Sticking Up for the Big Guys

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted February 17, 2006.

Page through a recent copy of the New York Times or Washington Post, and you're likely to find quite a few articles on the unethical goings-on of lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But the great irony is that those articles are often sandwiched between misleading ads funded by an even more brazenly corrupt lobbyist who has evaded the law for decades.

One of these full-page ads proffers something called "the new union label." The graphic features a "closed" sign hanging over a padlocked fence. "Brought to you by the union 'leaders' who helped bankrupt steel, auto, and airline companies." In the bottom right corner is the website "UnionFacts.com," with the slogan, "The facts they don't want you to know."

If you missed the quarter-million-dollar ad campaign, perhaps you caught the giant, inflatable dinosaur installed outside AFL-CIO headquarters, with picketers sporting signs: "AFL-CIO: Colossal Fossil," "Smart Union Leaders: Extinct?" and "Labor Leaders: Dis-organized."

Who is behind the campaign? It's actually nearly impossible to tell who's behind the Center for Union Facts. While you can read extensively about the nonpartisan, educational motives of the site, what appears only once on the site, buried in a press release is Richard Berman's name. Yet it is Berman, the Washington lobbyist for the tobacco, restaurant and beverage industries, who is behind the high-visibility campaign.

A former labor law director for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Berman served as vice president of the restaurant chain Steak and Ale as well as the Pillsbury Restaurant Group before founding his own lobbying group, Berman & Co.

Berman's work on behalf of his clients -- among them Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Tyson Foods, Philip Morris and Hooters -- includes opposing the Americans with Disabilities Act and arguing against increases in federal minimum wage. Berman also helped defeat legislation that proposed a lower blood-alcohol threshold to qualify as drunken driving (In response to the MADD campaign, Berman said, "I don't believe that having a glass of anything makes it unsafe to go behind the wheel.") And his clients? Monsanto, Coca-Cola, Tyson Foods, Philip Morris, Outback Steakhouse, Hooters, Red Lobster, just to name a few.

Berman is talented enough that he can apparently serve as both an industry lobbyist and "consumer advocate," protecting our rights to ingest whatever those industries send our way.

But the AFL-CIO labor union believes UnionFacts.com is in fact a front group designed to stealthily aid business groups. AFL-CIO spokeswoman Esmerelda Aguilar sent AlterNet a document stating in part:

Unionfacts.com is a project of the Chamber of Commerce, according to an anonymous source. In a meeting of the State Chambers of Commerce National Conference held on Sanibel Island in Florida on Jan. 26, the Chamber announced it was spending $8 million a year to launch this anti-union website.

Berman's rebuttal to this charge, as reported by the New York Times, is that "when he spoke at the conference, [Berman] neither asked for nor received contributions. Rather, he said, he asked chamber officials to recommend that businesses in their states donate to his efforts."

It's this kind of sly language, hinging on technicalities, that has kept the origin of the anti-union smear campaign under wraps. And though Berman has come under considerable criticism, he carries on undeterred, telling the press:

This is just the beginning of a major education campaign about union leadership ... We're going to tell everyone the facts that labor leaders don't want you to know.

The allegedly nonprofit Center for Union Facts is not the first front that Berman has established to advance his clients' cause. While Berman runs the for-profit Berman & Co., he is simultaneously at the helm of his nonprofit called "The Center for Consumer Freedom" (CCF). CCF is the group behind FishScam.com, a site that purports to tell you, based solely on your weight, how much albacore tuna (FDA and EPA be damned) you can safely eat. "We'll tell you what the scaremongers won't," proclaims the site.

The CCF started as the "Guest Choice Network," which got off the ground thanks to nearly $1 million in funds from Philip Morris. In the next two years, the tobacco titan pumped $2.1 million more into the "nonprofit" to keep it rolling. From this consumer advocate platform, Berman put out newsletters that gave consumers the "real facts" -- promoting the safety of EPA-opposed pesticides.

The nonprofit fronts that Berman has established funnel money into his for-profit Berman & Co. Raw Story columnist Nancy Goldstein reports on the CCF's finances:

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is an editorial fellow at AlterNet.