InfluenceWatch Friday

InfluenceWatch, a project of Capital Research Center, is a comprehensive and ever-evolving compilation of our research into the numerous advocacy groups, foundations, and donors working to influence the public policy process. The website offers transparency into these influencers’ funding, motives, and connections while providing insight often neglected by other watchdog groups.

The information compiled in InfluenceWatch gives news outlets and other interested parties research to use in reporting on significant topics that are often overlooked by the American public.

CRC is pleased to present some of the most significant additions to InfluenceWatch in the past week:

• AltaSea is an environmental activist group claiming that planet’s oceans can be used to develop a “Blue Economy” to help solve issues of food security, climate change, and energy production. It was reported that between 2015 to 2018, Sandra Whitehouse, the wife of Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), was one of the group’s highest paid contractors and had been paid $489,704 during that time.
• Business Coalition for a Global Plastics Treaty is a coalition of non-profit and for-profit organizations created to advocate environmentalist policies within the United Nations (UN). Consisting of roughly 130 organizations as of August 2023, the coalition calls for a legally binding treaty banning non-biodegradable plastics and calling for “near-zero” plastic pollution by the year 2060.
• The Guardian.org Foundation is the United States-based nonprofit fundraising arm of The Guardian Media Group, the publisher of the Guardian newspaper in the United Kingdom. Between 2020 and 2022 the Foundation received roughly $2.3 million in grants from the Open Society Foundation, the grantmaking organization founded by liberal philanthropist George Soros. The grants were intended to assist in reporting on topics including “environmental and climate justice,” “vaccine equity,” and “gender equality in the US.”
• Mercy Corps is an international aid organization which provides humanitarian assistance for communities affected by both natural and man-made disasters. The group’s co-founder Ellsworth Culver was accused of sexual assault by his daughter Tania Culver Humphrey. Humphrey filed a lawsuit against Mercy Corps claiming “intentional infliction of emotional distress” from the group which is ongoing as of 2023.
• Grassroots Power Project is a charitable organization that advocates for wealth redistribution, feminism, and increased government regulation through shifting, “away from short-term, incremental campaigns and towards building and wielding governing power.” The organization claims that the U.S economy was built by “racial capitalism” through exploiting labor from minority groups and people of color, and that this has produced a “popular base for white nationalism.”