Since its founding in the early 1940s, the Milwaukee-based Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation has been a mainstay in funding and building conservative institutions, and supporting right-wing projects. A new report by The Center for Media and Democracy’s “Exposed” project, dives into a new “national effort funded by the … foundation to assess and expand right-wing ‘infrastructure’ [in order] to influence policies and politicians in statehouses nationwide.”
Research Cited
BREAKING: Wisconsin May Bring the Koch Brothers One State Closer To Rewriting the Constitution
Wisconsin, in particular, has been a beachhead of rightwing state takeovers. The Koch brothers and other right-wing interests contributed handsomely to Gov. Scott Walker’s 2010 election campaign—an attempt to turn the traditionally progressive state into a laboratory for free market policies. Following suit, the language around Article V in Wisconsin suggests the state will use the convention to propose “amendments relating to a balanced budget.”
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“I really see it as a return to the Confederacy,” Arn Pearson, of Wisconsin’s Center for Media and Democracy, has said. “They want the ability for states to override Supreme Court rulings and any federal law they don’t like.”
To Make Your Conspiracy Theory Legit, Just Find an ‘Expert’
But even if an expert’s credentials seem to check out, they might still be bogus. “There’s a lot of false credentialing going on, especially at PR firms masquerading as think tanks that aren’t subject to peer review,” says Lisa Graves, executive director for the Center of Media and Democracy. Take, for example, the employees of the Center for Immigration Studies: you’d expect them to be immigration policy experts, right? Trouble is, CIS is actually a xenophobic hate group, founded by a longtime nativist. And these days, you don’t even have to be part of an organization to build an expert-sounding resume: many online journals will publish your research, valid or not, as long as you pay them first.
Three Women Who Are Fighting for Social Justice and Changing the World
Lisa Graves: The Dark Money Diviner
“I don’t know what Donald Trump thinks, aside from what he tweets, but I think he is deeply deceitful and deceptive. Throughout the campaign, he talked about draining the swamp, and instead, he’s stocking the swamp and locating it in the Rose Garden, just outside the White House,” says Lisa Graves. And she would know. Graves is the Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a watchdog group with a nose for sniffing out corporate bad guys, enlisting whistleblowers, and shedding light on secretive, misleading campaign contributions, known as “dark money.” She’s the country’s foremost expert on big-money political shenanigans, with decades of experience in government.
Foundation Uses Tax-Exempt Status to Fund Anti-Union Efforts
At the center of such efforts is the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (the Bradley Foundation), which has led a national effort to de-fund and destroy labor unions, according to the Madison, Wis., Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), a nonprofit advocacy group that uncovered key documents.
Join the Intercept in Documenting the Conflicts of Interest of Hundreds of Trump Appointees
To shed light on these appointees’ backgrounds, The Intercept and the Center for Media and Democracy have requested the Office of Government Ethics Form 278, the standard financial disclosure document, for hundreds of Trump officials. We have now received over 150 of them and compiled them in a public Google Documents table, and will be adding more as they arrive.
The Other Special Prosecutor We Need
Meanwhile, another scandal is brewing in the White House that demands equal attention — Trump, his family and his inner circle cashing in on the presidency for personal profit.
Let’s face it, Trump and his close associates have turned their backs on ethical norms and the anti-corruption protections written into the US Constitution and federal law in a way we haven’t seen in modern times.
The Truth Behind the Stand – Walter Carpenter
According to the Center for Media and Democracy, “ALEC is not a lobby; it is not a front group. It is much more powerful than that. Through the secretive meetings of ALEC, corporate lobbyists and state legislators vote as equals on “model bills” to change our rights that often benefit the corporations’ bottom line at public expense (www.alecexposed.org/wiki).” Member dues and donations, usually untraceable, from such conservative and libertarian groups as the Koch Brothers, fund ALEC. This group has been noted, for example, to be behind voter ID laws and other forms of voter suppression. It is hardly surprising that they rated Vermont as they did, using their “15 state policy variables,” created by their lobbyists and member legislators.
‘You Can’t Make This Up’: Comcast Threatens Legal Action Against Net Neutrality Proponents
Indeed, the fake comment scandal in addition to the FCC’s failure to process comments in favor of net neutrality drew sharp criticism in the wake of the FCC’s vote, and raised concern over how much influence the telecom industry holds over Pai, and now the FCC.
In case there was any question on that front, The Intercept’s Lee Fang and Nick Surgey reported on Tuesday on an internal email from GOP leadership instructing House Republicans on how best to defend the FCC’s decision.
Lawsuit Targets Trump’s Climate-Change Censorship
On March 23 the [Center for Biological Diversity] joined conservation biologist Stuart Pimm and the Center for Media and Democracy in a separate Freedom of Information Act request to prevent the administration from removing hundreds of environmental data sets on government websites.