Revealed: Conservative think tank SPN coordinating right-wing assault on education, healthcare and the environment in 34 states

By Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian

Conservative groups across the US are planning a co-ordinated assault against public sector rights and services in the key areas of education, healthcare, income tax, workers’ compensation and the environment, documents obtained by the Guardian reveal.

The strategy for the state-level organisations, which describe themselves as “free-market thinktanks”, includes proposals from six different states for cuts in public sector pensions, campaigns to reduce the wages of government workers and eliminate income taxes, school voucher schemes to counter public education, opposition to Medicaid, and a campaign against regional efforts to combat greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change.

The policy goals are contained in a set of funding proposals obtained by the Guardian. The proposals were co-ordinated by the State Policy Network, an alliance of groups that act as incubators of conservative strategy at state level.

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-giving activities, was asked by SPN to rank the proposals in two halves – a “top 20″ and “bottom 20″. It is not known how many of the 40 proposals were approved for funding, nor which may have been successful.

Moore told the Guardian that he is an unpaid adviser to the Searle Foundation, having been a lifetime family friend to Dan Searle. He said the grant decisions were made by Searle’s sons and grandsons based upon the late businessman’s “commitment to the advancement of free enterprise and individual rights”.

The proposals in the grant bids contained in the Guardian documents go beyond a commitment to free enterprise, however. They include:

• “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 promote private and home schooling in Florida;

• campaigns against worker and union rights in Delaware and Nevada;

• opposition to Medicaid in Georgia, North Carolina and Utah.

SPN’s president, Tracie Sharp, told the Guardian that “as a pro-freedom network of thinktanks, we focus on issues like workplace freedom, education reform, and individual choice in healthcare: backbone issues of a free people and a free society.”

In its grant bid, the Maine Heritage Policy Center asked for $35,000 to support a “research and demonstration project” that would “release residents from extreme government dependency”. It would turn the state’s poorest area into what the Portland Press Herald describes in its report from Washington County as “a gigantic tax-free zone”.

Dubbed “FreeME”, the initiative would eliminate state income tax and sale taxes from residents and businesses until the economic conditions in the county rise to the statewide average. The hole in the county’s income from lost tax revenues – estimated at $35m a year by the think tank – would be filled through budget cuts.

Medicaid is the target of a grant proposal coming from the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an influential thinktank funded largely by rightwing foundations and corporations including the energy tycoons the Koch brothers, tobacco company Altria and the telecoms giant Verizon. The Texas Observer has investigated the contents of the document and points out that in its request for $40,000 from Searle, TPPF claims credit for blocking Medicaid expansion in the state.

“[S]topping Medicaid expansion is just the first step,” the proposal says, adding that the “missing piece to complete our message is an economic forecast” showing how block-granting Medicaid would “bring significant savings” to the state. That information would then be used to garner attention from the media.

The Observer describes TPPF as “one of the most influential state-level thinktanks in the nation”. One of its former executives was Ted Cruz, now US senator for Texas, who today is the keynote speaker at the national conference in Washington of SPN’s sister organisation, the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec).

Several hundred miles to the north east in Massachusetts, the Beacon Hill Institute requested $38,825 from Searle to weaken or roll back a five-year effort by states in the region to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The institute said it would carry out research into the economic impact of the cap-and-trade system operating in nine states known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative.

BHI appeared to have already arrived at its conclusions in advance, admitting from the outset that the aim of the research was to arm opponents of cap-and-trade with data for their arguments, and to weaken or destroy the initiative. “Success will take the form of media recognition, dissemination to stakeholders, and legislative activity 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 department of Suffolk University in Boston. David Tuerck, its executive director, denied the group had engaged in lobbying. “There is never any lobbying,” he told the Guardian. “Maybe I need to look up the definition again, but lobbying consists of buttonholing legislators and other policymakers to get a particular result on a particular issue, and we never do that.”

But Suffolk University, which hosts the Beacon Hill Institute as a research arm of its economics department, sharply criticised the research 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 required, and that the university would never have approved the proposal. “The stated research goals, as written, were inconsistent with Suffolk University’s mission.”

Watchdogs that monitor 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 local activism into a nationwide movement. Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, which issued a recent report on SPN, said that the local identity of the network’s members belied a larger purpose. “They appear to be advocating purely local interests but what they are promoting is part of a larger national template to radically remake our government in a way that undermines public institutions and the rights of workers,” she said.

The SPN said that its co-ordinating role was justified because local and state issues were increasingly impinging on national politics. “There’s no mystery here,” Sharp said. “The whole idea of a state policy network is that individual thinktanks can be in communication, share best practices and analysis, and combine their efforts when they see a benefit from doing so.”

Some of the grant bids to Searle focus specifically on prominent local politicians the thinktanks hope to influence. The grant bid that emanated from New Jersey, from the Common Sense Institute (CISNJ), another tax-exempt “research and education organization”, floats the idea of a campaign to support the efforts of the Republican governor Chris Christie in ending the ability of public employees to claim untaken sick days and vacation leave in their retirement packages.

“Governor Chris Christie has been waging a war to eliminate this practice; and CSINJ would like to provide ammunition,” the proposal says. The thinktank plans to produce a “research study” which it would call “Busting the Boat Checks” – an allusion to the phrase Christie uses to denote the watercraft retirees are claimed to buy on the back of sick and holiday leave payments.

The institute conceives a “media campaign” with its aim being the “full elimination of unused sick and vacation leave payouts”.

“We believe our study can be used to sway public sentiment further and be used 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 instead that his group was providing a service that in the past might have been done by the decimated local media.

“CSINJ is an education organization focused on providing the public with facts and the truth. We don’t represent any interest besides the folks who are burdened by this practice – the taxpayers,” he said.

He said the proposal was focused on the “abusive practice of accumulating sick or vacation day payments over an entire career and using them as retirement bonus. We’ve seen too many instances of high level individuals working out the door with $500,000-$750,000 claiming to have never missed a day in 30 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)-style retirement plans similarly focuses on a politician – in this case Mayor Rahm Emanuel. The proposal says that “Mayor Emanuel has privately expressed the need for 401(k)-style changes to truly achieve reform.”

The institute plans 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 work in tandem with Mayor Emanuel to move it forward in the legislative process.”

John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute, told the Guardian that Emanuel had been “an outspoken proponent of pension reform that includes moving to a 401(k)-style, defined contribution system.” He saw no problem with the lobbying that the think tank undertakes.

“We are not allowed to do any campaigning or electioneering, and we don’t. We are allowed to spend a significant percentage of our expenditures on lobbying and we are very proactive in lobbying for liberty-based policy, including the urgently needed pension reform. We report our activities accordingly.”

GOP Senate Candidate Linked To Controversial ‘Christian Supremacist’ Group

By Zack Beauchamp/Think Progress

GOP Representative and Missouri Senate Candidate Todd Akin has a long history of extremism, particularly with respect to the role of religion in public life. As it turns out, that shouldn’t be much of a suprise: one of Akin’s principal political influences appears to be Reverend D. James Kennedy, a minister who spent his life organizing a movement dedicated to reorganizing the American government along radically conservative evangelical lines.

Kennedy is widely believed to be a leading advocate for a variant of dominionism, (roughly) the idea that the American government should be run according to Christian, biblical lines. “It must be remembered that D. James Kennedy is a leader among the distinct group of ‘Christian Supremacists’ who seek to ‘reclaim America for Christ’ and turn the U.S. into a Christian nation guided by their strange notions of biblical law,” Abraham Foxman, the President of the Anti-Defamation League, explains.

Indeed, the Reverend has called the US a Christian nation that should be governed by Christians, sought to “rebuild America based on the Bible,” and suggested that Darwinism was responsible for the Holocaust.

Though he died in 2007, Kennedy is respected throughout the GOP, and was particularly influential on Akin’s worldview. According to a Politico profile of Akin, “[t]wo sermons by Dr. D. James Kennedy have been very influential for Todd and he references them frequently in discussions of government.” Akin told Kennedy’s Truth in Action (formerly Coral Gables Ministries) organization that “Dr. Kennedy understood how to connect the principles of Scripture with the practical applications of what keeps a nation free, the principles that America was founded on.” Akin also co-sponsored a resolution last year that “honors Dr. Kennedy’s lifetime of service and sacrifice to his God, his country, [and] the ideals of the Christian faith.”

Kennedy, for his part, recognized Akin’s commitment to his mission. In his book How Would Jesus Vote?, he praised Akin as “one of my favorite statesman,” suggesting Akin’s tenure in the House reflected that “he is a seminary graduate and has chosen politics as his ministry.” In 2007, Kennedy’s Center for Christian Statesmanship gave Akin their “Christian Statesman Award,”awarded to “a person recognizes that individuals (as well as nations) must ultimately give account to God and are dependent on Him for prosperity and success.”

Akin’s rhetoric and policy views bear clear marks of Kennedy’s influence. In “The Bible and Economics, one of the two Kennedy tracts that Politico reported were favorites of Akin’s, Kennedy writes that “the Bible has a great deal to say” about politics, economics, and science, and that we can use it to “erect certain systems and derive an understanding about those subjects.” Akin actually goes further, calling the Bible “an entire blueprint for the way civilization can be structured” in an apocalyptic anti-Obamacare video from 2009. Watch it:

Indeed, Akin consitently amplifies and intensifies Kennedy’s hateful rhetoric:

1. Marriage equality destroys civilization: Akin justified his legislative crusadeagainst LGBT rights by saying “anybody who knows something about the history of the human race knows that there is no civilization which has condoned homosexual marriage widely and openly that has long survived.” Kennedy, in his book What’s Wrong with Same-Sex Marriage, wrote that marriage equality would “sink the culture from civilization to barbarism” because “there’s never been a society — ever in the history of the world — that has survived this kind of perversion.”

2. Liberals hate God. Akin said that “the heart of liberalism really is a hatred for God.” In The Gates of Hell Shall Not Prevail, Kennedy argues that even liberal seminary members “don’t believe in the Bible [or] the Deity of Christ.”

3. Liberals are Soviet-style socialists. A common touchstone of Akin’s rhetoric is that liberals are pushing America towards a Soviet Union-style society. This theme also pervades Kennedy’s work. In one sermon on socialism (for example), he said that a liberal is a “secular humanist socialist…it’s the same mindset that destroyed the Communist world that is at work in America.” One of Akin’s two favorite Kennedy lectures is called “The Bible and Socialism.”

This link to Kennedy should prepare us for Akin’s radicalism to become increasingly more obvious: just this Thursday, Akin claimed that he wanted to outlaw the morning-after pill.

Fox analyst uses quote from alleged hate site to deny right-wing racism

By David Edwards and Muriel Kane

In the wake of an NAACP resolution calling on Tea Party leaders to condemn racist elements among their ranks, some conservatives have responded by claiming that any allegations of right-wing racism are an unfounded smear.

Fox News political analyst Dick Morris attempted to make this point on Wednesday during an appearance on Fox & Friends by quoting the line, "A racist is somebody who is winning an argument with a liberal."

The odd thing about Morris's use of this quote to deny the reality of racism, however, is that it comes from Peter Brimelow, founder of the anti-immigration website VDARE, which has been accused of being a white nationalist hate site.

After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, for example, VDARE columnist Steve Sailer was widely condemned for his statement that African-Americans "tend to possess poorer native judgment than members of better-educated groups." Even John Podhoretz at the conservative National Review called this "the most disgusting sentence yet written about Katrina."

"VDARE.com is an anti-immigration hate website 'dedicated to preserving our historical unity as Americans into the 21st Century,'" the Southern Poverty Law Center asserts. "Now run by the VDARE Foundation, the site is a place where relatively intellectually inclined leaders of the anti-immigrant movement share their opinions. VDARE.com also regularly publishes articles by prominent white nationalists, race scientists and anti-Semites."

Brimelow strongly rejects these and similar charges, referring to them as "guilt-by-association conspiracy theories spun by the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center, which, despite that noble-sounding name, has been pretty thoroughly discredited as a left-wing shakedown scam preying on the elderly, Holocaust-haunted rich."

Brimelow does acknowledge, however, that his site has provided a platform for well-known white nationalist writers.

Now I will boldly go etc. We also publish on VDARE.COM a few writers, for example Jared Taylor, whom I would regard as “white nationalist,” in the sense that they aim to defend the interests of American whites. They are not white supremacists. They do not advocate violence. They are rational and civil. They brush their teeth. But they unashamedly work for their people—exactly as La Raza works for Latinos and the Anti-Defamation League works for Jews.

Get used to it. As immigration policy drives whites into a minority, this type of interest-group "white nationalism" will inexorably increase.

The Brimelow quote has been widely cited online since the NAACP resolution was passed ten days ago. Morris's use of it occurred as he and Fox's Brian Kilmeade were discussing a recently leaked email from journalist Spencer Ackerman, the contents of which were featured Tuesday at conservative website The Daily Caller.

During the 2008 presidential campaign, a number of liberal reporters held a private discussion of ways they might defuse the Jeremiah Wright controversy. Ackerman wrote to the group, "If the right forces us all to either defend Wright or tear him down, no matter what we choose, we lose the game they've put upon us. Instead, take one of them -- Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares -- and call them racists."

After Kilmeade cited Ackerman's comment, Morris responded by saying with a chuckle, "I read a quote somewhere that a racist is somebody who's winning an argument with a liberal."

Morris is a longtime Republican strategist who briefly became an adviser to President Bill Clinton between 1994 and 1996 before being brought down by a prostitution scandal. He has repeatedly come under fire for using his appearances on Fox News to appeal for donations to Republican candidates and groups, to some of which he has financial ties.

During the 2008 election, for example, Morris was accused of having a conflict of interest with regard to the National Republican Trust PAC, which according to Politico "spent $7.5 million in 2008 - most of it running ads featuring Jeremiah Wright in the closing days of the presidential campaign."

More recently, Morris has been arguing that President Obama "is letting his supporters strip away his image of a post-racial president by their increasingly racial rhetoric and his support for radical black activists."

"Attorney General Eric Holder’s refusal to prosecute the Black Panthers so obviously guilty of racial intimidation at the Philadelphia polling places in 2008 is of a piece with the NAACP’s loud denunciation of the Tea Party movement as racists," Morris writes, presenting what has been described elsewhere as a highly distorted version of both situations.

"In a bid to increase enthusiasm and, therefore, turnout among minority voters, Barack Obama is sacrificing his white support and his non-racial image," Morris continues. "Obama, as president of the United States, is increasingly taking sides in the old racial debates, reigniting them and lending new fuel to their flames. He is no more the president of all the people, but is retreating into the racial cocoon of a supportive minority vote."

This video is from Fox News' Fox & Friends, broadcast July 21, 2010.