Investigating Power
In Wisconsin the Badger Institute can be relied upon to release reports showing a hike in the minimum wage is a terrible idea. Formerly known as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, the group has received at least $14.2 million in funding from the conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation including $375,000 in 2018, as the liberal Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has reported.
Alaska Governor Mike Dunleavy’s decision to slash the state’s funding for the University of Alaska by nearly 41% has the academic and research community up in arms.
Wisconsin’s open records law applies to all records requests, big or small. But under former Attorney General Brad Schimel, the Wisconsin Department of Justice implemented a restrictive policy that limited access based on the number of potentially responsive emails.
From SourceWatch: “Speaker Howell is on the Board of Directors of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) as of September 2014 (and has been since 2003) and is the former National Chairman…In April 2012, Speaker Howell strongly defended ALEC at a press conference in Richmond, Virginia, saying that it had “been subjected to a six-month attack by liberal groups, including the Occupy movement, Moveon.org and billionaire George Soros.”
SourceWatch outlines the Center for Freedom and Prosperity’s strong ties to Koch-funded organizations such as the State Policy Network — a group that touts the free market as the panacea to all ills and rails against government regulation — and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate bill mill.
Thanks to our pals at the Koch brothers’ oxymoronic “Americans for Prosperity” and at The Bull Elephant for giving us a good shortlist (see below) of which Virginia Republicans we need to go all-out OPPOSING this year. First, a quick reminder — courtesy of SourceWatch — of how bad “Americans for Prosperity” is:
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Getting the idea? In short, AfP is the worst of the worst; totally antithetical to anyone who cares about fighting for workers, the environment, healthcare, transit, good government, etc.
“It’s extremely troubling,” Lisa Graves, president of the board of the Center for Media and Democracy, said.
“One of the primary rules for nonprofits is that they’re supposed to be in the public interest,” she said, “not for private benefits.”
We talk to Stevenson and to Mary Bottari, a muckraker at the Center for Media and Democracy who has investigated Hendricks’s political donations, about how Hendricks has changed the state of Wisconsin, and whether the good she’s done for Beloit can ever make up for the harm (especially from the perspective of labor unions and their supporters) her political giving has done to the state’s workers.
The Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit investigative news organization in Wisconsin, has published stories on ALEC since 2011, initially based on leaked documents. The group posts its research and stories online here.
With an ALEC membership, “Comcast got legislators behind closed doors,” David Armiak, research director at the Center for Media and Democracy, said on Friday. “ALEC would hold two meetings a year when state legislators from around the country came to fancy hotels and would meet” with Comcast and other companies.
Bradley Files, Democracy, Wisconsin
Center for Media and Democracy — $5,000 to help defray expenses to research Bradley Foundation funding.