A new piece of reporting is up at
Raw Story detailing how the Heritage foundation, in the early 80s, came up with, then implemented, a plan to starve the left of any sort funds, both public and private, in an effort to control the direction of the American government.
When Crazy Eyes Bachmann said, recently, "Defunding the left is going to be so easy,and it’s going to solve so many of our problems.", she was preaching to the converted - and in many cases, the very same people who came up with the plan to starve progressives of funds and limit their ability to lobby Congress.
From SourceWatch:
The rise of public interest groups campaigning on a broad range of issues in the 1960's antagonized conservative groups. While little could be done to restrict informal action groups, the larger non-profit groups relied on the benefits of their tax-exempt status to attract tax-deductible donations from individuals and foundations. In some cases, they also gained grants directly from government.
The funding of voter registration drives as part of the civil rights movement by some foundations in the 1960's so enraged conservatives that in 1969 they convened congressional hearings in an attempt to regulate the activities of non-profit groups and foundations. These hearings resulted in the 1969 Tax Reform Act, which created the architecture of the current regulatory framework. In 1976 the legislation was further refined to allow non-profit groups with 501 c 3 tax-deductible status to engage in some lobbying as long as it didn't exceed 20 percent of an organization's budget.
But, as is so often the case, this didn't go far enough for the anti-progressives. They didn't want the left to just go hungry, they wanted to starve them to death.
From Raw Story:
The Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded in 1984 by a former Heritage Foundation vice president to implement this agenda by uncovering the presumably questionable funding sources of progressive groups. CRC's central assumption has always been that "a unified, sophisticated and well-funded philanthropic elite is dedicated to imposing on us the doctrine of 'progressive' philanthropy, doctrines that would reorder our political, economic and cultural priorities."
The CRC selected ACORN as a favored targed long before almost anybody else had heard of the group.
Heritage was rewarded with Presidential Executive Order A-122 - Cost Principles for Non-Profit Organizations,. After a three-year battle, this was rescinded, but the fight had just begun.
SourceWatch:
In 1984, the Capital Research Center (CRC) was founded by former Heritage Foundation senior Vice-President and Reagan administration staffer Willa Johnson. CRC was established with seed funding from Richard Mellon Scaife, Adolph Coors and John Olin foundations. The role of CRC was to erode the standing of those it viewed as 'liberal' non-profit advocacy groups and foundations.
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The rise of the anti-environmental Wise Use Movement also adopted the calls to 'defund the left'. 'Wise Use' leaders such as Ron Arnold - who more recently has been a regular contributor to CRC publications - routinely made eliminating financial support for environmental groups one of his key messages. "We want to destroy the environmentalists by taking away their money and their members" Arnold told the New York Times.
The tobacco industry too spotted the attraction in constraining the advocacy of public interest health groups. An internal Philip Morris strategy document prepared in late 1993 proposed to run a campaign in California to "regulate" charitable health organisations by capping advocacy spending and diverting funding into research activities. "Reporting requirements for percent of funds used for research vs salaries: cap administrative costs, salaries, lobbying expenditures; establish minimum percentage of funds for research," the strategy stated.[2]
With the success of the Republicans winning control of the House of Representatives in 1994, the targeting of non-profit groups was once more elevated on the political agenda. The Republicans success was captured in Newt Gingrich's Contract with America which aimed to slash federal funding on a range of 'liberal' programs.
Conservative activists though needed to tread carefully because what they wanted was to strip federal funding from 'liberal' organisations without affecting corporate lobbying or funding for conservative groups. By targeting only federal grants but excluding contracts, corporate contractors - such as the defense industry - would remain free to lobby and most conservative groups would be unaffected.
In 1995, the environmental watchdog CLEAR "obtained documentation that details evidence of a right-wing legislative effort to 'defund the left' being coordinated by an alliance of conservative advocacy groups and Members of Congress. Their target: federal funding of non-profit advocacy organizations."[3]
Amongst those supporting the campaign were the Christian Coalition, Grover Norquist's Americans For Tax Reform, the Competitive Enterprise Institute the Institute for Justice, the Eagle Forum and the American Conservative Union.
The documents revealed that a bill - Stop Taxpayer Funded Political Advocacy - would be introduced by Oklahoma Republican Representative, Ernest Istook, that would have prohibited any 501 (c) 4 and 501 (c) 5 organizations from receiving any federal funds.
In American Prospect, Karen Paget reported that it would have given private citizens legal standing to challenge the activity of any non-profit in court, with the burden of proof falling on the NGO to clear its name and would have prohibited any organisation that received federal funds from engaging in any "advocacy" activity. [6]
CLEAR described the strategy as being aimed as being for a quick, clean hit. "The strategists behind this bill hope it will be dropped in about two weeks and go straight to the floor with no committee hearings. They are also very concerned that they 'spin' this campaign to make it look like a 'good government' campaign rather than a 'defund our enemies list' effort."
In early 1995, Jeff Shear wrote in the National Journal and subsequently the Baltimore Sun of a Republican project - later to be dubbed the K Street project - being co-ordinated out of the office of House Majority Leader Dick Armey. Heading the project was Virginia Thomas (wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas), which also involved Scott Hodges the Heritage Foundation's budget director. One of those involved in the project, conservative activists Grover Norquist, told Shear "we will hunt [these liberal groups] down one by one and extinguish their funding sources".
"With control over Congress and the White House, it's all over. We will go back and sue people who broke the law, who were ripping off taxpayers to do political work. If Planned Parenthood is lobbying, taxpayers need to be reimbursed," he said.
Of course, once again, even that wasn't enough for the anti-progressives, who then resorted to illegally spying on the "DFH", but I digress.
Raw Story:
For an organization whose mission is to expose the funding sources and organizational ties of the left, the Capital Research Center is ironically protective of its own connections. As a non-profit organization, for example, it is not obliged to report the names of its donors, only its total revenue -- which amounted in 2007 to about $2.5 million.
The CRC's tax filings similarly include the name of its officers, its directors -- who include former Reagan administration Attorney General Edwin Meese III -- and its two highest-paid employees,
but the membership of its National Advisory Board has not been revealed since 2001. At that time, however, the board was heavily loaded with individuals tied to both the Reagan administration and the Heritage Foundation, as well as to various other right-wing publications, think-tanks, and legal foundations.
Although the evidence is skimpy, it suggests that many of the same people who were involved with CRC when it was founded in 1984 may have continued to be connected with the group and its ongoing agenda.
One of the more interesting names on the 2001 list is that of T. Kenneth Cribb, Jr., a former Reagan adviser and president of the Intercollegiant Studies Institute (ISI). Although it is not well known, ISI is one of the largest recipients of grants from conservative foundations, having been listed a few years ago as second only to the Heritage Foundation.
Much of ISI's activity is carried on through its Collegiate Network, which creates and subsidizes conservative student publications on college campuses. James O'Keefe -- the young filmmaker whose sting operation allegedly caught ACORN employees endorsing illegal activities -- was the founder of one such publication when he was a student at Rutgers University.
O'Keefe had also received advice and a start-up grant to help launch the Rutgers Centurion from Morton Blackwell's Leadership Institute -- which has been training young Republican dirty tricksters since the 1970's, ranging from Karl Rove to Jeff Gannon. Blackwell himself appeared on a "Defunding the Left" panel at the 2001 Conservative Political Action Conference, along with CRC president Terrence Scanlon.
<snip>
These multiple cross-connections again suggest that the goal of defunding the left has been carried along by a small, tightly-knit group of conservatives for over 25 years, and that James O'Keefe's sting operation against ACORN is merely the latest step towards that goal.
Around and around and around we go - and always end up back at the same place. The anti-progressives at Heritage and their spawn.
Raw Story
Dick Armey, FreedomWorks, and the Tea Baggers
The crusade to defund the left has not been limited to attempts to discredit progressive organizations. The so-called K Street Project of the 1990's, which was intended to steer lobbyist contributions more towards Republicans and to shut out Democrats, had the same objective. So did Jack Abramoff's courting of Indian tribes in order to cut off payments that had previously gone largely to Democrats.
Even calls for "tort reform" -- which are now being raised again in connection with health care -- are intended to prevent trial lawyers, who are often generous Democratic donors, from receiving a share of large settlements in personal injury cases.
Attacks on federal funding of liberal non-profits, however, are particularly attractive as a strategy because most conservative non-profits receive the bulk of their funding from corporations and right-wing foundations and not from the federal government.
In 1995, the new Republican majority in Congress took part in a particularly ambitious -- though ultimately unsuccessful -- attempt to defund the left. According to a May 30, 1995 story in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (which does not appear to be available online except through subscription-only sources):
"Congressional Republicans -- with the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas playing a key role -- are preparing a new budget-cutting assault on scores of government-funded nonprofit groups whose liberal views are considered a threat to the conservative agenda. ... The effort, referred to by conservatives as 'defunding the left,' is intended to take aim at what they consider advocacy groups that lobby for liberal social programs from which they receive grants and contracts."
The story went on to say, "Led by Virginia Lamp Thomas, the wife of the Supreme Court justice, a special group of senior House Republican experts and staff members has been quietly working under the auspices of House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas. Their aim is to identify nonprofit organizations whose funding should be cut and to plan a strategy to end their grants or contracts with the government or the programs for which they provide services."
Both the Raw Story and SourceWatch articles are definitely worth a read if you have a chance.
I don't know what the answer is, and I don't suggest dirty tricks on our side as a remedy to their dirty tricks, but it is at least time to demand parity on the reporting of and on the attempts of the anti-progressives to disenfranchise the left.
It has become "conventional wisdom" that what business wants for America is "good", while what labor wants for America is "bad". It is time to expose this as the self-serving lie that it is and remind everyone that "labor" means "Americans" - the people! What is good for labor is good for people. What is bad for labor is bad for people, Americans, and therefore - AMERICA! We have had two decades of social experimentation by the anti-progressives to prove this. It is time for us to have OUR TURN. We won the election, we have the majority, and for the first time in my lifetime, a PROGRESSIVE MANDATE!
It is time for REAL CHANGE!!