Robert P. George

Trustee, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation

Center for Media & Democracy

The Center for Media & Democracy (CMD) is a counterculture public relations effort disguised as an independent media organization. CMD isn’t really a center it would be more accurate to call it a partnership, since it is essentially a two-person operation.

Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber operate, as do most self-anointed progressive watchdogs, from the presumption that any communication issued from a corporate headquarters must be viewed with a jaundiced eye. In their own quarterly PR Watch newsletter, they recently referred to corporate PR as a propaganda industry, misleading citizens and manipulating minds in the service of special interests. Ironically, Rampton and Stauber have elected to dip into the deep pockets of multi-million-dollar foundations with special interest agendas of their own.

Their books Mad Cow U.S.A. and Toxic Sludge Is Good for You! were produced and promoted using grant monies from the Foundation for Deep Ecology ($25,000) and the Education Foundation of America ($20,000), among others. Along with the more recent Trust Us: We’re Experts, these books are scare-mongering tales about a corporate culture out of control, and each implies that the public needs rescuing. Guess who the heroes in this fantasy are?

Despite his wild claims that federal agencies have covered up U.S. mad cow disease cases, John Stauber has become a quotable celebrity on the subject. In 1997, at the height of the initial mad-cow panic, a CMD press release warned: Evidence suggests there may already be a mad-cow-type of disease infecting both U.S. pigs and cattle. Rampton and Stauber have never provided any documentation to back up this reckless claim; no cases of mad-cow disease have ever been documented in U.S. livestock. John Stauber was one of only four mad-cow experts offered to reporters by Fenton Communications’ media arm, Environmental Media Services.

National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse

It has been over 70 years since alcohol prohibition was swept off the books in the United States, but the mindset behind it is definitely alive and kicking.

Since the 1950s, when research into substance abuse and addiction formally became part of the Public Health field, an enormous amount of financial and human resources has been poured into investigating the “whys and wherefores” of substance abuse. The vast majority of this work is truly scientific, pursued by conscientious researchers whose findings are based on careful inquiry, and confirmed by the stringent process of peer review.

As with any scientific discipline, however, not everyone in the field respects this time-honored recipe for scientific progress. While most scientists recognize that their primary mandate is to work out reliable explanations for how nature — or, in the case of addiction and substance abuse, human nature — works, there always seem to be a few bad apples in the research corps who insist on faking data, “cooking” the books, or otherwise crafting results to fit their prejudices. Their motives are almost always political, and they tend to complement their deceit with slick public-relations skills.

Such high public profiles and strong political acumen also tend to attract huge amounts of money from like-minded and deep-pocketed sources. In the case of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, this financial confluence is compounded by the degree to which local and federal government agencies continue to pile on their support, often sending good money chasing after bad.

The CASA that Joe built

CASA’s fearless leader is Joseph A. Califano, Jr., a long-time policy wonk who, as chief domestic policy advisor to LBJ, was regarded as one of the key architects of the “Great Society” programs. Califano also served in President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Cater fired him in 1979, largely because, according to Washingtonian magazine, his “blunt, high-profile, self-promoting approach cost Carter too many political allies.”

After more than 12 years in private law practice, and a stint on the board of the Chrysler Corporation, Califano was approached by former Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke (then in charge of the executive-branch Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP) with the idea to found CASA. Califano jumped at the chance, telling reporters that he was bored with practicing “commercial law,” and that he “wake[s] up every morning ready to roar.”

On May 18, 1992, the birth of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) was announced to the press, along with prominent mention of its sources of startup funding. United Press International reported that “more than $2 million” would come from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, “more than $5 million” from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a single five-year, $8 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This latter windfall represented the single largest grant in that foundation’s history (a $13-million-plus grant to CASA in 1998 would later raise the bar even higher).

The fact that CASA came about as the result of a request from the ONDCP director (a White House official) didn’t turn many heads in 1992, but perhaps it should have. At the time, a combination of private and public donors were already pouring $400 million per year into substance-abuse and addiction studies, mostly in long-standing university research programs. This new organization, with its initial endowment of over $15 million, promised to spread those resources even thinner. Furthermore, the appointment of Califano — a political firebrand, not a scientist — as CASA’s director was viewed with remarkably little suspicion.

While the press also noted that CASA’s new Medical Director, Dr. Herbert Kleber, had been ONDCP’s deputy director only two years before, nobody at the time asked about the propriety of ONDCP chairman James Burke using his office to drum up high-prestige work for a former colleague. It’s not clear whether CASA’s association with Columbia University had much to do with Kleber’s tenured position on Columbia’s psychiatry faculty, but it probably didn’t hurt.

Since CASA opened its offices in New York City, Califano has played a dual role as both rainmaker and spokesman. His boardroom contacts at Chrysler have yielded CASA corporate donations from the likes of CBS, Walt Disney, Citigroup, Bristol-Myers Squibb, American Express, and Travelers Insurance. His presumed gravitas as a former cabinet official has translated into the highest profile imaginable for just about any pronouncement his organization’s “research” dictates, no matter how baseless or logically contorted.

During the years of the Clinton Administration, Califano parlayed his Democratic Party credentials into a pair of multi-million-dollar fundraisers, titled “Concerts of Hope.” Featuring stars like Natalie Cole, En Vogue, Kenny G, Tim McGraw, and Wynnona, these events were televised by CBS and expressly honored then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for her (unspecified) efforts to combat substance abuse in children.

Fuzzy Math

Remarkable, but true: Califano’s enormous political clout and the $150 million dollars that he has raised since 1992, have brought about a “think/action tank” (in the words of CASA’s web site) that is widely considered a laughingstock among mainstream social scientists. The 2002 release of a CASA report, entitled “Teen Tipplers: America’s Underage Drinking Epidemic,” provides an explanation of why.

With the release of this report, Califano declared on February 26, 2002, that “underage drinkers account for 25 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the U.S.” It was a truly shocking, incendiary finding, aimed directly at America’s brewers and distilled spirits marketers. With teen drinking “out of control,” the CASA report argued, America had an obligation to quickly ban all alcohol advertising. Issued only weeks after NBC’s controversial decision to re-open its airwaves to liquor ads, CASA’s pronouncement was political opportunism at its worst.

The most shocking information about “Teen Tipplers,” though, was yet to come. Within 24 hours, it emerged that CASA’s central finding was just plain wrong. The New York Times, in an article entitled “Disturbing Finding on Youth Drinkers Proves to Be Wrong,” reported the following morning that the real proportion of alcohol consumed by American teens was less than half CASA’s published figure.

How did CASA’s “experts” come to publish such a falsehood? “Teen Tipplers” was based on a 1998 government project called the Household Survey on Drug Abuse, in which 25,500 people were interviewed in their homes. For a variety of legitimate reasons, the federal survey’s architects decided to “oversample” teenagers. While 38 percent of those surveyed were in the 12-20 age group, they make up only 13 percent of the American population.

CASA’s researchers, to say nothing of its leaders, managed to ignore this important distinction. The result was a headline-ready statistic that overstated the truth by over 200 percent. In the days following the release of “Teen Tipplers,” the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), the very same federal agency that produces the Household Survey on Drug Abuse, issued a scathing news release announcing that CASA had misinterpreted its data. The real percentage of alcohol consumed by underage Americans, it announced, was just 11.4 percent.

The only remaining question was whether CASA’s error was an unintentional blunder or a willful deception. CASA president Joseph Califano provided the answer almost immediately. In an incredible show of hubris, Califano tried to justify his organization’s faulty statistics. One typical news report (out of over 200), written in the Baton Rouge Advocate, noted that Califano “defended his group’s decision not to make the [appropriate statistical] adjustment.”

Getting it 100 percent wrong

While this particular boneheaded arithmetical gaffe led to the most astonishing mistake in “Teen Tipplers,” it was by no means the report’s only ridiculous statement. Another of the report’s key findings was that “82.8 percent of adults who drink had their first drink of alcohol before age 21.” Here is another made-for-TV headline that says absolutely nothing of value. A majority of today’s adults grew up in an era when the minimum legal drinking age was 18 (most states raised the drinking age to 21 during the 1980s). In addition, the United States is remarkably puritanical when compared to other nations, very few of which set the legal drinking age so high. So millions of American “adults who drink” could easily have had their first tastes of alcohol — quite legally — before reaching their twenty-first birthday. CASA’s “82.8 percent” number presumably also includes Christian youngsters who are given wine with communion (an increasingly common phenomenon) as well as any college student who has visited Europe, Mexico, South America, or Canada.

It gets worse for CASA’s scientific integrity. A front-page New York Times account of CASA’s misdeeds noted that “alcohol consumption by teenagers dropped sharply in the 1980s” (when the drinking age rose to 21). Furthermore, the Times said, “the proportion of teenagers who engage in binge drinking has declined… In 1998, 6.6 percent of girls and 8.7 percent of boys 12 to 17 reported binge drinking, compared with 11 percent of the girls and nearly 19 percent of the boys a decade earlier” (emphases added).

So the real news was that teen drinking was becoming less of a problem. Yet CASA chose to twist reality in an attempt to convince Americans that teen drinking was “an epidemic.” And even as CASA’s “results” were being retracted by one television network after another, Califano never followed suit himself. Instead, CASA issued a second press release, insisting that “America has an underage drinking epidemic” and arguing that the real proportion of alcohol consumed by minors in America was probably even higher than it estimated, a number approaching “30 percent or more.” Instead of conceding that their numbers didn’t add up, CASA threw even more fuel on the fire.

Indeed, CASA remains unapologetic to this day. The original “Teen Tipplers” report can still be found on CASA’s web site, unchanged, and without the slightest hint that anything went wrong. Americans with $20 to spare can order a bound copy of the report, which comes without any mention that its central finding was flat wrong and thoroughly debunked.

The damage continues to pile up. Putting sensationalism before science, an April 1, 2002 TIME magazine cover story cited the CASA “Teen Tipplers” study in order make the point that the binge-drinking gap between teenage boys and girls had narrowed. TIME, like CASA, didn’t bother noting that teen binge-drinking rates for both sexes had drastically declined.

A “Serial Abuser of Statistics”

The “Teen Tipplers” episode was not the first time CASA has been exposed for factual distortion. In 1997 William London, the long-time Public Health Director of the American Council of Science and Health, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that CASA “is a group that is interested in painting the most alarming picture possible.”

Other scientists who study the effects of drugs and alcohol, normally not the most venom-tongued people in the world, are often unabashed in their condemnation of the goings-on at CASA. Craig Reinarman, a noted UC Santa Cruz sociologist, told Washingtonian magazine in 1998 that Califano is “not playing by the same rules that all other faculty and research centers have to play by.” Reinarman’s advice to Califano: “Don’t pretend you’re a Columbia University scholar when you’re not.”

Professor David J. Hanson, who has spent over 25 years studying drinking patterns among young people, told reporters that CASA’s “Teen Tipplers” report was “a political report, not a scientific study,” and declared that its research standards and methods “aren’t even acceptable at the undergraduate level.” He added that CASA has a tendency to “misinform the public, and diminish the credibility of all research in the field.”

And Joseph D. McNamara, a former Kansas City and San Jose police chief who now studies drug control policy at Stanford, told Washingtonian that “what CASA does is present information in a kind of hysterical-crisis mode… It’s a propaganda war.”

It’s a well-funded propaganda war, too. At the end of 2000, CASA had $44.9 million in the bank and was paying 6-figure salaries to at least 10 people. Califano took home the biggest chunk, with a personal salary over $375,000. And the Office of National Drug Control Policy — the White House department that first lured Califano to Columbia — has certainly taken care of CASA. In 2000 alone, ONDCP contributed $5.75 million.

Ruckus Society

The Ruckus Society was founded in late 1995 by two giants of the radical environmentalist movement: Mike Roselle and Howard “Twilly” Cannon. Roselle was a founder of Earth First! (of 1980s tree-spiking fame), the group which spun off the domestic terrorist Earth Liberation Front in 1992. He also co-founded the radical Rainforest Action Network. Cannon built his extremist credentials as a front-line activist and ship’s captain with Greenpeace’s French and Russian anti-nuclear campaigns.

Ruckus is turning into a violent version of Forrest Gump, grooming the footsoldiers of the “protest industry” for every major newsworthy protest event since its founding. Activists descending on San Diego for the 2001 “biodevastation” demonstrations (railing against life-saving food technology) looked to Ruckus leaders for planning, logistics, media attention, and physical tactics. The same can be said for the massive and violent protests against Philadelphia’s 2000 Republican Convention, and the aggressive anti-World Bank demonstrations in Washington, DC, during that same year. In these two latter cases (as with Seattle), serious damage was done to private and public property alike. In Philadelphia alone, 23 police cars were damaged and 15 officers were injured.

Whether the target du jour is biotech foods, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, or globalization in general, the organization recruits, trains, transports, and houses the army of militants needed to earn media coverage and make life difficult for the rest of us. Some observers have even claimed that Ruckus paid protesters to show up in Seattle. Joseph Bast, president of the Heartland Institute, wrote that one protester there told a colleague, “Sorry, I’ve got to go. If I don’t get to the finish line of the march I don’t get paid.”

Ruckus itself has no problem getting paid, reaping six-figure grant awards from the likes of Ted Turner and the “caring capitalists” at Ben & Jerry’s. When the multinational corporation Unilever bought the ice cream maker in 2000, it agreed to continue Ben & Jerry’s bizarre flavor of philanthropy for the foreseeable future. The Turner foundation has also contributed heavily to Ruckus, including over $150,000 in grants made via The Ecology Center, Inc., a Montana group where Ruckus’ first slate of officers met in the mid-1990s.

Ruckus’s primary contributions to the activist agenda are its “action camps”: weeklong boot camps for leftist protesters, usually held a few weeks prior to a major organized demonstration. A few hundred young Ruckus recruits typically attend each camp, where they are trained in the finer points of “police confrontation strategies,” “street blockades,” “urban climbing & rappelling,” “using the media to your advantage,” and “learning to lock your head to something” (among other things). Predictably, food served at the activist camps is vegetarian all the way. One 1998 camp chef told The Washington Post that “people here have some serious views on food, but that’s to be expected.” A participant in the same event adamantly insisted to a CNN camera crew: “Absolutely no meat whatsoever; no meat products, by-products, whatsoever.”

If you’ve heard of Ruckus Society at all, it was probably in relation to the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Americans watched in horror as organized hoodlums ran roughshod over the city’s commercial district, smashing windows, setting fires, overturning vehicles, ransacking a Starbucks coffee shop and a McDonald’s restaurant, and generally putting lives at risk. It’s no coincidence that the Ruckus Society staffers were in the middle of the melee, giving on-the-record quotes to national media figures. Nor was it an accident that Ruckus director John Sellers represented the protesters when the terms of their arrest were being negotiated with Seattle police. The Ruckus Society is generally credited with organizing the whole Seattle spectacle in the first place. When the dust had settled, Sellers smugly told USA Today, “We kicked the WTO’s butt all over the Northwest.”

Civil Society Project

The Civil Society Project (CSP) is a nonprofit organization that promotes “a recovery of the non-governmental institutions of American society as the indispensable foundation of public virtue and democratic competence.”

Founded in 1994 by former White House aide Don Eberly, CSP believes that the “great challenge” facing the United States is to rebuild nongovernmental institutions so that they can replace the failed welfare state.

One of the reasons for declining civic participation, insists CSP, is that individual Americans have grown accustomed to looking to government bureaucrats to solve problems. By relying on families, neighborhoods, civic associations, and other voluntary groups to address public problems, Americans can develop the moral traits necessary for democratic citizenship.

Through hundreds of articles, books, speeches and interviews, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania-based CSP disseminates its civil society message both domestically and internationally. In addition, CSP has advised several U.S. Presidents and other national political figures on how to promote civic renewal.

Transcending Partisan Gridlock

Recognizing the public’s disillusionment with government, and sympathizing with their frustration with partisan stalemates, CSP consults with policymakers to develop non-legislative ideas that can help transcend bitter disputes. “Most political people want something more than the sterile positions of the past,” Eberly told the San Jose Mercury News in 1997.

The previous year, Eberly had met with Clinton White House advisor Dick Morris to discuss civil society alternatives (Morris later incorporated these themes into Clinton’s re-election campaign). Eberly’s proposed initiatives included support for uniforms in public schools, and for teen curfews to combat youth violence.

Organizing a Presidential Volunteerism Summit

CSP worked with the Clinton White House to promote civil society initiatives by helping organize the April 1997 “President’s Summit on America’s Future.” Chaired by General Colin Powell, the Philadelphia event brought together governors, mayors, businessmen, and charity leaders to promote volunteerism. Joining President Clinton were former presidents George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.

In particular, the Summit meeting identified the importance of community-based organizations to provide 15 million at-risk children with continuing relationships with caring adults; a safe place to spend after-school hours; and an opportunity to “give back” through their own community service.

Eberly moderated a Summit panel focusing on how to attract young people to groups like the Boy Scouts and parents to parent-teacher associations. In an op-ed appearing in the San Antonio Express-News on the Summit’s first day, Eberly offered the participants general principles on the role of volunteerism. These included:

• Volunteerism isn’t just about filling the gap left by government. Individuals should give of themselves because “giving is an essential part of being human.”
• Volunteerism celebrates not so much the power of the individual as the power of individuals working together.
• Volunteers are no substitute for families. While children need many mentors, there is no example of millions of volunteers signing up to raise other people’s children.

Putting “Faith” in the White House

In December 2000, President-elect George W. Bush chose Civil Society Project founder Don Eberly to head a transition advisory team that would create a new White House office on community and faith-based organizations.

During the campaign, Bush had frequently promoted the use of community groups for social services. The proposed office would consolidate everything the Administration planned to do to encourage “community-based solutions to social problems.” (Eberly had already worked with then-Governor Bush to establish the Texas Fatherhood Initiative.)

In early 2001, President Bush named Eberly Deputy Director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. Eberly helped implement Bush’s plan to direct up to $8 billion in federal financing to private charities, or “armies of compassion,” to combat social ills.

In response to critics who said the effort blurred the constitutional distinction between church and state, Eberly told the Lancaster New Era in January 2001: “We’re not going to have the federal government advocating religion. But on the other hand, you shouldn’t exclude (faith-based) programs from participating.”

Promoting Civil Society on a Global Scale

In 2005, Eberly left the Bush Administration and resumed advocating for civil society issues at CSP.

Eberly says the September 11 terrorist attacks influenced him to expand CSP’s advocacy on an international scale. As CSP’s website explains, “American institutions are in a position to promote ideas and model programs for the development of civic, democratic and economic institutions worldwide.”

Eberly’s 1994 book Building a Community of Citizens: Civil Society in the 21st Century has been translated into Arabic and is widely circulated via pro-democracy movements in the Middle East.

In 2008, Eberly wrote a book called The Rise of Global Society: Building Communities and Nations from the Bottom Up. Named by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as one of the year’s top 10 books, it makes the case that charitable giving is eclipsing governmental aid and becoming the dominant form of U.S. influence in the world.

“The most important thing for people to appreciate,” wrote Eberly, “is that 20 years ago, 70 percent of all assistance to the world came from the government; today, 85 percent is private.”

Making Compassion America’s Most Important Export

Prior to his return to CSP in 2005, Eberly helped lead the relief effort at the U.S. State Department for victims of the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia. Within days of the disaster, more than $2 billion in private U.S. donations – three times the government offer – poured into the relief fund.

Private relief worldwide totaled $11 billion.

Eberly says American generosity had an immediate effect on public opinion toward the U.S. He told the Sunday News in 2008: “In Indonesia, the most Muslim nation on Earth, attitudes that were 60 percent negative toward America prior to the outpouring of aid became positive by the same percentage following it – which is why I have called compassion America’s most consequential export.”

National Center for Policy Analysis

The National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) is a nonprofit research organization dedicated to promoting “private alternatives to government regulation and control.” 

Established in 1983, the Dallas-based think tank proposes reforms in health care, Social Security, retirement pensions, environmental regulation, taxes, and education. When John C. Goodman founded NCPA, his goal was to make a name for the group by emphasizing issues that were not being addressed by other foundations and nonprofits. 

In that regard, NCPA has been quite successful. It is credited with creating and implementing Health Savings Accounts, one of the most innovative free-market-based health care reforms introduced during the last 30 years.  

Humble Beginnings to National Powerhouse 

NCPA established its first offices in a mostly abandoned building at the University of Dallas. During its first two years, Goodman waived his salary and paid expenses out of his own pocket. 

Today, NCPA reports a $7 million budget and 40 full-time employees. Its Board Chairman is Pete du Pont, the former Delaware Governor and 1988 presidential candidate.  

NCPA consistently attracts a significant amount of major media coverage. In 2009, NCPA staff were interviewed on CNBC’s “The Kudlow Report,” Fox News Channel’s “America’s Newsroom,” and “The CBS Evening News With Katie Couric.” Major print publications have published NCPA op-eds or quoted its staff including, The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, The Dallas Morning News, The New Republic, and Forbes. 

Revolutionizing the Health Care Reform Debate 

Health Savings Accounts (HAS) address the most serious problem plaguing U.S. health care, a third-party payment system in which individuals don’t know the cost of the health care they purchase since they don’t pay for it directly.  

“Our health care system is dominated by large bureaucratic institutions, and individual patients have little control over the prices they pay or the quality of care they receive,” said Goodman in a February 1992 press statement. “We want to restore the patient as the principal buyer of health care and unleash an army of millions of informed shoppers into the medical marketplace.”

 
How HSAs work:

• They are tax-exempt accounts in which individuals deposit funds to pay for medical expenses.
• The accounts are usually partnered with a high-deductible plan to cover serious illness or injury once the deductible is met.
• Individuals are free to use the HAS to pay for routine medical expenses.
• Any portion of the HAS not spent can be rolled over to the next year, and upon retirement the individual is free to spend the money as he may wish. 

Millions of people are already enrolled in HSAs and are one of the most rapidly growing health insurance plans in the nation. Currently, the maximum contribution for individuals is $2,850 and $5,650 for families.

“Father of Health Savings Accounts” Wages Campaign 

John Goodman is credited with devising the idea of HSAs in 1983. Over the next 20 years, Goodman and the NCPA waged a battle to turn this radical concept into law. The Wall Street Journal calls Goodman the “Father of Health Savings Accounts.” 

In 1992, Goodman and Gerald Musgrave co-authored Patient Power: Solving America’s Health Care Crisis, which argued for Medical Savings Accounts (MSA). (From 1983 to 2003, the private account proposal was called a MSA.) The publisher reports that 300,000 copies are in print. 

Winning acceptance for HSAs proved an arduous task.  

“When I first took the idea to Congress in the early 1990s, only five congressmen wanted to be with me,” Goodman told Investor’s Business Daily in 2008. 

MSAs gradually took hold during the 1994 health care debate. More than 200 congressmen, seeking an alternative to President Clinton’s government interventionist plan, co-sponsored bills with MSA provisions.

In 1995, new House Speaker Newt Gingrich called MSAs the heart of his Congressional Medicare reform agenda. “MSAs are what I believe the most exciting health care innovations in modern times,” said Gingrich in a September 21, 1995 article in the Dallas Morning News. 

On August 21, 1996, President Clinton signed MSAs into law. Participation was supposed to include up to 750,000 taxpayers. 

However, by 1998 only 100,000 accounts had been opened. The problem was that the program was limited to the self-employed and employees at small businesses. As a result, major insurers were reluctant to enter so small a market.

HSAs Take Off 

HSAs became a viable health insurance alternative with the passage of the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003. Ironically, NCPA opposed the final bill because it also dramatically increased Medicare entitlement spending.  

The Health Opportunity Patient Empowerment Act of 2006 made HSAs more user-friendly by loosening the restrictions. According to America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the number of Americans enrolled in HSAs grew from 1 million in 2005 to more than 6.1 million in 2008. 

An April 2007 Modern Healthcare article summed up the new attitude to HSAs: “The voices of critics of consumer-directed health plans are fading into the background as such plans and their accompanying health savings accounts are enjoying strong growth.”

Expanding the Use of 401(k) Plans 

In 2006, NCPA played an important role in developing legislation enacted by Congress that expanded the use of 401(k) plans.

For years, NCPA worked with the Brookings Institution to advocate allowing employers to automatically enroll employees in a 401(k). Between 1981 and 2006, employee enrollment in 401(k) plans was voluntary. But large numbers of workers never signed up. 

Matt Moore, a NCPA senior policy analyst, would write that about one-third of workers typically didn’t take advantage of the 401(k) option. And only 47 percent of those under 29 elected to set up a plan. “But it pays to start sooner rather than later,” added Moore. “Automatic enrollment of new employees will help workers – especially younger workers – build a nest egg for retirement.” 

NCPA worked with congressional offices to develop a policy for automatic 401(k) enrollment to be included in pension reform legislation. In April 2006, NCPA conducted a briefing on Capitol Hill that detailed “10 important steps to reform our health and pension systems.” Among the problems addressed by the bipartisan panel of experts, that included Goodman, was the fact that employers are abandoning traditional pension plans. But workers who have access to 401(k)s weren’t contributing enough.

The Pension Protection Act of 2006 included key provisions backed by NCPA:

• Automatic enrollment of new employees into 401(k) and 403(b) plans;
• Automatic increases of contribution rates when workers receive a raise; and
• Automatic investment in diversified portfolios. 

NCPA says that as a result of the changes “half of all future 401(k) enrollees will be enjoying higher and safer returns.” 

Experts concur. “This will revolutionize the 401(k) plan from something dependent on an individual taking action to a design that essentially gets people saving more,”says Dallas Salisbury of the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

Improving Education Through Competition 

NCPA believes that the key to improving education is to break the monopoly of the public education establishment.  

To that end, NCPA supports charter schools, public schools freed from bureaucracy and regulation to try innovative approaches. NCPA specifically advocates for tax-funded and privately-funded vouchers to allow children – mostly minorities from low-income families – to leave failing public schools and attend private schools instead. 

NCPA studies show that such “choice” programs boost student test scores. They can also help improve public schools that compete to attract students.  

A 2001 NCPA study presented evidence of the beneficial effects of a Milwaukee voucher program. Math scores of students who switched to a private school were 5 to 11 percentile points higher than those of their public school counterparts.  

And in response to the loss of its students, the Milwaukee public school system began guaranteeing that students would be able to read by the end of the third grade.

School choice programs can also save millions of taxpayer dollars.  

A 2007 study released by the NCPA, the Hispanic Council for Reform and Educational Options, and the Milton and Rose D. Friedman Foundation estimated that the 2007 class of Texas high school dropouts will cost state taxpayers $377 million each year over the course of their lifetime. This figure includes increased Medicaid costs, increased incarceration costs, and the loss of tax revenue.

School districts facing more private school competition also have lower dropout rates. The study concluded that a school choice program which “increased private school enrollment by just five percent” would reduce the public school dropout rate by as much as 17,400 students per year, and save up to $53 million annually over the expected life of the students.

Economic Policy Institute

The Economic Policy Institute (EcPI) calls itself a “nonprofit, nonpartisan” think tank. But behind its façade of political balance lays an agenda-driven organization. EcPI has roots in radical leftist politics, and it receives a large portion of its funding from organized labor. EcPI‘s donors have on at least one occasion been allowed to review its research prior to publication.

The Economic Policy Institute was founded in 1986 by Jeff Faux, who was previously the co-director of the National Center for Economic Alternatives (NCEA). As its name suggests, the NCEA specialized in offering “alternatives”—alternatives characterized as “radical” in The New York Times—to mainstream U.S. domestic policy.

NCEA‘s co-director was Gar Alperovitz, now a University of Maryland professor and author of America Beyond Capitalism. Prior to working at the NCEA, Alperovitz co-authored the essay collection Strategy and Program: Two Essays Toward a New American Socialism, where he advocated using socialist ideas to make the United States a “fairer” nation.

Together, Faux and Alperovitz advocated reindustrialization, a scheme that required a national committee to review and guide the re-development of selected major industries in the United States. One professor at Columbia University, writing in The New York Times, called their ideas “a poorly disguised version of national planning.”

At NCEA, Faux and Alperovitz promoted public ownership of energy, defense, and transportation corporations, and economic planning handled through local councils. Over time, they envisioned the replacement of large U.S. corporations with new institutions directly accountable to the public.

Center for American Progress

The Center for American Progress (CAP) and its parallel advocacy arm the Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAP Action) are two key cogs in the left-wing policy and message machine. Using the institutional imprimatur of CAP’s “think tank” and CAP Action’s blog ThinkProgress, CAP’s directors and funders — who include left-wing hedge fund titan George Soros — attempt to move national policy debates ever leftward.

Background

Founded by the well-connected John Podesta, who was the former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton, and Obama’s Presidential Transition director— the CAP empire was intended to serve as a counterweight to the conservative Heritage Foundation. However, credible allegations of anti-Semitism, reporting errors by ThinkProgress bloggers, and the alignment between both groups’ views and those of their donors, have hindered its rise to prominence.

According to Podesta, who served as president until 2012, CAP was founded in 2003 “to provide long-term leadership and support to the progressive movement.” CAP Action, now run by former one-term Democratic Representative Tom Perriello, is officially an “independent non-partisan education and advocacy organization.”

CAP officials, including Podesta, were deeply involved in the transition to President Obama’s administration in 2008-09. TIME characterized the involvement: “President-elect Obama has effectively contracted out the management of his own government’s formation to [John] Podesta.” POLITICO characterized the interrelationship between the transition team and CAP as “historically unique.”

In a feature article on the expansion of ThinkProgress, POLITICO illustrated how the site differs from a mainstream news organization. POLITICO reported:

ThinkProgress [… is] hardly just another media organization. […] Further, CAP Action Fund openly runs political advocacy campaigns, and plays a central role in the Democratic Party’s infrastructure, and the new reporting staff down the hall isn’t exactly walled off from that message machine, nor does it necessarily keep its distance from liberal groups organizing advocacy campaigns targeting conservatives.

Motivation

CAP and ThinkProgress are well-funded: CAP alone raked in $36.5 million in 2010, the latest year for which tax records are available. CAP Action, which runs ThinkProgress, brought in over $9 million to fund its operations.

That money comes from a wide array of left-leaning ideological and big corporate interests. Although CAP and CAP Action exercise their legal rights as organizations structured under Sections 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code and do not disclose their donors, some donations can be identified through other required filings with the Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Labor.

CAP receives money from multibillionaire hedge fund manager George Soros through two of his nonprofit groups, the Foundation to Support Open Society and the Open Society Institute. From 2005 through 2010, the two organizations gave CAP over $5.4 million. CAP receives money from other liberal-leaning foundations, including the Tides Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the foundation of Progressive Insurance chairman Peter B. Lewis.

Some of the organizations’ donations have been highly questionable. For example, Bermuda-based Atlantic Philanthropies donated $1.5 million to the CAP Action Fund, which operates ThinkProgress in 2010. (Bermuda is a British Overseas Territory.) United States-based foundations are forbidden by tax law from donating to organizations incorporated under Section 501(c)(4)—such as CAP Action—but as POLITICO reports, no such restrictions apply to foreign grant-makers.

This didn’t stop a ThinkProgress reporter from attempting to rescue flagging Democratic candidates with an “October Surprise” in 2010 by claiming that the United States Chamber of Commerce, a business association backing Republicans in that election, was using foreign funds to influence elections. He speculated that the Chamber’s activity might violate FEC regulations. *The New York Times *investigated the allegations and found no evidence the Chamber did anything illegal, noting, “The piece detailed the [C]hamber’s overseas memberships, but it provided no evidence that the money generated overseas had been used in United States campaigns.”

Labor unions are also major sources of funding for the Center and especially ThinkProgress. According to unions’ required filings to the Department of Labor, since 2009 unions have donated over $2.2 million to the two organizations. Unsurprisingly, The Center and ThinkProgress have provided fawning coverage of unions and endorsed policies the unions support, like the “card check” legislation and the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”). Additionally, the former Secretary-Treasurer of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Anna Burger, was named to the CAP Action board of directors in 2010. The SEIU has been one of the largest union supporters of CAP and its affiliates, with over $600,000 in total contributions.

Black Eyes

Corporate Interests

Unions aren’t the only groups that benefit from contributions with mutually interested advocacy support. CAP and ThinkProgress have also faced scrutiny for their silence toward retail giant Wal-Mart, uncommon in progressive circles. Both the liberal newsmagazine The Nation and the conservative Weekly Standard have reported that Wal-Mart had donated to CAP, and CAP touted Wal-Mart as a partner in the healthcare reform debate. (The Washington Free Beacon estimated the donations at over $500,000 over a ten-year period, citing a Wal-Mart webpage that is no longer active.) Wal-Mart, which had been singled out for an employer mandate in some states, was a strong advocate of a national mandate on employers much smaller than the multibillion-dollar corporation.

ThinkProgress Staff Accused of Anti-Semitism

ThinkProgress was embroiled in a controversy in late 2011-early 2012 over language its bloggers used to characterize the United States’ relations with Israel. The controversy began with a report by Ben Smith, then of POLITICO, on dissension within the liberal ranks on the issue of what to do about a possible Israeli-Iranian conflict. Smith quoted a CAP analyst writing at a ThinkProgress sub-site, Middle East Progress, comparing Israel’s Gaza policy to “segregation in the American south.” Unnamed ThinkProgress officials were reported as saying that the Center’s goal was to open political space to President Obama’s left; CAP denied the reports.

The policy firestorm stirred by the article led ThinkProgress bloggers to cross the line between legitimate criticism of the policies of the governments of Israel and the United States into anti-Semitism. Then-ThinkProgress blogger Zaid Jilani wrote on Twitter: “So DC ‘liberals’ are going to spend a lot of time defending Obama against the charge that he’s not supportive enough of Israeli apartheid.” The American Jewish Committee (AJC) responded, telling The Jerusalem Post that “References to Israeli ‘apartheid’ or ‘Israel-firsters’ are so false and hateful they reveal an ugly bias no serious policy center can countenance.” Jilani left ThinkProgress within the month, according to the Post.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a usually left-leaning watchdog against anti-Semitism, also objected to the appropriateness of some ThinkProgress staffers’ comments. It warned against characterizing Americans who supported closer alignment with Israel as “Israel-Firsters.” ADL recognized a ThinkProgress blogger who had done so for apologizing for his misdeed. Additionally, the ADL called “troubling […] an accusation in a blog that the Israel lobby was marching America to war against Iran as it did with regard to Iraq.”

Egregious Reporting Errors

ThinkProgress has published a series of weakly supported, when not outright false, hatchet-jobs on opponents of CAP and Democratic policies. During the 2008 Presidential campaign, ThinkProgress published an allegation that 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain had plagiarized a Navy admiral in one of his speeches, only to retract the story within 24 hours. (McCain had used the disputed fragment in a speech before the admiral did, and the text was available on McCain’s Senate website.) POLITICO reporter Michael Calderone characterized the blog’s decision to publish the allegations without requesting comment from the McCain camp or accessing McCain’s publicly available Senate speech text as “remarkable.”

A different ThinkProgress blogger alleged that David Koch—a benefactor of free-market causes and former Libertarian Party nominee for Vice President—had resigned from the “NIH cancer board” under pressure from Greenpeace after using his position to block the listing of formaldehyde as a carcinogen. As conservative blog Powerline.com details, almost none of that is true. Koch was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board in 2004, and his term expired in 2010. The board on which Koch served has no authority over the listing of carcinogens. ThinkProgress was forced to retract the claim that Mr. Koch resigned under Greenpeace pressure.

Alliance for Justice

Alliance for Justice is a group of over 100 progressive organizations focused on legal issues to advance the liberal causes of its members and donors. AFJ is best known for its Judicial Selection Project, which has turned federal judicial nominations into a highly partisan process. The Project encourages the rapid confirmation of Democratic-appointed judges while calling for Senate filibusters of Republican nominees. AFJ also provides legal assistance to left-leaning nonprofit organizations and foundations in order to help them in their advocacy and lobbying. AFJ has even advised its members to “take advantage” of the controversial Citizens United Supreme Court decision while simultaneously condemning the case in one of its First Monday films. Nan Aron, AFJ’s president, promised to engage in “scorched Earth” tactics to defeat a Republican president’s judicial nominees.

Background

Alliance for Justice (AFJ) was founded in 1979 by its current president, Nan Aron. AFJ grew out of the Council for Public Interest Law, which was formed in 1975. The June 1975 issue of the American Bar Association (ABA) Journal explains that the project was meant to be a two to three year joint venture funded by the ABA, the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, and the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation. One of the Council’s co-chairmen, Mitchell Rogovin, was at that time the general counsel for Common Cause, a liberal advocacy group. ??“Public interest” law firms began popping up in the 1960s to provide legal aid to underrepresented individuals and groups and to support environmental causes. The Council’s primary goal was to find more funding and support for these firms, thereby advancing liberal causes.

When Aron joined the Council in 1979, she pushed to change the organization. Aron’s original pitch to public interest advocacy groups asked if they would pay dues to become members of “an association devoted to representing their interests on issues affecting their funding or issues affecting the access of their clients to the courts.” One of the primary goals of the newly-formed Alliance for Justice was to block proposed reforms on payment of large attorney’s fees for public interest litigation brought by AFJ and its allies. The Wall Street Journal said that this funding scheme “could make the American taxpayer the largest single contributor to the ‘public interest’ movement.” AFJ succeeded in blocking the proposed reforms.

Over time, AFJ’s mission changed. Today, much of AFJ’s current efforts focus on the federal judiciary and the nomination process, as well as advocacy for nonprofit organizations.
Member organizations span a wide range of progressive causes, including nine environmental organizations, five abortion rights advocacy groups, three law school clinics, and two labor unions. AFJ took in over $3.6 million in 2011 and held over $5.4 million in total assets. AFJ has offices in Washington, DC and Oakland, CA.

Activities

Politicizing Judicial Selection

The Judicial Selection Project is probably the most well-known activity of AFJ. AFJ’s work in this area has helped make the U.S. judicial confirmation process more polarized and partisan.

AFJ’s Judicial Selection Project began in late 1984, when Newsweek reported that the AFJ-coordinated effort would “collect tips from local lawyers on possible candidates for the federal bench” and use the information “to mount full-fledged campaigns” against then-President Ronald Reagan’s appointees to the federal courts.

By 1987, AFJ had succeeded in turning the judicial nomination process into a political issue. Thanks to AFJ, “borking” is a widely known tactic in the judicial nomination process. The term is derived from AFJ’s scorched-Earth attack against D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bork, who was nominated to the Supreme Court by Reagan in 1987. Bork’s opponents bragged that they would engage in an “all-out frontal assault like you’ve never seen before.” Aron claimed that there would be a “mass mobilization,” a tactic that The Washington Post editorial board referred to as engaging in “a mud-pie contest.”

And mud-slinging was what AFJ did. Nancy Broff, then director of the Judicial Selection Project, claimed that “Bork is somebody, who, to sum it up very simply, would close the door to the courts for the poor and the powerless.” Aron claimed that in August of that year, AFJ was “in triple gear” and that AFJ “constructed much of the case” to oppose Bork. Aron even brought politics into the ABA’s rating process, telling The Washington Post that while at the association’s convention, “I think I’ve talked to every lawyer here.” And it paid off: the ABA, which founded AFJ’s predecessor group, split its vote in rating Bork “well-qualified.” The ABA panel rated him “exceptionally well-qualified” only five years earlier. A not-unanimous vote was rare and showed contention at the ABA, but nonetheless, Aron praised it as “wonderful news.”

The assault on Bork culminated with a statement by Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts:

Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists would be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.

This coordinated outrageous and personal attack forever changed the tone of judicial confirmations. Bork was not confirmed to the court, and AFJ had its first scalp. Since then, judicial selection has been a highly partisan battle rather than an honest debate about a judge’s qualifications for office.

Aron stressed the importance of making judicial selection a political matter. As she told The Washington Post in October 1987, “We applaud the fact that the process is political, and with more modern technology it’s become even more so with even more opportunities for Americans to let their concerns be known. I don’t think this is cause for alarm or dismay.”

Guiding Advocacy Groups

Although not as prominent as the judicial nomination campaign, the advocacy program of AFJ actually commands the largest amount of its operating budget–almost $2 million in 2011. “Bolder Advocacy: Change the World with Confidence” educates nonprofit organizations and foundations on ways that they can create change. The program offers guidance on what is allowable lobbying under IRS tax code. “Advocacy coaches” provide training and workshops for member organizations and other groups. The website offers several resources and tools, including tips on starting your organization, influencing ballot measures, organizational assessments, and community organizing resources. The Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and The California Endowment helped to start the Resources for Evaluating Community Organizing (RECO) tools. Others who assisted in the project include individuals from the Ford Foundation, Movement Matters, the Virginia Organizing Project, Discount Foundation, Center for Community Change, and Woods Fund of Chicago.

Promoting Liberal Causes Through Documentaries

The First Monday Campaign began in 1994 and features a new short documentary each year on an issue about which AFJ believes is important to educate law students and the public. Although there are AFJ member organizations that push these issues, several AFJ projects correlate with foundation donors.

AFJ is also interested in “educating” law students through its First Monday documentary series. Each year’s crop of new students is another group of future lawyers that can be convinced to work for AFJ’s and its members’ left-leaning causes.

In 2001, the Surdna Foundation contributed $100,000 to AFJ “[t]o continue building a national network of well trained, youth-led efforts to combat gun violence.” In 2000 and 2001, AFJ released America Up In Arms and Deadly Business:  How the Gun Industry and the NRA Market Mayhem to America, which discussed gun violence in America.

In 2009 AFJ received a grant of $40,000 from the John Merck Fund “To hold US officials who provided legal justification for torture accountable for their actions, to reform the government agencies that failed to prevent torture, and to engage the public in ongoing calls for accountability.” The First Monday film Tortured Law was released in 2009.

Lobbying for Liberal Agenda

The more direct lobbying done on behalf of public interest groups is accomplished by AFJ’s 501(c)(4) organization, Alliance for Justice Action Campaign (AFJAC). AFJAC, which was founded in 2004, engages in “lobbying and advocacy for a fair and independent judiciary, common-sense gun laws, and reasonable and efficient nonprofit tax and election laws.” In 2005 AFJAC received a $60,000 donation from the left-wing Tides Foundation. Because AFJAC is a 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization, AFJAC is not required to disclose its donors.

Motivation

AFJ initially concentrated on ensuring that public interest legal groups could still obtain large legal fees from the government in order to pursue its causes. The group saw this as an important aspect of its mission to ensure “equal access” to courts of law. But AFJ did not find it sufficient to merely get a case before a judge with the help of taxpayer funds. Rather, the organization began to focus on those judges who would determine the outcome of their cases.

After its initial success in thwarting Robert Bork’s Supreme Court nomination, AFJ has continued its aggressive tactics to attack the judicial nominees of Republican presidents. In turn, AFJ also supports most, if not all of the Democratic nominees to the federal bench, and has been critical of any delays in their confirmation. During Republican administrations, AFJ is most concerned with questioning the qualifications, fitness for office, and judicial philosophy of the nominees to the federal courts. During Democratic administrations, AFJ finds ways to discuss the “crisis” of judicial vacancies.

As a corporation organized in compliance with Section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, AFJ is not required to disclose its donors. However, some major donors can be identified from other required public filings. Left-leaning nonprofit foundations, including George Soros’s Open Society Institute, are some of the largest known benefactors to AFJ. This funding is sometimes given for general operating expenses, but may also be earmarked for specific projects. Since 2000, several foundations stand out in their support of AFJ.

• Ford Foundation: $3.36 million
• Atlantic Foundation: $2.45 million
• The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation: $1.81 million
• Open Society Institute: $1.6 million
• Richard and Rhoda Goldman Fund: $1 million

More recently, in 2010 and 2011, AFJ has received its largest foundation contribution from The Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, which donated nearly $500,000. Other major donations include two $225,000 donations from the donor-directed Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program; just under $384,000 in total donations from The California Endowment; $282,500 from the Ford Foundation, $100,000 From the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and $75,000 donations from the Arcus Foundation and the George Gund Foundation.

Black Eyes

Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill

Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas is only the second African American nominated to sit as a member of the highest court in America. But his July 1991 nomination to the Court stands out as one of the most contentious political and judicial battles in recent memory. Thomas was the target of a massive “borking” campaign by AFJ and its allies to keep him off the Court. AFJ worked directly with Senate Democrats in doing opposition research and in pushing sexual harassment rumors. The mud-slinging and callous treatment of Thomas even caused Arthur Kopp, president of People for the American Way, a liberal group that frequently worked alongside AFJ, to tell The Washington Post “I watch [the testimony] and I feel sick.” Kopp said “This process is going to poison the water for a long time… There is no one taking any joy in this.”

President George H.W. Bush nominated Thomas to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in 1990, and the Senate approved him, but not without threats of future challenges from AFJ. By the summer of 1991, George Kassouf, a top researcher for AFJ, had been researching Thomas for two years. Kassouf claimed to have conducted over 100 interviews and reviewed a millions of pages of documents on the future Supreme Court Justice. Carol Seifert, who was deputy director of AFJ, said that it had three people working on it, and tracked down leads from AFJ’s member organizations. Seifert said that AFJ would research Thomas, then “work with the [Senate] Judiciary Committee” to share the research on Republican nominees.

And when attacks against Thomas’s public record failed, allegations of sexual harassment by one of Thomas’s former co-workers, Anita Hill, would become the deciding factor in the confirmation hearings. In the racially-charged hearing that would follow, Law Professor Derrick Bell, credited as an originator of critical race theory, writing in Newsday, referred to AFJ as an “Orwellian interest group” and said that “[l]eft-liberals must save progressive politics” from groups such as AFJ.

There are several different accounts of how the Anita Hill story began to churn in the Washington rumor mill, but most all of them point to AFJ as the source. Articles in the ABA Journal, Newsweek, The Washington Post, and Newsday all stated that Aron received a call from one of Hill’s former Yale classmates and then passed along the information to the Senate Judiciary Committee—most likely to the staff of Senator Howard Metzenbaum. The May 1992 report by Senate Special Counsel Peter Fleming Jr. said that Aron passed the information to Judiciary Committee aides and that on October 2, 1991, three days before the media broke the story of Hill’s accusations, Aron called a Judiciary Committee aide and asked if Hill was ready to go public. The book Supreme Discomfort puts Kassouf front and center as being the first one to learn of Hill.

Contradictory on Citizens United

One of AFJ’s First Monday films, Unequal Justice: The Relentless Rise of the 1% Court, plays on the terminology of the “Occupy” movement to criticize the U.S. Supreme Court. The film proposes that the Court has taken “judicial activism to new levels” and favors businesses over individuals. One of the highlighted cases is Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2010), a controversial campaign finance law ruling that said unions and corporations have free speech rights and may spend money out of their own treasuries to make independent expenditures for or against candidates for office.

In the documentary, narrator Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of the liberal newsmagazine The Nation, explains that Citizens United is the “one case [that] stands alone as the most notorious Supreme Court decision favoring corporate interests.” The documentary shows video clips of protestors and explains that the decision is very unpopular. But the film leaves out two facts that would be important to AFJ members.

First, it fails to mention that unions receive the same First Amendment protections as corporations. As of October 2012, the National Education Association (NEA) and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), both labor unions, are members of AFJ. In 2011, SEIU gave AFJ a $10,000 donation and another union, the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) made a contribution of $5,000 and another $10,000 contribution as an event sponsor.

Second, Unequal Justice also does not mention that certain nonprofit corporations also receive free speech rights. This is especially important information for the dozens of nonprofit members of AFJ. But a review of AFJ’s website and projects reveals that it is very interested in these changes. On its Citizens United issues page, AFJ explains that:

What gets less attention, however, is the fact that labor unions and nonprofit organizations focused on the social good were also affected by the legal changes triggered by Citizens United. The same doors that opened for increased campaign spending by business interests opened for spending by groups like the Human Rights Campaign, the Sierra Club, and NARAL Pro-Choice America.

Furthermore, in its materials on electoral advocacy in the wake of Citizens United, AFJ states:

More than ever, nonprofit corporations can and should actively participate in elections. Even if you think the case was wrongly decided, 501(c)(4)s and other nonprofit corporations (except for 501(c)(3)s) should take advantage of it—use it to strengthen democracy by increasing your public communications about the candidates and what’s best for the future of our country. [Emphasis added]

Aron’s recent article in The Nation is also critical of “the implications of Citizens United” that have led to “the current onslaught of political ads funded by secret right-wing donors.” But in April of 2012, AFJ submitted comments to the Senate in opposition to the DISCLOSE Act, which would require greater disclosure by section 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) organizations, even with some exceptions made for 501(c)(3) organizations.

Hypocrisy on Judicial Selection

“You name it, we’ll do it.”

-Nan Aron in USA Today, Nov. 1, 2005, on opposing the nomination of Sam Alito to the Supreme Court.

The Alliance for Justice has made it clear that it will stop at nothing to halt the confirmation of judges who do not agree with its progressive worldview. Amidst the Thomas hearings in 1991, an AFJ staffer told Newsday, “Let’s just say that we get stories all the time [about nominees] and then you give it to the [Judiciary] committee.” Although AFJ claims to support an independent judiciary, it really means that it only favors judges appointed by Democrats. Much of Aron’s and AFJ’s opposition to candidates appears to be based not on judicial qualifications but by party affiliation and personal political views. It is especially curious considering the judicial record of many of those nominees.

In 1975, as president of The Women’s Legal Defense Fund, Nan Aron opposed the nomination of John Paul Stevens, who was nominated by Republican Gerald Ford. Aron stated in a  letter to the Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee that she “urges [him to] re-examine the credentials of Judge Stevens as to his fitness to serve on the Supreme Court and further urges [him] to vote ‘no’ on his nomination.” But by 2010, when Stevens retired, Aron praised Stevens after he turned left. In an AFJ press release, Aron said that he was a “tremendous force for fairness” on the Court and was “one of the Court’s most vocal and eloquent spokespersons for individual liberties, separation of powers, and equal access to justice.” There was no statement on his subpar qualifications to be found.

AFJ similarly questioned the nomination of David Souter, nominated to the bench by Republican President George H.W. Bush, going as far to say that, “Our conclusion is that Souter’s opinions and legal briefs threaten to undo the advances made by women, minorities, dissenters and other disadvantaged groups” and was highly critical of the terms he used to discuss abortion. AFJ formally opposed Souter’s nomination and said that the Senate should “resist the drumbeat” saying that Souter is a moderate. Of course, Souter’s record on the Court led most observers to agree that he was a liberal justice. And in the end, Aron also praised Souter’s record.

But partisanship has been the name of the game since early on in the project. Susan Liss of AFJ told The Los Angeles Times in 1985 that the organization’s goal is forming a “watchdog unit” for Reagan nominees so “that the judiciary remain an independent third branch of government and not so directly reflect the political views of the President.” In 1987, a New York Times article described the process by which the Judicial Selection Project drew up a memo “supporting the view that the Senate should consider ideology” of judicial nominees. But in 1999, in the San Francisco Chronicle, Aron said that “President Clinton has a duty to fill judicial vacancies and appoint jurists who share his views.”

Compare that to what Aron told The Atlanta Journal Constitution in December 2000, that in the expected battle of president-elect George W. Bush’s judicial nominees, “It will be scorched Earth… We won’t give a lousy inch.”

AFJ issued a statement only 27 minutes after Bush nominated John Roberts and accused Roberts of writing legal policy that would “weaken school desegregation efforts, the reproductive rights of women, environmental protections, church-state separation, and the voting rights of African Americans.” Chief Justice Roberts, who according to AFJ was a right-wing stooge, ended up casting the deciding vote to uphold President Obama’s Affordable Care Act.

AFJ has provided direct research support to Democratic Senate offices. David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America, once noted that “if one compares the Alliance for Justice’s critique of Thomas’s record at the EEOC with [Senator] Metzenbaum’s, the similarities are too striking to be mere coincidence.” In a 2005 profile of Aron, a Washington Post article quoted a staffer of Senator Ted Kennedy telling AFJ “Just keep sending us research.”

AFJ has enjoyed superior access to members of the judiciary committee when Democrats are in power. During the nomination of Brooks Smith to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals, Smith’s supporters were unable to supply their information to media, while AFJ handed out press releases. In the same hearing, it was reported that “a reporter accepting a pro-Smith press statement from a conservative group has her arm literally twisted behind her back by a male [Senator Patrick] Leahy aide who snarls ‘you can’t have that.'”

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AFJ has also been inconsistent in setting standards for professional and judicial experience. Perhaps the best example is the absence of this criticism with the nomination of Elena Kagan. Kagan told the ABA Journal in 2012 that her first appellate argument of any kind did not occur until she was Solicitor General and argued the Citizens United case in its second oral argument hearing before the Supreme Court. Kagan had no experience on the bench, limited appellate experience, and was a member of the Obama administration—which has actually caused her recusal from several cases.  And as law professor Paul Campos explained, the entire body of Kagan’s academic work as a professor consisted of three law review articles, two book reviews, and some short essays.

Nonetheless, Aron praised Kagan’s nomination in an AFJ press release, saying that Kagan had “sterling academic and professional qualifications.” Compare this to President George W. Bush’s nomination of Harriett Miers, who was the first nominee tapped to replace the retiring Sandra Day O’Connor. AFJ set out several standards that Miers had to prove, in detail, in order to be considered by the Senate. Among these were judicial experience and independence (questioned because of her close relationship with President Bush as personal lawyer and White House counsel). Aron complained of Miers’s “sparse public record” and said that “Her record is so thin and her views so unknown that it is incumbent upon the senators to ask probing questions.”

In 2010, it did not take long for many to draw the comparisons between Miers and Kagan. Instead, Aron told FOX News that “She couldn’t be farther from Harriet Miers in my view. She has stellar academic and professional qualifications.” 

AFJ’s support for use of the filibuster in the judicial confirmation process has waxed and waned over the years. In 2005, Aron consistently called for Senate Democrats “to stand up and say no” despite being in the Senate minority. Today, AFJ slams the “theater of the absurd” of Republicans filibustering or not approving judicial nominees made by President Obama. During the Clinton and Obama administrations, AFJ has argued that there is a “crisis” in the judiciary because of the delays in confirming those appointees.?

Earth First!

“It could have killed someone,” said San Diego fire captain Jeff Carle. Three workers sleeping at a construction site were able to escape after the terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF) set fire to an unfinished, 200-unit condominium development late one night in August, 2003.

A newspaper reported: “Flames leapt 200 feet into the air and could be seen for miles. Grapefruit-sized fireballs landed in courtyards and patios of adjacent buildings, and burning embers swirled in the night.” Nearby residents were evacuated and returned home to find their window blinds had melted from the heat. A 500-gallon fuel tank exploded. Damages were estimated at $50 million.

One local resident described the event for San Diego’s NBC affiliate: “Smoke was just coming straight at you. The flames were just all over. It was just terror.” A construction worker remarked: “I’m out of work now. Thank you, arsonist.”

A twelve-foot sign next to the arson site read: “If you build it — we will burn it — the E.L.F.’s are mad.” The Earth Liberation Front, along with its sister group, the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), have taken responsibility for more than 600 crimes since 1996, totaling more than $100 million in damages.

The Earth Liberation Front sprung from — and in many ways is still an arm of — Earth First!.

Earth First! (EF!) is a “warrior society” that takes a “by any means necessary” approach to “defending mother earth.” The group declines to participate in the democratic process, preferring instead to damage, disable, and destroy the property of its ever-growing list of enemies. EF! targets include, but are by no means limited to, loggers, ranchers, and farmers — especially those who grow genetically modified crops. Earth First!ers’ crimes include assault, arson, and untold acts of sabotage.

Before he quit in the late 1980s, the driving force behind EF! was a man named Dave Foreman. His book Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching is a how-to for environmental saboteurs. It includes nine chapters of instructions on subjects ranging from tree spiking to destroying roads, from disabling equipment to making smoke bombs. Rodney Coronado, an Earth First! zealot who was sentenced to 57 months in federal prison following a string of arsons, calls the book “our bible.”

A “Mainstream” Spin-off?

The legend of EF!’s founding involves five friends hanging out in the desert, drunk and high. They were inspired by Edward Abbey’s book The Monkeywrench Gang, which chronicles a gang of environmental zealots who sabotage oil, mining, and farming interests. A different story, one that doesn’t get told as often or as gleefully, was outlined by author Ron Arnold in Trashing the Economy:

Defectors from the environmental movement have told us that Earth First! founder Dave Foreman was approached by the Sierra Club and his employer, the Wilderness Society, in 1979 with an offer to fund a new extremist point group for the movement. It would serve the function of making their own demands look more reasonable … Defectors say that Foreman made the deal by himself in a comfortable Wilderness Society office, and accepted the offer on the condition that funding would be steady and adequate, and that his participation was a limited 10-year deal.

While this story is almost impossible to confirm, there is evidence for its veracity. Dave Foreman did quit EF! after about ten years. And comments from Foreman himself are revealing. Smithsonian magazine writes:

“We thought it would have been useful to have a group to take a tougher position than the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society,” Foreman remembers. “It could be sort of secretly controlled by the mainstream and trotted out at hearings to make the Sierra Club or Wilderness Society look moderate.”

In his own book, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, Foreman brags: “A major accomplishment of Earth First! … has been to expand the environmental spectrum to where the Sierra Club and other groups are perceived as moderates.” Foreman made the same point to Audubon magazine in 1982: “When I call the Sierra Club ‘namby pamby,’ that is done consciously to negate what [Secretary of the Interior James] Watt says when he calls them extremists.”

In the same Audubon article, long-time Sierra Club executive director and Foreman mentor David Brower argued: “The people that are easily named extreme make the people who were extreme seem suddenly reasonable.” Brower told E magazine:

The Sierra Club made the Nature Conservancy look reasonable. I founded Friends of the Earth to make the Sierra Club look reasonable. Then I founded Earth Island Institute to make Friends of the Earth look reasonable. Earth First! now makes us look reasonable. We’re still waiting for someone else to come along and make Earth First! look reasonable.

The Earth First! Journal

Every industry has its trade rags, and the leading magazine for the environmental fringe is the Earth First! Journal. Unsuspecting magazine browsers in mainstream bookstores might stumble across the Journal, which provides tactical information and motivation to saboteurs — while singing the praises of Earth First!ers who destroy fishing boats, genetically modified crops, and logging equipment.

The Journal features articles by some of America’s most violent eco-terrorists. One issue, for example, included an essay by convicted arsonist Jeffrey Luers about “Why I set a fire at [Eugene, Oregon’s] Romania Chevrolet.” The same issue included a treatise titled “The Non-violent Use of Gunpowder.”

“By every means necessary we will bring this and every other empire down! Mutiny and sabotage in defense of Mother Earth!” screamed another recent article condemning the war in Iraq. Elsewhere in that same issue: “A snitch is no longer entitled to basic expectations of safety. As such, it is righteous to hurt them, burn down their house or do similarly naughty things to them.”

In 2000, the 20th Anniversary issue of the Earth First! Journal bragged: “The simple idea of putting the earth first had drawn expanding crowds of hippies, anarchists, animal rights activists and all sorts of riffraff.” The kind of people who “riff” alphabet songs like this one:

I is incendiary, like burning ‘dozers

J is for jail time, and other enclosures

K is for kill, what they’ll do if they catch you.

In 2002, the Earth First! Journal published a two-page spread called “Most-Wanted Eco-terrorists: the Biotechnology Industry.” Claiming that “everyone at Monsanto is an eco-terrorist,” it opened with a line that has become emblematic of green radicals everywhere: “The Earth is not dying, it is being killed by corporations such as the biotechnology industries, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses.” The article then went on to list names and addresses.

“The Earth First! Journal Collective” wrote an open letter appearing in the Spring 2003 issue of the rag for Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC). One of the most violent groups of animal-rights zealots, SHAC has incubated the technique of harassing, threatening, and in some cases physically harming people who happen to work for a company they don’t like. The open letter read:

SHAC’s tactics and strategies need to be analyzed and implemented by the environmental movement. The results generated by SHAC’s actions are awe-inspiring, and the environmental movement needs to start paying attention.

The letter went on to describe how Earth First!ers have begun harassing “an ecoterrorist in our eyes” whose job it is to remove tree sitters safely from their perch:

In recent months, activists haven’t waited for Climber Eric to show up in the forest. They have visited his home, business and insurance company. At home, Climber Eric was not the same confident, controlled person that he is in the woods, where he is usually protected by his crew and local police. In fact, he was visibly distraught. For Climber Eric, this is just the beginning.

Several newspapers reported Rodney Coronado boasting that he “was no pacifist hippie, my actions speak louder than my words.” What the papers didn’t report was that those words were directed at “Climber Eric,” and, according to his employer, Coronado continued: “I’m coming to your door. Hey, do you got any food in your house? Don’t worry, I’ll go to your house and ask your wife.”

“Earth First! is a verb, not a noun.”

EF! works very hard to convince the public that its activities are not governed by any formal institution. “Earth First! is not an organization, but a movement” is the constant refrain. “There are no members of Earth First!, only Earth First!ers.”

There are practical as well as romantic reasons to downplay any organizational structure. According to the Earth First! Journal: “To avoid co-option, we feel it is necessary to avoid the corporate organizational structure so readily embraced by many environmental groups.” Of course, most green groups engage in legal activities — and therefore don’t fear “co-option.”

While there is no primary EF! office, there are numerous incorporated Earth First! organizations, each with its own specific function. These include Daily Planet Publishing (which publishes the Earth First! Journal), the Fund for Wild Nature (formerly the Earth First! Foundation), the Trees Foundation, and the Earth First! Direct Action Fund.

For the benefit of anyone who doubts that these are genuine, legal “organizations,” consider that the website of the Fund for Wild Nature once read: “The Fund relies on invididual [sic] contributors like yourself, and your friends. We accept donations of cash, stock or other financial assets.” Here is a tax-exempt foundation making a plea for corporate securities, on behalf of a group that claims to exist without any structure.

This non-organization, which preaches “no compromise in defense of mother earth,” is very much aware of who pays the bills. The Washington Times reports that Atlanta media mogul Ted Turner, who has personally contributed to radical environmental groups, gets a free pass from EF! militants:

While a timber-cutting operation was under way on one of his [Turner’s] ranches in 1998, members of the radical environmental group Earth First! instead protested timber cutting on a nearby ranch owned by Zachary Taylor, said private investigator Barry R. Clausen, who spent a year undercover at EarthFirst.

He asked a protester why the group did not include take on [sic] Mr. Turner, Mr. Clausen said, and was told: “We cannot. That’s where our money comes from.”

Mr. Clausen, author of “Burning Rage,” an investigation of domestic terrorism, said environmental groups’ nickname for Mr. Turner is “Daddy Greenbucks.”

“Ted Turner has canned hunts where you can shoot a buffalo … and drilling … in New Mexico and clear-cutting trees and he never gets protested. And when you ask why, it’s because he is one of the biggest contributors to extremist groups,” Mr. Clausen said.

Interlocking, Interrelated Radicals

If you want to contribute money to EF! and get a tax break on your donation, send your check to the Fund for Wild Nature (FWN). Formerly named the Earth First! Foundation, FWN serves as a tax-exempt pass-through for money to reach Earth First!ers. It has funneled hundreds of thousands of dollars to EF! organizations.

FWN has doled out money to the Earth First! Journal, Mendocino Earth First! and North Coast Earth First! (California), Elaho Earth First! (Canada), Wild Rockies Earth First!, Arizona Earth First!, and many others. More often, though, the Fund gives to EF! groups that don’t have the words “Earth First!” in their names — like the Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters (BACH). BACH’s leader is Karen Pickett, whose arrest record hasn’t prevented her from holding the purse strings for the Earth First! Direct Action Fund.

Another FWN beneficiary is the Cascadia Forest Alliance (CFA). According to Bear Deluxe magazine, “Former Earth First! members conceived the CFA as a fresh organization for combating Salvage Rider cutting in Oregon. Since then, hundreds of people — including Portland’s Tre Arrow, who gained local fame when he spent 11 days protesting the sale from a second story ledge at the Forest Service headquarters in Portland — have occupied the tree-sits at Eagle Creek.”

“Tre Arrow,” whose real name is Michael Scarpitti, graces the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list. He was indicted by a federal grand jury in October, 2002 for a string of arsons, including the torching of three cement trucks. The government has offered $25,000 for information leading to his arrest. Although Scarpitti is still on the loose, law enforcement officers spotted him in 2003 near Arcadia, California — accompanied by none other than Rodney Coronado.

Coronado argues that EF! is part of one big happy family, along with the FBI’s most feared domestic terrorist groups, the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front: “Whether a member of a Headwaters nonviolent affinity group, Cascadia Forest Defenders or the Earth Liberation Front,” Coronado wrote in a 2001 essay, “all Earth First!ers should recognize the positive value of each other’s contributions and exploit the leverage they create against our common opponent.”

FWN provided the initial support for EF! spin-offs like the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Ruckus Society, both of which were started by Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle. Indeed, FWN thinks of itself as the venture capitalist of radical environmental groups.

The Fund for Wild Nature is by no means Earth First!’s only source of revenue. For example, the Dogwood Alliance, which claims to believe in “peaceful” tactics, has funneled money to Katuah Earth First! and other groups that work with Earth First!.

Earth First! founders Dave Foreman, Bart Koehler, and Howie Wolke are now board members, officers and/or founders of other environmental organizations. Those include: the Alliance for the Wild Rockies (Wolke); the Ecology Center, Inc. (Wolke); the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance (Foreman); the Wilderness Society’s Wilderness Support Center (Koehler); and the Wildlands Project, a.k.a. North American Wilderness Recovery, which recently merged with the Cenozoic Society (Foreman).

“Direct Action” on Your Dinner Plate

In 1999 FWN began to bankroll “direct action” against biotech crops (although Earth First!ers began targeting them as early as 1987). The now defunct Bioengineering Action Network (BAN) received FWN money. When it was functioning, BAN served as a press-outreach service for the FBI-certified domestic-terrorist Earth Liberation Front (ELF), another Earth First! spin-off. BAN’s website featured a how-to guide for tearing out biotech crops (they call it “nighttime gardening”) and instructed saboteurs on how to “research your target.”

1999 was also the year that Al H. Jacobson, founder of the avowedly anti-biotech crops organic food line Garden of Eatin’, gave FWN $54,500. Jacobson’s Naturganic Foundation kicked in $200,000 to FWN for 2000. In those years, Jacobson was by far FWN’s biggest donor.

Earth First! makes your dinner more expensive by practicing economic sabotage on cattle ranchers as well as farmers who raise genetically enhanced crops. The EF!-founded and FWN-funded Buffalo Field Campaign, for example, uses “direct action” to block government officials from keeping buffalo in and around Yellowstone Park from passing on the contagious disease brucellosis to nearby cattle. As of December 2002, at least 21 Buffalo Field Campaign activists have been arrested — quite a rap sheet for a tax-exempt group.

But even EF! draws a line between the kind of illegal activities that can be funded with tax-exempt money, and those that are too violent for the Fund for Wild Nature to touch. Cash for these endeavors comes from the Earth First! Direct Action Fund. Bragging that “thousands of EF!ers have been arrested around the world,” the EF! Direct Action Fund’s website appeals for donations:

Direct action requires courage, commitment, training and the ability to focus on an urgent issue. Unfortunately, it also requires money. Since 1985, The Earth First! Direct Action Fund (DAF) has assisted in planning, coordinating, and funding activists on the front lines. These people are the backbone, indeed the heart and soul, of the Earth First! movement.

Earth First! co-founder Mike Roselle registered the Earth First! Action Fund as a California business in 1990, with the Action Fund’s address listed as “C/O Rainforest Action Network,” another Roselle creation. He lost control of the checkbook in settling his divorce from fellow Earth First!er Karen Pickett. But that hasn’t stopped Rainforest Action Network from supporting Earth First! groups. On one occasion, RAN donated “$10,000 of general support to Luna Media in their work with North Coast Earth First!.”

Yet another Roselle group, the Ecology Center in Montana, is also active in funding Earth First! activities. In the 1990s the Ecology Center poured more than $20,000 into Earth First!’s Cove Mallard anti-logging campaign in Idaho. The Ecology Center also supports the Buffalo Field Campaign, the Earth First! Journal, and the legal defenses of Rodney Coronado and something called the Buffalo Action Project, or BAP!

BAP! appears to be little more than a support system for a woman named Delyla Wilson. Wilson gained fame in 1997 after she dumped a five-gallon bucket of rotting bison innards on a panel of senior government officials who were discussing how best to manage Yellowstone Park’s buffalo herd. Her victims included Dan Glickman, then President Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture, Marc Racicot, then Governor of Montana, and Montana Senators Max Baucus and Conrad Burns.

Another Fund for Wild Nature grantee is New West Research, a New Mexico anti-ranching group that produced the “Animal Damage Control Hall of Shame.” A more appropriate name would have been the “New Mexico Hit List.”

New West Research sued the federal government under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the names and addresses of all New Mexicans who had petitioned the Wildlife Service to help control predators on their property. New West proceeded to post this information — 25 pages in all — on its website. At the top of this “Hall of Shame” was the familiar line: “The earth is not dying — it is being killed. And the people killing it have names and addresses.”

When criticized for inciting violence against ranchers and farmers, New West responded: “That’s the same kind of whining we hear from pedophiles and crack dealers who don’t want their identities known to the public.”

The Earth First! Octopus

There are several hundred Earth First! organizations in America, and at least 50 in other nations. Most of them use the words “Earth First” in their title, but a cheat-sheet might be helpful for those Earth First! entities that go by other names. Bear in mind that many Earth First! organizations rapidly form around a cause, and then disappear. As a result, a complete list of Earth First! organizations is impossible to compile. However, when you see the following names, think Earth First!

Blue Mountains Biodiversity Project

Cascadia Forest Defenders

Coastwatch

Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers

Cove Mallard Coalition

Daily Planet Publishing, Inc.

Direct Action Fund

Earth Defense Education Project

End Corporate Dominance

Environmentally Sound Promotions

Friends of the Wolf

League of Wilderness Defenders

Redwood Action Team

Warrior Poets Society

Zero Xtract from Public Lands

The Earth First! Journal includes a section called “EF! Campaigns and Projects.” The following organizations have graced that list in recent years:

Bioengineering Action Network

Cold Mountain, Cold Rivers Video Project

Earth Liberation Prisoners

EF! Action Update

North American ALF Press Office

ELF Press Office

Earth Liberation Front

North American Earth Liberation Support Network

The Earth First! Journal has listed the following groups as “contacts”:

Arizona Wildlands Museum

Autonomous Zone

Biodiversity Liberation Front

Blue Mtns. Biodiversity Project

Boxcar Books and Community Center

The Brokedowns/Elgin Food Not Bombs

Cascadia Forest Alliance

Cascadia Forest Defenders

Church of Deep Ecology

Confluence/St. Louis IMC

Direct Action Network

Environmental Resource Center

Fairfax Action Team

Flagstaff Activist Network

Foghorn

Forest Ecosystems Action Group

Green Vigilance

Lawrence Grassroots Initiative

Liberated Zone Infoshop

Lost Cause Collective

Mass Direct Action

Mountain Eco-Collective

New Mexico Direct Action

Oceandream Media Foundation

Pink Planarians

Popular Power

Project Harmony

Rustic Revolt

Shuksan Direct Action

Slingshot

Solidarity Books

Stone Soup Collective

Tornado Alley Resistance

Unci Maka Uonihanpo (Honor Mother Earth)

Wild Wasatch Front

Wilderness Defense

The following EF!-named groups have been listed by the Earth First! Journal as contacts:

Alachua EF!

Allegheny EF!

Bay Area EF!

Big Bend EF!

Boundary Waters EF!

Buffalo Trace EF!

Croatan EF!

Dallas EF!

East Texas EF!

EF! Austin

French Broad EF!

Gainesville/Ichetucknee EF!

Houston EF!

Kalmiopsis EF!

Katúah EF!/River Faction

Katúah EF!/Tennessee Valley Faction

Katúah Foothills EF!

Kekionga EF!

Lake Erie EF!

Lake Worthless EF!

Loon Antics EF!

Love Canal EF!

Madison EF!

Maine EF!

OFF!

Olympia EF!/Cascadia Defense Network

Peninsular Ranges EF!

Phoenix EF!

Red Gate EF!

San Juan EF!

Santa Cruz EF!/EF! Radio

Seattle EF!

Shawnee EF!

Sonoma County EF!

Teewinot EF!

Tucson EF!

Two Rivers EF!

Uwharrie Earth First!

Wild Rockies EF!/Wild Rockies Review

Yellowstone EF!