WASHINGTON — The August recess traditionally gives members of Congress a chance to go home and hear directly from local constituents clamoring for personal contact with their elected representatives.
Unless they go to Israel.
But in some districts, a different stripe of player will be competing for political attention: the Heritage Foundation, a Washington think tank specializing in public policy research.
The nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour,’’ to be headlined by the think tank’s president, former Republican senator and Tea Party movement leader Jim DeMint, is appealing to supporters to “join fellow conservatives in your area and learn how to get America back on track.”
Related: Tea Party takes aim at GOP
It is a new and startlingly aggressive role for a leading Washington research institution, even one with the ideological underpinnings of Heritage, and emblematic of a larger trend.
Wait until you $ee who started it.
Not long ago, Washington’s think tanks constituted a rarefied world of policy-minded scholars supported by healthy endowments and quietly sought solutions to some of the nation’s biggest challenges. But now Congress and the executive branch are served a limitless feast of supposedly independent research from hundreds of nonprofit institutions that are pursuing fiercely partisan agendas and are funded by undisclosed corporations, wealthy individuals, or both.
They were always funded by them, so what's the problem?
The shift is upending the role of think tanks, prompting some researchers to worry it is eroding trust in these institutions.
As if we ever had any in them.
Indeed, it now is difficult to tell the difference between truly objective advice and high-priced advocacy for political or private profit, according to a Globe review of public and internal documents and interviews with dozens of current and former think tank scholars, management staff, and donors.
Related:
Six Zionist Companies Own 96% of the World's Media
Declassified: Massive Israeli manipulation of US media exposed
Operation Mockingbird
Why Am I No Longer Reading the Newspaper?
Not that difficult to tell the difference, is it?
Some say Washington’s once-heralded “ideas industry” steadily looks like a “think tank-industrial complex.”
Corporations have to do something with the gobs of money they are making.
“They have evolved into what looks like a business,” said Alan Dye, a Washington attorney who has represented think tanks, including Heritage, for three decades. “A brain trust for sale.”
Some thinks tanks on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum have grown so political that, to avoid losing their tax status as charitable organizations, they have established separate operations dedicated to lobbying and other advocacy work.
The Heritage town hall tour, one of the most high-profile examples of merging scholarship with political salesmanship, is being organized by Heritage Action for America, the lobbying arm Heritage launched three years ago under the same roof.
The aggressive politicking is making even some of the think tank’s own scholars uncomfortable, according to a number of insiders who declined to be identified for fear of reprisal....
The Globe is sore at them because they put out an anti-immigration reform report.
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Think tanks have long occupied a unique niche in Washington: nonprofits straddling the worlds of academia and government. For decades they have served as influential havens for top policy experts, as well as aspiring and former government officials.
The term “think tank” was coined during World War II to describe a secure facility where scientists and military planners plotted strategy, according to a 2002 history published by the Department of State. The definition was later expanded to include a variety of respected institutions.
Founded by leading philanthropists and intellectuals, the first groups included the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which seeks to reduce international conflict; the vast and multidisciplinary Brookings Institution, which is widely considered left-leaning; the conservative Hoover Institution; the Council on Foreign Relations, which remains a who’s who of the foreign policy establishment from both parties; the conservative American Enterprise Institute; and the government-funded Rand Corporation, which was established by the Pentagon at the dawn of the Cold War.
“They were sleepy places, mainly for scholars who didn’t want to teach at universities,” said Leslie Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations....
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The growing fusion of scholarly research and acute partisanship is hardly the exclusive preserve of the right.
The founding principle of the Center for American Progress, established a decade ago by former Clinton administration officials, was to use policy studies to press a liberal agenda. In the process it helped pioneer the new breed of aggressively ideological think tank....
So that is who is behind an organization that is often quoted in my newspaper.
CAP, as it is widely known in policy circles, has about $34 million in annual revenues. Like other think tanks, according to internal documents, it relies on a mix of corporations, foundations, and wealthy benefactors to fund its research, including banking and telecommunications firms, and major players in the energy and health care industries.
Ohhhhhh, the "LEFT"-leaning think tank is FUNDED by FOUR of the MOST POWERFUL CORPORATE SECTORS in existence, ones that have basically bought Congress!
What sets CAP apart is that, from the moment it was created, its founders sought to aggressively push an agenda on Congress and the White House....
A "liberal" agenda!
Btw, did you know think tanks are NONPROFITS! That means they pay NO TAXES!
The hybrid CAP pioneered has prompted other institutions with an ideological orientation to catch up, most visibly, the Heritage Foundation.
Established in 1973 by a trio of wealthy conservative Republicans who thought President Richard Nixon was too moderate, Heritage is one of the most well-funded think tanks, with $72 million in revenues in 2011, according to the IRS....
Heritage’s lobbying efforts this year have been focused on defeating proposals in Congress backed by think tanks like CAP, such as the extension of unemployment benefits and immigration reform. It has also lobbied against Obama’s nominations for federal judgeships....
Heritage added to its edge earlier this year when it hired DeMint, a strident and outspoken former senator from South Carolina.
DeMint wasted little time before penning a private fund-raising letter with striking similarities to those used by political office seekers. It called on conservatives around the country to help it “thwart,” “resist,” and “fight” the so-called “age of Obama.”
“We’ll provide the fuel for the very necessary resistance and defense of these next four years,” pledged DeMint, who declined repeated requests for an interview.
Big money, big questions
This sharp partisan turn at many think tanks hasn’t stopped officials from turning to them for advice and ideas.
“The government doesn’t have the time or the resources to think long term,” said Robert Work, a former undersecretary of the Navy who is now the chief executive officer of the Center for a New American Security, which was established in 2009 by former Clinton administration officials. “They often ask you to do the thinking for them.”
What more is there to type?
That is particularly true of the Department of Defense, he said. And Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, a former Republican Senator from Nebraska, is himself a creature of the think tank world.
As chairman of the Atlantic Council of the United States from 2009 to 2013, he presided over a massive expansion of an organization that had been among Washington’s smaller foreign policy think tanks....
Hagel’s role came under scrutiny when he was nominated by Obama earlier this year. As a result, the Atlantic Council was required by Congress to disclose its foreign donors, offering a rare window into a typically secret world.
Its financial backers include oil-rich kingdoms including Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and state-run oil companies such as the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan and Turkish Petroleum Corporation.
Related: Hagel Haters
An example of the hidden reach of such sponsorships arose in June, when Hagel arrived in Singapore’s plush Shangri-La Hotel for one of his first major policy addresses to a large gathering of defense ministers and generals from across Asia. He outlined plans for a long-term — and costly — US security umbrella requiring a greater commitment of forces, warships, training, and foreign weapons sales.
Undisclosed to Hagel’s audience — or the public, for that matter — was the fact that his remarks were crafted with help from scholars at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, one of the most respected of Washington think tanks.
National security agencies increasingly rely on the center to help formulate strategy, even as the think tank receives its biggest share of tax-deductible contributions for research from arms manufacturers, energy companies, and other major corporations seeking to shape policy — nearly a third of its $33 million in revenues last year, according to think tank officials and public records.
As if they didn't have enough influence.
Roughly 4 percent of annual revenue is raised from foreign governments, including the Canadian province of Alberta; Norway; and several Persian Gulf emirates.
CSIS is building a new 15,000-square foot, $100 million headquarters in Washington with money raised by a high-powered collection of former senior government officials and titans of industry representing defense giants Lockheed Martin, Boeing, and Raytheon, along with pharmaceutical conglomerate Procter & Gamble, oil giant Chevron, and a top adviser to the Sultan of Oman, according to CSIS officers and documents....
Of course, they are looking out for your best interests, Americans, with their recommendations.
Bipartisan battlers
Some think tanks are resisting the trend, trying to navigate a course through the growing thicket of partisanship and corporate influence. They are finding it hard going.
The Bipartisan Policy Center, as its name suggests, was started in 2007 by former leaders of both parties, including former Senate majority leaders Bob Dole, a Republican, and Democrat George Mitchell....
Its attempt at being nonideological has come at a cost. By occupying what Jason Grumet, the founder and president, calls a “vast and lonely” space on the think tank continuum, fund-raising has been exceedingly difficult.
“We’re living on the edge,” he said. “We need to raise $10 million to get through the year.”
But in the face of a glut of well-funded partisan think tanks, the Bipartisan Policy Center quickly realized that scholarship alone was not sufficient to punch through the political noise. It, too, has established its own lobbying arm.
That's why Washington is broke, right there.
According to lobbying disclosure records, the Bipartisan Policy Center Advocacy Network has spent nearly $10 million since 2008 lobbying Congress and the executive branch in favor of issues ranging from the Obama administration’s economic stimulus spending to clean-energy legislation — more than double that of CAP and Heritage combined. Without such advocacy, in Grumet’s view, the think tank would be irrelevant.
“We have to try and crash into the real world.”
As part of its work, the center recently offered what it billed as a “healthy debate” about an overhaul of immigration law, which the Senate has passed but is stalled in the House.
In what appears to be the new normal for increasingly partisan think tanks, the ostensibly high-minded forum quickly turned into an arena for partisan attacks....
All thanks to Clinton-era officials!
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What I found interesting is there was never any mention of AIPAC or WINEP, the exclusively Jewish and lobbying group and think tank. Maybe the Globe is saving that for a separate report.
Also see:
Sunday Globe Special: Congre$$ Calling
Sunday Globe Special: Senate a Downer For Dole
Seeing Through the Kansas Haze
Sunday Globe Special: Courting the Senate
GOP Eases Up on Obama's EPA Nominee
Eating Anger For Lunch
Sunday Globe Special: AmeriKan Media Mimics Politics
Sunday Globe Special: Carving Up North Carolina
Sunday Globe Special: Freed From the FEC
Sunday Globe Specials: Fiscal Cliff Fraud
No parti$anship there.
Imho, the Globe sees a Washington that never was. It longs for the days when information was strictly controlled and only available through certain $elf-$erving avenues. Now that it isn't that way anymore all of a sudden Washington is broken.
Related:
"Local government boards feel the sting of incivility" by Peter Schworm | Globe Staff, August 12, 2013
While partisan vitriol is becoming a native language in Washington, D.C., the tenor of local politics in Massachusetts has taken on an increasingly combative tone, observers say. Constituents and town officials alike are voicing their displeasure in more aggressive, personal terms, as if taking their cue from the Beltway bickering. All politics, and its squabbling, is local, after all....
That's because politicians are not doing what we want. They are all bought off by special intere$ts, regardless of what letter is after their name.
The rising rancor has sparked a number of public spectacles, underlin[ing] a growing problem: a fundamental lack of trust in elected officials....
I think all the lying and corruption did it.
“People immediately don’t believe you.”
Then it is like reading a Boston Globe.
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The larger political culture, from talk radio vitriol to the theatrics of political round tables, has trickled down to the local level to similarly corrosive effect....
While surveys have shown the country has become more polarized politically, said Cassandra Dahnke, cofounder of The Institute for Civility in Government in Houston, a reality-show culture, in which extreme views dominate the conversation, has crept into all corners of life....
It's the world we live in.
Whatever the cause, when voicing displeasure in person, some vent as if writing an anonymous online diatribe.
Hi, folks.
“The wheels of government grind very slow, and it seems to me that people get angry or upset when things don’t move fast enough,” saidsaid Donald Beaulieu, a selectman in Salisbury, where emotions over a proposal for a casino have run high....
They don't seem to move slow when it comes to Patriot Acts, what Israel wants, and bank bailouts.
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