Can we fight Koch-funded Astroturf by hitting their weakest link? Here's an idea on how we might be able to end the pollution of our national conversation by billionaires-- at the state level.
(based on a post at Mercury Rising at Mercury Rising)
A number of Kossacks (e.g., Fish out of water, Meteor Blades, and agnostic) have diaried how an organization called Donors Trust has funded state-level organizations to launder billionaire money into state-level propaganda arms. Today DemocracyNow carried a segment summarizing the work of some of the investigators who have been working on the story, including Suzanne Goldenberg of The Guardian, Andy Kroll of MoJo, and Paul Abowd of the Center for Public Integrity.
But this journalism, useful as it is, doesn't actually list the individual state organizations and their degree of dependence on Donors Trust and--this is important, because it gets lost in some of the journalism-- the sister organization Donors Capital Fund. I got interested in tracking this down and discovered that
John Mashey of DeSmog blog has done a database. You can look up the puppets in your state, and spread the word. Just scroll down to the bottom of the post and get the entire spreadsheet, updated as of October 2012. There was an update just a few days ago adding money from Big Tobacco. I was able to find out in a few minutes that the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota and the Minnesota Family Institute are the two big think tanks for that state.
The fact that this is a coordinated effort, with (at least in some cases) an overwhelming fraction of the money of these state organizations coming from a single entity, and that so much of it is political suggests to me that these may not qualify as charities under some state laws. Perhaps not even under federal law, since they appear to be lobbying for policies that benefit the donors--even if the money has been passed through a money laundry like Donors Trust. At the very least, the question of their independence ought to be asked. and the state-level organizations ought to be brought out into the light as the puppets that at least some of them are. If legislators know who these people are, their work will be discredited.
I have contacted politically-connected people in my state and sought their advice. I see four strategies:
- contact sympathetic state legislators
- ask the question of state attorneys general whether these entities are really non-profits.
- ask sympathetic congressmen to look into this issue as a tax law violation
- blog about it so that other progressives know that we are fighting people with faces
Again, I recommend John Mashey's database at DeSmog Blog as a terrific resource.
And thanks to all the Kossacks who have covered this issue who I didn't mention.
(based on a post at Mercury Rising )