Investigating Power
One of the publications I followed at the time was PR Watch. It was a quarterly that was exactly what its name suggests. In 2002, I stumbled across a story that filled in the gaps in my understanding of the dialogue schema used by PR firms. The piece was written by two guys I don’t know: Bob Burton and Andy Rowell.
[The Fund for American Studies] is a far-right organization with ties to myriad conservative academic fronts, legal institutions and ideological welfare organizations. TFAS is directly tied to the State Policy Network (SPN) group of think tanks and tax-exempt entities, according to The Center for Media and Democracy. SPN itself is funded by various multinational corporations including Facebook, Walmart and has their ground operation almost entirely paid for by the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity.
In a change from longstanding practice, he doesn’t post his appointment schedules. And, after scrutiny of his emails as attorney general of Oklahoma were pried loose by The New York Times and a lawsuit from the Center for Media and Democracy—exposing his close ties to energy companies in his efforts to smash regulations affecting them—Pruitt avoids email exchanges with EPA staffers, preferring face-to-face meetings and verbal instructions. Plausible deniability enabled.
Thousands more pages of emails from his time as Oklahoma’s attorney general, released earlier this year after the Center for Media and Democracy sued for them to be made public, detailed an often-chummy relationship between Pruitt’s office and Devon Energy, a major oil and gas exploration and production company based in Oklahoma City.
The meetings were last hosted in 2014 and drew more than 600 attendees from state and local offices, school boards, public officials and residents. Hunter’s renewal of the meetings comes on the heels of his predecessor Scott Pruitt, now head of the Environmental Protection Agency, who was often the subject of open records requests himself. In fact, prior to being sworn in as President Donald Trump’s pick to head the agency, the Center for Media and Democracy filed nine open records requests with the AG’s office beginning in January 2015.
In 2016 and again in 2017, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed legislation that would empower the U.S. executive branch to enter bilateral surveillance agreements with foreign nations. Under these agreements, police in both nations would have the reciprocal power to bypass [Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties]—and each other’s privacy laws—and instead make direct demands to service providers for data located in the other nation.
EFF and a coalition of 20 other privacy advocates sent a letter to Congress opposing this DOJ bill. The other signatories are Access Now, Advocacy for Principled Action in Government, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Media and Democracy, the Constitutional Alliance, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Defending Rights & Dissent, Demand Progress, Fight for the Future, the Government Accountability Project, Government Information Watch, Human Rights Watch, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, National Security Counselors, New America’s Open Technology Institute, the Project on Government Oversight, and Restore the Fourth.
Farr also has fought vigorously against workers’ efforts to unionize. He was a staff attorney at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has deep ties to the Koch brothers and was described by The Center for Media and Democracy as “a national leader in the effort to destroy public and private sector unions.”
According to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a national corporate watchdog organization, the SPN is currently working to weaken the unions that represent first responders who are helping Houston residents get back on their feet after Hurricane Harvey:
One such group is the Koch-funded State Policy Network, which the Center for Media and Democracy describes as an “$83 million right-wing empire.” The State Policy Network has organizations in nearly every state that can react quickly — and with resources — to counter any policy they don’t like across the country. Other opponents, such as the American Medical Association, Third Way Democrats and right-wing think tanks and media, will also be militant in their opposition to the single-payer bill.
Farr also has fought vigorously against workers’ efforts to unionize. He was a staff attorney at the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, which has deep ties to the Koch brothers and was described by The Center for Media and Democracy as “a national leader in the effort to destroy public and private sector unions.”2 Later, in private practice, he filed an amicus brief supporting a lawsuit challenging California’s State Employer-Employee Relations Act, which provided for collective bargaining for state employees. He did this even though he was a North Carolina resident and was not representing any party to the litigation. He also defended companies trying to deny recognition of unions and committing unfair labor practices.