By Ken Silverstein, The Nation
The
Center for American Progress, Washington’s leading liberal think tank,
has been a big backer of the Energy Department’s $25 billion loan
guarantee program for renewable energy projects. CAP has specifically
praised First Solar, a firm that received $3.73 billion under the
program, and its Antelope Valley project in California.
Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional
Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political
cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his
testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it
headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees.
Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner—
a top Obama fundraiser who left his
job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees
and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on
CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley
represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”
Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to
CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according
to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José
Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin
Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy
issues” for
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012
while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member,
according to the group’s latest tax filing.
CAP is a strong proponent of alternative energy, so there’s no reason
to doubt the sincerity of its advocacy. But the fact that CAP has
received financial support from First Solar while touting its virtues to
Washington policy-makers points to a conflict of interest that, critics
argue, ought to be disclosed to the public. CAP’s promotion of the
company’s interests has supplemented First Solar’s aggressive Washington
lobbying efforts, on which it spent more than $800,000 during 2011 and
2012.
“The only thing more damaging than disclosing your donors and having questions raised about the independence of your work is not
disclosing them and have the information come to light and undermine
your work,” says Sheila Krumholz, executive director of the Center for
Responsive Politics. “The best practice, whether required by the IRS or
not, is to disclose contributions.”
Nowadays, many Washington think tanks effectively serve as
unregistered lobbyists for corporate donors, and companies strategically
contribute to them just as they hire a PR or lobby shop or make
campaign donations. And unlike lobbyists and elected officials, think
tanks are not subject to financial disclosure requirements, so they
reveal their donors only if they choose to. That makes it impossible for
the public and lawmakers to know if a think tank is putting out an
impartial study or one that’s been shaped by a donor’s political agenda.
“If you’re a lobbyist, whatever you say is heavily discounted,” says
Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University and an expert
on political ethics. “If a think tank is saying it, it obviously sounds a
lot better. Maybe think tanks aren’t aware of how useful that makes
them to private interests. On the other hand, maybe it’s part of their
revenue model.”
* * *
When Newt Gingrich was running for president, The Washington Post
ran a story about the Center for Health Transformation, which it
described as his “hybrid” single-issue think tank. The center, which
subsequently went bankrupt and was bought by WellStar, published reports
and advocated on behalf of donors—including lobbyists and industry
groups that donated millions to support its work—in addition to offering
perks like “direct Newt interaction.” While the center did disclose
some of its donors, it didn’t reveal how much money they had
contributed.
It was an interesting story, but it obscured a key point: Newt’s
“hybrid” was a particularly straightforward form of pay-to-play, but its
basic features are common at Washington think tanks. Like Newt’s Center
for Health Transformation, many lure big donors with a package of
benefits, including personalized policy briefings, the right to directly
underwrite and shape research projects, and general support for the
donor’s political needs.
Most think tanks are nonprofit organizations, so a donor can even get
a nice tax break for contributing. But it’s their reputation for
impartiality and their web of contacts that makes them especially useful
as policy advocates. “Think tanks can always draw a big audience to
your event, including government folks,” a Washington lobbyist who has
worked with several told me. “And people generally don’t think they
would twist anything, or wonder about where they get their money.”
While think tanks portray themselves as altruistic scholarly
institutions, they emphasize their political influence when courting
donors. “If you have a particular area of policy interest, you can
support a specific research effort under way,” the Brookings Institution
says in one pitch for cash. Those interested in
”a deeper
engagement”—read: ready to fork over especially large sums of money—get
personal briefings from resident experts and can work directly with
senior Brookings officials to draw up a research agenda that will
“maximize impact on policymaking.”
The Center for Strategic and International Studies advertises itself
as being “in the unique position to bring together leaders of both the
public and private sectors in small, often off-the-record meetings to
build consensus around important policy issues.” It allows top-tier
donors to directly sponsor reports, events and speaker series.
Because most think tanks don’t fully disclose their donors, it’s not
always easy to see what sort of benefits money can buy. But during Chuck
Hagel’s confirmation hearings, the Atlantic Council, where he’d been
chairman before moving to the Pentagon, released a list of its foreign
donors. One of them turned out to be the oil-rich government of
Kazakhstan, headed by dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Last year, the
council hosted a conference on Kazakhstan that was paid for by the
Nazarbayev regime and Chevron, which has vast oil interests in the
country and is also a major donor to the
council. Keynote speakers
included Kazakhstan’s former ambassador to the United States and Kenneth
Derr, a former Chevron CEO and now Kazakhstan’s honorary consul in San
Francisco.
* * *
John Podesta, former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and the
head of Obama’s first transition team, founded the Center for American
Progress in 2003. Last year, Podesta stepped down as CAP’s president—he
remains its chair and counselor—and was replaced by Neera Tanden, who
served in both the Obama and Clinton administrations. Former Virginia
Congressman Tom Perriello heads the CAP Action Fund, an advocacy unit,
which operates out of the same offices and shares personnel.
CAP has emerged as perhaps the most influential of all think tanks
during the Obama era, and there’s been a rapidly revolving door between
it and the administration. CAP is also among the most secretive of all
think tanks concerning its donors. Most major think tanks prepare an
annual report containing at least some financial and donor information
and make it available on their websites. According to CAP spokeswoman
Andrea Purse, the center doesn’t even publish one.
Purse told me that CAP “follows all financial disclosure requirements
with regard to donors…. We don’t use corporate funds to pay for
research or reports.” But she flatly refused to discuss specific donors
or to provide an on-the-record explanation for why CAP won’t disclose
them.
After growing rapidly in its first few years, tax records show, CAP’s
total assets fell in 2006 for the first time, from $23.6 million to
$20.4 million. Assets started growing again in 2007 when CAP founded the
Business Alliance, a membership rewards program for corporate
contributors, and then exploded when Obama was elected in 2008.
According to its most recent nonprofit tax filing, CAP’s total assets
now top $44 million, and its Action Fund treasury holds $6 million more.
A confidential CAP donor pitch I obtained describes the Business
Alliance as “a channel for engagement with the corporate community” that
provides “the opportunity to…collaborate on common interests.” It
offers three membership levels, with the perks to top donors ($100,000
and up) including private meetings with CAP experts and executives,
round-table discussions with “Hill and national leaders,” and briefings
on CAP reports “relevant to your unique interests.”
CAP doesn’t publicly disclose the members of its Business Alliance,
but I obtained multiple internal lists from 2011 showing that dozens of
major corporations had joined. The lists were prepared by Chris Belisle,
who at the time served as the alliance’s senior manager after having
been recruited from his prior position as manager of corporate relations
at the US Chamber of Commerce. According to these lists, CAP’s donors
included Comcast, Walmart, General Motors, Pacific Gas and Electric,
General Electric, Boeing and Lockheed. Though it doesn’t appear on the
lists, the University of Phoenix was also a donor.
Incidentally, Scott Lilly, a Hill veteran who joined CAP in 2004 as a
senior fellow covering national security, simultaneously served as a
registered lobbyist for Lockheed between 2005 and 2011. Rudy deLeon,
CAP’s senior vice president for national security and international
policy, was a Boeing executive and directed the company’s lobbying
operations between 2001 and 2006, before joining the think tank the
following year.
Of the CAP donors mentioned in this story, I contacted Lockheed,
which refused to confirm or deny its membership in the Business
Alliance, and First Solar and Boeing, both of which confirmed that they
had been members but wouldn’t say how much they gave or when. “Our work
with think tanks is not political, but is more educational in nature,”
Tim Neale of Boeing told me. “We want to learn from and share ideas with
scholars across the political spectrum, and we like to get a wide range
of viewpoints and ideas rather than focus solely on a particular
political bent.”
Several CAP insiders, who asked to speak off the record, told me that
when Podesta left, there was a fear that contributions would dry up.
Raising money had always been important, they said, but Tanden ratcheted
up the efforts to openly court donors, which has impacted CAP’s work.
Staffers were very clearly instructed to check with the think tank’s
development team before writing anything that might upset contributors, I
was told.
I obtained a March 2012 e-mail from Belisle to Podesta and CAP’s
communications and legal teams, which was also copied to Tanden. The
e-mail noted a Think Progress item featuring a New York Times
op-ed by former Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith, who called the
company’s environment “toxic and destructive.” At the time, the firm was
under heavy fire for deceiving investors and for its larger role in
driving the speculation in toxic securities that unwound the economy.
Belisle said he was “flagging” the item for Tanden since she had
recently met with Michael Paese, director of Goldman’s Washington
lobbying office. Two sources told me that Goldman Sachs subsequently
became a donor. Purse and Paese declined comment.
* * *
Foreign governments and business entities can also join the Business
Alliance, whose membership list includes the Taipei Economic and
Cultural Representative Office—which functions as Taiwan’s embassy in
Washington and retains many lobbyists, including former Oklahoma
Republican Senator Don Nickles and former Missouri Democratic
Representative Richard Gephardt—and the Confederation of Businessmen and
Industrialists of Turkey (TUSKON).
In 2010, CAP issued a report, “Ties That Bind: U.S.-Taiwan Relations
and Peace and Prosperity in East Asia,” which warned that the
partnership between the two countries had stagnated and suggested that
the United States maintain arms sales to Taiwan, increase economic and
diplomatic cooperation, and otherwise “seek ways to deepen their
relationship.” That same year, CAP’s Scott Lilly gave an address at the
American Institute in Taiwan, in which he hailed the ties between the
two nations as “one of the more important bilateral relationships in the
world” before calling for additional arms sales to Taiwan. Lockheed,
whom Lilly lobbied for at the time, is a leading arms merchant to
Taiwan.
With help from TUSKON, CAP also makes an annual fact-finding trip to
Turkey, the most recent being in February of this year. The CAP
delegation met with US Ambassador Francis Ricciardone and senior Turkish
government officials. A former CAP staffer told me that TUSKON had
“amazing access” and “could call anyone in the government and get us a
meeting or interview.” As a result of the Turkish group’s support, CAP
was “totally in the tank for them,” this source said.
CAP also presses for closer ties between the US and Turkish
governments, just as Ankara’s lobbyists do. Last year, CAP hosted an
event featuring Commerce Secretary John Bryson, who spoke on his “vision
for deepening even further the US-Turkish commercial relationship.” Two
years earlier, Podesta gave the keynote address at a TUSKON conference
in Istanbul. In his speech—titled “The Unique Importance of the
Turkish-American Relationship”—he praised CAP senior fellow Michael Werz
for his work on “strengthening the US-Turkey relationship.” He also
pointedly noted that Werz’s predecessor as CAP’s Turkey expert, Spencer
Boyer, had left the think tank to become the Obama administration’s
deputy assistant secretary for European affairs.
“Our policy work is independent and driven by solutions that we
believe will create a more equitable and just country,” Purse told me.
It would be easier to believe that statement, let alone evaluate it, if
CAP was more transparent about its funding. The same holds true for
think tanks in general—which, unlike other powerful Washington
institutions, have the luxury of telling the public and policy-makers
only what they choose about their funders.
Source URL: http://www.thenation.com/article/174437/secret-donors-behind-center-american-progress-and-other-think-tanks
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