Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and companies in the important regions of education, healthcare, cash flow tax, workers’ compensation and the surroundings, paperwork obtained by the Guardian reveal.
The technique for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, consists of proposals from six distinct states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to minimize the wages of government workers and eliminate revenue taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign towards regional efforts to fight greenhouse gas emissions that result in climate alter.
The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals have been co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative approach at state level.
The paperwork have 40 funding proposals from 34 states, providing a blueprint for the conservative agenda in 2014. In partnership with the Texas Observer and the Portland Press Herald in Maine, the Guardian is publishing SPN’s summary of all the proposals to give readers and information retailers full and fair access to state-by-state conservative programs that could have important influence during the US, and to enable the public to attain its personal conclusions about whether or not these routines comply with the spirit of non-profit tax-exempt charities.
Information of the co-ordinated method come amid expanding federal scrutiny of the political activities of tax-exempt charities. Final week the Obama administration announced a new clampdown on people groups that violate tax rules by engaging in direct political campaigning.
Most of the “thinktanks” concerned in the proposals gathered by the State Policy Network are constituted as 501(c)(3) charities that are exempt from tax by the Internal Revenue Support. Although the groups are not concerned in election campaigns, they are subject to strict restrictions on the quantity of lobbying they are permitted to carry out. Several of the grant bids contained in the Guardian paperwork propose the launch of “media campaigns” aimed at modifying state laws and policies, or refer to “advancing model legislation” and “candidate briefings”, in techniques that arguably cross the line into lobbying.
The paperwork also cast light on the nexus of funding arrangements behind radical rightwing campaigns. The State Policy Network (SPN) has members in every of the 50 states and an yearly warchest of $ 83m drawn from main corporate donors that include the power tycoons the Koch brothers, the tobacco business Philip Morris, foods giant Kraft and the multinational drugs business GlaxoSmithKline.
SPN gathered the grant proposals from the 34 states on 29 July. Ranging in dimension from requests of $ 25,000 to $ 65,000, the ideas were submitted for funding to the Searle Freedom Believe in, a private basis that in 2011 donated almost $ 15m to largely rightwing causes.
The believe in, founded in 1998, draws on the family fortune of the late Dan Searle of the GD Searle & Organization empire – now part of Pfizer – which produced NutraSweet. The believe in is a significant donor to this kind of mainstays of the American proper and the Tea Parties as Americans for Prosperity, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), the Heartland Institute and the State Policy Network itself.
SPN’s link to Searle, the Guardian documents show, was Stephen Moore, an editorial writer with the Wall Street Journal. Moore, who advises Searle on its grant-offering pursuits, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a “leading twenty” and “bottom twenty”. It is not acknowledged how many of the 40 proposals have been accepted for funding, nor which may have been effective.
Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family members good friend to Dan Searle. He mentioned the grant choices were manufactured by Searle’s sons and grandsons primarily based on the late businessman’s “dedication to the advancement of free enterprise and person rights”.
The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian paperwork go beyond a commitment to free of charge enterprise, nonetheless. They contain:
• “reforms” to public employee pensions raised by SPN thinktanks in Arizona, Colorado, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey and Pennsylvania
• tax elimination or reduction schemes in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Maryland, Nebraska and New York
• an education voucher system to market private and house schooling in Florida
• campaigns towards worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada
• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.
SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, advised the Guardian that “as a professional-freedom network of thinktanks, we concentrate on concerns like workplace freedom, training reform, and person option in healthcare: backbone concerns of a cost-free men and women and a free of charge society.”
In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $ 35,000 to help a “investigation and demonstration undertaking” that would “release residents from extreme government dependency”. It would flip the state’s poorest location into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-totally free zone”.
Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state earnings tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until finally the economic situations in the county rise to the statewide regular. The hole in the county’s income from misplaced tax revenues – estimated at $ 35m a year by the consider tank – would be filled via price range cuts.
Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Basis (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations such as the vitality tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco business Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and factors out that in its request for $ 40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit score for blocking Medicaid growth in the state.
“[S]topping Medicaid growth is just the 1st phase,” the proposal says, adding that the “missing piece to total our message is an financial forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring significant financial savings” to the state. That data would then be utilised to garner interest from the media.
The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential state-degree thinktanks in the nation”. A single of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who these days is the keynote speaker at the nationwide conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).
A number of hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $ 38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a 5-yr effort by states in the area to lessen greenhouse gas emissions. The institute explained it would carry out analysis into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade program operating in nine states acknowledged as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
BHI appeared to have presently arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the investigation was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or ruin the initiative. “Good results will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative action that will pare back or repeal RGGI,” the funding proposal says.
The Beacon Hill Institute, technically an affiliate rather than a full member of the SPN, operates out of the economics division of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never ever any lobbying,” he advised the Guardian. “Possibly I need to have to look up the definition once again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a certain situation, and we by no means do that.”
But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a investigation arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the study proposal to the Searle Foundation. In a statement to the Guardian, the university said the grant bid had not been submitted to the university, as necessary, and that the university would in no way have authorized the proposal. “The stated analysis ambitions, as written, had been inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”
Watchdogs that check the work of SPN and other conservative networks in the US said that the centralised coordination of state-level campaigns showed a significant attempt to build regional activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a current report on SPN, stated that the local identity of the network’s members belied a greater purpose. “They seem to be advocating purely regional interests but what they are marketing is component of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of employees,” she said.
The SPN mentioned that its co-ordinating function was justified simply because neighborhood and state concerns had been more and more impinging on national politics. “There is no mystery here,” Sharp mentioned. “The whole notion of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and mix their efforts when they see a advantage from undertaking so.”
Some of the grant bids to Searle focus exclusively on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), an additional tax-exempt “analysis and education organization”, floats the idea of a campaign to assistance the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the capacity of public workers to declare untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.
“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to remove this practice and CSINJ would like to supply ammunition,” the proposal says. The thinktank ideas to make a “research review” which it would call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie utilizes to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to acquire on the back of sick and vacation depart payments.
The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim becoming the “full elimination of unused sick and holiday depart payouts”.
“We think our research can be employed to sway public sentiment additional and be utilised as a brandisher for reform in Trenton,” it says.
CSINJ’s president, Jerry Cantrell, denied that the grant bid involved any element of lobbying, insisting rather that his group was offering a service that in the past may well have been accomplished by the decimated local media.
“CSINJ is an education organization centered on offering the public with facts and the truth. We do not represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he mentioned.
He stated the proposal was centered on the “abusive practice of accumulating sick or holiday day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We’ve noticed too many cases of higher level individuals operating out the door with $ 500,000-$ 750,000 claiming to have in no way missed a day in thirty many years of employment.”
The proposal from the Illinois Policy Institute for a campaign to deal with Chicago’s government worker pensions crisis by switching to 401(k)-design retirement ideas similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need to have for 401(k)-type adjustments to really obtain reform.”
The institute programs to “leverage the leadership potential of Mayor Emanuel … as the spark for wider pension changes in Illinois.” It adds that “friendly legislators would be welcome to draft legislation modelled on our policy work and function in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative method.”
John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, advised the Guardian that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that consists of moving to a 401(k)-type, defined contribution system.” He noticed no difficulty with the lobbying that the believe tank undertakes.
“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we never. We are allowed to devote a substantial percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are really proactive in lobbying for liberty-based mostly policy, which includes the urgently required pension reform. We report our actions accordingly.”
State conservative groups plan US-wide assault on education, health and tax
