Investigating Power
ALEC, Climate, Environment, Koch
The Center for Media and Democracy, a nonprofit that documents corporate influence, has identified fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil and Koch Industries as among ALEC’s financial backers. Amid a pressure campaign, dozens of companies including Google and Walmart dropped out, though not always explaining why, according to USA TODAY.
A report on IWF (Independent Women’s Forum) by the Center for Media and Democracy reveals the group’s close links to the Koch Brothers. While the relationship between the IWF and the Kochs is tenuous now, in the group’s early stages it shared space and leadership with David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity.
Since 2006, between two and three dozen Wisconsin lawmakers have been members of ALEC or attended ALEC conferences, according to the Center for Media and Democracy. And since 2011, at least three dozen bills or state budget provisions approved by the GOP-controlled legislature and signed into law by Republican Gov. Scott Walker were based on ALEC model legislation, according to the group.
“I believe that Donald Trump in the White House would be more abusive to the Constitution than Barack Obama – and that’s saying a lot,” Pruitt said in the interview.
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The audio was posted by a watchdog group called Documented that “investigates how corporations manipulate public policy that harms our environment, communities, and democracy,” according to its website. Documented was created in December, its co-director is also a fellow for another watchdog group called the Center for Media and Democracy.
Mary Bottari, deputy director of the Center for Media and Democracy in Madison, Wisconsin, a watchdog group that’s focused on ALEC, says the bill is a reasonable reaction to the agenda of the organization’s major corporate telecommunications members. “These companies are relentless and they will come back and back and back again because they want to make sure every neighborhood is available for a monopoly-based operation,” she said. “There’s no principle behind ALEC’s position. They are for whatever the corporations want.”
A group called the Center for Media and Democracy, based in Madison, Wisconsin, calls TIA [Truth in Accounting] “a right-wing non-profit” and a “deficit alarmist organization” that is an associate member of the State Policy Network.
The State Policy Network “and its member think tanks are major drivers of the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide,” according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
While Truth in Accounting describes itself as a nonpartisan group of accountants and other financial experts, the Center for Media and Democracy describes it a right-wing entity with ties to the Koch Brothers and the corporate-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.
The gerrymandering in Wisconsin, which experts call among the most extreme in U.S. history, is but one part of Republicans’ stealth plan to stay in office. Since Gov. Scott Walker and the Republican Legislature took power, they’ve also introduced some of the country’s harshest voting restrictions, passing laws that make it harder for Democratic-leaning constituencies to register to vote and cast ballots. At the same time, the state has become the “Wild West of dark money,” according to Lisa Graves, a senior fellow at the Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, with Republican politicians like Walker raising unprecedented sums from billionaire donors to finance their campaigns.
But the tax return revealing the contributions from the Illinois Policy Institute “clearly shows that Project Six is far from the independent government watchdog that it claims to be and seriously calls into question Khan’s motivation for establishing the group,” said David Armiak, a researcher with the Madison, Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy, which has tracked funding to the institute and similar conservative organizations.
“The National School Choice Week website’s Partners page provides a who’s-who gallery of (Koch Industries CEO Charles) Koch network groups, corporations and billionaires promoting privatization,” said Lisa Graves, The Center for Media and Democracy Executive Director in a press release. “Although the week features many local events, it is backed by national entities, some of which are hostile to the idea of public schools and whose goals have included full privatization.”