CRC Staff
Scanlon Washington Times op-ed: Bubbles out of the bottle
Today’s Washington Times carries an op-ed by Capital Research Center president Terrence Scanlon:
SCANLON: Bubbles out of the bottle
The nannies aim the hopeless soda-pop war at food stamps
By Terrence Scanlon
The history of welfare programs in the United States is chock full of restrictions on how recipients go about their daily lives. Some are reasonable and in the public interest, but others are heavy-handed and unduly intrusive.
For example, the recent push to block food-stamp recipients from using their benefits to purchase carbonated soft drinks reeks of overreach.
Hopping on New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s anti-obesity bandwagon, South Carolina Republican Gov. Nikki Haley has gone too far, proposing to curtail what food-stamp recipients may purchase in her state.
“You are looking at $1 billion that will no longer be put toward candy and chocolate and sodas and chips, but may be put into apples and oranges and things that are healthy.”
It is wishful thinking to expect that forbidding food-stamp users to buy soft drinks with their benefits will stop them from buying soft drinks altogether.
Food-stamp benefits may currently be used to buy “any prepackaged edible foods, regardless of nutritional value (e.g. soft drinks and confections),” according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), which administers SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), the formal name of the food-stamp program, whose benefits are distributed by individual U.S. states. Items available in “fast-food restaurants and similar retail settings” cannot be purchased with food stamps.
A 2007 USDA report concluded that prohibiting the use of food stamps to purchase specific items would probably be pointless.
Unfriendly Persuasion: Will the Labor Department disarm employers in their struggle with the unions?
Unfriendly Persuasion
Will the Labor Department disarm employers in their struggle with the unions? (Labor Watch, May 2013 – PDF here )
By Diana Furtchgott-Roth
Summary: At the behest of unions desperate for new members, the U.S. Labor Department plans to make a major regulatory shift. The change has no basis in existing law or precedent, and it will harm labor-management relations while costing billions of dollars.
A shocking change in American labor relations is brewing at the U.S. Department of Labor, which is expected sometime soon to alter a major regulation. The change involves a new interpretation of the “advice exemption” of the Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act. Specifically, businesses would have to disclose the names of, and fees paid to, attorneys and consultants who advise them on union-organizing activities. In turn, attorneys and consultants providing such advice would be required to disclose their client lists and the fees they receive.
In making this change, the administration would sweep away over a half-century of precedent and contravene both the clear intent of Congress and the law’s express language. This new regulation would violate Read all »
Richard Windsor, aka Lisa Jackson: What’s in the secret e-mails of the head of the EPA?
Richard Windsor, aka Lisa Jackson
What’s in the secret e-mails of the head of the EPA? (Green Watch, May 2013 – PDF here)
By Christopher C. Horner
Summary: Transparency used to be a treasured goal of the Left. But the current administration, especially where environmental issues are concerned, has worked hard to prevent sunlight from disinfecting its machinations. Recently, the discovery of secret e-mails may have prompted the resignation of EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
People on the Left say they love transparency—which they do, except when it inconveniences them, as it does increasingly today.
For a long time, the Left trumpeted transparency as a core value of liberalism. By the early years of the twentieth century, “open government” was a policy demanded by those who called themselves Progressives. Before Woodrow Wilson nominated him to the U.S. Supreme Court, Louis Brandeis coined a famous metaphor for transparency: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
Similarly, Justice William O. Douglas once quoted from a New York Review of Books article by historian Henry Steele Commager: “The generation that made the nation thought secrecy in government one of the instruments of Old World tyranny, and committed itself to the principle that a democracy cannot function unless the people are permitted to know what their government is up to.” That quotation has a near-perfect liberal pedigree: an iconic liberal jurist quoting an iconic liberal historian writing in an iconic liberal publication. Yet as with so many progressive agenda items, “transparency” proved to be about other people. Read all »
Going Soft on Juvenile Crime: How the MacArthur and Casey foundations distort youth offender policies
Going Soft on Juvenile Crime: How the MacArthur and Casey foundations distort youth offender policies
By Fred Lucas (Organization Trends, May 2013) (PDF here)
Summary: Although the young still commit outrageous crimes, two multi-billion-dollar foundations have spent years working to make the juvenile justice system more lenient. Now the Obama Justice Department has also joined in the effort.
The family of Antonio Torres didn’t feel better after the January 24 sentencing of James Lee Allen, now 18. In 2011 Torres was murdered at the age of 42 by a group of four teenagers in Oakland, California. Prosecutors said the armed teens were “hunting” for someone to rob. They stole a gold chain and an iPod from Torres before fatally shooting him in the back as he tried to run away. Allen didn’t shoot the gun that killed Torres, but he was charged as an adult with murder and robbery for participating in the crime, the Oakland Tribune reported.
Allen ultimately pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to 12 years, too short for the Torres family. “My concern is that he is going to come out [of prison] and hurt another family,” said Maria Torres. “They not only took my brother’s life away, they took a part of each of us.”
Some advocates would oppose ever trying these four offenders as adults, despite their horrific crime. Forget the question of whether 12 years is too light a sentence. These advocates do not want any incarceration for crimes committed by offenders under the age of 18, and their thinking has begun to influence our legal system.
Over the last eight years, the courts have made juvenile justice, even for the worst offenders, more and more lenient. This gradual evolution follows what Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy has called, “the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.”
Those evolving standards have largely been driven by two left-wing philanthropies, the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. These two funders have battled the get-tough-on-crime approach of the 1990s and pushed for alternatives to incarceration for youth offenders. They have also opposed trying minors as adults. These organizations and their allies have had their way in abolishing the death penalty for juveniles (thanks to Justice Kennedy), and eliminating—in most cases—life sentences for youth murderers. They have also forged a tight-knit relationship with the Obama Justice Department and swayed the thinking of a majority of states across the country (red and blue) on the issue of crime and punishment for minors.
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation: Subverting democracy and balkanizing America
The W.K. Kellogg Foundation: Subverting democracy and balkanizing America
By Kirk MacDonald (Foundation Watch, May 2013) (PDF here)
Summary: Founded in 1930 by breakfast cereal tycoon W.K. Kellogg with the goal of improving the lives of impoverished children, the W.K. Kellogg Foundation today funds a great deal of left-wing activism, especially attacks on so-called “white privilege” and “structural racism.”
Americans who insist that elections should be honest, fair, and free from undemocratic vote-rigging, and who believe it’s not unreasonable to require voters to provide valid photo ID before they mark a ballot, received a rude awakening last year. Advocates of honest voting were smeared as Jim Crow-era racists, and worse, by the Applied Research Center (ARC), a New York-based “racial justice think tank that uses media, research and activism to promote solutions.”
ARC produced a steady stream of vicious propaganda aimed at conservative and Tea Party groups like True the Vote through its www.ColorLines.com website. The site currently includes a collection of left-wing articles that promote organic food and vegetarianism, and blast proposed budget cuts, guns, anti-illegal immigration groups, and even singer Justin Timberlake, who is supposedly “appropriating black music.” ARC executive director Rinku Sen claimed that efforts such as implementing state level ID laws, and monitoring polling stations amounted to “attempts to deny the vote to communities of color.” (ARC was profiled in the March 2013 Foundation Watch.)
The think tank worked closely with the far-left Nation magazine in its campaign against so-called “voter suppression” and “voter intimidation,” and it has accepted grants from the Service Employees International Union for “consulting” ($200,000 in 2011), as well as the Tides Foundation ($1.1 million), and George Soros’s Open Society Institute ($715,000).
These donations were certainly generous, but they pale in comparison to the incredible $5.2 million in grants that were provided by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan, between 2010 and September 2012.
Writing in these pages six years ago, Capital Research Center senior fellow Martin Morse Wooster noted that the Kellogg Foundation “does not take the lead role in any of the areas it funds” and is “the most obscure—and least significant—of the big foundations,” and yet its funding represents a “reflexive, deeply entrenched liberalism.” Since that time, Kellogg launched an Orwellian-sounding, 5-year, $75 million “American Healing” initiative in 2010 that amounts to throwing money at radical activists and academics to combat so-called “structural racism” and “white privilege.”
The Sinking Ship of Cabotage: How the Jones Act lets unions and a few companies hold the economy hostage
The Sinking Ship of Cabotage
How the Jones Act lets unions and a few companies hold the economy hostage (Labor Watch, April 2013 – PDF here)
By Malia Blom Hill
Summary: The Jones Act is a 1920 law that protects the U.S. maritime industry from competition. It also raises costs for many other industries, keeps foreign ships from helping when disasters like the BP oil spill strike, and seems to be slowly killing the very industry it’s supposed to protect.
It’s just a few lines of legislation, but it makes it necessary for Jacksonville, Florida, to bring in coal from Colombia rather than from American mines; it requires Maryland and Virginia to bring in road salt from Chile rather than Ohio; and it makes it cheaper for livestock farmers to buy feed from grain farmers in Argentina and Canada than from Americans. It has helped put many new ventures out of business, from an artisan pastry manufacturer Read all »
30 Years of Junk Science, from SDI to Fracking: How politics and ideology combat scientific innovations and economic development
30 Years of Junk Science, from SDI to Fracking
How politics and ideology combat scientific innovations and economic development (Green Watch, April 2013 – PDF here)
By Kevin Mooney
Summary: The politicization of science, and leftists’ use of pseudoscience, can be traced back many decades, notably to the Left’s false attacks 30 years ago on President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative. Today, politicized science and anti-American ideology combine to frustrate natural gas development and other innovations that could help the nation be stronger and more secure. The biggest losers include average Americans who would benefit directly from fracking.
Would you like to build a pipeline that would extend from a safe, friendly region of world to parts of rural America in need of jobs? Or use innovative drilling techniques to free natural gas that was previously inaccessible? Or apply high-tech agriculture to arid, semi-desert regions in order to boost living standards?
Try advancing any of these policy aims and you can expect to run into “green” roadblocks. Almost any policy that advances America’s geopolitical interests and economic well-being is now attacked as Read all »
The Carnegie Corporation of New York: From building libraries to undermining American society
The Carnegie Corporation of New York: From building libraries to undermining American society
By Kirk MacDonald, Foundation Watch, April 2013 (PDF here)
Summary: The Carnegie Corporation is the largest single philanthropy created by Andrew Carnegie, whose own life is a tribute to the possibilities of the American dream. Yet thanks to the lack of guidance Carnegie gave the Corporation, it soon betrayed his own views and began eroding the very system that made his success possible.
Famed steel entrepreneur Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Corporation of New York in 1911. The enterprise was such a labor of love for the self-made man that one of his trustees, Henry S. Pritchett, later joked that Carnegie had “simply incorporated himself.” Though called a corporation, it was a grant-making institution that today would be called a foundation.
Its total assets as of Sept. 30, 2011, were $2.5 billion, and that fiscal year it made a total of 258 grants worth $93.2 million, according to the latest financial information available at www.carnegie.org. From its original endowment of $135 million (roughly $2 billion in current U.S. dollars), the Corporation has provided grants totaling over $1.4 billion.
The Carnegie Corporation’s current president is Vartan Gregorian, who previously served as president of the New York Public Library and of Brown University. In 2010, WND.com reported that while at Brown, Gregorian served on the selection committee of the Annenberg Foundation, which funded activist Bill Ayers’s Chicago Annenberg Challenge with a $49.2 million, two-to-one matching challenge grant over five years. WND also reported Gregorian was “central” in Ayers’s recruitment of Barack Obama to serve as the project’s first chairman. In 2009, President Obama named Gregorian to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. Gregorian has received honors and awards from Obama’s predecessors, too, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush.
Shadow Network: A leaked strategy memo reveals a powerful, and partisan, network of left-wing nonprofits
Shadow Network: A leaked strategy memo reveals a powerful, and partisan, network of left-wing nonprofits
By Susan Myrick, Organization Trends, April 2013 (PDF here)
Summary: Thanks to a leaked strategy memo, the inner workings of the Left have been revealed in North Carolina. Dozens of nonprofits have colluded to make personal assaults on their political foes and to subvert state voting laws.
The veil of secrecy that shrouds left-wing nonprofits in North Carolina was recently shredded with the public exposure of a shocking memo. Thanks to this leak, the public can see how these organizations collaborate and employ highly coordinated hardball tactics to achieve their goals, hoping to undermine elected officials and apparently defying the law. For once, we have proof of something long suspected: left-wing nonprofits wield an alarming amount of power in the media, state politics, and government.
Just a few weeks ago the Charlotte Observer broke the story of the leaked strategy memo that described the game plan that “progressive” groups should use to attack the Republican Governor and leaders in the Republican-majority House and Senate. The memo would not be so unusual, if it had been written by and for a political party.
But a political party didn’t write it. Instead, it was circulated by a nonprofit organization, Blueprint North Carolina, that acts as a coordinating group for the state’s Left. The strategy memo was presented to a group of left-wing nonprofits at a Blueprint North Carolina meeting, and to the best of our knowledge was developed and written by at least one of those nonprofits.
IHS summer seminars deadline fast approaching
A message from the fine folks at the Institute for Humane Studies:
Get more liberty in your life! This summer, the Institute for Humane Studies will offer nine week long seminars on the foundations and applications of liberty. Learn about principles that transcend politics, discuss world-changing ideas with participants from around the globe, and hear about careers that make a difference. Students and recent graduates are eligible. Deadline is March 31st! Find out more by clicking here.