It appears author Steven J. Milloy of JunkScience.com was right when he quipped that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “owns” the American Lung Association (ALA). Taxpayer money may be indirectly financing lobbying campaigns aimed at banning smoking in public places. Since 2001, the EPA has given the ALA more than $20 million in grants, and the ALA, in turn, has been passing on grant money to local governments to encourage such bans. For example, smoking is now banned on the beaches of Fenwick Island, Delaware, after its town council accepted a grant from the ALA. Officials in nearby Dewey Beach are planning to ban smoking on their beaches, too, and are seeking money from the ALA to promote the ban.

“A blockbuster congressional investigation of campaign finance activities by corporations, trade associations, and high net worth individuals may be coming,” warns Covington & Burling, a law firm that focuses on election law. According to its latest report, not only 501(c)(4) groups and trade associations may be congressional targets, but also 501(c)(3) nonprofits. The chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Carl Levin (D-Mich.), has announced he will “tackle … the use of secret money to fund political campaigns.” Levin is notoriously tough, and his new ranking member on the other side of the aisle is Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who is famous for his willingness to have Congress restrict political speech.

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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.”

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At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new post on a gun-control group’s complaint that the federal budget doesn’t have enough loose change in it to grease the “bribes” necessary to buy the votes of Members of Congress.

“Bribery isn’t what it once was,” said an official with one of the major gun-control groups. “The government has no money. Once upon a time you would throw somebody a post office or a research facility in times like this. Frankly, there’s not a lot of leverage.”

Mayor Bloomberg also comes in for criticism. Read the full post here.

(crossposted from PJ Tatler)

As I’ve written before, the anti-conservative propaganda website, Media Matters for America, lies, distorts, and makes up things in order to make good Americans look bad.

A case in point is Eric Boehlert, a senior slime-purveyor at the George Soros-funded character assassination factory.

Boehlert, known for his sloppy research and typographical errors, is now trying to justify the mainstream media’s virtual blackout of the trial of abortionist Kermit Gosnell by accusing conservative media outlets of ignoring the proceedings.

Specifically, Boehlert writes that the conservative Weekly Standard magazine only bothered covering the trial recently.

He notes that the April 22 print version contains an unsigned editorial on Gosnell titled “See No Evil,” and that the online version contains only two articles on Gosnell — “A House of Horrors,” by Gary Bauer (April 3) and “The Gosnell Scandal” by Jon A. Shields (April 10).

But in fact the Weekly Standard has published at least three other pieces on Gosnell dating back to 2011 and Gosnell has been mentioned in various items available in the online archive dozens of times.

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Organizing for Action just sent out a press release bragging that it raised almost $5 million in the first quarter of this year.

“In the first few months of this brand-new organization, 109,582 supporters stepped up and invested in what we’re building together — from the grassroots up.”

The average donation was $44. (If you multiply $44 by 109,582 you get $4,821,608.)

Organizing for Action will “play an active role” in “mobilizing around and speaking out in support of important legislation” during Obama’s second term, the president said in January.

The group, which sprang out of Obama’s reelection campaign, urges supporters to get in others’ faces. Its leader, Jon Carson, says OfA’s most important immediate priorities are “immigration reform, reducing gun violence, and tackling the budget in a balanced way.”

I have a news article at the Daily Caller today.

Contrary to the established mainstream media narrative, the left-wing organization reported to be behind the alleged illegal wiretapping of Sen. Mitch McConnell’s office is not an independent group but one with close ties to the Democratic Party.

Shawn Reilly, the executive director of Progress Kentucky, the controversial super PAC allegedly involved in the recording, is a notable Democratic Party activist and veteran community organizer.

Read the article here.

(originally posted at The Spectacle)

As the explosion of left-wing apoplexy unleashed by the passing of Margaret Thatcher intensifies, it appears the tilting-to-port Century Foundation didn’t get the memo from the activist left.

Harold Pollack of the New York-based Century Foundation is lauding the late British prime minister for her trailblazing response to the arrival of HIV/AIDS in the 1980s. He writes:

The Thatcher government responded rather effectively and humanely to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Embracing harm reduction measures such as syringe exchange and methadone maintenance, it saved thousands of lives. Indeed the words ‘harm reduction,’ anathema to American drug control policy until the Obama administration, were official watchwords of British drug policy.

Of course much of the rest of Pollack’s post is ahistorical drivel in which the writer regurgitates one of the Left’s most successful lies in recent decades, to wit, that the Reagan and Bush 41 administrations did nothing to combat HIV/AIDS.

Still, the left-wing attacks on the United Kingdom’s greatest leader since Winston Churchill seem misplaced. Thatcher was one of the few Members of the Westminster Parliament to vote to decriminalize homosexuality and to liberalize abortion.

The Century Foundation, by the way, was founded in 1919 by department store magnate Edward Filene. The nonprofit group describes itself as a “progressive non-partisan think tank.” It is funded by pillars of the left-wing philanthropic establishment, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, Carnegie Corp. of New York, Ford Foundation, William & Flora Hewlett Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund Inc.

The Century Foundation is so far left that its board of trustees includes Melissa Harris-Perry, the Marxist luminary who recently attacked the idea that parents should be the sole arbiters of how their children are raised.

At PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a piece on the disturbing fact that multi-billion-dollar foundations fund “population control” and “reproductive health services” but are silent about China’s war on women, even though that nation’s “One Child Policy causes more violence against women and girls than any other official policy on earth.”

The whole story is here.

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 »

Over at PhilanthropyDaily.com, I have a new piece on Sen. Carl Levin’s plan to open an investigation that will target giving to conservative political causes, especially by corporations.  Unions, the administration’s asleep-at-the-switch Department of Labor, and left-wing activists have little to fear.

Read the full story here.