Irony: Far-left ThinkProgress Takes Foreign Funds, But Media Yawn
In October of last year, the far-left blog ThinkProgress alleged - with exactly zero evidence - that the Chamber of Commerce was illegally using money collected from foreign corporations to fund its American political activities. The charge was breathlessly repeated by major media outlets, including the New York Times and MSNBC.
Well it turns out that the Center for American Progress Action Fund, the organization that runs ThinkProgress, itself takes money from foreign sources.
Surely CAPAF has adequate controls in place to prevent money acquired from foreign donors from being funneled into its electioneering activities (right?), but it was ThinkProgress itself that mere months ago was demanding that the Chamber reveal its own inner workings to hostile political observers to prove such constraints existed. A number of media personalities, most notably MSNBC's Chris Matthews and Ed Schultz and the folks at the New York Times editorial board, were happy to play along with the baseless smear campaign.
The Center for Competitive Politics unearthed ThinkProgress's breathtaking hypocrisy in a Thursday blogpost, first noting an excerpt from a Politico article on donations from wealthy Bermudans to liberal American political groups.
The Atlantic Philanthropies has emerged in recent years as a key, quiet funder of the institutional left, providing the money behind, among other groups, the health care outfit Health Care for America Now.
The organization has kept a low profile in part because its funder, duty-free shopping magnate Chuck Feeney, doesn't appear particularly interested in pubicity. Feeney's foundation is a giant donor in a number of regions around the world, including Northern Ireland; but he and the Atlantic Philanthropies are based in Bermuda, with the consequence that -- through a quirk of tax law -- they can freely finance the 501(c)4 organizations that play in politics, which American family foundations can't do.
The CCP did some digging, and discovered some very interesting facts about Atlantic Philanthropies.
Bermuda is a British territory, meaning this is a foreign entity. And if we're going to go full-on xenophic [sic] about it, it should probably be noted that the company founded by Feeney (and therefore is the origin of the funds given away by Atlantic Philanthropies), the Duty Free Shoppers Group, was started in and retains its headquarters in Hong Kong, once upon a time a British territory and now under control of the Chinese government.
So, which U.S. based organizations do the foreign-based and foreign-funded Atlantic Philanthropies support? The foundation helpfully provides a list and a searchable database, and it turns out that the highly political Center for American Progress (CAP) and Center for American Progress Action Fund (CAPAF) received $1,653,000 in five separate grants in 2008 and 2009, most of that going to CAPAF.
Well isn't that ironic. In short, we can allege that the Center for American Progress Action Fund uses foreign money to influence elections with precisely the same amount of evidence provided by ThinkProgress in its accusation that the Chamber was doing the same.
So why aren't Ed Schultz and Chris Matthews and the New York Times editorial board all over the story? As of Friday morning, none of them had even mentioned these latest revelations.
Surely they were truly concerned with the integrity of US elections, and weren't just using ThinkProgress's smear as a cudgel against Republican-friendly political groups. That would make them simple shills for the Democratic Party, but Chris Matthews has already informed us that his show is "totally nonpartisan," so that can't be the case.
Since the Times and MSNBC are most certainly not mere extensions of the Democratic Party - though they should feel free to correct us on that score if we're mistaken - we'll expect to see these same commentators demand ThinkProgress divulge the means by which they prevent foreign money from financing their electioneering activity. If they don't, well, you can draw your own conclusions.
- Lachlan Markay's blog
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Comments
You're way out of line in
Submitted by classicliberal2 on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 1:33pm.
You're way out of line in portraying the ThinkProgress work from last year as a "baseless smear campaign." The Chamber of Commerce was spending huge amounts of money ($75 million) on the various congressional campaigns from entirely undisclosed sources. That, alone, should be a major scandal. It is a fact that the Chamber takes money from foreign sources, and it's a fact that this same money goes into the same fund that was paying for all that campaigning. Any reasonable person, and, more to the point, any responsible press outlet would, at that point, be asking questions. That's just a matter of responsible citizenship. Characterizing it as a "baseless smear campaign" suggests a degree of partisanship that clouds all reason.
If you're a 'responsible citizen' as you claim,
Submitted by SickofLibs on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 1:59pm.
then I assume you are also calling for an investigation of the boatloads of foreign/undisclosed money Obama For America harvested.
The FEC IS investigating that
Submitted by classicliberal2 on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 3:33pm.
They're always unbelievably slow, but they usually get to the bottom of these things. They deal with matters of legality, though, which is a much narrower question than that of propriety.
Obama For American returned thousands of dollars in attempted foreign donations, and at least seems to have made a good-faith effort to avoid them. The Obama campaign's money from undisclosed sources mostly came from small contributions, which don't legally have to be disclosed. The argument in favor of this state of affairs is that it's simply too much work to disclose every person who might give $5 to the cause, and that makes sense, but we should always keep a critical eye to ANY money from an undisclosed source (the 2010 congressional campaigns were an abomination, in this respect). Unfortunately, we don't even keep an eye on the money that IS disclosed, and though everyone instinctively knows that money is what dictates everything of meaning in government, no one seems to like to acknowledge it (the apparent lack of interest in this thread today is an example--if it was an article about gay marriage or some other hot-button "issue" of little real consequence in the larger scheme of things, there would be three dozens responses to it).
SoL---
Submitted by matthewdean on Fri, 05/20/2011 - 7:15pm.
classicliberal2 is so proud to be a lib that he/she is on it's second version.
Musta wore out the first embodiment working so hard at rabble rousing and afflicting the comfortable (rich) while comforting the afflicted (welfare weenies and illegal aliens).
Sounds pretty much like a run-of-the-mill Obama admin apologist to me.
With the exception, maybe, of detailing what "we" should do to make life more amenable through accountability regarding money and politics.
Do I detect an oxymoron in the phrase "--if it was an article about gay marriage or some other "hot button" issue of little real consequence in the greater scheme of things" ?
MD