Welcome to SourceWatch, part of the Center for Media and Democracy!
The Center for Media and Democracy publishes SourceWatch, this collaborative resource for citizens and journalists looking for documented information about the corporations, industries, and people trying to influence public policy and public opinion. Please check out our sister sites, PRWatch and ALECexposed, to find more of our award-winning investigative reporting.
As concerned workers come together across Michigan in protest, partisan politicians are poised to make one of the strongholds for America's blue-collar worker rights into a so-called "Right to Work" (RTW) state -- in accordance with the ALEC blueprint to change to state laws at the behest of some of the biggest corporations in the world. Yet, 42 corporations, including General Motors, have distanced themselves from ALEC this year after ALEC's role in controversial and divisive legislation was exposed.
At issue is a bill spearheaded by ALEC legislators so beholden to their corporate benefactors that they think it's legitimate to vote in secret as equals with corporate lobbyists on model bills like RTW through ALEC "task forces," as the Center for Media and Democracy's PRWatch/ALECexposed has previously reported. Key provisions of the Michigan RTW bills (for instance, HB 4054) are taken almost verbatim from the ALEC template. Read the rest of this item here.
With final receipts tallied, spending on the 2012 federal elections has topped $6 billion, making it the most expensive election in the history of the world -- and absent reform, election spending is certain to escalate in coming cycles, despite much of the money spent in 2012 failing to sway election outcomes.
The U.S. Supreme Court in Citizens United v. FEC opened the door to much of the unlimited fundraising and spending that marked the 2012 elections. That decision directly led to the rise of Super PACs, which are responsible for around half of all reported spending, and are largely funded by just a handful of donors -- 59 percent of the reported $834 million raised by Super PACs in 2011 came from just 156 people and organizations giving more than $1 million each.
The Washington Post's Bob Woodward obtained an audio recording of a conversation between David Petraeus, the general turned CIA Director who recently resigned in the midst of a sex scandal, and Fox News contributor Kathleen T. McFarland. The conversation took place in spring 2011 in Kabul, during the time that Petraeus was the commander of U.S. and coalition forces there. McFarland is a national security analyst for Fox News and has a long resume working for GOP administrations going back to Reagan.
Despite two separate Wisconsin courts striking down the state's voter ID law as an unconstitutional burden on the right to vote, the state legislature's incoming Assembly Leader, Rep. Robin Vos, has pledged support for amending the state constitution to require ID at the polls -- despite hundreds of thousands of Wisconsin residents not having ID and no significant evidence of voter fraud in the state. Vos is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) State Chair for Wisconsin; Wisconsin's voter ID law, like many of those introduced in recent years, echoes the ALEC "model" voter ID Act.
Amidst massive pro-labor protests, Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder has signed sweeping legislation attacking private and public sector unions, just hours after passing the lame-duck legislature. The operative language in the bills is nearly identical to the American Legislative Exchange Council's "model" Right to Work Act.
On December 6 in Michigan, Governor Rick Snyder and his GOP controlled lame-duck legislature pulled a fast one, introducing and then ramming through the House and the Senate so-called "right to work" legislation. The bill was introduced at 11 a.m., passed the House at 5 p.m. by a narrow margin and the Senate at around 6:00 p.m. When the process is complete and the bill is signed, Michigan will become the 24th right to work state.
In October, the inevitable was announced: Struggling Newsweek magazine would be finished as a print publication as of the end of the year. But the last mass newsweekly left, Time, also made an announcement of sorts: It was out of the factchecking business.
"Who Is Telling the Truth? The Fact Wars," read Time's October 15 cover. With a setup like that, one might have hoped for a bold break from the campaign pack, an acknowledgment that facts matter, and that politicians who run on a record of resisting reality should be exposed.
A new report by the International Forum on Globalization details the role of David and Charles Koch in undermining international talks to address the rapidly escalating problem of climate change. As the United Nations meets in Doha, Qatar, the goal is to create a framework in which the governments of the world make internationally binding commitments to cut carbon emissions fast enough to keep climate change within the agreed threshold of 2C.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) is a lobbying group that calls itself "the voice of small business." However, the group has been shown to lobby on issues that favor large corporate interests and run counter to the interests of small businesses. NFIB is best known for its legal attack on the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") and for spearheading the opposition to President Clinton's health care reform package in 1993.
NFIB has a legal arm called the NFIB Small Business Legal Center (SBLC). The SBLC spearheads the NFIB's legal assault on the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare"). It is one of its three 501(c)(3) foundation arms. Formed in January 1994 as the NFIB Legal Foundation, the litigation arm took years to get off the ground, possibly because of funding and turf issues.
"We've endured too many of these tragedies in the past few years," President Obama said in response to horrifying shooting massacre of 20 little children and six of their educators in Connecticut. "And we're going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics," he noted.
"Meaningful action" has been thwarted, largely because of the power and wealth of the National Rifle Association (NRA). One of the key avenues it has used to exert its influence is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For decades, the NRA has helped bankroll ALEC operations. Read the rest of this item here.
Don't fancy the thought of your spinach and carrots being grown in sewage sludge?
Neither does Mario Ciasulli, a semi-retired electrical engineer living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Mario likes to cook, and enjoys good food. When he found out last year about the practice of spreading dried and heated human and industrial waste as "fertilizer" on food crops, he was upset. Read more here.
With most voter ID laws blocked before the 2012 elections and local election officials and civic groups prepared for True the Vote's intimidation tactics, some of the worst fears about voter disenfranchisement were averted in Tuesday's vote. But partisan voting laws and continued confusion over election administration led to long lines -- prompting President Obama to note "by the way, we have to fix that," in his acceptance speech.
Messy, protracted recounts in Florida and Ohio were also averted by President Obama's decisive win.
After Republican victories in the 2010 midterm elections, a majority of states introduced new voting restrictions that would disproportionately make it harder for people of color and students to vote -- the same populations that turned out in record numbers to elect President Obama in 2008.
As NRA Hides from Public After Newtown, ALEC Ties Reveal Extensive Lobbying Behind U.S. Gun Laws
Democracy Now! - December 18, 2012: Since Friday's mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, that left 27 dead -- 20 children and seven adults -- the National Rifle Association has been silent. The powerful lobbying organization has long pressured lawmakers to maintain easy access to firearms in the United States, prompting many to say the NRA is standing in the way of reform. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, the NRA has spent more than $2.2 million lobbying Congress this year alone. By comparison, the gun control lobby spent just $180,000. We're joined by Lisa Graves, who has extensively tracked how the NRA's power and wealth has long thwarted gun control proposals. Graves documents how one of the key avenues used to exert its influence is the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), the secretive group helps corporate America propose and draft legislation for states across the country. Graves formerly served as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Clinton administration's Justice Department, where she handled national gun policy.
Getting Started on SourceWatch
Looking for somewhere to start?
You can read any SourceWatch article without registering, but if you would like to improve our articles or add new ones, you need to register here. You will be asked to provide an email address to verify that you are a real person and not a computer spamming links to other sites, but your email address will not be shown publicly on your user page. You will also be asked to create a user name, which can be your own name or a pen name. And, if you'd like, you can edit your user page to let readers know more about yourself, your work on SourceWatch, and your research interests -- but that is not required. Once you are registered, you will also be able to contact other editors through their user pages. If you do not wish to register but do want to contact us, you can use the addresses at the bottom of this page.
You can search for existing articles to improve using the search box, but please note that the search feature differentiates words and phrases with capital letters from those that are lower case. Please also visit the pages on our purpose, our tips on editing and citing authoritative sources, and our FAQs for help.
Thank you, in advance, for helping to make SourceWatch even stronger!
Praise for SourceWatch!
Here's what they're saying about SourceWatch:
"The folks at the Center for Media and Democracy have done incredible work documenting fake grassroots ("astroturf") groups. Here, they're helping protect the rights of all Americans to exercise their right to vote. They are completely non-partisan. These guys are the real deal."
—Craig Newmark, Craig's List
"A truly impressive project based on cutting edge web technology."
—David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community.
"The troublemakers at the Center for Media and Democracy, for example, point to dozens of examples of "greenwashing," which they defined as the "unjustified appropriation of environmental virtue by a company, an industry, a government or even a non-government organization to sell a product, a policy" or rehabilitate an image. In the center's view, many enterprises labeled green don't deserve the name.
—Jack Shafer, "Green Is the New Yellow: On the excesses of 'green' journalism," Slate.
"As a journalist frequently on the receiving end of various PR campaigns, some of them based on disinformation, others front groups for undisclosed interests, [CMD's SourceWatch] is an invaluable resource."
—Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire
"Thanks for all your help. There's no way I could have done my piece on big PR and global warming without CMD [the Center for Media and Democracy] and your fabulous websites."
—Zoe Cormier, journalist, Canada
"The dearth of information on the [U.S.] government [lobbying] disclosure forms about the other business-backed coalitions comes in stark contrast to the data about them culled from media reports, websites, press releases and Internal Revenue Service documents and posted by SourceWatch, a website that tracks advocacy groups."
Disclaimer: SourceWatch is part of the Center for Media and Democracy—email the publisher of SourceWatch, CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves, via lisa AT prwatch.org. You can also contact our Editor, Friday Thorn, via friday_thorn AT prwatch.org.
Antispam note: To avoid attracting spam email robots, email addresses on SourceWatch are written with AT in place of the usual symbol, and we have removed "mail to" links. Replace AT with the correct symbol to get a valid address. Read the full disclaimer.
