Reply #3: Expose The Bastards! More on CEI.... [View All]

[leftchick]

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Competitive_Enterprise_Institute

Competitive Enterprise Institute
From SourceWatch
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) calls itself "a non-profit, non-partisan research and advocacy institute dedicated to the principles of free enterprise and limited government." The Boston Globe has called it "one of Washington's feistiest think tanks." CEI's commentaries frequently appear in media venues such as ABC's 20/20, American Spectator, Christian Science Monitor, Consumers' Research, Crossfire, Forbes, Good Morning America, Larry King Live, MacNeil/Lehrer News Hour, Moneyline, New York Times, Policy Review, PBS, Reader's Digest, USA Today, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and Washington Times. It postures as an advocate of "sound science" in the development of public policy. In fact, it is an ideologically-driven, well-funded front for corporations opposed to safety and environmental regulations that affect the way they do business.

CEI says its main activities are media interest group education, coalition building, policy analysis, advocacy, and litigation. It publishes a newsletter, the CEI Update, as well as various reports with titles such as, "Clean Fuels, Dirty Air, Environmental Politics." Ongoing programs include:

A Death by Regulation project (sometimes referred to as its "Free Market Legal Program") aimed at "shifting the policy debate" about environmental regulations by making the argument that "government intervention carries its own deadly consequences." It claims, for example, that automobile emissions standards drive consumers to buy smaller, flimsier automobiles, causing more deaths from car crashes. Similarly, it argues that there are "adverse public health effects of medical drug regulation and nutritional labeling." Drug regulations, it says, keep new medications off the market. As for nutritional labeling, it believes that wine makers should be able to advertise that wine consumption prevents heart attacks. However, there should be no requirement for labeling of milk from cows treated with genetically-engineered bovine growth hormone.
The Warren T. Brookes Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, named after a now-deceased economist and marketing executive turned conservative newspaper columnist and author of books such as The Individual as Capital and What is Progressive About Taxation? The Brookes Fellowships are "yearly appointments granted to journalists to enable them to research, study and write about private and public approaches to environmental protection. During their Fellowship, appointees are also expected to contribute to the environmental public policy debate through speaking engagements, media interviews and other activities.

An Environmental Policy Program, which claims to focus on "the development and promotion of free market approaches to environmental policy."

CEI belongs to various conservative alliances, including the Alliance for America, Get Government Off Our Backs, Townhall.com, the National Consumer Coalition (a pro-corporate front group headed by Frances B. Smith, the wife of CEI founder Fred Smith), and the Environmental Education Working Group (EEWG), a national umbrella group for organizations working to undermine environmental education in schools. It is linked to the UK-based rightwing thinktank, the International Policy Network, via shared staff and an identical US contact address. It also sponsors several other subsidiary organizations, including: