The Way of the Astroturf III: 12 million everyday Americans

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. The Way of the Astroturf III: 12 million everyday Americans. Intl. J. Inact., 1:185–186

From an article by the Heartland Institute:

The American Environmental Coalition (“AEC”), a broad-based coalition of 12 million everyday Americans who are concerned about America’s future and working to keep America beautiful, strong and prosperous [...]

Meanwhile, the AEC web site states,

[...] AEC seeks to bring balance to the debate [on environmental policy] by being an alternative source of reliable information to Americans who seek the best way forward for our country.

I guess it’s always interesting when there’s a “broad-based” grassroots organization which is at the same time also an “alternative source of reliable information”, i.e. a wonky ‘academic’ think-tank. Very very interesting, eh isn’t it?

(To add to the fun, the AEC’s whois records show that its administrative contact is Belinda Rankin of Frontiers of Freedom — another right-wing think-tank. And the “12 million” figure, as far as I can tell, was concocted from thin air.)

* * *

With this, I now bring you an updated diagram of think-tanks, which now includes the AEC, the FoF and also the National Center for Policy Analysis. You can view the diagram by clicking on the nice-looking kanji.

The Caliph instead of the Caliph

cite as: F. Bi. 2008. The Caliph instead of the Caliph. Intl. J. Inact., 1:176–177

This isn’t new, but it turns out that the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Tennessee Centre for Policy Research, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, and lots of other think-tanks are members or associate members of an organization called the State Policy Network. (I’ve updated the diagram of think-tanks accordingly.)

Now, on to the new stuff. On the SPN site there’s a document titled New Media Mania which gives advice on how free-market think-tanks should design their web sites in the, um, Web 2.0 era. It contains this: