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This article is part of the Center for Media & Democracy's spotlight on front groups and corporate spin.
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A front group is an organization that purports to represent one agenda while in reality it serves some other interest whose sponsorship is hidden or rarely mentioned -- typically, a corporate or government sponsor. The tobacco industry is notorious for using front groups to create confusion about the health risks associated with smoking, but other industries use similar tactics as well. The pharmaceutical and healthcare industries use front groups disguised as "patients rights" advocates to market their products and to lobby against government policies that might affect their profits. Food companies, corporate polluters, politicians -- anyone who has a message that they are trying to sell to a skeptical audience is tempted to set up a front group to deliver messages that they know the public will reject if the identity of the sponsor is known.
The shadowy way front groups operate often makes it difficult to know whether a seemingly independent organization is actually representing some other entity. That's why we need your help to research and expose them. Using the resources that we have listed here, it is often possible to identify publicize the hidden sponsor who lurks behind a front group. We need you to help in the search.
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Video ads by the Center for Union Facts portray union organizers as thugs who invade workers' homes to intimidate them into joining.
The Center for Union Facts is a secretive front group for individuals and industries opposed to union activities. It is part of lobbyist Rick Berman's family of front groups including the Employment Policies Institute. The domain name www.unionfacts.com was registered to Berman & Co. in May 2005.
Campaigns
In May 2006 the Center for Union Facts, launched its first TV ad campaign. The 30-second spot, running on Fox News and local markets, has "actors posing as workers" saying "sarcastically what they 'love' about unions," like paying dues, union leaders' "fat-cat lifestyles," and discrimination against minorities. The ad campaign cost $3 million, which was raised "from companies, foundations and individuals that Mr. Berman won't identify." [1]
The group planned to film another TV ad in June 2006. Labor and economics professor Harley Shaiken said the effort "to create an anti-union atmosphere" more generally, as opposed to business-funded ads against a particular union organizing drive or strike, "is a new wrinkle." An AFL-CIO spokesperson called the ad's accusations "unfounded and outrageous." [2]
In June 2007, the group campaigned heavily against the Employee Free Choice Act, legislation which "would give employees at a workplace the right to unionize as soon as a majority signed cards saying they wanted to do so." The Center for Union Facts has spent "$500,000 on newspaper and broadcast advertisements this week alone," reported the New York Times on June 20, 2007. [3] The group's print ads for the campaign compared union leaders to Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, calling the bill a "scheme to eliminate workers' right to a secret ballot." [4]
The Center for Union Facts is behind the billboards with the web site TeachersUnionExposed.com which have been put up around Newark, New Jersey[5].
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- APCO Worldwide, a PR firm affiliated with the law firm of Arnold & Porter, has created front groups for the tobacco industry such as The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition and Citizens Against Lawsuit Abuse. Other tobacco industry front groups have included Associates for Research in the Science of Enjoyment, the Beverly Hills Restaurant Association, the California Political Empowerment Committee, Contributions Watch, the European Science and Environment Forum, and the Hospitality Coalition for Indoor Air Quality.
- Former Arkansas Governor and U.S. presidential candidate Mike Huckabee raised money to support his political career through a tobacco-funded front group called Action America.
- Lexington Communications, a PR firm based in the United Kingdom, has sponsored pro-biotechnology organizations in the UK including the Agricultural Biotechnology Council and CropGen.
- Alaska's Future is a front group created to promote a natural gas pipeline on behalf of companies including ExxonMobil, BP and ConocoPhillips.
- America's PAC, a conservative political action committee, has one of the top ten election-season advertisers in American markets, featuring vitriolic attack ads that attempt to discourage African-Americans from voting at all. Using a group that is not formally affiliated with the Republican Party to engage in negative campaigning is a tactic designed to minimize public backlash against this type of negative campaigning.
- The American Center for Voting Rights actually campaigned to make it harder for Americans to vote, under the guise of preventing "voter fraud."
- Funded by the chemical and food industries, the American Council on Science and Health campaigns to defend sugar, pesticides and chemical additives in foods.
- With funding from Enron, a group called Americans for Affordable Electricity campaigned in the 1990s for deregulation of the electricity market in the U.S., undermining the reliability of the electricity supply and trigging rising electricity prices and blackouts in California and the northeastern states of the US.
- Americans for American Energy, a front group created by Pac/West Communications to campaign for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, attempts to link environmental concerns to terrorism, accusing "liberal lawyers and environmental extremists" of subverting "America's access to vital energy supplies."
- Bureaucrash, an anti-regulatory website targeting a youth audience, is actually a project of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a corporate-funded think tank.
- Some front groups like to use the word "responsible" in the name they choose for their organization, usually as a weaselly way of positioning themselves to advocate against the cause that the rest of their name seems to support. Examples include the Canadian Coalition for Responsible Environmental Solutions (which opposed environmental action to prevent global warming); the Citizens' Alliance for Responsible Energy (which advocates expanded oil drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge); and the Coalition for Responsible Healthcare Reform (created in 2007 by Blue Cross of California to oppose health care reforms being pushed by Democratic lawmakers and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger).
- The "AB 32 Implementation Group": A Wolf in Green Clothing
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In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, the "Global Warming Solutions Act," which requires the state to bring its greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Since then, a coalition with the helpful-sounding name the "AB 32 Implementation Group" has appeared, claiming to represent green businesses and a broad section of California interests focused on global warming regulations. The Implementation Group's Web site features photos of white clouds and flowers, and the organization is being managed by a big public relations firm, Woodward & McDowell. In truth, the Group actually represents 22 of California's biggest carbon polluters (as ranked by the California Air Resources Board), and, according to environmentalists and lawmakers, is engaged in a steady campaign to undermine the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Even some of its own member businesses were surprised to learn that the group was trying to negatively impact the global warming law. The PR firm Woodward & McDowell has a history of working with the tobacco industry to defeat clean indoor air laws and working with polluting industries to defeat environmental measures. In the 1990s, it helped defeat California's Proposition 128, also known as "Big Green," which would have enacted a number of environmentally-friendly measures related to pesticides, water quality and old-growth forests. The Group's co-chair said in an interview that she supports suspending AB 32, saying "It will add significant costs to manufacturing, particularly in the electricity side." A chief sponsor of the Group is California's Chamber of Commerce, and its membership includes the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Tesoro, Valero and BP.
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- Wal-Mart's Hidden Cashroots Advocacy Exposed in Chicago
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Wal-Mart creates front groups such as Working Families for Wal-Mart and also hires hidden public relations operatives to create the appearance of grassroots support. Kevin Robinson of Chicagoist.com, a Web site about Chicago, reports that in Chicago, support for Wal-mart
"... is being manufactured by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, a local PR powerhouse, and by Wal-Mart itself. A few weeks ago, a series of posts that I wrote attracted the attention not only of our regular readership, but also people that don’t normally visit our site on a regular basis. One reader in particular, going by the login 'Chatham,' took issue with the subject matter of the posts, but also with the arguments that Wal-Mart opponents have made. ... I checked out the URL that was associated with Chatham’s comments (OurcommunityOurChoice.com) and discovered it's a website promoting the opening of a Wal-Mart in Chatham ... . Then I looked up the IP address and found the comments were made from an IP address associated with Serafin and Associates ... the Chicago-based consulting firm that Wal-Mart has retained to manage its public relations campaign in Chicago. That includes push polling done last summer in Chicago. ... Michael Mini, the Government Relations Director at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce ... told me that Wal-Mart is indeed a member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce ... I asked him if he was familiar with Serafin and Associates. 'Yes, we have worked with them in our strategy sessions. We’ve worked with [Thomas] Serafin and his team.' When I told him that our site had gotten comments from the email address that led me to him and asked if he knew that it was being used to comment on blogs, he said 'no, not that I’m aware of.' Are you surprised that an IP address from Serafin was being used that way? 'No, not in particular.' Why not? 'I really can’t comment without looking into it further.' ... While Wal-Mart certainly has the right make its case to Chicago, the way they’ve gone about this -- creating a fake community group that purports to represent a community's residents and interests - is sneaky and underhanded."
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- Secret Money Abounds in Health Reform Fight
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 Reporter Dan Eggen quotes CMD in a review of how special interests have attempted to influence health reform: "It's sort of like money-laundering their PR," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the group that operates PRWatch.org "A lot of these groups are heavily funded by corporations and then don't reveal it. They try to imply that they are funded primarily by individuals, but that's clearly not the case." As Eggen notes, interest groups working to influence health reform legislation have jointly contributed a record $200 million to advertising campaigns to sway lawmakers, but figuring out just who these groups represent is often tricky. Many purposely adopt names that obscure their origins, and the law requires they only reveal minimal information, like overall revenue and expenses. Support for these groups is coming from industries with a financial stake in the debate, unions or charitable foundations with a political bent, helping enrich previously obscure groups. The Institute for Liberty, for example, was previously a one-man operation that in 2008 pulled in under $25,000 in revenue and had only a post office box. Now it operates out of a downtown D.C. office and is running a $1 million anti-health care reform advocacy campaign. The group's president, Andrew Langer, refused to offer any information about the group's leap in funding. The Parternship to Improve Patient Care was created by the drug industry in 2008 to oppose medical effectiveness studies that might help determine what health insurance companies must cover. The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is an offshoot of the Pacific Research Institute, which has taken money from Philip Morris, Pfizer, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The anti-government group Americans for Prosperity, that was instrumental in organizing the raucus "tea party protests," has been connected with the conservative Koch Family, owners of the largest private energy company in the U.S Click on this next link to see who else makes up the Tea Party movement .
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- Patton Boggs Runs Pro-War Front Group for Hamed Wardak and NCL Holdings
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The Campaign for a U.S.-Afghanistan Partnership is being exposed as an insidious pro-war front group. Aram Roston reports in the The Nation magazine that "As President Obama prepares a massive military buildup in Afghanistan, a House subcommittee has launched an investigation into whether Defense Department contractors are paying off the Taliban to protect American supply lines. ... One of the contractors under investigation is NCL Holdings, a U.S. firm headed by Hamed Wardak, the Afghan-American son of Afghanistan's defense minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak. ... Parallel to his business ventures, he's been running an aggressive foreign policy campaign in Washington to keep the U.S. heavily vested in Afghanistan. A confidential lobbying memo obtained by The Nation shows that Wardak commissioned a blue-chip lobbying firm to push for an extended U.S. presence in Afghanistan -- a potentially lucrative outcome for NCL. Earlier this year Patton Boggs LLP, Washington's most monied lobbying firm, established a nonprofit front group (Campaign for a U.S. - Afghanistan Partnership) on Wardak's behalf to act as the 'face' of a campaign for increased US engagement in Afghanistan, according to confidential legal records." Blogger Steve Hynd first reported critically on this front group in a posting on October 29, 2009.
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- "Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare": Yet Another Health Insurance Industry Front?
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According to the Associated Press, "Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare" (AQAH) is a "secretive" group that organizes "below-the-radar" activities to drum up opposition to health care reform. AQAH is opposed to a government-run public health insurance option, but supports a mandate to require all citizens to purchase health insurance -- views that happen to exactly match those of the health insurance industry. The group's Web site contains no address, telephone number or other contact information. AQAH is operated by one of the largest law firms in North Carolina, Moore and Van Allen. A spokesman for the law firm, Matthew French, refused to disclose the group's funders, and would say only that "They want to stay in the background and off the front page ... They want the message to be the important thing."
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