◼ Leak reveals secret corporate cash behind Obama-allied think tank... - Bill McMorris/Washington Free Beacon
A liberal think tank with close ties to the Obama administration took money from General Motors and other businesses it did not disclose while campaigning for policies benefitting those companies, according to The Nation magazine.
Members of the “Business Alliance” of the Center for American Progress (CAP) include bailed out car company GM, unsafe Bangladeshi factory utilizer Walmart, and embattled solar energy company First Solar, according to a membership list obtained by the liberal magazine.
CAP, whose chairman is Democratic Party power player John Podesta, was a major proponent of the auto bailout, which used $50 billion of taxpayer money to spare GM a traditional bankruptcy.
The month before GM entered bankruptcy proceedings with the backing of the federal government, CAP posted an article titled, “As General Motors Goes, So Goes the Nation.”
◼ The Secret Donors Behind the Center for American Progress and Other Think Tanks - Ken Silverstein/The Nation
Last year, when First Solar was taking a beating from congressional Republicans and in the press over job layoffs and alleged political cronyism, CAP’s Richard Caperton praised Antelope Valley in his testimony to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce, saying it headed up his list of “innovative projects” receiving loan guarantees. Earlier, Caperton and Steve Spinner—
a top Obama fundraiser who left his job at the Energy Department monitoring the issuance of loan guarantees and became a CAP senior fellow—had written an article cross-posted on CAP’s website and its Think Progress blog, stating that Antelope Valley represented “the cutting edge of the clean energy economy.”
Though the think tank didn’t disclose it, First Solar belonged to CAP’s Business Alliance, a secret group of corporate donors, according to internal lists obtained by The Nation. Meanwhile, José Villarreal—a consultant at the power-
house law and lobbying firm Akin Gump, who “provides strategic counseling on a range of legal and policy issues” for
corporations—was on First Solar’s board until April 2012 while also sitting on the board of CAP, where he remains a member, according to the group’s latest tax filing.
