

His first shot was to destroy PATCO, the air traffic controllers' union, and he did it in less than a week in August of 1981. He, along with Republicans in Congress and conservatives on the Supreme Court, then embarked on a campaign to eliminate unions from the American landscape, thus gutting the Democratic Party's ability to win elections.

It worked, and by 1992, American union membership, and union's ability to fund elections, had collapsed so severely that Bill Clinton and the Democratic Party turned to giant corporations and billionaires to win that election year.

Reagan's plan not only kneecapped the Democratic Party for the next 40 years but also changed the party at its core, turning it from President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society party into Bill Clinton's corporate-friendly Democratic Leadership Council/New Democrats, now in bed with big banks, insurance companies, etc.

Defunding the Republican Party may even force it to start focusing on the needs of regular people rather than just billionaires and corporations, which only adds to the urgency of the job. There are just a few steps through the process, which include:

• End "Red State Welfare."
• Kentucky gets $2.41 for every dollar they send to Washington, D.C. Most other red states are similarly "taker" states, so let's fight for a law limiting states to no more than, say, $1.50 for every buck they sent to D.C. in tax revenues. Call it welfare reform!
• End corporate welfare that gets recycled to GOP politicians. This includes $700 billion a year to fossil fuel companies, and nearly $1 trillion a year we give to Big Pharma, as well as support for insurance companies (like subsidies for the "Medicare Advantage" scam) and "Big Ag."
• End corporate monopolies. Break up giant corporations and make America safe again for small businesses while rejuvenating local economies. From airlines to tech to banking and retail, giant monopolies rip off working-class Americans and use some of that money to fund the GOP.
• Bring back Eisenhower's 91 percent top tax rate, or at least something north of 50 percent. America's strongest economy was during the 30 years from 1950 to 1980, with a top tax rate of 91 percent to 74 percent. Progressive taxation on the super-wealthy was openly supported by Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, and Ford. With that tax revenue, we built highways, schools and hospitals, and put men on the moon, while the best way CEOs could avoid the tax was to use the money to pay their workers better wages. Reagan cut that top rate to less than 30 percent, and the billionaires it produced now pour money into the GOP to keep it that way.
• Follow Europe's example and impose a wealth tax on great fortunes. Average Americans pay a wealth tax every year—the property tax on their largest store of wealth, their homes. Billionaires should pay a similar annual tax on their money bins.
• :{:{}:

}:

• End campaign contributions from corporations, end super PACs, and limit billionaires' ability to skew our politics with their money. We did this in the 1970s after the Nixon bribery scandals, but the Supreme Court blew it up. There are multiple ways around that, and the Democratic Party should make this job one.

These simple "Progressive Contract with America" steps, along with restoring the ability of American workers to unionize, will not only revive the Democratic Party, but also restore America to economic greatness and give us a far more honest political system.

Thom Hartmann is America's number one progressive talk-show host and the New York Times bestselling author of The Hidden History of American Oligarchy and more than 30 other books in print. His online writings are compiled at HartmannReport.com. He is a writing fellow at the Independent Media Institute.

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

mary b

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

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ANNEE SCHWANK

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 Prosperityhave 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 Norquistof 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 thanhalf 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 unionsthis 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.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/project-blitz-is-producing-model-legislation-for-christian-nationalists

no lnx

Project Blitz is producing model legislation for Christian Nationalists

Written by Nancy LeTourneau / Washington Monthly January 24, 2020

You may have heard about legislation passed recently in Tennessee and other states which allows adoption agencies to discriminate against gay couples or families with whom they have religious objections. The fact that bills like that are being considered and passed by red states is no coincidence. They are the product of an organized effort being led by Project Blitz.

The first thing to know about Project Blitz is that it was launched in 2015 by the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, the National Legal Foundation, and Wallbuilders. The latter is an organization founded by David Barton, the Republican operative and discredited historian who rejects the separation of church and state, claiming that the United States was founded as a Christian nation.

This project seems to have maintained a low profile until Fred Clarkson, who has been studying the Christian right for decades, came across their 116-page manual of model legislation in early 2018. As Clarkson explains, Project Blitz is to Christian nationalists what the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was to big business.

Many of the bills on [the Christian right] agenda are making news; some have passed key legislative committees or whole state legislative chambers, and some have already been signed into law. But what reporters, activists, and most legislators don’t realize is that many of these bills draw from an unusual package of 20 model bills included in a report assembled by a coalition of Christian Right groups for an initiative they call “Project Blitz.”

The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content—from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that’s animated a meaningful portion of the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks probusiness state legislators, drafts sample legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.

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http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/ginni-thomas-teams-up-with-james-okeefe-in-dark-money-operation-to-protect-trump/

Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and a right-wing political activist, has launched a new set of organizations meant to “protect President Trump” and attack Democrats and left-leaning organizations, according to an article published by The Intercept this week.

The well-connectedThomas, a former Heritage Foundation staffer, presented her plans to build a “robust infrastructure” to a meeting of the secretive Council for National Policy last month. TheCNP is a strategy-development-and-sharing network that includes leaders across the U.S. religious and political Right, including people like neo-Confederate Christian Reconstrucionist Michael Peroutka. CNP members pushed Trump to sign an executive order on religious liberty.

Thomas is planning to build a “robust infrastructure” of affiliated organizations.Among her partners in the new project are longtime right-wing operative Richard Viguerie; undercover videographer and political tricksterJames O’Keefe;Republican campaign lawyer Cleta Mitchell;and Bill Meierling, chief marketing officer for the American Legislative Exchange Council, a matchmaker for corporate lobbyists and conservative legislators willing to do their bidding.

A slide from Thomas’s presentation at Council for National Policy notes, “Long Term teams taking shape will focus on Education, Media, Entertainment/Arts, Faith, Corporate/Economic, Government, Science, and more”—nearly identical to the list of spheres of cultural influence targeted by Religious Right proponents of Seven Mountains Dominionism.

The Intercept also reported that Thomas had spoken at another CNP event last October, at which she declared, “The hard left is in control of the Democrat Party … And they’re controlling the media and corporations and Hollywood and education.”

This January, Thomas organized a White House meeting where she was joined by anti-Muslim activist Frank Gaffney and others where, among other things, they complained that White House aides were blocking right-wing Trump supporters from getting administration jobs.

Thomas and many of her partners were among conservative activists who mobilized a year ago to try to replace then-House Speaker Paul Ryan with right-wing favorite Rep. Jim Jordan.

Thomas presented United in Purpose “Impact” awards to O’Keefe, Gaffney, and Sean Hannity in 2017. In 2016, TPM reported that Thomas “wanted to ‘target’ the ‘most questionable’ precincts in Virginia with an anti-voter fraud campaign.”

Thomas also interviewed right-wing radio host Jesse Lee Peterson for the Daily Caller in 2016. The two talked about what Thomas called “race hustlers” who she said are “in the business of keeping blacks angry” and about Black Lives Matter, which Peterson called “evil,” “wicked,” and “worse than the KKK.” Last year, Thomas reportedly hired a former Turning Point USA staffer who had resigned after The New Yorker published screenshots of text messages that included a text that said “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE.”

Tags: Bill MeierlingCleta MitchellGinni ThomasJames O'KeefeRichard ViguerieElection 2020Seven MountainsALECAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilCouncil for National Policy

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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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http://documentedinvestigations.org/2018/07/12/janus-decision-rooted-koch-wishlist/

With last month’s monumental Janus decision by the Supreme Court, the Koch family won a major victory in their multi-generational attack on unions.

The ruling spreads to the entire public sector one of the laws the Koch fortune first helped push through in Kansas 60 years ago: “right-to-work.” And in doing so it enshrines the union-busting agenda their fossil fuel money has helped advance for decades.

(This story was first published by In These Times.)

Through a single vote, the Court’s 5-4 Janus decision reverses decades of legal precedent that had obstructed part of the Koch’s pro-corporate agenda. That vote was secured with the Kochs’ help in bankrolling efforts that include: helping to maintain a GOP Senate majority; helping the Senate block President Obama from filling the February 2016 Supreme Court vacancy; and helping to win the confirmation of right-wing corporate activist Neil Gorsuch.

Janus helps cement the nation’s highest court as the Koch Court, and Charles Koch wants to keep it that way.

As Documented first detailed in partnership with the Intercept, for months the Kochs had been investing heavily in anticipation of Justice Anthony Kennedy’s retirement from the Court, which was announced on June 27, the same day as Janus. Earlier this year, the Koch group “Americans for Prosperity” (AFP) hired Sarah Field from the Koch-funded Federalist Society to spearhead its campaign to extend the Koch hold on the Court for perhaps a generation or more.

Despite claims by AFP that helping to seat Gorsuch was their “first” foray into Supreme Court nominations, the Koch effort to influence who becomes a judge and how they interpret the law goes back much further.

In fact, the Kochs have been investing in reshaping the law to suit their personal agenda for decades.For example, the Koch group Citizens for a Sound Economy, AFP’s predecessor, backed Clarence Thomas’ controversial confirmation to the Court more than 25 years ago.

The Kochs’ long-term agenda to remake the United States in their image is a multi-pronged effort that includes changing both the law and who makes or interprets the laws, including the anti-union Janus decision.

THE SEEDS OF JANUS

The effort to roll back union rights actually began almost a century ago, as wealthy industrialists objected to the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, known as the Wagner Act, which enshrined the right to collective bargaining in the United States.

Many tycoons of the time, like Alfred Sloan, head of General Motors, opposed those rights along with other business reforms of FDR’s New Deal.

Fred Koch, co-founder of the corporation that later became Koch Industries, harshly criticized American workers under New Deal policies in 1938. He extolled the economic policies of Emperor Hirohito and fascists Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini:

Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard… The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.

Only recently, through the investigative work of Jane Mayer, has the public learned that the Koch fortune was actually built in part on directly aiding Hitler by building the oil-cracking factory that became “a key component in the Nazi war machine.” As Mayer noted in her 2016 book Dark Money:The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, that factory refined high-octane fuel needed for the Luftwaffe, which targeted, terrorized, and killed many thousands of innocent civilians. Fred Koch’s praise of Germany came afterHitler’s air bombers helped murder 136 men, women, and children in Guernica in the Basque region, a tragedy made famous by the mural painted by Pablo Picasso.

Meanwhile, industrialists like Sloan pursued efforts to undo New Deal reforms. In 1947, Congress amended the Wagner Act with the Taft-Hartley Act. It gave states the power to pass “right-to-work” laws that undermined collective bargaining by not requiring workers who benefit from bargained rights to pay dues to the unions that secured and enforced them.

HOW THE KOCHS FERTILIZED “RIGHT-TO-WORK”

As Mayer noted:

[Fred Koch] was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an anti-labor group [founded in 1945] that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s ‘Astroturf’ strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its ‘anonymous quarterbacks,’ and ‘call the turns.’ But he said they needed to sell the ‘yarn’ that the group was ‘composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners-not big business industrialists.’ Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was ‘almost certainly doomed to failure.’

By 1954, an engineer from Wichita, Kan., Reed Larson,took a leave from his job at the Coleman Company, to launch Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work. The following year, former Rep. Fred Hartley, Jr., (R-N.J.) co-founded the National Right to Work Committee (NRTWC). By 1958, the NRTWC was targeting six states to adopt right-to-work laws but it failed in every place, except Kansas.

“Fred [Koch] co-led a referendum drive to alter the state constitution in order to make it harder for unions to take root in Kansas,” Duke University Professor Nancy MacLean noted.

On Nov. 9, 1958, the New York Timesreported that right-to-work won in Kansas because anti-union views had taken hold, noting:

More campaign efforts and more money were expended on the emotion-provoking issue than on the campaigns of all Republican and Democratic state and Congressional candidates combined. … For the last 10 days or so before Election Day an organization called Kansans-for-the-Right-to-Work flooded newspapers, television channels and other advertising media with appeals to ‘vote yes.’ These by far outnumbered the ‘vote no’ advertisements of unions opposing the amending.

A month later, Fred Koch joined Robert Welch and ten other men in Indianapolis to found the extreme rightwing group dubbed the “John Birch Society” (JBS).

As the Washington Post noted in its 1961 profile of JBS:

At the top of the Society’s structure in Wichita are several very wealthy industrialists. Oil engineer Fred Koch is president of the Rock Island Oil and Refining Co. A millionaire several times over, he is on the Society’s national council. … Wichita is the John Birch Society’s center of strength in Kansas, and one of its greatest in the country. … The leadership of the Birch Society overlaps heavily with the leadership of the organizations that successfully campaigned in 1958 for a right to work amendment to the State’s Constitution.

As detailed by Group Research Inc. in its 1962 history of JBS, Koch worked with both NRTWC and the Christian Crusade in arguing against union dues like those at issue in the Januscase.

A History of Hostility

In 1959, Fred Koch joined the Executive Committee to plan the JBS strategy to push back against what it viewed as communism in nearly every American institution.

In 1960, Koch published his polemic “A Business Man Looks at Communism” and distributed it to JBS chapters across the country. That pamphlet makes a variety of hysterical claims against unions, including:

Labor Unions have long been a Communist goal. How far they have been penetrated by Communists I have no idea, but it must be very far indeed, judging the hatred andvenom poured out in some labor papers….

Koch also accused the U.S. Supreme Court under former Gov. Earl Warren (R-CA) of issuing pro-Communist decisions, the universities of having thousands of Communist professors, the United Nations of being subversive, and former GOP President Dwight Eisenhower of being soft on Communism.

Similar sentiments were expressed in numerous other publications the JBS also pushed. The organization pitched a screed against the union workers who organized against Kohler fixtures in Wisconsin. It pushed attacks on the UAW’s Walter Reuther, who was posthumously awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

It published and peddled right-wing writer Rosalie Gordon’s attack on the U.S. Supreme Court for decisions enforcing collective bargaining rights as protecting the “labor-union monopoly,” along with what she called the “plague” of desegregation caused by Brown v. Board of Education.

The JBS also pushed reprints of tomes by Ludwig von Mises attacking unions as illegitimate intervenors in the “free market,” artificial inflators of wages for workers, and thieves of the profits of tycoons. It promoted F.A. Hayek’s vilification of government regulation of corporations as leading to fascism and Hilaire du Berrier’s conspiracy theories that American labor unions were supposedly using union dues to finance communist terrorist violence abroad.

Fred Koch’s son Charles urged visitors to the John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita to read copies of JBS pamphlets, including those by anti-labor writers from the Austrian School of Economics, like Mises.

Indeed, as the present author first documented for the Center for Media and Democracy, Charles Koch became active in JBS after returning home to Wichita to help with the family business. Charles was a leader and fundraiser for JBS, including underwriting its publications and national radio network, while it attacked collective bargaining and leaders of the civil rights movement such as the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.

CHARLES KOCH IN ACTION

Though he left JBS in 1968, Charles Koch never abandoned its core anti-union agenda and the lessons of his father’s commitment to right-to-work. He did try to shed some of the rhetoric around communist conspiracies, though of late he was painted by Koch political strategist Richard Fink as a martyr against “collectivism,” in audio obtained by the Undercurrent, which also included outlandish claims linking fascism and the minimum wage.

It was Charles Koch’s investment in lifting up the work of Mises and Hayek, who made similar claims, that helped preserve and extend their legacy. As Stephen Moore noted in a 2006 profile on Charles for the Wall Street Journal:

The authors who have had the most profound influence on his own political philosophy include, Ludwig von Mises, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Simon, Paul Johnson and Charles Murray. Mr. Koch says that he experienced an intellectual epiphany in the early 1960s, when he attended a conference on free-market capitalism hosted by the late, great Leonard Reed.

Charles brought Mises to Wichita to speak and deployed F.A. “Baldy” Harper’s Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) to promote Mises and his protégé Hayek. As lauded by Reed’s Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), Hayek argued that unions violated the very idea of the “rule of law” and that the Wagner Act was central to that violation, a sentiment he promoted in numerous writings.

Charles Koch is deeply devoted to an alternative universe in which collective bargaining undermines the rule of law and is not a major cause of increased wages.Moore noted in his interview:

As we continue, Mr. Koch becomes increasingly animated. He discusses another seminal work in his collection, F.A. Harper’s 1957 Why Wages Rise. The book demonstrates ‘that wages rise not because of unions or government action, but because of marginal productivity gains — people get more money when they produce more value for other people.’ Then he confides, “I was so thrilled by this revelation that I had what Maslow called a ‘peak experience.’'”

Koch has also supported the NRTWC, which “sought to put a new face on the anti-union campaign by building its rhetoric on the arguments of Hayek, Mises, and others with a ‘respectable’ pedigree.” The NRTWC argues that:

Compulsory unionism itself violates the dignity of the individual worker, regardless of how the forced union tribute is spent. As the late Nobel Prize-winning economist Friedrich A. von Hayek wrote: “[T]he coercion which unions have been permitted to exercise … is primarily the coercion of fellow workers.

Deep Devotion and Investment

Hayek and Mises are not the only two virulently anti-union economists Charles Koch backed. As Nancy MacLean documented in Democracy in Chains, one of the key architects of the Koch agenda domestically and internationally,James Buchanan, also railed against the so-called “union monopolies” for distorting “free market” wages.

And, as UnKoch My Campus has detailed, Koch money has funded scores of academics to push their agenda at universities, buying control over content and personnel with restrictive dictates attached to their donations.

Many of the rightwing groups Charles Koch is known to have made a major investment in since the 1970s have pushed right-to-work or attacked collective bargaining rights. These include Reason magazine, the Cato Institute, Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network and many more.

During David Koch’s 1980 bid to become vice president, running on the ticket of Libertarian Ed Clark—which was pushed by Charles and fueled with Koch cash—the campaign platform included making right-to-work the law of the land:

[W]e urge repeal of the National Labor Relations Act, and all state Right to Work Laws, which prohibit employers from making voluntary contracts with unions. We oppose all government back-to-work orders as imposing a form of forced labor.

That is, there would be no need for state right-to-work laws if there were no NLRA that protects collective bargaining rights. As a result, right-to-work would be effectively nationalized at the determination of the employer.

After badly losing that election, the Kochs have invested heavily in changing the culture—and courts of America—to make their anti-union vision a reality.

Right-to-work is part of that vision.

MILLIONS SPENT

A leak of the Kochs’ summer retreat in 2010 revealed that they featured NRTWC leaders at their gathering of billionaires to plot plans for that year’s midterm elections.

In 2012, before most of America even knew that the Kochs had branded their billionaire conclave as “Freedom Partners,” that group injected $1 million directly into the NRTWC among the more than $200 million of its known spending that cycle.

In 2016, they focused much of their known political spending on keeping a GOP majority in the Senate, and they influenced the make-up of the U.S. Supreme Court by helping to block Judge Merrick Garland’s confirmation.

For the 2018 election, they’ve pledged to spend more than $400 million through the Seminar Network, the latest rebranding of their network of tycoons.

To be clear, the Koch family fortune is not the only one that has been expended pushing right-to-work laws to try to weaken the power of ordinary people to negotiate through unions. A major funder of right-to-work effort has been the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, along with Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which Mother Jones has dubbed “the ATM” of the right wing.

Collective bargaining has provided women with greater economic opportunities and job security. Right-to-work laws also have a disproportionate impact on people of color, who are union members at a higher rate than whites. Black women will likely be the group most adversely affected by the Janus case. Notably, workers in right-to-work states also have lower wages than in states that have rejected this agenda.

UNDERMINING PROGRESSIVES TOO

The spread of right to work through Janusalso will affect our elections.

As In These Times has documented with the Center for Media and Democracy,the national push for right-to-work is designed to undermine the power of unions and to “defang and defund” them as a way to weaken the chances for progressives to win in politics and policy.

The Koch investment in making right-to-work a national reality represents one of the longest and deepest commitments to this agenda, aside from NRTWC itself.

And this year marks the 60th anniversary of Fred Koch’s victory of making right-to-work legally binding in Kansas.

Now, six decades later, Charles Koch has helped make his father’s wish binding on the rest of America through helping to make the Janusruling a reality.

Lisa Graves

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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”.

==

does right understand how to attack networks?:

==

will break tie wrong way

https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-right-wing-plan-destroy-unions-and-hinder-democratic-fundraisin

Monday, the Supreme Court heard a major case that will substantially weaken public-sector unions and diminish the strength of the Democratic Party.

That case is Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which will determine whether public-sector unions can collect fees from non-union employees.

It sounds like a simple and technical issue, but the outcome could change the fate of public-sector unions, the strongest-standing bulwark of labor organizing in a time when many private unions have largely faded.

Unions need to be able to enforce fees on non-members because these employees could otherwise reap the benefits of collective bargaining, such as higher payer, job protection, and good working conditions. Without the power to enforce fees on non-members, unions could be substantially weakened because there would be a strong incentive for employees to free-ride and not pay the fees — ultimately undermining the benefits of collective bargaining.

Opponents say that forcing non-member to pay union fees violates the First Amendment because unions engage in political speech. However, the court already ruled on those arguments in 1977 in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, coming down in favor the unions. There's no reason for the court to take the issue again. Even many conservative legal analysts disagree with that the court should hear Janus.

But the court heard a similar case last year, and it came down 4-4 after Justice Antonin Scalia died. It's widely believed that Scalia would have voted against the unions. Justice Neil Gorsuch is almost certain to follow this path.

As the New York Timesreports, major conservative donors have backed this aggressive legal attack on public sector unions. And it's not just about labor — it's a political attack to weaken the Democratic Party, which draws substantially on public-sector unions for financial and organizational support.

As Eric Segall, a law professor at Georgia State, argues, there's no constitutional basis for the conservative justices to rule against unions and overturn Abood.

"If the Justices were to take their prior rules regarding precedent (and federalism interests) seriously, they would not overturn Abood," Segall writes. "[I]t will demonstrate yet again that the values and politics of the Justices trump their alleged commitments to legal principles and the rule of law. Moreover, if the Justices overturn Abood, it will be because Justice Gorsuch, not Judge Garland, now sits on the Court, not because the first amendment forbids states from making the decision to require all public sector employees to financially support the unions that represent their best interests."

==

==

9/17 busted

9/17

:{

}:

 Hurricane Harvey was still generating devastation -- and countless public workers worked night and day on search and rescue -- a little known ally of the American 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.

:{

}:

:{

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Bernie Sanders attacks 'greedy' Nissan for waging anti-union campaign

 Read more

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]

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 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 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” lawsthat 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.

:{

}:

:{

}:

How a father's tragedy moved the Teamsters to fight an opioid distributor]

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”.

===

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/nancy-maclean/democracy-in-chains/

How American democracy is being destroyed by powerful libertarians.

Focusing on Nobel Prize–winning economist James McGill Buchanan (1919-2013), whom Charles Koch funded and championed, MacLean (History and Public Policy/Duke Univ.; The American Women's Movement, 1945-2000: A Brief History with Documents, 2008, etc.) elaborates on the revelations about the Koch brothers’ insidious, dangerous manipulation of American politics that has been presented forcefully by Jane Mayer in Dark Money (2016) and Daniel Schulman in Sons of Wichita (2014). Based on Buchanan’s papers as well as published sources, MacLean creates a chilling portrait of an arrogant, uncompromising, and unforgiving man, stolid in his mission to “save capitalism from democracy.”

To Charles Koch, he seemed a kindred spirit. Buchanan believed that growth of government undermines individual freedom. Government overreach, he maintained, included public schools, the Postal Service, prisons, labor laws, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid for the poor, guarantees of voting rights, foreign aid, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the graduated income tax. Government’s only role, Buchanan and his followers believe, “is to ensure the rule of law, guarantee social order, and provide for the national defense.”

MacLean traces Buchanan’s career at several universities—the last was the fledging George Mason, which the Wall Street Journal called “the Pentagon of conservative academia”—where he reigned over his own economics institutes, backed generously by wealthy libertarians; and his embrace by exclusive think tanks, such as the Mont Pelerin Society, the Hoover Institution, the Cato Institute, the Club for Growth, and the Heritage Foundation, among many other Koch-funded organizations. Besides influence at home, Buchanan helped design a constitution for the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, a document that ensured constraint of majority power. MacLean offers a cogent yet disturbing analysis of libertarians’ current efforts to rewrite the social contract and manipulate citizens’ beliefs—e.g., by spreading “junk pseudo science” about climate change.

An unsettling exposé of the depth and breadth of the libertarian agenda.

https://www.amazon.com/Democracy-Chains-History-Radical-Stealth/dp/1101980966

==

2x diff highlights:

AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]

Defunding the Left

February 18, 2001 |

For years, "defunding the left" has been an idea that has resonated deeply with conservatives. Now that Republicans have control of the White House and Congress, it's an idea whose time may be coming faster than you think. President Bush's initiative to move government services to faith-based organizations and the battle over the nomination of Attorney General John Ashcroft may provide the necessary trigger to turn the right's twenty-plus-year pipedream into a reality.

Terrence Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), and Mark R. Levin, head of the Landmark Legal Foundation are two longtime conservative activists on the front lines of this fight.

Scanlon's Capital Research Center, founded in 1984, is one of the lesser-known Washington, DC-based think tanks that serves as a conservative watchdog over so-called liberal/left nonprofit philanthropic institutions. CRC's analyzes how "those organizations with tax-exempt, tax-deductible -- and sometimes tax dollars -- mix advocacy and 'direct action' to promote their own vision of the public interest." CRC also looks at how closely individuals in the corporate and foundation sectors are sticking to the"donor intent"of the founders of these corporations.

In mid-February, Scanlon told a packed house at the 28th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that "for the first time we have an opportunity to go after these [liberal nonprofit] groups and take away their federal money." Conservative News Service (CNS) reported that in his remarks, Scanlon named several organizations that are receiving federal funding including the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). He told the gathering that the "AARP received $73 million in federal grants in 1999, 73 million of your tax dollars went to the AARP. Most of this money came from the Labor Department for job training programs for seniors."

Scanlon pointed to what he considered the most "egregious" example of a group getting federal funds -- the National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC). Founded in 1960 during the Kennedy-Johnson campaign, Scanlon said that NCSC "were well known four years ago during the Hillary Clinton health care debate when they were lobbying for national health care. Their budget is 96 percent federally funded. If it were not for federal dollars there would be no National Council for Senior Citizens."

Mark R, Levin, head of the Landmark Legal Foundation has been doing more than giving speeches about challenging federal funding of liberal non-profit groups. During the first week in February, Landmark announced the formation of its "501-C Project" which intends to "ensure that liberal non-profit organizations that lobby against presidential appointments comply with U.S. tax and lobbying laws."

The Unification Church-owned Washington Times reported that Landmark has asked the Internal Revenue Service "to investigate accusations that several civil rights groups and other nonprofit organizations violated their federal tax-exempt status by participating in lobbying efforts against the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general."

According to Levin: "Published reports reveal that scores of liberal, 501(c) tax-exempt groups spent the last month, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a well-coordinated and highly organized lobbying campaign against the Ashcroft nomination. They have also announced that they will lobby against future nominees who they consider too conservative. The IRS must look at these activities very carefully to ensure that these organizations are not skirting the law or failing to pay their taxes."

Levin pointed to a January 9 meeting of organizations opposed to Ashcroft's nomination, held at the headquarters of the American Association of University Women. Called by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, among the groups Levin identified as present were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People(NAACP), the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Education Association and the National Black Women's Health Project.

This was one of several complaints with federal agencies that Landmark has filed during the past few months. They filed a complaint with the IRS and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against one of the right's perennial targets, the National Education Association. Over the years, Landmark has butted heads with the NEA particularly around the issue of school vouchers in Wisconsin, where Landmark provided legal support for pro-voucher organizations.

Levin claims the teachers union is using millions of dollars in unreported tax-exempt funds to influence the outcome of political races. According to its website www.landmarklegal.org, [3] the complaint, part of the its Quality Schools 2001 initiative, claims that "the last several NEA Form 990 federal tax returns, submitted to the IRS under penalty of perjury, disclose no political expenditures whatsoever. The NEA and several of its affiliates have also failed to disclose the full extent of their political activities to the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

Landmark is asking these government agencies to "initiate comprehensive investigations of the NEA's political activities and expenditures to determine whether it has violated federal tax and campaign laws. Landmark is also asking the IRS to consider whether the NEA's tax-exempt status should be revoked, and whether the IRS and the FEC should impose fines and penalties on the NEA."

Landmark was founded in 1976, as the Great Plains Legal Foundation with an office in Kansas City, Mo. (it also has an office in Herndon, Va.) Its mission is to provide litigation and legal aid to conservatives and conservative causes. In 1995, taking advantage of the Republican takeover of the House, Landmark stitched together a plan called "Beyond the First 100 Days: A Legal Reform Plan for the 104th Congress," which put forward strict conservative ideas in several areas including antitrust, civil justice, criminal justice, and private property rights.

"Defunding the left" is not a new project for conservatives. (It should be noted that for conservatives, "left" includes any organizations to the right of Attila the Hunt.) Almost eighteen years ago, longtime muckraker James Ridgeway wrote about the onslaught against various non-profit organizations in the Village Voice. He noted that the campaign was "being carried out through direct-mail solicitation‚ in the pages of Conservative Digest‚ and in other right-wing publications‚ and by researchers and propagandists for such conservative think tanks as the Heritage Foundation."

Flash forward two decades and the defunding crowd's planets are moving closer toward alignment. According to CNS, Terrence Scanlon praised Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) for "attempting to take away federal funding from these non-profits during the last congressional session." Although Gregg lost that battle, Scanlon believes that the Senator's efforts, combined with the GOP's control over the government, might be the prelude to success. Since most heads of government agencies should be conservative, "for the first time we have an opportunity to go after these groups and take away their federal money," he told the aroused crowd. "Let's do it," he bellowed, urging his audience to go back home and mobilize at the grassroots in order to realize their twenty-plus-year dream of defunding the left.

Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland-based freelance journalist covering the Religious Right and related conservative movements. Contact him via e-mail atwkbbronx@aol.com. [4]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/10496/defunding_the_left

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bill-berkowitz

[3] http://www.landmarklegal.org

[4] mailto:wkbbronx@aol.com

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

==

What the Union Fight is Really About: Defunding the Left

The GOP's new three-part plan to starve the Dems.

By Kevin Drum | Fri Mar. 25, 2011 2:04 PM PDT

When Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker took on [1] his state's public-sector unions last January, it seemed to require no explanation. Republicans are sympathetic to corporate interests and opposed to organized labor, and challenging public-sector workers' pay and benefits appeared to be just one more skirmish in a longstanding ideological battle.

But Walker went one crucial step further. He deliberately sparked a dangerous, months-long war by proposing to end the public-sector unions' collective bargaining rights entirely. Why take that risk?

Here's why: Politics in the United States is a game played on multiple levels, and ideology is only the first. Walker was playing on a second, deeper level, where the issues are secondary. Here, the goal is not so much to advance one party's agenda, but to actively undermine the infrastructure that allows the opposing party to exist at all. And on this level, one of America's two political parties routinely outplays the other: Defunding the left [2] is a longtime goal of the smartest and savviest Republican strategists, and they've pursued it for decades.

The old-school version of this tactic began in the '70s and '80s with the right's campaign to undermine private-sector unions, traditionally one of the Democratic Party's biggest sources of funding and campaign support. In the early '70s, a newly aggressive and politicized Chamber of Commerce [3], joined by newcomers like the Business Roundtable [4] and a new breed of "union avoidance" consultants (PDF [5]), took advantage of divisions on the left and the decline of manufacturing industries to block labor reforms and gut rules against union-busting. All this made it nearly impossible to organize new workplaces in the growing service sector, which led to unions' long, steady decline: Since 1970, private-sector union membership has dropped from 29 percent [6] of the workforce to less than 7 percent [7]. And with that decline, the Democratic Party has lost a major source of its funding.

Organized labor wasn't the right's only target. In the late '80s and early '90s, Republican strategists approached the NAACP [8] with offers of free mapping software to help [9] them create majority-minority congressional districts that would be more likely to elect black and Hispanic members of Congress. But this tactic, dubbed "Project Ratfuck [10]" by one of its chief architects, had nothing to do with increasing minority representation. Rather, it was designed to pack lots of liberal-leaning minority voters into a single district, leaving the surrounding districts as easy pickings for Republican challengers.

A similar dynamic fueled [11] thetort-reformpush of the mid-'90s. This one was a twofer: Tort-lawyer bashing had always been a reliable applause line for Republican politicians, but in 1994 conservativeur-strategist Grover Norquist pointed out [12] that the big losers in tort reform are trial lawyers, and trial lawyers contribute huge amounts of money [13] to the Democratic Party. "The political implications of defunding the trial lawyers would be staggering," he wrote. After that, the tort-reform movement exploded.

You can think of this triumvirate—unions, minority redistricting, and tort reform—as Defunding 1.0. And most of it hasn't stopped: Republicans are still battling private-sector unions and pressing for tort reform. But private-sector unions have mostly been beaten, and tort reform has turned out to be a tough nut to crack. So the GOP has moved on to Defunding 2.0, with a brand new trio of pet projects.

The Brennan Center has been tracking the issue for years, and its conclusion is clear: Actualvoter fraud is virtually nonexistent.

One of the prime obsessions of the conservative movement over the past decade has been passage of voter-ID laws at the state level (PDF [14]). This is not because Republicans think citizens should have to identify themselves to government authorities and Democrats don't. Nor is it because the United States has seen a wave of voter fraud recently. The Brennan Center for Justice [15] has been tracking cases of electoral fraud diligently for years, and its conclusion is clear: Actual voter fraud is virtually nonexistent. In case after case where fraud has been alleged, the number of verified episodes amounts to no more than a tiny handful, typically less than one-thousandth of 1 percent of the votes cast.

This makes perfect sense. Retail voter fraud, in which someone tries to vote under a fake name, is hard to pull off and invites serious penalties. It's almost inconceivable that anyone would try to do it on a large enough scale to swing an election. So why has voter fraud become a cause célèbre among conservatives? Here's a clue: In 2007, a University of Washington study found that among whites, the middle-aged, and the middle income, about 90 percent of registered voters had access to a picture ID as required by a new voter law in Indiana (PDF [16]). Among blacks, the young, and low-income residents, the number was just 80 percent. These are among the most loyal Democratic Party demographics [17] in the country. A law that makes it harder for them to vote makes it harder for Democrats to win elections.

Yet the Supreme Court—even though it acknowledged that actual voter fraud is vanishingly rare (PDF [18])—upheld Indiana's law in 2008. By 2009, a dozen states had introduced (PDF [19]) new voter-ID laws, and conservatives had a second target in their crosshairs: ACORN[20], much of whose work involved running voter-registration drives targeting poor and minority citizens. ACORN had long been a bête noire of the right, and so when conservative activist Andrew Breitbart released James O'Keefe's video sting purporting to show [21] ACORN staffers advising a flamboyantly dressed pimp on how to run a child prostitution ring, the right-wing noise machine went ballistic. The videos turned out to have been deceptively edited [22] (among other things, O'Keefe never wore his pimp costume when talking to ACORN), but the damage was done: A few ACORN staffers had indeed acted badly, Congress passed a law defunding the group, and ACORN disbanded. (O'Keefe has since moved on to attacking NPR [23]; see "Pimps, Lies, and Videotape [24].")

Despite Walker's protestations, the Wisconsin fight had little to do with its budget and everything to do with crushing  a pillar of support for the Democrats.

Most recently, of course, a third target has appeared front and center in the battle to defund the left: public-sector unions, the only sector of organized labor still thriving. New Jersey governor and presidential almost-hopeful Chris Christie was one of the first to gain notoriety for taking them on, but by February, the spotlight had turned to Wisconsin.

That fight, despite Walker's protestations, had almost nothing to do with the state's budget deficit and everything to do with decimating a pillar of Democratic Party support. Longtime DC reporter Howard Fineman explained [25] theraw math: Republicans had hoped to take away as many as 20 governorships from the Democrats in the 2010 elections, but in the end they only won 12. Why? "Well," reports Fineman, "according to postgame analysis by GOP strategists, the power and money of public-employee unions was the reason.'We are never going to win most of these states until we can do something about those unions,' one key operative said at a Washington dinner in November."

In a similar vein, New York Times statistician Nate Silver analyzed [26] recent election polls and concluded that even in their current emaciated state, union households overall voted Democratic in big enough numbers to add about two percentage points to Democratic vote totals in the 2008 election. And in terms of raw dollars, three public-sector unions (AFSCME [27] and the two main teachers' unions, the NEA [28] and the AFT [29]) were among the top five donors to Democratic candidates [30] in the 2010 election cycle—and that doesn't include individual union members.

"If we win this battle," the leader of Wisconsin's GOP-controlled Senate predicted, Obama is going to have a "much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state."

Put it all together—the funds public-sector unions provide to Democrats, the votes they bring, and the doorbell-ringing and phone-banking they do—and it becomes obvious why Republicans want to cripple them. The Wisconsin Senate's Republican majority leader made it [31] crystal clear. "If we win this battle, and the money is not there under the auspices of the unions," he said, "certainly what you're going to find is President Obama is going to have a...much more difficult time getting elected and winning the state of Wisconsin."

There's nothing illegal about the right's efforts to defund the left. As they say, politics ain't beanbag. But the left is fighting with one hand tied behind its back if it doesn't understand exactly what's going on and doesn't make sure that the public understands it, too.Unlike the fights over funding for NPR [32] or Planned Parenthood [33], these aren't just—or even mainly—fights over liberal versus conservative priorities or principles, regardless of how often the right likes to portray them that way. They're really fights over raw, naked power, with Republicans trying to permanently tilt the political playing field and restore their Bush-era dream of a permanent majority.

Public opinion can change in these fights, as it eventually did in Wisconsin. But that happens only when the public understands just how ugly and partisan the battle actually is.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/scott-walker-defunding-democratic-donors

Links:

[1] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/whats-happening-wisconsin-explained

[2] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/defunding-left

[3] http://motherjones.com/category/primary-tags/us-chamber-commerce

[4] http://businessroundtable.org/

[5] http://www.newunionism.net/library/organizing/Logan%20-%20The%20Union%20Avoidance%20Industry%20in%20the%20United%20States%20-%202006.pdf

[6] http://www.workinglife.org/wiki/Union+Membership:+Private+Sector+%281948-2004%29

[7] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/union2.nr0.htm

[8] http://redrawingthelines.org/

[9] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2006_10/009799.php

[10] http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0611.morris.html

[11] http://books.simonandschuster.com/Blocking-the-Courthouse-Door/Stephanie-Mencimer/9780743277006

[12] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/01/war-against-public-sector-unions

[13] http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary.php?id=D000000065

[14] http://brennan.3cdn.net/e20e4210db075b482b_wcm6ib0hl.pdf

[15] http://www.brennancenter.org/

[16] http://depts.washington.edu/uwiser/documents/Indiana_voter.pdf

[17] http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2010/results/polls/#USH00p1

[18] http://www.scotusblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/07-21.pdf

[19] http://brennan.3cdn.net/a1de45ee2cc2836042_1tm6bn3h5.pdf

[20] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/03/acorn-finally-cracks-for-good-closing-community-organizer-racism-obama-right-wing

[21] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UOL9Jh61S8

[22] http://oag.ca.gov/news/press_release?id=1888

[23] http://motherjones.com/media/2011/03/james-okeefe-investigative-journalism

[24] http://motherjones.com/politics/2011/05/pimps-lies-and-videotapes

[25] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/25/the-real-political-math-in-wisconsin_n_828429.html?view=screen

[26] http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/26/the-effects-of-union-membership-on-democratic-voting/

[27] http://www.afscme.org/about/1028.cfm

[28] http://www.nea.org/

[29] http://www.aft.org/

[30] http://www.opensecrets.org/overview/topcontribs.php

[31] http://current.com/1h59p4c

[32] http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/03/npr-james-okeefe

[33] http://motherjones.com/mojo/2011/02/house-gop-slashes-planned-parenthood-family-planning-funding-zero

==

House Republicans To Defund ACORN Again, Even Though It Still Does Not Exist

Posted: 06/04/2013 12:37 pm EDT  |  Updated: 06/05/2013 11:02 am EDT

WASHINGTON -- House Republicans are scheduled to vote on two separate budget bills this week, each of which would reject funding for the poverty activism group ACORN, despite the fact that ACORN disbanded three years ago.

ACORN, also known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, came under heavy fire in the fall of 2009 after conservative videographer James O'Keefe released a set of selectively edited videos that appeared to show its employees offering advice on tax avoidance related to prostitution and child smuggling. Independent investigations by the California attorney general, the Massachusetts attorney general and the Brooklyn, N.Y., district attorney would later clear ACORN of criminal wrongdoing, and an investigation by the Government Accountability Office would clear ACORN of charges that it mishandled federal funds.

But in the fall of 2009, Congress banned federal funding for ACORN using broad language that applied to "any organization" that had been charged with breaking federal or state election laws, lobbying disclosure laws or campaign finance laws or with filing fraudulent paperwork with any federal or state agency. The funding ban also extended to any employees, contractors or others affiliated with any group so charged.

Struggling with the bad publicity and loss of federal funds, ACORN dissolved in early 2010. Just to be sure, however, Rep. John Culberson (R-Texas) included this language in a government funding bill introduced on May 28 of this year: "None of the funds made available in this Act may be distributed to the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) or its subsidiaries or successors."

Section 545 of a bill put forward the next day by Rep. John Carter (R-Texas) delves still deeper into faux certainty, extending the funding ban to "any prior appropriations Act."

In fact, ACORN has no subsidiaries, because it has not existed for three years. Neither bill defines "successors," but the broad language of the original 2009 funding ban left little room for leeway, extending to "Any State chapter of ACORN registered with the Secretary of State's office in that State," "any organization that shares directors, employees, or independent contractors with ACORN," and any organization that "employs" someone "indicted" for violations that ACORN was initially charged with.

"Is it too late to defund Saddam Hussein?" mocked Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.).

Jennifer Hing, a spokeswoman for House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), defended the passages as routine language that House Republicans always include. "These provisions are typically carried every year in appropriations bills," Hing said.

Indeed, like a game of legislative Mad Libs, the House GOP routinely inserts a similar provision in appropriations bills it approves. In March, the House signed off on a short-term "continuing resolution" budget with language identical to Culberson's.

The decision of whether to cover prior legislation in the ACORN funding ban is left to individual Appropriations subcommittees, according to Hing. The House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, chaired by Carter, traditionally includes the retroactive ban. The Culberson and Carter bills are both set for a vote this week.

===

ROVE

The Architect

1st to conflate politics and policy,eg WHIG eternal campaign, deception and doubt p 5 becomes sop p4

Abramoff is taking $ from indians to shut down other indians casinos, then charging group 2 to fix, then paying r reed to shut down gambling  p 10 and etc

Defund the left: take out funders anddismantle parts of gov't that serve poor and other demo constituets([students?] p 12  also take out whatever sustains left ideology; inserted at every opp, eg Homeland security bill forbade unions or at least restrict p15

===

from capital reserch c:

In April 1995, House Majority Leader Richard Armey wrote on official letterhead to 82 companies warning them that their contributions to non-profit groups helped "support expansion of the welfare state." The companies were selected on the basis of a classification by CRC which ranked Greenpeace as "radical left" and groups such as the American Cancer Society, the American Heart Association and the American Lung Association as "liberal", the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

Spokesman for CRC Robert Berkebile explained that the American Cancer Society was classed as 'liberal' because it supported taxes on cigarettes. (It is now known that Philip Morris was funding CRC at the time). The American Lung Association got the same rating because it supported regulations on burning hazardous waste in cement kilns. Monsanto, not known for its support for radical causes, got a "centre-left" tag because it contributed to the Nature Conservancy, amongst others.

Equally interesting is CRC's assessment of who it viewed as the real conservatives. The RAND Corporation was tagged as "center left" while the American Enterprise Institute was designated as in the "center". The true believers, gaining the "conservative" badge of honour were CRC itself, the Center for the Study of American Business, the Chamber Foundation, the Heritage Foundation, the Hoover Institution and the Hudson Institute.

The director of the Congressional Accountability Project, Gary Ruskin, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that the analysis was more than 'defunding the left' "it's defunding the center, too".

In mid-February 2001, CRC President Terrence Scanlon addressed the 28th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) stating "for the first time we have an opportunity to go after these [liberal nonprofit] groups and take away their federal money."

===

 AlterNet [1] / By Bill Berkowitz [2]

Defunding the Left

February 18, 2001 |

For years, "defunding the left" has been an idea that has resonated deeply with conservatives. Now that Republicans have control of the White House and Congress, it's an idea whose time may be coming faster than you think. President Bush's initiative to move government services to faith-based organizations and the battle over the nomination of Attorney General John Ashcroft may provide the necessary trigger to turn the right's twenty-plus-year pipedream into a reality.

Terrence Scanlon, president of the Capital Research Center (CRC), and Mark R. Levin, head of the Landmark Legal Foundation are two longtime conservative activists on the front lines of this fight.

Scanlon's Capital Research Center, founded in 1984, is one of the lesser-known Washington, DC-based think tanks that serves as a conservative watchdog over so-called liberal/left nonprofit philanthropic institutions. CRC's analyzes how "those organizations with tax-exempt, tax-deductible -- and sometimes tax dollars -- mix advocacy and 'direct action' to promote their own vision of the public interest." CRC also looks at how closely individuals in the corporate and foundation sectors are sticking to the "donor intent" of the founders of these corporations.

In mid-February, Scanlon told a packed house at the 28th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) that "for the first time we have an opportunity to go after these [liberal nonprofit] groups and take away their federal money." Conservative News Service (CNS) reported that in his remarks, Scanlon named several organizations that are receiving federal funding including the American Association of Retired Persons(AARP). He told the gathering that the "AARP received $73 million in federal grants in 1999, 73 million of your tax dollars went to the AARP. Most of this money came from the Labor Department for job training programs for seniors."

Scanlon pointed to what he considered the most "egregious" example of a group getting federal funds -- the National Council of Senior Citizens (NCSC). Founded in 1960 during the Kennedy-Johnson campaign, Scanlon said that NCSC "were well known four years ago during theHillary Clinton health care debatewhen they were lobbying for national health care. Their budget is 96 percent federally funded. If it were not for federal dollars there would be no National Council for Senior Citizens."

Mark R, Levin, head of the Landmark Legal Foundation has been doing more than giving speeches about challenging federal funding of liberal non-profit groups. During the first week in February, Landmark announced the formation of its "501-C Project" which intends to "ensure that liberal non-profit organizations that lobby against presidential appointments comply with U.S. tax and lobbying laws."

The Unification Church-owned Washington Times reported that Landmark has asked the Internal Revenue Service "to investigate accusations that several civil rights groups and other nonprofit organizations violated their federal tax-exempt status by participating in lobbying efforts against the nomination of John Ashcroft as attorney general."

According to Levin: "Published reports reveal that scores of liberal, 501(c) tax-exempt groups spent the last month, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, in a well-coordinated and highly organized lobbying campaign against the Ashcroft nomination. They have also announced that they will lobby against future nominees who they consider too conservative. The IRS must look at these activities very carefully to ensure that these organizations are not skirting the law or failing to pay their taxes."

Levin pointed to a January 9 meeting of organizations opposed to Ashcroft's nomination, held at the headquarters of the American Association of University Women. Called by the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, among the groups Levin identified as present were the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Sierra Club, Planned Parenthood, the National Organization for Women's Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Education Association and the National Black Women's Health Project.

This was one of several complaints with federal agencies that Landmark has filed during the past few months. They filed a complaint with the IRS and the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against one of the right's perennial targets, the National Education Association. Over the years, Landmark has butted heads with the NEA particularly around the issue of school vouchers in Wisconsin, where Landmark provided legal support for pro-voucher organizations.

Levin claims theteachers union is using millions of dollars in unreported tax-exempt funds to influence the outcome of political races. According to its website www.landmarklegal.org, [3] the complaint, part of the its Quality Schools 2001 initiative, claims that "the last several NEA Form 990 federal tax returns, submitted to the IRS under penalty of perjury, disclose no political expenditures whatsoever. The NEA and several of its affiliates have also failed to disclose the full extent of their political activities to the Federal Election Commission (FEC)."

Landmark is asking these government agencies to "initiate comprehensive investigations of the NEA's political activities and expenditures to determine whether it has violated federal tax and campaign laws. Landmark is also asking the IRS to consider whether the NEA's tax-exempt status should be revoked, and whether the IRS and the FEC should impose fines and penalties on the NEA."

Landmark was founded in 1976, as the Great Plains Legal Foundation with an office in Kansas City, Mo. (it also has an office in Herndon, Va.) Its mission is to provide litigation and legal aid to conservatives and conservative causes. In 1995, taking advantage of the Republican takeover of the House, Landmark stitched together a plan called "Beyond the First 100 Days: A Legal Reform Plan for the 104th Congress," which put forward strict conservative ideas in several areas including antitrust, civil justice, criminal justice, and private property rights.

"Defunding the left" is not a new project for conservatives. (It should be noted that for conservatives, "left" includes any organizations to the right of Attila the Hunt.) Almost eighteen years ago, longtime muckraker James Ridgeway wrote about the onslaught against various non-profit organizations in the Village Voice. He noted that the campaign was "being carried out through direct-mail solicitation‚ in the pages of Conservative Digest‚ and in other right-wing publications‚ and by researchers and propagandists for such conservative think tanks as the Heritage Foundation."

Flash forward two decades and the defunding crowd's planets are moving closer toward alignment. According to CNS, Terrence Scanlon praised Senator Judd Gregg (R-N.H.) for "attempting to take away federal funding from these non-profits during the last congressional session." Although Gregg lost that battle, Scanlon believes that the Senator's efforts, combined with the GOP's control over the government, might be the prelude to success. Since most heads of government agencies should be conservative, "for the first time we have an opportunity to go after these groups and take away their federal money," he told the aroused crowd. "Let's do it," he bellowed, urging his audience to go back home and mobilize at the grassroots in order to realize their twenty-plus-year dream of defunding the left.

Bill Berkowitz is an Oakland-based freelance journalist covering the Religious Right and related conservative movements. Contact him via e-mail atwkbbronx@aol.com. [4]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/story/10496/defunding_the_left

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/bill-berkowitz

[3] http://www.landmarklegal.org

[4] mailto:wkbbronx@aol.com

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

wrecking crew: howard phillips orig strategy, picked up by GN and delay etc p 80-

cf Team Themis spy scandal

excerpt: ��Amongst those supporting the campaign were the Christian Coalition, Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute the Institute for Justice, the Eagle Forum and the American Conservative Union.

 GOP Catch Phrase for the '90s: 'Defunding the Left'

April 23, 1995|By JEFF SHEAR  gen'l

��

GOP Catch Phrase for the '90s: 'Defunding the Left'

April 23, 1995|By JEFF SHEAR overview http://articles.baltimoresun.com/1995-04-23/news/1995113246_1_liberal-hunt-leadership

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/10/30/798815/-GOPs-25-yr-Plan-to-Defund-the-LeftRevealed

Raw Story excerpt:

404:

  The requested URL /2009/10/conservatives-25year-goal-defunding-left-revealed-acorn-controversy/

For an organization whose mission is to expose the funding sources and organizational ties of the left, the Capital Research Center is ironically protective of its own connections. As a non-profit organization, for example, it is not obliged to report the names of its donors, only its total revenue -- which amounted in 2007 to about $2.5 million.

The CRC's tax filings similarly include the name of its officers, its directors -- who include former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese III -- and its two highest-paid employees,

but the membership of its National Advisory Board has not been revealed since 2001. At that time, however, the board was heavily loaded with individuals tied to both the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to various other right-wing publications, think-tanks, and legal foundations.

Although the evidence is skimpy, it suggests that many of the same people who were involved with CRC when it was founded in 1984 may have continued to be connected with the group and its ongoing agenda.

One of the more interesting names on the 2001 list is that of T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., a former Reagan adviser and president of the Intercollegiant Studies Institute (ISI). Although it is not well known, ISI is one of the largest recipients of grants from conservative foundations, having been listed a few years ago as second only to the Heritage Foundation. 

Much of ISI's activity is carried on through its Collegiate Network, which creates and subsidizes conservative student publications on college campuses. James O'Keefe -- the young filmmaker whose sting operation allegedly caught ACORN employees endorsing illegal activities -- was the founder of one such publication when he was a student at Rutgers University.

O'Keefe had also received advice and a start-up grant to help launch the Rutgers Centurion from Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute -- which has been training young Republican dirty tricksters since the 1970's, ranging from Karl Rove to Jeff Gannon. Blackwell himself appeared on a "Defunding the Left" panel at the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, along with CRC president Terrence Scanlon.

These multiple cross-connections again suggest that the goal of defunding the left has been carried along by a small, tightly-knit group of conservatives for over 25 years, and that James O'Keefe's sting operation against ACORN is merely the latest step towards that goal.

The Right Isn't Only Trying to Take Down ACORN, It's Got a 25-Year Project to 'Defund' the Left

By Muriel Kane, Raw Story

Posted on October 31, 2009, Printed on March 15, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/143631/

When Michele Bachman crowed in September that the exposure of alleged illegal activity by the anti-poverty group ACORN was just the start of a campaign to "defund the left," she may have revealed more about current Republican strategy than she intended.

"Defunding the left is going to be so easy,” Bachmann told the audience at a conservative conference, “and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.”

The Senate and House had just voted to cut off ACORN's federal funding in what CBS/AP called "a GOP-led strike against the scandal-tainted community organizing group" that followed the release of video showing ACORN employees apparently endorsing illegal activities, The bills passed by lopsided majorities, with many Democrats joining Republicans, and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi told a news conference, "We have to have our own scrutiny of an organization with an allegation of this kind against it."

The initial Congressional defunding of ACORN was scheduled to expire at the end of October, however, causing Bachman to warn a bloggers' conference at the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation, "This is the biggest trick or treat. On November 1 the prohibition will lift."

The Capital Research Center

The idea of starving the Democratic Party of donations by defunding the progressive non-profits that form a central pillar of its support is not new. It goes back to at least 1981, when the Heritage Foundation published a set of over 2000 policy recommendations for the Reagan administration. According to SourceWatch, "One challenge, as Heritage saw it, was to counter the rise of its ideological opponents by whittling away their status a

s 'public interest' organisations and eliminating federal financial support for 'liberal' groups."

The Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded in 1984 by a former Heritage Foundation vice president to implement this agenda by uncovering the presumably questionable funding sources of progressive groups. CRC's central assumption has always been that "a unified, sophisticated and well-funded philanthropic elite is dedicated to imposing on us the doctrine of 'progressive' philanthropy, doctrines that would reorder our political, economic and cultural priorities."

The CRC selected ACORN as a favored targed long before almost anybody else had heard of the group. In January 2005, Bill Berkowitz, who regularly reports on right-wing organizations, wrote:

"In mid-October of last year, the Center's president, Terence Scanlon, launched a pre-emptive strike against ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) and its voter registration efforts. Scanlon cast a shadow over ACORN's reports that it had registered over one million new voters. He charged that because of irregularities, the organization was coming under scrutiny by lawmakers 'in state after state [where] allegations are surfacing that ACORN activists are padding the registration books'

"As a non-profit community-based organizing group, ACORN has been on the CRC's radar for several years. According to Scanlon, ACORN, with some 150,000 dues-paying members organized into 65 city chapters, 'is better known for public disruption.' Its so-called community organizing 'has relied on in-your-face confrontation,' including a 1995 demonstration targeting then House Speaker Newt Gingrich. 'In 2002 it burst into the Heritage Foundation to harangue welfare reform expert Robert Rector. Dozen of city councils and state legislatures have had to face angry ACORN protesters demanding higher minimum wages and more welfare entitlements. Banks have been pressured to change their lending practices or face ACORN charges of discrimination before regulators.'”

Currently, CRC senior editor Matthew Vadum -- who describes himself as "America's foremost expert on the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)" -- seems to be carrying much of the weight of the anti-ACORN campaign through his blog, Twitter feed, and frequent appearances with Glenn Beck and other right-wing TV hosts.

Last May, Vadum Beck, "ACORN is an immense crime family ... that has tentacles all though the United States, and now it's trying to spread to India and Canada and other places. ... They're engaged in racketeering. ... They break the law constantly."

"Something that needs to be explored is the roots of ACORN in the 1960s," Vadum continued. "It grew out of the radical welfare rights movement. And the idea behind that was that not enough people were on welfare and that you needed to pack the welfare rolls with as many people as possible in order to overwhelm the governments -- the various levels of government -- and cause social chaos. ... I guess you could say it was a Marxist-anarchist idea."

Vadum's latest entry at his CRC blog attempts to drag progressive filmmaker Brave New Films into his ACORN-related conspiracy theories. "Unwilling to admit it’s an ongoing criminal conspiracy to defraud the people of the United States of America, ACORN has retained -Bolshevik- Brave New Films to do some of its dirty work for it," Vadum writes. "The leftist propaganda factory headquartered in Culver City, Calif., has launched a new website, DeFOXamerica.com, which is an effort to shoot the messenger. Fox is the only television network that has taken much of an interest in covering the ACORN scandal which some commentators say is bigger than Watergate. ... It’s not known how much ACORN had to pay Brave New Films, a 501(c)(4) advocacy nonprofit, to shill for it."

[DeFox America's Video on the attacks on ACORN is the video on the upper right-hand side of the screen]

CRC and its allies

For an organization whose mission is to expose the funding sources and organizational ties of the left, the Capital Research Center is ironically protective of its own connections. As a non-profit organization, for example, it is not obliged to report the names of its donors, only its total revenue -- which amounted in 2007 to about $2.5 million.

The CRC's tax filings similarly include the name of its officers, its directors -- who include former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese III-- and its two highest-paid employees, but the membership of its National Advisory Board has not been revealed since 2001. At that time, however, the board was heavily loaded with individuals tied to both the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to various other right-wing publications, think-tanks, and legal foundations.

Although the evidence is skimpy, it suggests that many of the same people who were involved with CRC when it was founded in 1984 may have continued to be connected with the group and its ongoing agenda.

One of the more interesting names on the 2001 list is that of T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., a former Reagan adviser and president of the Intercollegiant Studies Institute (ISI). Although it is not well known, ISI is one of the largest**recipients**of grants from conservative foundations, having been listed a few years ago as second only to the Heritage Foundation.

Much of ISI's activity is carried on through its Collegiate Network, which creates and subsidizes conservative student publications on college campuses. James O'Keefe -- the young filmmaker whose sting operation allegedly caught ACORN employees endorsing illegal activities -- was the founder of one such publication when he was a student at Rutgers University.

O'Keefe had also received advice and a start-up grant to help launch the Rutgers Centurion from Morton Blackwell'sLeadership Institute -- which has been training young Republican dirty tricksters since the 1970's, ranging from Karl Rove to Jeff Gannon. Blackwell himself appeared on a "Defunding the Left" panel at the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, along with CRC president Terrence Scanlon.

Both Cribb and Blackwell have strong ties to the Heritage Foundation as well. Blackwell was a close associate of the late founder of the group's founder, Paul Weyrich, for over 40 years. Cribb is a good friend (pdf) of former Heritage president Edwin Feulner.

These multiple cross-connections again suggest that the goal of defunding the left has been carried along by a small, tightly-knit group of conservatives for over 25 years, and that James O'Keefe's sting operation against ACORN is merely the latest step towards that goal.

Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Baggers

The crusade to defund the left has not been limited to attempts to discredit progressive organizations. The so-calledK Street Project of the 1990's, which was intended to steer lobbyist contributions more towards Republicans and to shut out Democrats, had the same objective. So did Jack Abramoff'scourting of Indian tribes in order to cut off payments that had previously gone largely to Democrats.

Even calls for "tort reform" -- which are now being raised again in connection with health care -- are intended to prevent trial lawyers, who are often generous Democratic donors, from receiving a share of large settlements in personal injury cases.

Attacks on federal funding of liberal non-profits, however, are particularly attractive as a strategy because most conservative non-profits receive the bulk of their funding from corporations and right-wing foundations and not from the federal government.

In 1995, the new Republican majority in Congress took part in a particularly ambitious -- though ultimately unsuccessful -- attempt to defund the left. According to a May 30, 1995 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which does not appear to be available online except through subscription-only sources):

"Congressional Republicans -- with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas playing a key role -- are preparing a new budget-cutting assault on scores of government-funded nonprofit groups whose liberal views are considered a threat to the conservative agenda. ... The effort, referred to by conservatives as 'defunding the left,' is intended to take aim at what they consider advocacy groups that lobby for liberal social programs from which they receive grants and contracts."

The story went on to say, "Led by Virginia Lamp Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, a special group of senior House Republican experts and staff members has been quietly working under the auspices of House Majority Leader Dick Armeyof Texas. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services."

Thomas, who was then a policy analyst for Rep. Armey, later went to work for the Heritage Foundation. Armey himself left Congress in 2003 and became the co-chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy -- one of whose representatives had participated in that same 2001 "Defunding the Left" panel as Morton Blackwell and CRC's Terrence Scanlon. Armey's organization is now known as FreedomWorks and is the principal astroturf backer of the teabagger protests.

��

Muriel Kane is director of research for Raw Story.

© 2011 Raw Story All rights reserved.

View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/143631/

==

From SowA

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Defund_the_left

Defund the left is a term used in America to describe efforts by conservative activists to eliminate government financial support for non-profit groups deemed to be 'liberal'.

While initially coined in response to Reagan government proposals to curtail funding of non-profits, it has subsequently been more loosely used to describe a range of other administrative measures aimed at silencing advocacy groups.

Conservative concern grows

The rise of public interest groups campaigning on a broad range of issues in the 1960's antagonized conservative groups. While little could be done to restrict informal action groups, the larger non-profit groups relied on the benefits of their tax-exempt status to attract tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In some cases, they also gained grants directly from government.

The funding of voter registration drives as part of the civil rights movement by some foundations in the 1960's so enraged conservatives that in 1969 they convened congressional hearings in an attempt to regulate the activities of non-profit groups and foundations. These hearings resulted in the 1969 Tax Reform Act, which created the architecture of the current regulatory framework. In 1976 the legislation was further refined to allow non-profit groups with 501 c 3 tax-deductible status to engage in some lobbying as long as it didn't exceed 20 percent of an organization's budget.

Through the 1970s traditional foundations, supplemented by new foundations, broadened the scope of what they were willing to fund to include more 'liberal' projects. 2012-13 left has asked IRS to look at outrageously political PAC, etc/ a al swiftboat? ATI?

The Reagan administration moves to muzzle non-profits

In 1981, the Heritage Foundation, the dominant conservative think-tank at the time, published Mandate for Leadership, a comprehensive conservative agenda with over two thousand policy recommendations for the incoming Reagan administration.

One challenge, as Heritage saw it, was to counter the rise of its ideological opponents by whittling away their status as 'public interest' organisations and eliminating federal financial support for 'liberal' groups. "Unless conservatives can break the moral monopoly still enjoyed by persons indifferent to the well-being of the American private sector and by proponents of expanded government power, any effort to reform federal domestic policies is likely to be reduced to the level of tinkering," they wrote.

According to OMB Watch, a non-profit group that has tracked attempts to constrain non-profit groups, the Heritage Foundation's 1981 proposals comprised three key changes. (OMB is the acronym for the Office of Management and Budget). Firstly they wanted to "impose some sort of lobbying and advocacy restrictions on any organization receiving federal funds", even if any lobbying was funded by funds raised independently by the organisation itself. Secondly was to "specify the type of such 'informational' activity that can be done with federal grants". Thirdly Heritage sought to "limit the circumstances under which grants and contracts can go to groups organized primarily for lobbying and advocacy."^[1]

The Heritage Foundation's proposal was quickly translated into a proposed Presidential Executive Order, named A-122 Cost Principles for Non-Profit Organizations, by the Office of Management and Budget general counsel, Michael Horowitz. The draft order defined the freshly minted term "political advocacy" as comprising any action "attempting to influence a government decision." Any organization engaging in political advocacy would not be eligible for federal grants irrespective of whether the advocacy was paid for by other sources of fundraising revenue or federal funds.

The proposals prompted a massive backlash with a three year campaign, led by the National A-122 Coalition comprising non-profit, religious, and other charitable organizations, defeating the proposals. Horowitz recounted over a decade later being rebuked by Reagan's Chief of Staff James A. Baker III. "The leader of the free world has come to me and said that all he has been hearing is this business about A-122," he said. (After working for the Reagan administration Horowitz went on to become a senior fellow at the Washington office of the conservative think tank, the Hudson Institute).

While the A-122 proposals were defeated, they still had the effect of chilling both non-profits and some foundations. Nor had the conservative movement given up on the notion of 'defunding the left'.

In 1984, the Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded by former Heritage Foundation senior Vice-President and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson. CRC was established with seed funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and John Olin foundations. The role of CRC was to erode the standing of those it viewed as 'liberal' non-profit advocacy groups and foundations.

Non-profits and the Gingrich revolution

The rise of the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement also adopted the calls to 'defund the left'. 'Wise Use' leaders such as Ron Arnold - who more recently has been a regular contributor to CRC publications - routinely made eliminating financial support for environmental groups one of his key messages. "We want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members" Arnold told the New York Times.

The tobacco industry too spotted the attraction in constraining the advocacy of public interest health groups. An internal Philip Morris strategy document prepared in late 1993 proposed to run a campaign in California to "regulate" charitable health organisations by capping advocacy spending and diverting funding into research activities. "Reporting requirements for percent of funds used for research vs salaries: cap administrative costs, salaries, lobbying expenditures; establish minimum percentage of funds for research," the strategy stated.^[2]

With the success of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives in 1994, the targeting of non-profit groups was once more elevated on the political agenda. The Republicans success was captured in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America which aimed to slash federal funding on a range of 'liberal' programs.

Conservative activists though needed to tread carefully because what they wanted was to strip federal funding from 'liberal' organisations without affecting corporate lobbying or funding for conservative groups. By targeting only federal grants but excluding contracts, corporate contractors - such as the defense industry - would remain free to lobby and most conservative groups would be unaffected.

In 1995, the environmental watchdog CLEAR "obtained documentation that details evidence of a right-wing legislative effort to 'defund the left' being coordinated by an alliance of conservative advocacy groups and Members of Congress. Their target: federal funding of non-profit advocacy organizations."^[3]

Amongst those supporting the campaign were the Christian Coalition, Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute the Institute for Justice, the Eagle Forum and the American Conservative Union.

The documents revealed that a bill - Stop Taxpayer Funded Political Advocacy - would be introduced by Oklahoma Republican Representative, Ernest Istook, that would have prohibited any 501 (c) 4 and 501 (c) 5 organizations from receiving any federal funds.

In American Prospect, Karen Paget reported that it would have given private citizens legal standing to challenge the activity of any non-profit in court, with the burden of proof falling on the NGO to clear its name and would have prohibited any organisation that received federal funds from engaging in any "advocacy" activity. [6]

CLEAR described the strategy as being aimed as being for a quick, clean hit. "The strategists behind this bill hope it will be dropped in about two weeks and go straight to the floor with no committee hearings. They are also very concerned that they 'spin' this campaign to make it look like a 'good government' campaign rather than a 'defund our enemies list' effort."

In early 1995, Jeff Shear wrote in the National Journal and subsequently the Baltimore Sun of a Republican project - later to be dubbed the K Street project - being co-ordinated out of the office of House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Heading the project was Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), which also involved Scott Hodges the Heritage Foundation's budget director. One of those involved in the project, conservative activists **Grover Norquist**, told Shear "we will hunt [these liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources".

"With control over Congress and the White House, it's all over. We will go back and sue people who broke the law, who were ripping off taxpayers to do political work. If Planned Parenthood is lobbying, taxpayers need to be reimbursed," he said.

Kate O'Beirne, the Heritage Foundation's vice president for government relations, told Shear that "publicly funded political advocates rarely find themselves debating anyone who's privately funded �� They are all supported by tax dollars. If their ideas are so compelling, let them go out in the marketplace, as Heritage does, and see if the public agrees with them."

The momentum was gathering on other fronts too. In 1996 the CRC launched its new monthly newsletter, Foundation Watch, to target the philanthropic activities of foundations it considered were funding groups too liberal for their tastes.

The Istook bill too provoked an uproar. Once more a coalition of non-profit groups, Let America Speak - co-chaired by the Alliance for Justice, Independent Sector, and OMB Watch - was created to counter the proposals. The Istook amendments were eventually defeated in 1997. However, according to OMB Watch, around the same time "the Senate worked out an agreement to restrict eligibility of 501(c)(4) (social welfare) organizations that lobby from receiving federal grants."

'Truth in Testimony'

After the two major full frontal attacks by conservative groups to constrain non-profit groups were rebuffed, the focus switched to procedural changes. In 1997 the House of Representatives passed a rule called "Truth in Testimony" that required all non-governmental groups testifying to disclose how much money in grants and contracts they have received from the government during the previous three years. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch described the rule as a "naked attempt to intimidate mainly nonprofit, liberal advocacy groups from testifying".

A spokesman for the Free Congress Foundation, Bradley Keena, welcomed the rule as "a first step toward levelling the playing field" and "part of a much larger plan to defund the left." Heritage foundation director of Congressional affairs, Marshall Whitmann, described the rule as an opportunity to highlight federal funding of non-profit groups. "For 40 years, we saw the growth of a spending complex that involved nonprofit organizations and governmental organizations that worked in tandem to grow Government. This rule is an opportunity to shed some light on this phenomenon and educate the taxpayer," he told the New Work Times.

More recent skirmishes

In February 2001, the annual Conservative Political Action Conference featured a "Defunding the left" panel of speakers with Terrence Scanlon from the Capital Research Center, Stefan Gleason from the National Right to Work Foundation, Paul Beckner from the Citizens for a Sound Economy and Morton Blackwell from the The Leadership Institute.^[4]

Conservative News Service reported that Scanlon complained of 'liberal' groups opposing the nomination of John Ashcroft to Attorney General and told the conference that left-wing non-profits could be stopped.

"For the first time since 1952, we have a Republican Congress, House and Senate, we have a Republican President, so the agency heads will be hopefully mostly conservatives. So for the very first time we have an opportunity to go after these groups and take away their federal money. Let's do it," Scanlon said.^[5]

In March 2003, a bill from Republican Representative, Michael Castle, to reauthorize the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, revived elements of both the Istook amendments and the Reagan era A-122 proposals. Once more a storm of protest erupted. The following month the proposed restrictions were dropped.

However, OMB Watch notes that with omnibus proposals repeatedly defeated, the conservative emphasis has switched to piecemeal changes that add up over time.

In July 2003 OMB Watch, released a report, An Attack on Nonprofit Speech: Death By a Thousand Cuts - chronicling a myriad of minor attacks on the ability of NGO groups to speak out. The report authors noted that “when there were attacks on non-profit advocacy in 1983 and 1995, the sector organized galvanizing responses to fend them off. Unfortunately, it appears that such attacks are again surfacing, but in ways that are broader yet much harder to fight back.” ^[6]

Using 'eco-terrorism' smears to mask funding attacks

The environmental movement in particular has been singled out for attention by think tanks and PR companies to be marginalised by being portrayed as 'ecoterrorists'. In 2002, the Competitive Enterprise Institute co-sponsored a conference with the aggressive anti-green PR company Nichols-Dezenhall. (The company has since been renamed Dezenhall Resources after Nick Nichols, who spoke at the conference, retired). The conference was titled "Stopping Eco-Extremism: A Conference On Legislative, Legal And Communications Strategies To Protect Free Enterprise". When CLEAR, the watchdog organisation on the anti-environmental movement, tried to gain access to the conference it was denied.^[7]

The week before the conference an article had appeared on TechCentralStation, written by Nick Nichols. Nichols argued 'eco-terrorism' was being funded by legitimate non-profit groups. "Like many foreign-based terrorist groups, many eco- and animal rights terrorist groups receive encouragement, support and funding from groups that are perceived to be legitimate charities. In the United States, charitable organizations classified as 501 (c)(3) groups under the tax code benefit from taxpayer subsidies, government grants and foundation philanthropy. This classification can bring enormous financial benefit to extremist groups," he wrote.^[8]

According to a report of the meeting by David Case, the executive editor of TomPaine.com: ."Nichols painted with the broadest of brushes, deftly segueing among references to September 11th, eco-terrorists and the mainstream environmental movement. One minute, he (rightly) condemns the $43 million-plus in property damage caused by ELF since 1996. Next, he reproaches the green crisis, a powerful "$22 billion per year" global conspiracy."

The firm's strategy, said the article "depends on routine, if hard-hitting, PR warfare: attacking a group's tax exempt status, its credibility and its funders. To eco-terrorists, these tactics are irrelevant. To media-dependent mainstream groups that that have rent and salaries to pay, they could be lethal".^[9]

While the term 'defund the left' is American, the strategy of seeking to curtail the voice of non-profit groups has spread beyond, largely through the fusion of aggrieved corporations working with conservative think tanks.

Attacks on IRS Non-Profit Status

On June 18, 2001, Frontiers of Freedom, sent a letter to the IRS asking it to revokeRainforest Action Network's501(c) 3 nonprofit tax status. A Frontiers of Freedom press release was headed "Test Case Could Slash Donations to Radical Environmental Groups test case". If successful, the press release noted, the strategy could be applied against other "radical environmental groups that are skirting our nation's tax laws". "It's really pretty simple," Frontiers of Freedom spokesman Jason Wright said. "If you take taxpayer dollars, you ought not to get involved in controversial issues".

The protest actions that FoF listed mostly involved the hanging of banners, which according to the think tank, does not fall under the legal definition of "charitable" or "educational" activities. On this basis, Frontiers of Freedom argued RAN's IRS tax-exempt status should be withdrawn.

A tax lawyer specialising in non-profits at the legal firm Shaw Pittman in Washington told the Wall Street Journal that even if the complaint was dismissed it was a tactic that would have an effect. "Reporting political enemies to the IRS is an attractive tactic because it forces the enemy to spend resources and sleepless nights ... Adverse publicity is an added bonus, particularly if it scares away donors," he said.

Rather than retreating, RAN opted to defends its actions and accuse Frontiers of Freedom of attempting to curtail their rights to free speech. The President of the Tides Foundation, Drummond Pike, spoke out as a foundation funder that wasn't going to be deterred. "If it were up to these folks, they would have taken away Martin Luther King's church's status," he said in a RAN media release.^[10]

Jim Wheaton, founder and senior counsel for First Amendment Project, which is provided legal support to RAN: "No one should think for a moment that this is anything other than an attempt to put RAN out of business".^[11]

Resources

References

1. ↑ [1]
2. ↑ "Core Objectives," Philip Morris strategy document, 1994
3. ↑ [2]
4. ↑ [3]
5. ↑ Collective Intelligence: Posts 3224-3352
6. �� [4]
7. ↑ "CLEAR ALERT: CLEAR denied access to 'eco-terrorism' conference," March 4, 2002
8. ↑ [http://www.techcentralstation.com/022802C.html
9. ↑ [5]
10. ↑ "Industry-backed, Anti-Environmental Groups and Logging Giant Boise Cascade Attack Rainforest Action Network," Environment News, May 2000
11. ↑ "Massive Attack: Logging allies launch coordinated effort to cripple Rainforest Action Network"

��

Related SourceWatch articles

• criminalising civil disobedience
• eco-terrorism

External resources

• OMB Watch, "Background and History on Attacks on Nonprofit Advocacy Rights, March 26, 2003.
• Tim Egan, "Fund-Raisers Tap Anti-Environmentalism", New York Times, December 19, 1991.
• Philip Morris, "Core Objectives", Bates No. 2044333554-2044333581, 1994.
• Clearinghouse on Environmental Advocacy and Research, "Right Wing "Defund the Left" Campaign", June 14, 1995.
• Karen Paget, "The Big Chill: Foundations and Political Passion", American Prospect, May - June 1999.
• Jeff Shear, "GOP Catch Phrase for the '90s: 'Defunding the Left'", The Sun (Baltimore), April 23, 1995
• A New Scarlet Letter, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, editorial, February 5, 1997.
• Katherine Seelye, "The Fine Print: A new Rule on Advocacy; House Rule May Rein In Liberal Advocacy Groups", The New York Times, January 16, 1997.
• Conservative Political Action Conference, "Current schedule, February 12, 2001.
• Jim Burns, "Conservatives Must End Government Funding Of Non-Profits", Conservative News Service, February 15, 2001.
• Gary D. Bass, Kay Guinane and Ryan Turner "An Attack on Nonprofit Speech: Death By a Thousand Cuts, OMB Watch, July 2003.
• Bill Berkowitz, "Truth about Trade?", Multinational Monitor, Volume 21, Number 7 &8, July/August 2000.
• Will Potter, "The New Backlash" Texas Observer 4/20/06
• George C. Landrith, "The Environmental Left: Breaking the Law in the Name of Charity," Policy Perspectives, May 2003
• Patricia Abbott, "Teenage Mutant Environmental Warriors," Frontiers of Freedom, November 19, 2001

Intimidating public interest groups

From SourceWatch

The dramatic increase in the number and influence of public interest groups over recent years has alarmed conservative groups. In response, there has been a flurry of attempts to establish on-line databases to monitor non-profit groups. For all the bluster accompanying these projects, few have amounted to much.

Another strand in their strategy has been developing the intellectual rationale and rhetoric on how curtailing non-profit groups is consistent with maintaining a healthy democracy.

The Capital Research Center's Green Watch - which gained $50,000 in funding from ExxonMobil in 2002 and 2003 - is perhaps the most effective at profiling the "liberal environmentalist movement". [1][2]

Others, such as ActivistCash.com purport to 'expose' activist groups, while in reality providing little more than information that is publicly available. The ActivistCash.com website was launched in December 2001 with profiles on only 16 activist groups. By January 2003 it had crept up to only 33. In the next eighteen months to June 2004 only an additional six groups had been added to the database.

Public Interest Watch (PIW) was launched in September 2002 by Mike Hardiman. Hardiman, the principal of the public relations and lobbying company Hardiman Consulting, was also a lobbyist for the 'wise use' group, the American Land Rights Association. The group seems to have been primarily a vehicle to attack Greenpeace. On the basis of a review of IRS 990 forms, PIW filed a complaint with the IRS urging an investigation claiming that the perfectly legal transfer of funds between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) arms amounted to 'money laundering'. Hardiman resigned in January 2004 . In March 2004 Lewis Fein was appointed as an interim Executive Director.

However, PIW appears to be a phantom organisation. Asked if the organization had had filed an IRS return Fein said "I believe so". Nor was he able to state who the Board members were or whether the address listed on the website was in fact an office address rather than the residential address of a board member.

In May 2003 the National Center for Public Policy Research, established the Envirotruth website, which it claims "sheds light on the environmentalist movement, offering information about their tactics, terrorist acts and fundraising machines." Like most of the other profiling sites, it is long on hype and short on details. In 2003 Exxon Mobil contributed $30,000 to underwrite the project. [3]

The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise's RANamuck website targeting the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has not been updated since September 2002. Similarly, its PETA Probe site was last actively updated in late 2002.

In June 2003, with a great deal of fanfare, the American Enterprise Institute unveiled NGOWatch.org, a joint project with the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The site, they claimed, would "expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs". However, one-year later sections of the site remain "under construction" while the actual profiles on groups are spartan.

The launch of the NGOwatch site co-incided with a conference on NGO's co-hosted with the Australian conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) The IPA itself launched a specialist newsletter, NGO Watch, in April 2001 to profile human rights, development and environmental organisations. However, faced with little subscriber support, the October 2002 edition was the last. "It just wasn't financially sustaining, there weren't enough buying the product," said IPA Senior Fellow, Gary Johns told Inter-Press Service.

While some of these projects have floundered or been abandoned by their sponsors it would be a mistake to conclude they have no effect. In part, their role is to create a climate in which non-profits divert scarce resources away from their core mission or soften their advocacy.

While there are thousands of non-profit environmental and other non-profit groups, only a handful appear to have been singled out for specific attention. The key groups featured by one or more of these groups are:

• Conservatives target the Sierra Club
• Conservatives target the Natural Resources Defense Council
• Conservatives target Greenpeace
• Conservatives target the Rainforest Action Network
• Conservatives target the Dogwood Alliance
• Conservatives target the Environmental Working Group
• Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Other SourceWatch resources

• Intimidating democracy
• Intimidating foundations
• Criminalising civil disobedience
• War on NGOs
• Trade Practices Amendment (Small Business Protection) Bill 2007 (Australia)

External links

• Interview with Bob Burton, June 10, 2004.
• Bob Burton, "Calls to Reign in NGOs Dismissed by Critics", Inter-Press Service, April 9, 2004.
• Gary Johns and John Roskam, "The Protocol: Managing Relations with NGOs", Institute of Public Affairs, April 2004.
• Michael Marx, "Thinking Like a Network Series: Preparing for the Backlash to Marketplace Campaigns", Business Ethics Network Newsletter, May 2005.

much overlap with above:

Intimidating democracy

From SourceWatch

The notion that a healthy democracy is based on the free exchange of ideas and that citizens should be able to freely organise to influence public policy is under attack.

The dominance of the Republican Party and an increasingly assertive conservative movement, has led to a growing intolerance for allowing dissenting voices to speak, let alone be listened to. Fuelled with funds from foundations and corporations, the conservative movement is attempting to silence its critics.

With Republicans controlling the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and increasingly state governments, conservative activists believe they have an opportunity to intimidate democracy by restricting who qualifies for tax-exempt status, undermining government and foundation funding sources for non-profits and restricting attention grabbing civil disobedience protests.

What started as a plan to 'defund the left' in America has also inspired their counterparts around the world to adopt and adapt the same strategy.

From Reagan to Bush

For over twenty years there has been repeated attempts in the United States – initiated by the Heritage Foundation - to ‘defund the left’. The first two full frontal attacks - in 1981 and 1995 - that were aimed at stripping public funding from non-profit groups, were rebuffed by Congress. Subsequently conservative groups have developed a broader range of long-term strategies.

Following the defeat of Reagan era proposals, a handful of conservative foundations funded the establishment of the Capital Research Center, founded by former Heritage Foundation and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson.

CRC’s role has been to criticise mainstream foundations deemed to be too 'liberal' and attack non-government organisations critical of the groups corporate sponsors. (An insight into CRC’s view of the political spectrum was contained in a 1995 list it prepared, obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which tagged the American Enterprise Institute as in the political “center”).

While the 'defund the left' campaign strategy was developed by the Heritage Foundation or the Reagan and subsequent Republican administrations, it has permeated through the ranks of the conservative movement. In 1991 Ron Arnold, one of the founders of the Wise Use Movement, told the New York Times “we want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members”. In 1995 Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, bluntly stated that "we will hunt liberal groups down one by one and extinguish their funding sources���.

By mid-February 2001, the conservative movement was emboldened by its electoral success. The President of the Capital Research Center, Terrence Scanlon, appearing on a panel titled "De-funding the Left" at the 28th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) rallied conservative activists. "For the first time since 1952, we have a Republican Congress, House and Senate, we have a Republican President, so the agency heads will be hopefully mostly conservatives. So for the very first time we have an opportunity to go after these groups and take away their federal money. Let's do it," Scanlon said.

To starve non-profit groups of funding though, requires a multi-layered strategy. Some groups are heavily reliant on foundations, some get government grants, others rely overwhelmingly on contributions from individuals. Nearly all are registered with taxation authorities as incorporated tax-exempt non-profit groups.

Amid the de-regulatory, anti-Washington euphoria of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representative in 1994, Gingrich sought to target non-profit advocacy groups. Gingrich used the term ���iron triangles����� to describe Congressional liberals responding to calls from activist groups, especially in the social welfare sector, to establish government programs and include funding for non profit groups for services and other projects. In the conservatives assessment this freed up funds raised from other sources to allow them to increase the lobbying of government for policy change or more government programs.

The electoral success of the Republicans also had the effect of de-mobilising many in the local grass-roots ant-environmental groups comprising the Wise Use Movement, at least in terms of the focus on the federal government. The Executive Director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise Ron Arnold, one of the ‘wise use’ movements most prominent leaders, re-invented himself as a critic of ‘liberal’ foundations and gained a foothold with the national conservative network as a regular contributor to Capital Research Center publications. (See Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry).

Testifying before a U.S House of Representatives committee in February 2000, Arnold invoked Gingrich’s ‘:{iron triangle:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:’ analogy to portray the environmental movement as doing the bidding of foundations. “The foundations direct their funds to the second leg of the triangle, environmental groups with insider access to the third leg, executive branch agencies. This powerful ‘iron triangle�� unfairly influences federal policy to devastate local economies and private property,” he said. [1]

Arnold’s strategy is to portray acceptance of foundation funding by environmental groups as evidence that they lack local grass roots support and that they are simply the puppets of wealthy, distant interests. Not only does portraying foundations as all-powerful play to the populist ‘wise use’ networks but Arnold seeks to use it to support the case for greater regulation of both non-profits and foundations.

While attempts to block groups accessing federal funds have largely been rebuffed, conservative foundations and corporations have funded a range of projects in an attempt to ‘chill’ foundations from funding advocacy groups. Some are designed to fuel adverse media coverage of foundations while others provide information for lobbying of foundations.

The attack on non-profit advocacy continues, with ongoing attempts to amend legislation governing non-profit information disclosure and lobbying. However, where early unsuccessful attempts targeted all non-profits, a narrower more opportunistic approach is being adopted to whittle provisions away sector-by-sector.

Nor are conservative foundations, activists and corporations content to focus solely on extinguishing funding sources for advocacy groups. For years Ron Arnold and others have been using the rhetoric of 'Eco-terrorism' to smear groups engaged in peaceful protests. The consequences of such accusations, no matter how ill-founded, can be devastating for individuals and damaging for the environmental movement generally.

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, accusations equating civil disobedience with terrorism have become more potent and gathered momentum. Arnold has stepped up his efforts while the American Legislative Exchange Council has developed model legislation to criminalise civil disobedience protests by environmental and animal rights groups altogether. (See The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act).

Conservative think tanks, governments, corporations and public relations companies have embraced a crackdown on public interest groups as a way of silencing critical groups permanently.

The main strands to the conservative movement's attack on public interest groups are:

• Intimidating foundations - one strand in the Defund the left campaign
• Intimidating public interest groups - seeking to curtail the space for advocacy
• Criminalising civil disobedience - preventing publicity

The campaign countering non-profits goes global

The ripple effects of the U.S. campaign to 'defund the left' have been felt around the world. A U.S. mining company succeeded in having USAID funding for an Indonesian community group pulled. [2] A Fulbright scholarship to the U.S., helped the Senior Fellow at the Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), Gary Johns develop a good working relationship with the American Enterprise Institute and escalate their emphasis on curtailing the activities of public interest groups.

The IPA themselves have targeted public interest groups in Malaysia and those working on issues in Indonesia. In mid-June 2004 the conservative Australian government released a consultancy report by the IPA's Gary Johns and John Roskam proposing the first steps to reduce the access that non-government organisations have to government decision making. [3]

In May 2002 Canadian PR consultant Ross S. Irvine, who approvingly cites Johns views in his articles, was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand. In his presentation Irvine identified "charitable organization legislation", now before parliament, as one of the key focal points to consider in New Zealand.

In August 2004, the New Zealand Greens Green MP Sue Bradford warned that the proposed charities legislation "poses a real threat to one of the cornerstones of our democracy - the ability of people to come together and advocate for all manner of social, economic and environmental causes. Freedom of speech would be clouded because organisations that speak out on political issues would risk being deregistered by the Charities Commission." [4]

In early September 2004, the Director General of the New Zealand Health Ministry, Karen Poutasi, sent a draft instruction to health and disability NGOs revealing that it was proposed that "the Ministry does not fund lobbying activity and such activity will not be included in any contracts". The instruction, however, did not propose that organisations would be excluded from government funding if funds raised from other sources were used for lobbying. See Intimidating democracy/New Zealand Health Ministry memo to NGOs for the full text.

Conclusion

The campaign to intimidate foundations from supporting public interest groups and preventing non-profit groups from effectively articulating their concerns is little more than an attempt to prevent democracy from working. Their strategy in large part relies on 'chilling' their targets without necessarily having any outright wins. 'Chilling' public interest advocacy works most effectively where the victims are, or feel, isolated. In the absence of exposing attacks as part of a broader strategy against all public interest groups, those targeted respond the best that they can in the circumstances. Some assertively defend their rights while others tone down their advocacy.

Intimidation strategies are least effective where public interest groups are well prepared in advance of attacks and where they can quickly access support and advice on the most effective responses. Making such attacks visible allows those targeted to interpret them as being aimed at not just them but at all public interest groups. The visibility of the attack strategy can also lead to the development of effective counter-strategies.

For example, while legal threats against activists in the 1980's and early 1990 were invisible, each individual or group was left to fend for themselves. After they were publicised, documented and analysed, protective strategies soon emerged. The term SLAPPs was coined - the acronym for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - and legislative proposals to render them ineffective soon emerged and, in some states, passed into law. Elsewhere, the risk of adverse publicity - as in the infamous McDonald's libel case in the UK - was enough to persuade many corporations and others that resorting to legal action was a high risk strategy.

While conservative groups talk of 'transparency', 'accountability' and guarding taxpayers dollars, what they are really mean is 'do what I say not what I do'.

What they don't want is scrutiny of their own lack of accountability, their lobbying, or lack of transparency on who funds them to do what. Nor do they want their largely invisible corporate funders to lose their ability to deduct contributions against corporate tax.

Related SourceWatch articles

• Foundations and Funders
• War on NGOs

External links

• Christopher Carey, "GOP tells firms: don't aid liberals; donations by May, Anheuser-Busch catch eye or Armey's army", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1995.
• Philip Morris, "Core Objectives", Bates No. 2044333554-2044333581, 1994.
• Danielle Knight, "US AID accused iof cutting funding to Indonesian Conservationists", Inter-Press Service, May 15, 2000.
• Gary Johns and John Roskam, "The Protocol: Managing Relations with NGOs", Institute of Public Affairs, April 2004.
• Sarah Maddison, Richard Denniss and Clive Hamilton, "Silencing Dissent: Non-government organisations and Australian democracy", Discussion Paper No. 65, The Australia Institute, 2004.
• New Zealand Green Party, "Scrap the Charities Bill, say Greens", Media Release, August 18, 2004.
• Sue Bradford, "Health Ministry memo a further attack on community sector", Media Release, September 30, 2004.
• Glenn Milne, "Uncharitable clampdown", The Australian, April 18, 2005.
• Wendy Frew, "Perils of protest in the new age", Sydney Morning Herald, October 1, 2005.
• Michael Marx, "Thinking Like a Network Series: Preparing for the Backlash to Marketplace Campaigns", Business Ethics Network Newsletter, May 2005.
• Sarah Maddison and Richard Denniss, "Democratic constraint and embrace: implications for progressive non-government advocacy organisations in Australia", Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2005.

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Intimidating_democracy"

Categories: Activism | Democracy

http://harpers.org/archive/2008/08/0082132

Intimidating democracy

Jump to: navigation, search

The notion that a healthy democracy is based on the free exchange of ideas and that citizens should be able to freely organise to influence public policy is under attack.

The dominance of the Republican Party and an increasingly assertive conservative movement, has led to a growing intolerance for allowing dissenting voices to speak, let alone be listened to. Fuelled with funds from foundations and corporations, the conservative movement is attempting to silence its critics.

With Republicans controlling the White House, the Senate, the House of Representatives and increasingly state governments, conservative activists believe they have an opportunity to intimidate democracy by restricting who qualifies for tax-exempt status, undermining government and foundation funding sources for non-profits and restricting attention grabbing civil disobedience protests.

What started as a plan to 'defund the left' in America has also inspired their counterparts around the world to adopt and adapt the same strategy.

From Reagan to Bush

For over twenty years there has been repeated attempts in the United States – initiated by the Heritage Foundation - to ‘defund the left’. The first two full frontal attacks - in 1981 and 1995 - that were aimed at stripping public funding from non-profit groups, were rebuffed by Congress. Subsequently conservative groups have developed a broader range of long-term strategies.

Following the defeat of Reagan era proposals, a handful of conservative foundations funded the establishment of the Capital Research Center, founded by former Heritage Foundation and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson.

CRC’s role has been to criticise mainstream foundations deemed to be too 'liberal' and attack non-government organisations critical of the groups corporate sponsors. (An insight into CRC’s view of the political spectrum was contained in a 1995 list it prepared, obtained by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which tagged the American Enterprise Institute as in the political “center”).

While the 'defund the left' campaign strategy was developed by the Heritage Foundation or the Reagan and subsequent Republican administrations, it has permeated through the ranks of the conservative movement. In 1991 Ron Arnold, one of the founders of the Wise Use Movement, told the New York Times “we want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members”. In 1995 Grover Norquist, a leading conservative activist, bluntly stated that "we will hunt liberal groups down one by one and extinguish their funding sources”.

By mid-February 2001, the conservative movement was emboldened by its electoral success. The President of the Capital Research Center, Terrence Scanlon, appearing on a panel titled "De-funding the Left" at the 28th annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) rallied conservative activists. "For the first time since 1952, we have a Republican Congress, House and Senate, we have a Republican President, so the agency heads will be hopefully mostly conservatives. So for the very first time we have an opportunity to go after these groups and take away their federal money. Let's do it," Scanlon said.

To starve non-profit groups of funding though, requires a multi-layered strategy. Some groups are heavily reliant on foundations, some get government grants, others rely overwhelmingly on contributions from individuals. Nearly all are registered with taxation authorities as incorporated tax-exempt non-profit groups.

Amid the de-regulatory, anti-Washington euphoria of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representative in 1994, Gingrich sought to target non-profit advocacy groups. Gingrich used the term ���iron triangles�� to describe Congressional liberals responding to calls from activist groups, especially in the social welfare sector, to establish government programs and include funding for non profit groups for services and other projects. In the conservatives assessment this freed up funds raised from other sources to allow them to increase the lobbying of government for policy change or more government programs.

The electoral success of the Republicans also had the effect of de-mobilising many in the local grass-roots ant-environmental groups comprising the Wise Use Movement, at least in terms of the focus on the federal government. The Executive Director of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise Ron Arnold, one of the ‘wise use’ movements most prominent leaders, re-invented himself as a critic of ‘liberal’ foundations and gained a foothold with the national conservative network as a regular contributor to Capital Research Center publications. (See Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry).

Testifying before a U.S House of Representatives committee in February 2000, Arnold invoked Gingrich’s ‘iron triangle��� analogy to portray the environmental movement as doing the bidding of foundations. “The foundations direct their funds to the second leg of the triangle, environmental groups with insider access to the third leg, executive branch agencies. This powerful ��iron triangle’ unfairly influences federal policy to devastate local economies and private property,” he said. [1]

Arnold’s strategy is to portray acceptance of foundation funding by environmental groups as evidence that they lack local grass roots support and that they are simply the puppets of wealthy, distant interests. Not only does portraying foundations as all-powerful play to the populist ‘wise use’ networks but Arnold seeks to use it to support the case for greater regulation of both non-profits and foundations.

While attempts to block groups accessing federal funds have largely been rebuffed, conservative foundations and corporations have funded a range of projects in an attempt to ‘chill��� foundations from funding advocacy groups. Some are designed to fuel adverse media coverage of foundations while others provide information for lobbying of foundations.

The attack on non-profit advocacy continues, with ongoing attempts to amend legislation governing non-profit information disclosure and lobbying. However, where early unsuccessful attempts targeted all non-profits, a narrower more opportunistic approach is being adopted to whittle provisions away sector-by-sector.

Nor are conservative foundations, activists and corporations content to focus solely on extinguishing funding sources for advocacy groups. For years Ron Arnold and others have been using the rhetoric of 'Eco-terrorism' to smear groups engaged in peaceful protests. The consequences of such accusations, no matter how ill-founded, can be devastating for individuals and damaging for the environmental movement generally.

In the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks, accusations equating civil disobedience with terrorism have become more potent and gathered momentum. Arnold has stepped up his efforts while the American Legislative Exchange Council has developed model legislation to criminalise civil disobedience protests by environmental and animal rights groups altogether. (See The Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act).

Conservative think tanks, governments, corporations and public relations companies have embraced a crackdown on public interest groups as a way of silencing critical groups permanently.

The main strands to the conservative movement's attack on public interest groups are:

• Intimidating foundations - one strand in the Defund the left campaign
• Intimidating public interest groups - seeking to curtail the space for advocacy
• Criminalising civil disobedience - preventing publicity

The campaign countering non-profits goes global

The ripple effects of the U.S. campaign to 'defund the left' have been felt around the world. A U.S. mining company succeeded in having USAID funding for an Indonesian community group pulled. [2] A Fulbright scholarship to the U.S., helped the Senior Fellow at the Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), Gary Johns develop a good working relationship with the American Enterprise Institute and escalate their emphasis on curtailing the activities of public interest groups.

The IPA themselves have targeted public interest groups in Malaysia and those working on issues in Indonesia. In mid-June 2004 the conservative Australian government released a consultancy report by the IPA's Gary Johns and John Roskam proposing the first steps to reduce the access that non-government organisations have to government decision making. [3]

In May 2002 Canadian PR consultant Ross S. Irvine, who approvingly cites Johns views in his articles, was a keynote speaker at the annual conference of the Public Relations Institute of New Zealand. In his presentation Irvine identified "charitable organization legislation", now before parliament, as one of the key focal points to consider in New Zealand.

In August 2004, the New Zealand Greens Green MP Sue Bradford warned that the proposed charities legislation "poses a real threat to one of the cornerstones of our democracy - the ability of people to come together and advocate for all manner of social, economic and environmental causes. Freedom of speech would be clouded because organisations that speak out on political issues would risk being deregistered by the Charities Commission." [4]

In early September 2004, the Director General of the New Zealand Health Ministry, Karen Poutasi, sent a draft instruction to health and disability NGOs revealing that it was proposed that "the Ministry does not fund lobbying activity and such activity will not be included in any contracts". The instruction, however, did not propose that organisations would be excluded from government funding if funds raised from other sources were used for lobbying. See Intimidating democracy/New Zealand Health Ministry memo to NGOs for the full text.

Conclusion

The campaign to intimidate foundations from supporting public interest groups and preventing non-profit groups from effectively articulating their concerns is little more than an attempt to prevent democracy from working. Their strategy in large part relies on 'chilling' their targets without necessarily having any outright wins. 'Chilling' public interest advocacy works most effectively where the victims are, or feel, isolated. In the absence of exposing attacks as part of a broader strategy against all public interest groups, those targeted respond the best that they can in the circumstances. Some assertively defend their rights while others tone down their advocacy.

Intimidation strategies are least effective where public interest groups are well prepared in advance of attacks and where they can quickly access support and advice on the most effective responses. Making such attacks visible allows those targeted to interpret them as being aimed at not just them but at all public interest groups. The visibility of the attack strategy can also lead to the development of effective counter-strategies.

For example, while legal threats against activists in the 1980's and early 1990 were invisible, each individual or group was left to fend for themselves. After they were publicised, documented and analysed, protective strategies soon emerged. The term SLAPPs was coined - the acronym for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation - and legislative proposals to render them ineffective soon emerged and, in some states, passed into law. Elsewhere, the risk of adverse publicity - as in the infamous McDonald's libel case in the UK - was enough to persuade many corporations and others that resorting to legal action was a high risk strategy.

While conservative groups talk of 'transparency', 'accountability' and guarding taxpayers dollars, what they are really mean is 'do what I say not what I do'.

What they don't want is scrutiny of their own lack of accountability, their lobbying, or lack of transparency on who funds them to do what. Nor do they want their largely invisible corporate funders to lose their ability to deduct contributions against corporate tax.

Related SourceWatch articles

• Foundations and Funders
• War on NGOs

External links

• Christopher Carey, "GOP tells firms: don't aid liberals; donations by May, Anheuser-Busch catch eye or Armey's army", St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 25, 1995.
• Philip Morris, "Core Objectives", Bates No. 2044333554-2044333581, 1994.
• Danielle Knight, "US AID accused iof cutting funding to Indonesian Conservationists", Inter-Press Service, May 15, 2000.
• Gary Johns and John Roskam, "The Protocol: Managing Relations with NGOs", Institute of Public Affairs, April 2004.
• Sarah Maddison, Richard Denniss and Clive Hamilton, "Silencing Dissent: Non-government organisations and Australian democracy", Discussion Paper No. 65, The Australia Institute, 2004.
• New Zealand Green Party, "Scrap the Charities Bill, say Greens", Media Release, August 18, 2004.
• Sue Bradford, "Health Ministry memo a further attack on community sector", Media Release, September 30, 2004.
• Glenn Milne, "Uncharitable clampdown", The Australian, April 18, 2005.
• Wendy Frew, "Perils of protest in the new age", Sydney Morning Herald, October 1, 2005.
• Michael Marx, "Thinking Like a Network Series: Preparing for the Backlash to Marketplace Campaigns", Business Ethics Network Newsletter, May 2005.
• Sarah Maddison and Richard Denniss, "Democratic constraint and embrace: implications for progressive non-government advocacy organisations in Australia", Australian Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 3, 2005.

Categories:

• Activism
• Democracy

Intimidating public interest groups

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The dramatic increase in the number and influence of public interest groups over recent years has alarmed conservative groups. In response, there has been a flurry of attempts to establish on-line databases to monitor non-profit groups. For all the bluster accompanying these projects, few have amounted to much.

Another strand in their strategy has been developing the intellectual rationale and rhetoric on how curtailing non-profit groups is consistent with maintaining a healthy democracy.

The Capital Research Center's Green Watch - which gained $50,000 in funding from ExxonMobil in 2002 and 2003 - is perhaps the most effective at profiling the "liberal environmentalist movement". [1][2]

Others, such as ActivistCash.com purport to 'expose' activist groups, while in reality providing little more than information that is publicly available. The ActivistCash.com website was launched in December 2001 with profiles on only 16 activist groups. By January 2003 it had crept up to only 33. In the next eighteen months to June 2004 only an additional six groups had been added to the database.

Public Interest Watch (PIW) was launched in September 2002 by Mike Hardiman. Hardiman, the principal of the public relations and lobbying company Hardiman Consulting, was also a lobbyist for the 'wise use' group, the American Land Rights Association. The group seems to have been primarily a vehicle to attack Greenpeace. On the basis of a review of IRS 990 forms, PIW filed a complaint with the IRS urging an investigation claiming that the perfectly legal transfer of funds between 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) arms amounted to 'money laundering'. Hardiman resigned in January 2004 . In March 2004 Lewis Fein was appointed as an interim Executive Director.

However, PIW appears to be a phantom organisation. Asked if the organization had had filed an IRS return Fein said "I believe so". Nor was he able to state who the Board members were or whether the address listed on the website was in fact an office address rather than the residential address of a board member.

In May 2003 the National Center for Public Policy Research, established the Envirotruth website, which it claims "sheds light on the environmentalist movement, offering information about their tactics, terrorist acts and fundraising machines." Like most of the other profiling sites, it is long on hype and short on details. In 2003 Exxon Mobil contributed $30,000 to underwrite the project. [3]

The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise's RANamuck website targeting the San Francisco-based Rainforest Action Network has not been updated since September 2002. Similarly, its PETA Probe site was last actively updated in late 2002.

In June 2003, with a great deal of fanfare, the American Enterprise Institute unveiled NGOWatch.org, a joint project with the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies. The site, they claimed, would "expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs". However, one-year later sections of the site remain "under construction" while the actual profiles on groups are spartan.

The launch of the NGOwatch site co-incided with a conference on NGO's co-hosted with the Australian conservative think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) The IPA itself launched a specialist newsletter, NGO Watch, in April 2001 to profile human rights, development and environmental organisations. However, faced with little subscriber support, the October 2002 edition was the last. "It just wasn't financially sustaining, there weren't enough buying the product," said IPA Senior Fellow, Gary Johns told Inter-Press Service.

While some of these projects have floundered or been abandoned by their sponsors it would be a mistake to conclude they have no effect. In part, their role is to create a climate in which non-profits divert scarce resources away from their core mission or soften their advocacy.

While there are thousands of non-profit environmental and other non-profit groups, only a handful appear to have been singled out for specific attention. The key groups featured by one or more of these groups are:

• Conservatives target the Sierra Club
• Conservatives target the Natural Resources Defense Council
• Conservatives target Greenpeace
• Conservatives target the Rainforest Action Network
• Conservatives target the Dogwood Alliance
• Conservatives target the Environmental Working Group
• Conservatives target the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals

Other SourceWatch resources

• Intimidating democracy
• Intimidating foundations
• Criminalising civil disobedience
• War on NGOs
• Trade Practices Amendment (Small Business Protection) Bill 2007 (Australia)

External links

• Interview with Bob Burton, June 10, 2004.
• Bob Burton, "Calls to Reign in NGOs Dismissed by Critics", Inter-Press Service, April 9, 2004.
• Gary Johns and John Roskam, "The Protocol: Managing Relations with NGOs", Institute of Public Affairs, April 2004.
• Michael Marx, "Thinking Like a Network Series: Preparing for the Backlash to Marketplace Campaigns", Business Ethics Network Newsletter, May 2005.

Category:

• Activism

Intimidating foundations

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Conservative groups view persuading or, if necessary, coercing foundations from funding groups deemed too 'liberal' as critical to ensuring conservative ascendancy in the 21st century.

In a book review for the Philanthropy Roundtable, the senior program officer at the JM Foundation, Carl Helstrom pined for conservative dominance in philanthropy. "Advocates of private philanthropy and the free enterprise system of which they are an integral part have now spent close to a century in the wilderness. By recovering the capital of their intellectual forbearers [sic], they may just have the opportunity to turn the world right-side up again in the next century," he wrote. [1]

One strand of the conservative campaign has been to challenge the moral right of foundations to support mainstream and 'liberal' causes by disputing that such grants are consistent with donor intent. In particular this line of argument has been promulgated by Martin Morse Wooster and the Capital Research Center (CRC).

For example, the May 2004 edition of the Capital Research Center's publication, Foundation Watch, featured an article by 'wise use' movement leader Ron Arnold on the Pew Charitable Trusts. Arnold cited Wooster's book, The Great Philanthropists and the Problem of Donor Intent, when criticising the use of Pew funds, which originated from an oil company, to support work on climate change. (Undisclosed to readers was that in 2003 ExxonMobil funded both the Capital Research Center and the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise). [2]

In the context of Pew's financial restructuring, a February 2004 editorial page column in the Wall Street Journal, echoed the complaint that foundations were not complying with 'donor intent'. "Congress writes the laws that make this possible, but the last time Congress seriously debated the issue of foundations and donor intent and the tax breaks that guarantee perpetuity was the famous Patman hearings of the 1960s. Looks to us as though someone on the Senate Finance or House Government Reform Committees hasn't been minding the store," the WSJ wrote. [3]

But even if conservatives were successful in enforcing their version of 'donor intent', they would still be aggrieved. CRC for example, complains bitterly about the projects funded by George Soros. [4] [5] [6] For his part Ron Arnold has complained about the philanthropic activities of Ted Turner's Turner Foundation. [7]

In the last four years efforts by conservative groups to publicise the role of foundations in funding projects have taken off. A range of publications and online databases criticising foundations and specific non-profit groups deemed to be 'liberal' have proliferated.

The conservative group most active in this area is the Capital Research Center, publishing its monthly Foundation Watch, Organization Trends and Labor Watch newsletters. It also hosts an online database on foundations and NGOs Searchlight. However, profiles in the Searchlight database contain very dated information - such as the one on the CRC itself - creating the impression that the organizations enthusiasm for the project is flagging.

Rick Berman's Center for Consumer Freedom (CCF) is also active in this area hosting the ActivistCash.com website. While CRC explicitly criticises foundations, ActivistCash.com and CCF opts for a softer 'divide and rule' strategy. It publicly seeks to undermine the credibility of specific non-profit groups and, while it identifies their foundation funders, refrains from commentary. CCF apparently hope their profiles will 'chill' foundations from financially supporting profiled non-profits.

Ron Arnold's Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise also hosts an online database, Undue Influence, with information on both non-profit groups and foundation funders. While Undue Influence has extensive information, like CRC's Searchlight, it too is rather dated. While there are also numerous reports on groups and foundations on the CDFE's site, 2002 appears to have been the high-water mark. In 2003 only three new profiles were added. In 2004 Arnold has only added one profile, the republication of an article on Pew Charitable Trusts from CRC's Foundation Watch. [8]

Arnold's complaint is not that foundations fund projects out of touch with the views of the American public, but that they are in tune with them, thereby depriving 'wise use' groups of potential resources. The lack of funding for grassroots 'wise use' groups, he said in an interview, was "... a result of the overall liberal cast of American society, which has thoroughly permeated many big foundations, so you find that $3 out of every $4 given by foundations go to left-leaning groups rather than to right-leaning groups". [9]

While conservative groups would welcome government initiatives to curtail 'liberal' grantmaking by foundations, they can still achieve much simply by trading on fear. The strategy of conservative groups appears to be aimed at 'chilling' foundations from making grants to groups that offend conservatives policy preferences.

Just as there have been a small number of public interest groups singled out for particular attention, so too have conservatives zeroed in on a number of foundations supporting environmental and other groups. These include:

• the Tides Foundation;
• the Heinz foundations;
• the Ford Foundation;
• the Pew Charitable Trusts; and
• the Macarthur Foundation.

Other SourceWatch resources

• Conservatives target the Tides Foundation
• Ron Arnold and Teresa Heinz Kerry
• Conservatives target the Ford Foundation
• Conservatives target the Pew Charitable Trusts
• Conservatives target the MacArthur Foundation

• Intimidating public interest groups
• Intimidating democracy
• Criminalising civil disobedience

External links

• Carl Helstrom, "Turning the World Right-side Up: Taking another look at the New Charity", Philanthropy, September 2000.
• "Trusting Pew: Dubious accounting shouldn't be acceptable in the nonprofit world", Wall Street Journal, editorial, February 22, 2004.==
• ===

2x?

A new piece of reporting is up at

Raw Story  detailing how the Heritage foundation, in the early 80s, came up with, then implemented, a plan to starve the left of any sort funds, both public and private, in an effort to control the direction of the American government.

When Crazy Eyes Bachmann said, recently, "Defunding the left is going to be so easy,and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.", she was preaching to the converted - and in many cases, the very same people who came up with the plan to starve progressives of funds and limit their ability to lobby Congress.

From SourceWatch:

The rise of public interest groups campaigning on a broad range of issues in the 1960's antagonized conservative groups. While little could be done to restrict informal action groups, the larger non-profit groups relied on the benefits of their tax-exempt status to attract tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In some cases, they also gained grants directly from government.

The funding of voter registration drives as part of the civil rights movement by some foundations in the 1960's so enraged conservatives that in 1969 they convened congressional hearings in an attempt to regulate the activities of non-profit groups and foundations. These hearings resulted in the 1969 Tax Reform Act, which created the architecture of the current regulatory framework. In 1976 the legislation was further refined to allow non-profit groups with 501 c 3 tax-deductible status to engage in some lobbying as long as it didn't exceed 20 percent of an organization's budget.

But, as is so often the case, this didn't go far enough for the anti-progressives.  They didn't want the left to just go hungry, they wanted to starve them to death.

From Raw Story:

The Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded in 1984 by a former Heritage Foundation vice president to implement this agenda by uncovering the presumably questionable funding sources of progressive groups. CRC's central assumption has always been that "a unified, sophisticated and well-funded philanthropic elite is dedicated to imposing on us the doctrine of 'progressive' philanthropy, doctrines that would reorder our political, economic and cultural priorities."

The CRC selected ACORN as a favored targed long before almost anybody else had heard of the group.

Heritage was rewarded with Presidential Executive Order A-122 - Cost Principles for Non-Profit Organizations,.  After a three-year battle, this was rescinded, but the fight had just begun.

SourceWatch:

In 1984, the Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded by former Heritage Foundation senior Vice-President and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson. CRC was established with seed funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and John Olin foundations. The role of CRC was to erode the standing of those it viewed as 'liberal' non-profit advocacy groups and foundations.

..........

The rise of the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement also adopted the calls to 'defund the left'. 'Wise Use' leaders such as Ron Arnold - who more recently has been a regular contributor to CRC publications - routinely made eliminating financial support for environmental groups one of his key messages. "We want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members" Arnold told the New York Times.

The tobacco industry too spotted the attraction in constraining the advocacy of public interest health groups. An internal Philip Morris strategy document prepared in late 1993 proposed to run a campaign in California to "regulate" charitable health organisations by capping advocacy spending and diverting funding into research activities. "Reporting requirements for percent of funds used for research vs salaries: cap administrative costs, salaries, lobbying expenditures; establish minimum percentage of funds for research," the strategy stated.[2]

With the success of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives in 1994, the targeting of non-profit groups was once more elevated on the political agenda. The Republicans success was captured in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America which aimed to slash federal funding on a range of 'liberal' programs.

Conservative activists though needed to tread carefully because what they wanted was to strip federal funding from 'liberal' organisations without affecting corporate lobbying or funding for conservative groups. By targeting only federal grants but excluding contracts, corporate contractors - such as the defense industry - would remain free to lobby and most conservative groups would be unaffected.

In 1995, the environmental watchdog CLEAR "obtained documentation that details evidence of a right-wing legislative effort to 'defund the left' being coordinated by an alliance of conservative advocacy groups and Members of Congress. Their target: federal funding of non-profit advocacy organizations."[3]

Amongst those supporting the campaign were the Christian Coalition, Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute the Institute for Justice, the Eagle Forum and the American Conservative Union.

The documents revealed that a bill - Stop Taxpayer Funded Political Advocacy - would be introduced by Oklahoma Republican Representative, Ernest Istook, that would have prohibited any 501 (c) 4 and 501 (c) 5 organizations from receiving any federal funds.

In American Prospect, Karen Paget reported that it would have given private citizens legal standing to challenge the activity of any non-profit in court, with the burden of proof falling on the NGO to clear its name and would have prohibited any organisation that received federal funds from engaging in any "advocacy" activity.[6]

CLEAR described the strategy as being aimed as being for a quick, clean hit. "The strategists behind this bill hope it will be dropped in about two weeks and go straight to the floor with no committee hearings.They are also very concerned that they 'spin' this campaign to make it look like a 'good government' campaign rather than a 'defund our enemies list' effort."

In early 1995, Jeff Shear wrote in the National Journal and subsequently the Baltimore Sun of a Republican project - later to be dubbed the K Street project - being co-ordinated out of the office of House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Heading the project was Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), which also involved Scott Hodges the Heritage Foundation's budget director. One of those involved in the project, conservative activists Grover Norquist, told Shear "we will hunt [these liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources".

"With control over Congress and the White House, it's all over. We will go back and sue people who broke the law, who were ripping off taxpayers to do political work. If Planned Parenthood is lobbying, taxpayers need to be reimbursed," he said.

Of course, once again, even that wasn't enough for the anti-progressives, who then resorted to illegally spying on the "DFH", but I digress.

Raw Story:

For an organization whose mission is to expose the funding sources and organizational ties of the left, the Capital Research Center is ironically protective of its own connections. As a non-profit organization, for example, it is not obliged to report the names of its donors, only its total revenue -- which amounted in 2007 to about $2.5 million.

The CRC's tax filings similarly include the name of its officers, its directors -- who include former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese III -- and its two highest-paid employees,

but the membership of its National Advisory Board has not been revealed since 2001. At that time, however, the board was heavily loaded with individuals tied to both the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to various other right-wing publications, think-tanks, and legal foundations.

Although the evidence is skimpy, it suggests that many of the same people who were involved with CRC when it was founded in 1984 may have continued to be connected with the group and its ongoing agenda.

One of the more interesting names on the 2001 list is that of T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., a former Reagan adviser and president of the Intercollegiant Studies Institute (ISI). Although it is not well known, ISI is one of the largest recipients of grants from conservative foundations, having been listed a few years ago as second only to the Heritage Foundation. 

Much of ISI's activity is carried on through its Collegiate Network, which creates and subsidizes conservative student publications on college campuses. James O'Keefe -- the young filmmaker whose sting operation allegedly caught ACORN employees endorsing illegal activities -- was the founder of one such publication when he was a student at Rutgers University.

O'Keefe had also received advice and a start-up grant to help launch the Rutgers Centurion from Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute -- which has been training young Republican dirty tricksters since the 1970's, ranging from Karl Rove to Jeff Gannon. Blackwell himself appeared on a "Defunding the Left" panel at the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, along with CRC president Terrence Scanlon.

These multiple cross-connections again suggest that the goal of defunding the left has been carried along by a small, tightly-knit group of conservatives for over 25 years, and that James O'Keefe's sting operation against ACORN is merely the latest step towards that goal.

Around and around and around we go - and always end up back at the same place.  The anti-progressives at Heritage and their spawn.

Raw Story

Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Baggers

The crusade to defund the left has not been limited to attempts to discredit progressive organizations. The so-called K Street Project of the 1990's, which was intended to steer lobbyist contributions more towards Republicans and to shut out Democrats, had the same objective. So did Jack Abramoff's courting of Indian tribes in order to cut off payments that had previously gone largely to Democrats.

Even calls for "tort reform" -- which are now being raised again in connection with health care -- are intended to prevent trial lawyers, who are often generous Democratic donors, from receiving a share of large settlements in personal injury cases.

Attacks on federal funding of liberal non-profits, however, are particularly attractive as a strategy because most conservative non-profits receive the bulk of their funding from corporations and right-wing foundations and not from the federal government.

In 1995, the new Republican majority in Congress took part in a particularly ambitious -- though ultimately unsuccessful -- attempt to defund the left. According to a May 30, 1995 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which does not appear to be available online except through subscription-only sources):

"Congressional Republicans -- with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas playing a key role -- are preparing a new budget-cutting assault on scores of government-funded nonprofit groups whose liberal views are considered a threat to the conservative agenda. ... The effort, referred to by conservatives as 'defunding the left,' is intended to take aim at what they consider advocacy groups that lobby for liberal social programs from which they receive grants and contracts."

The story went on to say, "Led by Virginia Lamp Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, a special group of senior House Republican experts and staff members has been quietly working under the auspices of House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services."

Both the Raw Story and SourceWatch articles are definitely worth a read if you have a chance.

I don't know what the answer is, and I don't suggest dirty tricks on our side as a remedy to their dirty tricks, but it is at least time to demand parity on the reporting of and on the attempts of the anti-progressives to disenfranchise the left.

It has become "conventional wisdom" that what business wants for America is "good", while what labor wants for America is "bad".  It is time to expose this as the self-serving lie that it is and remind everyone that "labor" means "Americans" - the people! What is good for labor is good for people.  What is bad for labor is bad for people, Americans, and therefore - AMERICA!  We have had two decades of social experimentation by the anti-progressives to prove this.  It is time for us to have OUR TURN.  We won the election, we have the majority, and for the first time in my lifetime, a PROGRESSIVE MANDATE!

It is time for REAL CHANGE!!

Originally posted to Bcre8ve on Fri Oct 30, 2009 at 10:35 AM PDT.