This could turn out to be a bigger story than the ballot measures themselves, I think, if only for the $5,000 fine for each call. If everyone who got one of the illegal calls registered that fact with the Attorney General's office -- using the handy-dandy form available at the AG's website -- the collected fines alone might plug some holes in the state budget.
As I have noted before, Carla Axtman at BlueOregon deserves much credit for digging deep into the corners of the campaign to defeat Measures 66 and 67 in Oregon. "Another day, another pile of crap to wade through from the anti-tax-fairness cabal," Axtman wrote last night. "This time, it's illegal robo-calling."
It would seem the local chapter of Americans Prosperity (who also sticks their fingers in their collective ears on global climate change and rallies teabaggers against reforming health care before it bankrupts the country and is responsible for killing more Americans) decided to illegally call Oregonians whose numbers are on the National Do-Not-Call Registry. AFP's Oregon spokesperson Jeff Kropf and State Senator Brian Boquist (R-Dallas) apparently made the calls.
The "Yes For Oregon" campaign filed an official complaint with Oregon Atty General John Kroger against AFP, Kropf and Boquist.
The AG has sent a letter to AFP telling them to cease immediately and scrub their lists of Oregonians whose names appear on the registry. Not doing this in advance is illegal--but it's also just stupid and lazy. Calling people who have gone out of their way to be listed on the do-not-call list is just pissing off potential voters.
First -- because this is serious stuff and could generate a lot of money at the expense of some pretty bad actors in Oregon's political environment -- go here if you know you were on the do-not-call registry and you got one of these robo-calls illegally, and fill out the email complaint form. If you want to print out the pdf and send it in, do that here. If you want or need to talk to someone in person at the AG's office, call them: 378-4320 from Salem; 229-5576 from Portland (toll free), and 1-877-877-9392 elsewhere in Oregon (toll free).
I've written plenty about the ballot measures themselves.
This latest mention of Americans for Prosperity rekindled my curiosity about who they are. You don't have to search far to find out; a simple search at DailyKos of AFP tags over the past four years yielded more than 6,000 hits. Without trying whatsoever to be comprehensive, here's a bit of what I learned.
Last September, blogger JoesGarage wrote about Nancy Pfotenhauer, the director of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.
Pfotenhauer easily moved from the Bush Administration into the heady worlds of right-wing policy wonkery, conservative lobbying hackery, and corporate funded special interest think tankery. Eventually she emerged as the "Washington Director"--read lobbyist--for Koch Industries. In 2001, she moved over to the conservative think tank Independent Women's Forum, and currently directs the conservative think tank Americans for Prosperity Foundation. (These two foundations/think tanks share office space and staff and are essentially interchangeable. But hey, multiple positions help to give the old resume some pizazz.)
Both Americans for Prosperity and the Independent Women's Forum are funded in large part by foundations controlled by Koch Industries, a large conglomerate held by two brothers, Charles and David Koch. Indeed, the Kochs are the patron saints of the netherworld of conservative "intellectuals" generally, and Nancy Pfotenhauer specifically. The Koch brothers are two very edgy, very rich, libertarians. (Depending on the metric used, Koch is the 1st or 2nd largest privately held conglomerate in the United States.)
Originally founded in Texas by Charles and David's father, Fred Koch--a charter member of the John Birch Society--as an oil delivery company, Koch grew into a oil and natural gas delivery, trading and refining business. Eventually, Koch diversified into other extractive and extraction-related industries. Koch owns both Georgia-Pacific, a huge lumber and paper concern, and the chemical-fiber giant, Invista (a company that brought you--among other products--Teflon).
Wait a minute.... Wasn't the John Birch Society incubated in Orange County, California, whose recent resident N. Christian Anderson III is now the publisher of The Oregonian? The Southern Poverty Law Center says so:
And it was in Orange County that the John Birch Society, named after a Baptist missionary killed by Chinese communists, really took off, spreading its message of impending communist revolution and United Nations plots to destroy the U.S.
I wonder what interaction there may have been -- or may be -- between the Libertarian-rooted Orange County Register's former, longtime editor and publisher, and the leaders of the present-day John Birch-influenced Americans for Prosperity? I don't know that there are any, but I know that people who live in the same community for many years often see one another in the grocery store, if nowhere else. And if they happen to know the same people and believe the same things, then it's likely that the grocery store isn't the only place they happen to meet. It's just a good question to ask.
JoesGarage goes on:
There are many of these Koch financed think tanks--perhaps the most celebrated being the Cato Institute--including the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, headed today by Nancy Pfotenhauer. What is the AFPF's mission? Here's how the "non-profit" describes itself:
"[AFPF is] a nationwide organization of citizen leaders committed to advancing every individual's right to economic freedom and opportunity. AFPF believes reducing the size and scope of government is the best safeguard to ensuring individual productivity and prosperity for all Americans. AFPF educates and engages citizens in support of restraining state and federal government growth, and returning government to its constitutional limits."
So Americans for Prosperity is funded by the same people who fund the Cato Institute and the Independent Women's Forum, and the same people who own the first- or second-largest privately-held company in America. But they don't show up as residents of Oregon, so why are Americans for Prosperity's funders funding robo-calls in Oregon?
Sue Sturgis at DailyKos suggests there's a much vaster right-wing agenda at work here, stretching all the way to North Carolina and across several issues, including the Employee Free Choice Act.
One of the directors of Americans for Prosperity is North Carolina millionaire businessman and former state legislator Art Pope. He funds a network of pro-business think tanks that was behind an effort to scuttle efforts to address global warming in North Carolina, as we reported in our 2007 Facing South investigation titled "Hostile Climate."
Americans for Prosperity has also been active on labor issues in North Carolina, where it's fighting the Employee Free Choice Act, which would make it easier for workers unionize. Today the N.C. NAACP is holding a press conference to highlight the fact that the group is a front for big business. (For more on what's happening in North Carolina, check out Blue South's diary.)
Blogger David A Love ties Americans for Prosperity pretty tightly to the teabagger movement of the past year. He wrote at DailyKos last April,
From an organizational point of view, the tea parties are a prime example of "astroturfing", top-down machinations operating under the guise of a faux grassroots movement—like a phony, conservative version of MoveOn.org, but operated by a corporate puppetmaster. In this case, as was reported in The Atlantic and ThinkProgress, they are being led by corporate lobbyist-run, Republican-affiliated front groups and think-tanks: FreedomWorks, a conservative action group led by former U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey; the free-market group Americans For Prosperity, and the online-oriented, free-market group DontGo Movement, which was born out of last year’s offshore drilling debate in Congress. These organizations are writing the press releases and talking points, thinking up the ideas for the signs, setting up the conference calls, you name it.
Americans For Prosperity operates through the generosity of philanthropies such as the ultra-conservative Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation (which bankrolled Ward Connerly’s anti-affirmative action ballot initiatives, and The Bell Curve author Charles Murray), and the pro-oil drilling Koch Family foundations.
In accordance with the interests of Armey’s client base, FreedomWorks has lobbied for the privatization of Social Security, and the deregulation of the life insurance industry. It supports the status quo in America’s use of fossil fuels, and has lobbied against healthcare reform. Further, FreedomWorks has received funding from telephone giants Verizon and AT&T, and has opposed net neutrality legislation that would keep the Internet democratic and open. One FreedomWorks funder is the Scaife Foundation, from Richard Mellon Scaife, key patron of the American Right.
Yet another blogger, AmericanRiverCanyon, tied Americans for Prosperity to the national tobacco lobby in a report he posted in August:
David Koch also is the chairman of the board of his own astroturfing teabag grassroots group, "Americans for Prosperity." "Americans for Prosperity" also fronts for Phillip Morris in fighting Tobacco and smoking regulations. In a particularly cynical move, Americans for Prosperity had the nerve to send representatives recently to a Susan G Komen Race for the (Breast Cancer) Cure to hand out leaflets for "health care reform" that was actually a link to their "O Campaign for Cancer Prevention. " Looking up their facebook page, this "reform" consists of cutting taxes, less business regulation, and fiscal responsibility.
So it's not a coincidence that Oregonians Against Job Killing Taxes is run by Mark Nelson, a tobacco lobbyist?
And in July, Scott Gibbs connected AFP activists to the disruption in town hall meetings across the country, then targeting health care reform but employing "hit-and-run" tactics to "rattle" public speakers and create chaos. Gibbs footnotes his work and supplies ample links to source documents:
A leaked memo(3) from Bob MacGuffie, a volunteer for the lobbyist-run organization FreedomWorks(4), shows clearly that they, along with similar groups like Americans for Prosperity(5), have systematically invaded(6) local town hall meetings in an effort to invent the appearance of mass opposition to certain Democratic reform agendas.
These are the people making illegal robo-calls into Oregon?
Again, I ask: Why?
One more thing: I'm not a regular reader of the Wall Street Journal, mainly because it's considered Scripture by a "church" I don't attend. So I might have missed the editorial it published -- was it an editorial or an article? is there a difference in the WSJ? -- on Oregon's ballot measures if it wasn't for the American Prospect and a really funny point it made today. Apparently, the WSJ's editorticle asserted that "big numbers are being wielded on both sides" as a way to skate past the finer points of the proponents' arguments and to avoid having to subject the opponents' position to national scrutiny.
But Dean Baker of the American Prospect caught that assertion and heard bells in it.
WSJ on Oregon Tax Vote: "Math is Hard"
When it came to evaluating arguments on Oregon's initiatives to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations, the WSJ told readers that: "big numbers are being wielded on both sides." This is of course true, however WSJ reporters in principle have the time and expertise to determine which numbers are correct, most readers do not.
Specifically, it could have pointed out to readers that the 11 percent state income tax that would be paid by the richest residents of Oregon, if the measures pass, is a marginal tax. This is the tax rate that Oregon residents would pay on income in excess of $500,000 a year. It also would have been worth noting that Oregon has no state sales tax. This means that the Oregonians pay considerably less for most goods that they buy than do people in other states.
It also would have been worth noting that if the tax increases do not take place then Oregon will be required to cut spending and lay off workers in the middle of a steep recession. This will worsen the downturn and lead to higher unemployment.
Just having said that I don't read that paper, a friend of mine forwarded me a link to read and -- you guessed it -- it's a WSJ blog post.
Okay, this means something. When the right-wing's church publishes in its Bible an editorticle on Oregon's tax measures, it means that the notion of Oregonians taking charge of their own democratic processes has roused a slumbering East Coast giant's attention. But when that church turns its parish priests loose to quote Phil Knight on its blogs, and in such shrill language, it means that the slumbering giant smells a new direction in the wind, and it's turning on the fans to repel it.
There is just too much other economic and regulatory uncertainty. Do you think the small businessmen of New York, New Jersey and California are eager to add to their payrolls as their states grapple with bankruptcy? Or what about Oregon? Tomorrow that state will vote on Measures 66 and 67 which would hike personal and corporate income tax rates to make up for budget shortfalls. This is the kind of stuff that just kills small businesses.
Here’s Nike founder and famous Oregonian Phil Knight on 66 and 67: "They should be labeled Oregon’s Assisted Suicide Law II...They are anti-business, anti-success, anti-inspirational, anti-humanitarian, and ironically, they will deprive the state of tax revenue, not increase it."
Why is it that this all seems so obvious to Phil Knight and to me and to millions of other Americans, but not necessarily the President of the United States?
"But anything was better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die! — and now — again — hark! louder! louder! louder! LOUDER!"
Yes, that's the Wall Street Journal, quoting Phil Knight and Edgar Allan Poe in the same breath, an illustration of the pain that occurs when billionaires are asked to part with one or two more ducats.
Here's a question for the editors of the WSJ: What do the editors of the Daily Astorian know that you don't? I ask because THOSE editors urged their readers to support the measures today, saying they "make abundant sense."
Saying "no" will trigger budget cutting that will inevitably shrink social services at a time of great need, and cause another round of cuts in the schools. Measures 66 and 67 are aimed at the wealthiest individual taxpayers and at some businesses.
The nonpartisan Legislative Revenue Office calculates that 2.5 percent of Oregon income tax filers would be affected by Measure 66. Even with the tax increase on some businesses in these ballot measures, Oregon will remain a relatively low tax-burden state for business. We urge "yes" votes on measures 66 and 67.
As if to illustrate perfectly the imbalance of this picture, the WSJ has its readership of thousands, maybe tens of thousands, to hear its caterwauling choir, while a young woman blogging in Oregon today has only those who drop by her blog, like me. I don't know her, but her note reflects what I suspect a lot of folks are thinking today:
so tomorrow is the day that decides my fate. tomorrow the last day to vote on measure 66 and 67 in oregon that will determine if program’s like the one i now hold a job at will continue to receive funding and run a business. taxes are being raised so that corporations will pay more money to keep social services up and running. if the measures are passed with a "yes" then we stay open and i can keep my job, hopefully until whenever i choose to leave. if they get a "no" then our company loses our funding and will begin the process of shutting down and losing most of our client base by this summer. which means me losing my job, probably first since i’m #1 on the hit list right now apparently.
so that’s exciting. just another thing to add to the uncertainty that seems to intrude on every aspect of my life right now.
...
...i would really like to keep my job for awhile longer. i love my co-workers and their crazy selves. and my clients and their talents and surprises. ... if it’s just for those reasons alone i hope i get to stay here longer.
She reminds us that through all the squawking by Oregonians Against Job Killing Taxes about the threat of job cuts in the private sector, there are also public-sector jobs that will be affected by the measures' outcome. Are the jobs in one category somehow more important than the jobs in another category?
Excelsior, folks. And if you've not yet sent in your ballots, get to those drop boxes. Deadline is tomorrow night at 8, and "almost" voting doesn't count.