Google, the tech giant supposedly guided by its “don’t be evil” motto, has been funding a growing list of groups advancing the agenda of the Koch brothers.
Meet one of "America’s Highest Paid Government Workers" - George Zoley, Chief Executive Officer of GEO Group, one of America's largest for-profit prison firms providing services to states and the federal government.
The Center for Media and Democracy is re-releasing this reporters' guide, originally published in April 2013, in conjunction with our new report, "EXPOSED: The State Policy Network: The Powerful Right-Wing Network Helping to Hijack State Politics and Government," and with the launch of the website StinkTanks.org.
New Resource Details "Think Tanks" Tanking Americans' Rights
ALEC is pushing a new "Obamacare kill bill" based on a thin legal argument, and even some ALEC legislators are calling it "the nuclear option."
This week, Arizona Corporate Commission (ACC), the state entity responsible for regulating utilities, voted to charge ratepayers a monthly fee of 70 cents per kilowatt of solar energy installed on their roof.
Governor Scott Walker's campaign and dozens of Republican-aligned political groups have been subpoenaed in a wide-ranging probe into potential campaign finance violations during Wisconsin's contentious 2011 and 2012 recall elections, and a group at the center of the storm appears to be Wisconsin Club for Growth, one of the top spenders during the recalls and whose leaders have close ties to Governor Walker and national donors, including the Koch brothers.
Twelve new reports released today expose the State Policy Network (SPN), an $83 million web of right-wing "think tanks" in every state across the country. Although SPN's member organizations claim to be nonpartisan and independent, an in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its state affiliates are major drivers of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)-backed corporate agenda in state houses nationwide, with deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders. The reports show how these groups masquerade as "think tanks," and describe how some of them may be skirting tax laws while really orchestrating extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, all while reporting little or no lobbying activities.
The road to corporate control is paved with high tolls and non-compete clauses.
As freshly reported by the Huffington Post, ALEC is winding down a year of mostly failed attacks on clean energy laws, concluding with the ongoing final battle to weaken Ohio's renewable portfolio standard and energy efficiency incentives.
ALEC has quietly published some agenda details of its corporate-legislator task forces for its upcoming meeting, while keeping the identities of the corporate lobbyists or special interest groups that drafted any of the bills secret.
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