Powerful Right-Wing Groups Are on a Stealth Mission to Make America Look Like Texas

Continued from previous page

* * *

The pattern seen in the online education debate has been duplicated to pass corporate tax cuts, reductions to health and education programs, a rollback in state environmental laws, and other corporate and conservative priorities. In places like Minnesota and Louisiana, the playbook has been deployed to provide telecom companies with a greater monopoly by pushing to outlaw municipal fiber-optic broadband networks, a faster, cheaper alternative for consumers. (Notably, Comcast and Time Warner Cable helped sponsor the last State Policy Network retreat.) 

When the Free State Foundation, a Maryland affiliate of SPN, testified in Congress in opposition to so-called net neutrality rules, which prevent Internet providers from setting discriminatory download and upload speeds based on content, the National Cable and Telecom Association quietly provided the small think tank with a grant of $85,000. 

In 2010, when the Texas Public Policy Foundation filed similar comments to the FCC in opposition to net neutrality, the think tank received $76,500 from AT&T and $34,950 from Verizon, according to a leaked donor list. 

Meanwhile, several family foundations financed by Koch Industries—a firm that produces chemicals and transportation infrastructure for hydraulic fracturing (better known as fracking) and horizontal drilling for oil and natural gas—have helped with State Policy Network’s expansion. In turn, SPN think tanks from New York to California have attacked bills intended to create state-level regulations over fracking. 

* * *

State Policy Network was founded on March 24, 1992, in South Carolina by Thomas Roe, a wealthy businessman, Reagan adviser and leader of the South Carolina Policy Council, a state think tank modeled after the Heritage Foundation. Now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, SPN began as an effort to mobilize more than twenty state think tanks. Political Research Associates, a left-leaning investigative team, reported that the group quickly became a “government-in-waiting” for the wave of Republican governors elected in 1994. As SPN affiliates proposed broad tax cuts and privatization schemes, the Republican governors frequently hired policy professionals from the think tanks to help enact those ideas. 

Though backed by some of the largest Republican donors in the country, including the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, SPN also thrived in the 1990s by assisting the tobacco industry in packaging its resistance to tobacco taxes and health regulations as part of a “freedom agenda” for conservatives. 

Sharp herself gained experience working at this nexus of influence. Records stored with the University of California, San Francisco, reveal that Philip Morris not only gave generous financial donations to SPN affiliates, but was heavily involved in drafting and disseminating content for the think tanks. Before assuming her current position, Sharp served as executive director of the Cascade Institute, a State Policy Network affiliate in Oregon. The UCSF archive shows that during her tenure, the Cascade Institute corresponded with Philip Morris’s state lobbyist in Salem on promoting opposition to tobacco taxes, including one instance where Cascade published an opinion piece by a doctor. The doctor’s column, which was faxed to the Philip Morris representative, warned that high cigarette taxes could lead to “drive-by shootings and mob-style assassinations—turf wars—over the control of black market cigarette sales.”

At a 2001 meeting for SPN, Sharp invited Joshua Slavitt, Philip Morris’s director of external affairs, to give a talk. “I know that many of you have worked with Philip Morris,” Slavitt said, according to a prepared text, adding: “It won’t surprise you that we believe it is in our enlightened self-interest to be part of the policy discussions that ultimately shape the environment in which we do business.” He ended his speech with specific recommendations for SPN leaders in requesting corporate contributions.