Forum Post: The SPN and the Mackinac Center

The SPN just doesn't get enough press these days. What with ties to ALEC and the myriad Koch think tank concerns, it should, so here's what went on in Michigan's Mackinac Center.

"The Center for Media and Democracy and Progress Now have set up a new website called “StinkTanks.org” where you can follow the money to get a fuller understanding of just how powerful corporations have become in setting policy and passing laws to benefit their profit taking.

Here are some highlights:

While it has become an $83 million dollar right-wing empire, SPN and most of its affiliates do not post their major donors on their websites. The identities of the donors we have discovered reveal that SPN is largely funded by global corporations — such as Reynolds American, Altria, the e-cigarette company NJOY, Microsoft, AT&T, Verizon, Facebook, the for-profit online education company K12 Inc., GlaxoSmithKline, Kraft Foods, Express Scripts, Comcast, Time Warner, and the Koch- and Tea Party-connected DCI Group lobbying and PR firm — that stand to benefit from SPN’s destructive agenda, as well as out-of-state special interests like the billionaire Koch brothers, the Waltons, the Bradley Foundation, the Roe Foundation, and the Coors family — who are underwriting an extreme legislative agenda that undermines the traditional rights of modern Americans. Although SPN’s affiliates are registered as educational nonprofits, several appear to orchestrate extensive lobbying and political operations to peddle their legislative agenda to state legislators, despite the IRS’s regulations on nonprofit political and lobbying activities. SPN and its affiliates push an extreme right-wing agenda that aims to privatize education, block healthcare reform, restrict workers’ rights, roll back environmental protections, and create a tax system that benefits most those at the very top level of income. SPN and many of its affiliates are some of the most active members and largest sponsors of the controversial ALEC, where special interest groups and state politicians vote behind closed doors on “model” legislation to change Americans’ rights, through ALEC’s task forces. SPN has close ties to, and works with, other national right-wing organizations like the Franklin Center and David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity."

http://www.eclectablog.com/2013/11/new-reports-show-power-of-corporatist-groups-like-mackinac-center-to-implement-statewide-policieslaws-benefiting-corporations.html

Good old ALEC.

Destroying Democracy, one State at a time.