Investigating Power
While its name suggests it is “for” consumers, in fact, SourceWatch.org says CEA [Consumer Energy Alliance] is a “front group for the energy industry that opposes political efforts to regulate carbon standards while advancing deep water and land-based drilling for oil and methane gas.”
Companies such as Exxon Mobil Corp., which says it accounts for climate change in its investment decisions, have also sponsored the organization [ALEC], according to the Center for Media and Democracy.
The Bradley Foundation, whose founder, Harry Bradley, was a member of the John Birch Society, gave out more than $42.5 million in 2015 (the last year for which its tax return is available), including a half-million-dollar grant to the Freedom Foundation. Documents obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy showed that union-busting to defund Democrats has been an aim of Bradley Foundation grant-making for at least 14 years. The documents include notes about many of the foundation’s grants that are similar to one attached to a $100,000 gift to Colorado’s Independence Institute, for “neutralizing the power of Colorado’s teachers’ unions by defunding them at the local school district level.”
Via a Center for Media and Democracy report out this a.m.: “In the 2016 federal elections, 147 private equity firms and the individuals in them gave $92 million to federal candidates and committees …
“That’s more than double the $39 million the same group of donors gave in the 2012 elections. The amount only represents private equity, not firms primarily involved in venture capital or those running hedge funds”
Jessica Mason of PR Watch reported that Teachout was popular in rural upstate New York where people were organizing against fracking. She said that “dozens of towns across New York have considered banning fracking through zoning ordinances, a move the New York Supreme Court ruled legal in late July. Bans have passed in some 79 municipalities in New York state, concentrated in upstate counties like Otsego and Tompkins, both of which gave over 70 percent of their vote to Teachout.”
AFACT and PBTL are classic examples of the types of front groups and campaigns described in the excellent book, Trust Us We’re the Experts, by John Stauber, founder of the Center for Media and Democracy and PR Watch. To get their message across more effectively, corporations or organizations will create “independent” organizations to further their agenda. The aim being to convince the public that an “expert” third-party organization says, for example, that rBST is good for dairy farmers and consumers. The tobacco industry is notorious for funding such front groups as the “Center for Consumer Freedom” to defend the rights of consumers to smoke as they pleased. In this case, PBTL’s aim is to convince people that non-GMO labels are misleading and capitalizing on consumer fears.
Bradley Files, Koch, Wisconsin
The online watchdog group Sourcewatch has pegged the Center of the American Experiment as a “right-wing pressure group” with ties to Wisconsin’s Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation. This foundation, which has given the Center thousands of dollars in recent years, has its roots in a kind of ideological extremism once relegated to the fringes of American society.
Founder Harry Bradley, along with Fred Koch, patriarch of the Koch clan, was “one of the original charter members of the John Birch society,” according to Sourcewatch. The John Birch society is a far-right group that loomed large in the Cold War era, when routing out communists was all the rage. Jane Mayer covers this in her 2016 book Dark Money, in which she notes that Harry Bradley was also a “keen supporter of the Manion Forum.”
Michael Grebe, the former head of the Bradley Foundation who ran Walker’s 2014 campaign, will serve as “campaign chairman.” While Grebe headed up the Bradley Foundation, it spent millions of dollars funding groups in Wisconsin that tried to discredit the John Doe II investigation, as the Center for Media and Democracy has documented.
The last thing I’ll say, I said 2011 and 2013 are really important years for ALEC. That’s because at that time, that’s when actually all of these model bills were leaked through an organization I used to work for, Center for Media and Democracy, where 800 model bills were published the first time. Actually, before that ALEC never published their model bills, so citizens would have no idea ALEC was behind hundreds of bills that were passed in state houses, in the decades that came before that.
Thereafter, after that project went public called, “ALEC Exposed,” ALEC actually started publishing its model bills online, and became a little more transparent about the fact that they’re behind all these bills, but before that there was really no way to track or trace ALEC unless you got lucky through an open records request or something like that.
The study said that in each year since 2011, state legislative pre-emption efforts across the country have increased. The Center for Media and Democracy reported that 2015 saw “more efforts to undermine local control on more issues than any other year in history.”