Notorious Astroturf Pioneer Rick Berman Is Behind Business Group's Anti-Labor-Board Campaign

[Triana]

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"I've worked hard and played by the rules to make my franchise business a success," Ganahl said in an ad that ran on all three networks, as video showed her fawning over a golden retriever. "Now, unelected bureaucrats at the National Labor Relations Board want to change the rules. As Americans, we deserve better. Tell Washington, 'No.'"

Bankrolled by a free-market advocacy group called the Job Creators Network, the ad painted a sympathetic picture of a business owner struggling against onerous regulations imposed by the NLRB, the agency that enforces labor law and has long been a conservative target. But lurking behind the anti-NLRB campaign is a notorious PR operative and astroturf pioneer who encourages his corporate clients to "win ugly or lose pretty" and who says he wakes up each morning trying "to figure out how to screw with the labor unions."

The consultant, Rick Berman, is well known in political circles for funneling anonymous corporate money into vicious ad campaigns attacking various advocacy groups, such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Humane Society of the United States, which he has accused of spending a minuscule amount of their donations on their stated missions. Berman, who heads the DC-based communications firm Berman and Company, typically launches his offensives through a network of front groups. He has used these organizations to fight regulations governing food safety, animal cruelty, workplace safety, secondhand smoke, and even tanning beds, and in the process keeps his corporate funders anonymous.

"We run all of this stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors," Berman bragged in an October speech that was secretly taped and shared with the New York Times. "There is total anonymity." His brash M.O. has earned him a nickname—Dr. Evil—that Berman appears to relish.

THE REST: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/03/rick-berman-job-creators-network