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. We believe in telling the truth about the most powerful interests in society—not just relating their self-serving press releases or letting real facts be bleached away by spin. With the help of volunteer editors, SourceWatch focuses on the for-profit corporations, non-profit corporate front groups, PR teams, and so-called "experts" trying to influence public opinion on behalf of global corporations and the government agencies they have captured. We also profile some of the individuals and groups shining a light on these PR campaigns and also feature clearinghouses for information about select "hot topics" (to your left). Please check out our other sites: PRWatch, BanksterUSA, and ALECexposed. —Lisa Graves, Executive Director
On the campaign trail, Mitt Romney wants to have his cake and eat it too. “Governments do not create jobs,” a stern Romney told CNN’s Candy Crowley twice during the second debate. Here in Wisconsin, however, he is running ads promising to “crack down on China” and create 12 million new jobs.
When attempting to square the circle, a look at Bain Capital’s investment strategies might be helpful. In 1984, Romney co-founded Bain Capital, a spin-off from Bain & Company, a global management consulting firm. A new accounting details Bain Capital's history in shipping some 15,865 manufacturing jobs overseas. Using a conservative multiplier, which takes into account other jobs in the supply chain or community dependent on those manufacturing jobs, Bain is responsible for some 31,730 lost jobs.
The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) "I Built My Business" astroturf bus tour started rolling through Wisconsin recently in support of Republican candidates for office. NFIB advertises itself as the nonpartisan "Voice of Small Business," but CMD's new web resource NFIBexposed.org presents a wealth of facts that challenge that assertion.
Despite claiming to be non-partisan, NFIB's lawsuit against the 2010 federal health care reform bill was bankrolled by Karl Rove's Crossroads GPS. In the 2012 election cycle, 98 percent of NFIB's direct political contributions have been in favor of Republican candidates or against Democrats. According to the latest data available on OpenSecrets.org NFIB has spent $3,304,168 on independent expenditures in the 2011-2012 cycle: $1,113,791 against Democrats and $2,190,377 for Republicans. Read the rest of this item here.
Help CMD as we prepare for the National Conference for Media Reform (NCMR)! NCMR will be in Denver, CO on April 5-7, 2013. The conference is organized by the nonprofit media reform group Free Press, founded by John Nichols and Bob McChesney, and is dedicated to the fight for a more independent, robust and diverse media system in the United States, which is essential to our efforts to build a better democracy.
Help us get the word out about ALEC! at NCMR 2013. Vote for the panel on Exposing ALEC. It is titled "Exposing ALEC: Corporations, Media, and Democracy." Full details on the session are listed there. If the session on ALEC is chosen, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) will be organizing a fun, informative panel on the giant media firms using ALEC to advance their agenda state by state, and other ALEC issues. We hope to see you there!
The endgame is beginning in one of the most crucial Senate races in the nation, between former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and U.S. Representative Tammy Baldwin. With the race a virtual tie and Thompson trailing badly in fundraising ($5.7 million to Baldwin's $11 million), Karl Rove's dark money group Crossroads GPS has stepped in to massively subsidize Thompson's campaign, painting Baldwin as "too extreme" for Wisconsin in a pounding rotation of TV, radio, and direct mail. Read the rest of this item here.
In a new lawsuit against the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), big energy extractors are pushing for carte blanche in their interactions with foreign governments, making it harder to track whether their deals are padding the coffers of dictators, warlords, or crony capitalists. The United States Chamber of Commerce, American Petroleum Institute, the Independent Petroleum Association of America, and the National Foreign Trade Council filed a lawsuit on October 10, 2012 against a new SEC rule, which requires U.S. oil, mining and gas companies to formally disclose payments made to foreign governments as part of their annual SEC reporting.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, an alumnus of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) from his time as a state legislator, received an award named after one of ALEC's founders, Paul Weyrich, in February 2012. The award went unnoticed at the time as Walker battled a recall election, but was discovered by the "2old2care" blog.
Weyrich, a Racine native who died in 2008, didn't just found ALEC. The right-wing political apparatchik was the founding president of the Heritage Foundation, and led the Free Congress Foundation, a politically and socially conservative think tank striving, as its website used to say, to "return [America] to the culture that made it great, our traditional, Judeo-Christian, Western culture." He helped shape the right-wing agenda for more than thirty years. Read the rest of this item here.
The Koch Industries policy limiting employee speech on social media may be unlawful in light of recent decisions by the National Labor Relations Board, but employers still have broad leeway to impose their political views on workers and punish those who disagree.
On October 14, Mike Elk at In These Timesreported on how Koch Industries sent a mailer to 45,000 employees of its Georgia-Pacific subsidiary urging them to vote for Mitt Romney and other Republicans, warning that if they don't, they "may suffer the consequences." At the same time, the Kochs were limiting employees' speech through a social media policy that threatened Georgia Pacific workers with disciplinary action or termination if their Facebook posts or tweets "reflect negatively" on the company's reputation or are "disparaging." The policy applies even to social media usage outside of working hours, and Elk reports that the policy has deterred some employees from speaking freely in their online posts. Read the rest of this item here.
GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney suggested to business owners they tell their employees how to vote on a June conference call organized by the National Federation for Independent Business (NFIB), an organization the Center for Media and Democracy has recently exposed as a partisan lobbying group advancing big business interests.
The audio, obtained by Mike Elk at In These Times, shows Romney telling participants in the conference call to “pass… along to your employees” their opinions on the November presidential election:
"I hope you make it very clear to your employees what you believe is in the best interest of your enterprise and therefore their job and their future in the upcoming elections."
Progressive advocacy group One Wisconsin Now has filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission alleging U.S. Representative and Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan has improperly used his Congressional campaign funds to promote the GOP presidential ticket.
Rep. Ryan has purchased $2 million in ads from his Congressional campaign account, but none of the five ads specifically mention he is running for Congress. One Wisconsin Now alleges the ads promote Ryan's Vice-Presidential candidacy rather than his Congressional reelection.
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.
The Center for Media and Democracy invites you to join us for a terrific evening, Wednesday, October 24th, at Madison's Barrymore Theatre. We are screening two recently released documentaries that put the spotlight on Wisconsin: “United States of ALEC” - the extended version of the report which first aired on public broadcasting stations nationwide, and “As Goes Janesville” - a documentary that catapults viewers to the front lines of America’s debate over the future of our middle class.
The double feature supports the investigative work of the non-profit, Madison-based Center for Media and Democracy, and its award-winning “ALEC Exposed” project.
President Barack Obama rode into office in 2008 on a wave of small donations that some expected would change politics. The small-dollar strategy is still helping Obama fill his campaign accounts, but the electoral landscape has changed rapidly over the past four years and candidates' official campaigns are being overshadowed by unlimited spending from nominally "independent" groups funded by a handful of ultra-wealthy donors.
"People can invest what they want," billionaire industrialist David Koch recently told Politico.
Koch wasn't discussing the stock market or oil futures. He was talking money in politics: wealthy donors "investing" in elected officials, apparently with the expectation of getting a return. In total, donors like the Kochs, along with Sheldon Adelson, Harold Simmons, and "outside" groups have pledged to raise a total of $1 billion this election to elect Republicans, particularly President Barack Obama's opponent Mitt Romney. Read the rest of this item here.
For the past year, the Center for Media and Democracy has worked to unmask the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) through its award winning ALEC Exposed project. So far, 40 ALEC corporations, including Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Kraft, Amazon, Johnson & Johnson, General Motors, and more, have decided to listen to their customers and stop funding ALEC's extreme agenda.
Now, with one click, you can send a letter to the remaining ALEC corporate members or sponsors and tell them to do the same.
September 28, 2012: Moyers & Company presents "United States of ALEC," a report on the most influential corporate-funded political force most of America has never heard of -- ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council. A national consortium of state politicians and powerful corporations, ALEC presents itself as a "nonpartisan public-private partnership." But behind that mantra lies a vast network of corporate lobbying and political action aimed to increase corporate profits at public expense without public knowledge.
"United States of ALEC" is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs including the Center for Media and Democracy, whose investigators are featured in the report.
Using interviews, documents, and field reporting, the episode explores ALEC's self-serving machine at work, acting in a way one Wisconsin politician describes as "a corporate dating service for lonely legislators and corporate special interests."
In state houses around the country, hundreds of pieces of boilerplate ALEC legislation are proposed or enacted that would, among other things, dilute collective bargaining rights, make it harder for some Americans to vote, and limit corporate liability for harm caused to consumers -- each accomplished without the public ever knowing who's behind it.
"United States of ALEC" is a collaboration between Okapi Productions, LLC and the Schumann Media Center, headed by Bill Moyers, which supports independent journalism and public watchdogs including the Center for Media and Democracy, whose investigators are featured in the report.
CMD Receives 2012 Izzy Award
Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College: The fourth annual Izzy Award was presented April 10, 2012, to independent journalist Sharif Abdel Kouddous (Democracy Now correspondent, Nation Institute fellow) and to the Center for Media and Democracy, led by Lisa Graves. The award honored their work in 2011, during which Kouddous reported from Egypt on the Tahrir Square uprising and "unfinished revolution," and CMD exposed a secretive yet powerful corporate-front ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council.
Previous Izzy Winner Amy Goodman took part in the ceremony, presenting the award to Sharif -- who flew to the event, with his father, from his current home in Cairo. Lisa was able to announce that major corporations had withdrawn from ALEC in the previous days (largely as a result of the controversy generated by CMD's "ALEC Exposed"). The ceremony took place in Ithaca College's Emerson Suites.
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