Supposedly ‘Green’ Printing Company Sponsoring Oil Front Group Conference
Supposedly ‘Green’ Printing Company Sponsoring Oil Front Group Conference
In October, corporate front group Americans for Prosperity is hosting its annual “Defending the American Dream” conference. The get-together will feature right-wing notables such as Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). The keynote address will be given by Newt Gingrich, who was propelled back into the media spotlight last year with his “Drill Here, Drill Now” pro-oil campaign.
One of the “Gold Sponsors” of AFP’s global warming denying conference is the “green” print and paper company TrayPML. TrayPML markets itself as a company that makes “active strides to protect the planet.” On its website, TrayPML also boasts about its ability to help companies “go green.” The company touts its environmental credentials by publicizing the World Wildlife Fund as an esteemed client. AFP, of course, mocks the protection of endangered wildlife, and argues for increased drilling in Alaska’s preserved lands.
AFP is supported largely by money derived from the Koch Industries polluter empire. David Koch, the billionaire VP of Koch Industries, sits on the board of the AFP Foundation and helped found its predecessor, Citizens for a Sound Economy. Koch Industries has an abysmal environmental record that includes both major oil spills and several instances where Koch pipelines leaked millions of gallons of toxic crude into ponds, lakes and streams across the country. Supporting Koch’s polluter agenda, AFP runs various organizing efforts to discredit global warming science, and mobilizes opposition to clean energy legislation. Not only that, but AFP’s Phil Kerpen, as ThinkProgress has noted, is waging an all out war against the concept of green jobs.
By sponsoring AFP’s anti-environmental conference, TrayPML wipes out any possible credibility that the firm is a friend of the “green” movement.
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Koch Industries Not Only Fueling K St. Lobbying Boom And Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests, But Democrats Too
Koch Industries Not Only Fueling K St. Lobbying Boom And Anti-Obama Tea Party Protests, But Democrats Too
According to disclosures released earlier this month, oil and natural gas interests are pumping money into lobbying firms to influence climate change legislation at a furious pace. With $82.2 million spent in just the first half of 2009 — compared to $132.2 million in all of 2008 — the industry is on track to set new records.
Unfortunately, as large as this direct lobbying figure is, it represents probably a fraction of the total amount of money the oil and gas industry is pouring into the debate. Some of the money flows straight to candidates and to political action committees. Another huge, largely undisclosed portion goes to what is known as “outside lobbying” efforts — public relations and advertising firms which coordinate a pro-polluter propaganda campaign to influence public opinion. And finally much of the money goes to financing “think-tanks” to produce reports outside the realm of scientific consensus to legitimize skepticism of global warming.
The outside lobbying campaign the industry has embraced this year is the most corrosive because it is based upon deception — and increasingly, hate. Koch Industries, the oil and gas behemoth, bankrolls the astroturf groups Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. These groups were instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama tea party protests, where thousands gathered to display racist signs directed at the President, absurd calls for an impeachment, and more recently, protesters hanging Democratic leaders in effigy. In addition to the anti-Obama protests, these groups provide a useful front for industries as they hire dozens of field staff to spread misinformation about clean energy and bus people around the country to create the guise of public distrust of global warming. Koch has funneled its money not only to these astroturf efforts, but has been a prolific leader in all the aforementioned strategies that industries pursue (Charles Koch even founded the Cato Institute, a leader of global warming skepticism and has spent nearly $4 million in lobbying this year alone).
Although Koch has traditionally given mostly to Republicans, E&E notes that it is giving increasingly to Democrats. In 2009, Koch gave about 28 percent of its contributions to Democrats, compared to about 15 percent last year:
Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT): $5,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR): $10,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Sen. Mark Pryor (D-AR): $2,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]Rep. Marion Berry (D-AR): $2,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Dan Boren (D-OK): $3,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Allen Boyd (D-FL): $6,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX): $3,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D-TX): $4,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Gene Green (D-TX): $3,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Charlie Melancon (D-LA): $2,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-TX): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN): $6,500 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Mike Ross (D-AR): $2,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. David Scott (D-GA): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
Rep. Henry Teague (D-NM): $1,000 [FEC, accessed 7/29/09]
In accepting dirty energy Koch money, these lawmakers are legitimizing the financiers of the anti-Obama tea party effort.
Swimming Upstream Against Public Opinion, NRCC Running Anti-Clean Energy Ads Laced With Misinformation
Swimming Upstream Against Public Opinion, NRCC Running Anti-Clean Energy Ads Laced With Misinformation
The NRCC, the Republican Party campaign committee tasked with electing more House Republicans, announced today that it will be running television and radio ads against Democratic members of Congress who voted for the Waxman-Markey clean energy economy legislation passed last week. The ads erroneously state that the bill will “destroy jobs” and “cost middle-class families $1,800 a year.”
Media Matters Action has noted that both of these claims are patently false. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, clean energy economy legislation will create 1.7 million American jobs while simultaneously addressing climate change by capping carbon dioxide emissions. The $1,800 figure used by NRCC is also made of whole cloth. The Congressional Budget Office has scored the bill and found that by 2020, the annual cost would be about $175 per household — about a postage stamp a day.
Not only does the NRCC stand in defiance of reality, it is going against the tide of public opinion. A new Pew poll found that a super majority of 78% of Americans want the U.S. to reduce its emissions of carbon dioxide that cause global warming and 72% of Americans support the core principles underlying clean energy legislation. The same poll found that even 66% of Republicans want the U.S. to curb carbon emissions.
One of the targets of the NRCC ad campaign is freshman Rep. Tom Perriello (D-VA). Perriello’s district already contains at least ten businesses in either the clean energy or energy efficiency industry. Not only would clean energy economy legislation realign market incentives to help these businesses expand, it will new spur investments and bring more jobs to the area. Virginia is projected to gain at least 45,000 jobs and a net increase of $3.9 billion in clean energy investments.
While NRCC strategists assume they can dupe Perriello’s constituents with fear mongering ads laced with lies, the right-wing base is harnessing the same NRCC misinformation to demonize Republicans who also voted for the bill. A recent post on the popular right-wing blog Red State calls upon readers to burn Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), one of the 8 House Republicans to support clean energy legislation, in effigy. Organizers of the anti-Obama tea party protests are also coordinating a harassment strategy — in similar fashion to their treatment of Sen. Arlen Specter (D-PA) — against the 8 House Republicans.
As the NRCC suppresses the truth in a vain attempt to elect more Republicans, they could be fueling more defections from the party.
CD-ROM Converter Service Center HSI Doubles As The GOP’s Favorite ‘Academic Think Tank’
CD-ROM Converter Service Center HSI Doubles As The GOP’s Favorite ‘Academic Think Tank’
This morning on MSNBC, Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA) ripped into health reform, calling legislation to introduce the a public option “crazy talk.” “You’ve seen the cost,” Cantor said, “the latest estimate being discussed here on the House plan is three trillion dollars.”
Republicans are seizing upon a study produced by HSI Network LLC to claim reform will cost $3-3.5 trillion over the next ten years. They are taking to the floor, firing off press releases, and making nonstop television appearances, using the HSI figure to demonize health reform. But we’ve seen this dog-and-pony show before, when HSI played exactly the same role in 2008. They armed John McCain with friendly numbers for his health plan, while tearing into Barack Obama’s plan.
This is how it worked: Stephen Parente, one of the owners of HSI, was tapped by McCain policy adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin to formulate the McCain health plan. Then over the course of the summer, Parente and his colleague at HSI Roger Feldman, who is a former Bush economist, were quoted in various friendly media outlets praising the McCain plan without noting that they had authored the plan they were analyzing:
– “Roger Feldman, a professor at the University of Minnesota who focuses on health insurance, said the Minnesota program shows that high-risk pools can work. He added that Sen. McCain ‘will have the same question — how much does he want to subsidize these plans?’” [WSJ, 6/2/08]
– “Steve Parente, a professor of finance at the University of Minnesota, estimated the effects of an earlier version of McCain’s plan, with a $4,000 tax credit. He found that even that less generous plan would increase the number of people with insurance by 23 to 27 million.” [National Review, 3/3/08]
Indeed, the McCain campaign paid $50,000 to HSI, the same firm that wrote their health plan, to produce “independent” comparisons between the McCain health plan versus Obama’s. Trying to conceal the payment, the McCain campaign reported the $50,000 as “legal consulting.” Strangely enough, the McCain campaign also paid HSI $10,000 in the final weeks of the campaign for “get out the vote consulting.”
Unsurprisingly, the HSI study found that McCain’s plan would cover “more than half of the nation’s 47 million uninsured — and two million more than the plan put forward by Senator Obama.” But as NPR has noted, the HSI study of the McCain and Obama plans was an extreme “outlier” compared to almost every major academic think tank that had surveyed the two candidates’ health plans. HSI’s model of the Obama campaign plan predicted a Federal cost more than 4 times than that predicted by the independent Tax Policy Center.
Reprising their role during the Presidential campaign, HSI is now spreading misinformation about the House health bill. The Ways and Means Committee has noted:
– The HSI analysis assumes substantial erosion of private coverage that rests on two likely false assumptions: (1) that private plans sit idly by and fail to offer products at lower prices to compete with the public option for business; and (2) that an employer shared responsibility requirement is ineffective and leads to massive dropping of ESI, despite contrary experience in Massachusetts and in today’s market where the majority of employers already offer coverage on a voluntary basis.
– The analysis says there are no offsets in the discussion draft, yet the bulk of the text consists of payment and delivery system reforms in Medicare and Medicaid that will yield hundreds of billions of dollars in savings.
In addition to serving as the GOP’s favorite health care think tank, HSI doubles as a data service conversion center. The latest “Data Conversion Special!” advertises that for $100, HSI will convert mainframe cartridges into CDs or DVDs.
Though HSI has yet to produce their actual methodology for analyzing the the House health reform bill, they certainly have a unique revenue model.
A Symbiotic Relationship – The AMA And The For-Profit Health Lobby
A Symbiotic Relationship – The AMA And The For-Profit Health Lobby
The New York Times is reporting that the American Medical Association will be lobbying Congress to oppose a public health insurance program, an integral part of health reform. In an attempt at damage control, the AMA has responded with a statement declaring it would support a public option if it operates like a for-profit insurance agency. In effect, the AMA still opposes reform. While Igor Volsky details the various reasons why the member physicians of the AMA should support a public health insurance program, it is important to consider that the AMA as an institution is not a neutral player simply representing doctors. Started in the mid 19th century as an accrediting organization, the AMA has morphed into a behemoth lobbying and member services entity that is deeply entwined with the for-profit health industry.
In the past century, the growth of AMA has been not only funded by health industry lobbies such as drug makers, but this relationship has tailored AMA’s anti-reform policy agenda. In reading the Huffington Post and the New America Foundation articles revealing AMA’s opposition to health reform during the New Deal, its efforts to block the passage of Medicare, and the AMA’s critical role in defeating health reform in 1993, questions arise over why the AMA has historically opposed any initiative to take health care out of the hands of the for-profit health industry.
In the first 50 years after its inception, the AMA struggled to fill its coffers. Because member dues were deemed insufficient to fund its various activities, the AMA eventually decided to sell advertising space for its medical journal JAMA to drug companies. Expanding on this business model, AMA President George Simmons decided to create the “AMA seal-of-approval” for favored drugs in 1899, resulting in a five-fold increase in advertising revenue by 1909. Simmons, it turned out, had no credible medical credentials and the AMA did no drug testing for the products given the seal-of-approval.
Simmons was later driven out of the AMA, but his model for extracting fees for branding medical practices and products persisted. Simmons’ focus on molding public opinion also became one of the greatest weapons of the AMA – his “Propaganda Department” would soon expand to communicate the AMA’s views through a column syndicated published in over 200 newspapers, a weekly radio program, and various books about how homeopathic practices and non-AMA approved drugs were “quackery.”
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Tim Phillips, The Man Behind The ‘Americans For Prosperity’ Corporate Front Group Factory
Tim Phillips, The Man Behind The ‘Americans For Prosperity’ Corporate Front Group Factory
The rate at which the Koch Industries funded Americans for Prosperity (AFP) churns out front groups to promote its right-wing corporate agenda sets the organization out among similar conservative “think tanks.” This week, AFP created their latest front group called “Patients United Now,” an entity set up to defeat health care reform. Patients United follows a familiar pattern AFP has used for their other front groups: create a new stand alone website, fill it with lines like “We are people just like you” to give the site a grassroots feel, and then use the new group to recruit supporters and run deceptive advertisements attacking reform. This “astroturfing” model has been used by AFP to launch groups pushing distortions against other progressive priorities:
– The “Hot Air Tour” promoting global warming skepticism and attacking environmental regulations.
– “Free Our Energy,” a group promoting increased domestic drilling.
– The “Save My Ballot Tour,” a group that pays Joe the Plumber to travel around the country smearing the Employee Free Choice Act.
– “No Climate Tax,” a group dedicated to the defeat of Clean Energy Economy legislation.
– “No Stimulus,” a group launched to try to stop the passage of the Recovery Act.
Notably, AFP was also instrumental in orchestrating the anti-Obama, anti-tax tea party protests in April.
With nearly 70 Republican operatives and former oil industry spokesmen working behind the scenes of AFP’s various fronts and disclosures that point to ever increasing oil and corporate donations to the group, one must wonder, who is guiding this massive front group factory? The answer is Tim Phillips, the President of AFP who has built a long career of inventing fake grassroots causes. In Phillips’ official biography, there appears to be over a 10 year gap — but that period was when Phillips developed his very first astroturf groups to do everything from smearing his opponents with anti-Semitic attacks to laundering money for criminal lobbyists.
Click More To Read The WonkRoom’s Investigation Of AFP’s Tim Phillips
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NAM Tries To Hide Its Opposition To Clean Energy Legislation After Utility Company Departs
NAM Tries To Hide Its Opposition To Clean Energy Legislation After Utility Company Departs
Last Friday, Duke Energy announced it would not renew its membership with the right-wing trade group the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) because of NAM’s efforts to kill legislation to cap carbon emissions and invest in clean energy. NAM is one of the most aggressive business coalitions opposing legislation to address global warming. NAM has funded groups to deny the science underpinning climate change and has spent millions to derail any move to curb emissions.
Today, NAM hosted an event on Capitol Hill to update staffers on clean energy legislation Waxman-Markey. Asked if they will “modify their approach” on climate change given Duke Energy’s recent departure and the fact that other NAM coalition members are demanding climate change legislation, Keith McCoy, NAM’s Vice President of Energy and Resources Policy, apprehensively denied that NAM has staked out any position:
MCCOY: In terms of Waxman-Markey, I think its clear in anything you’ve read that the NAM hasn’t taken a position whether for or against it … As the legislation evolves, we’ll see. But right now, I don’t think there’s a position that the NAM has taken on the Waxman-Markey bill.
Listen here:
Despite McCoy’s claims of neutrality, the NAM has taken a very public position on Waxman-Markey. The NAM, in a partnership with the major oil industry trade group API, launched an advertising campaign last month using the name “American Energy Alliance.” The ads explicitly tell viewers to call their member of Congress and “Tell him that we can’t afford the Waxman-Markey Energy Tax.” Last week, NAM President John Engler appeared as a witness at the GOP mock energy hearing to denounce Waxman-Markey.
Of course, Duke Energy would not split from NAM if the trade group hadn’t “taken a position whether for or against” climate change legislation. Rather, it appears the NAM is attempting to conceal their true position on climate change legislation to deter further defections from its coalition.
NAM is instead working with the National Federation of Independent Businesses on a separate anti-climate campaign, claiming that Waxman-Markey is "anti-jobs, anti-energy."
CPR’s Rick Scott Holds Himself Up As A Model For Health Reform
CPR’s Rick Scott Holds Himself Up As A Model For Health Reform
Today, Rick Scott, the front man and funder of Conservatives for Patients’ Rights (CPR), talked up his agenda with Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review. After being asked about his view of health care reform, Scott touted his experience as a hospital executive as a model:
Kathryn Jean Lopez: Why are you stepping up to the health-care plate now?
Richard L. Scott: America is ready to improve health care. I believe there needs to be a strong advocate for patients’ rights, someone who has worked in the health-care industry. I hope my experiences focusing on reducing costs and improving outcomes can help ensure that any health-care proposals that are implemented focus on choice, competition, accountability, and personal responsibility.
In 1987, Scott didn’t start his hospital business for the sake of improving the quality of care, but rather wanted to “do for hospitals … what McDonald’s has done in the food business.” Indeed, through an aggressive strategy of rapid acquisitions and consolidation, Scott made his Hospital Corporation of America/Columbia Hospital Corporation into one of the largest health care companies in the world. Forbes magazine noted Scott ruthlessly bought “hospitals by the bucketful and promised to squeeze blood from each one.”
Carefully omitted from his official profile is the fact that under Scott’s leadership, Columbia/HCA plead guilty to a massive array of fraud charges – which resulted in a fraud settlement of $1.7 billion dollars, the largest in U.S history. Columbia/HCA systematically defrauded taxpayers, charging Medicare $15,000 for Tiffany pitchers and other luxury goods, “exaggerating the seriousness of the illnesses they were treating,” and engineering a program where doctors were granted partnerships in hospitals as a kickback for referring patients. In 1997, Scott resigned in disgrace.
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