Corporations have moved beyond merely setting up bogus "grassroots" organizations to back their legislative goals. Now they're establishing their own "watchdog" groups. Recently, the political research organization, Contributions Watch, was paid by Philip Morris to produce a study revealing that trial lawyers were major political campaign contributers. The study was used to promote "tort reform" -- a code phrase for the campaign to shield corporations from product liability lawsuits stemming from their manufacture of potentially unsafe products.
