Abramoff’s Toxicity Spreads to Right-Wing Think Tanks
posted on: December 19, 2005
The slime oozing from disgraced and indicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff has seeped into some of the nation’s most prominent conservative think tanks, including the Cato Institute and the Institute for Policy Innovation. Collectively, those two organizations brought in $5.1 million from foundations over the past several years.
Eamon James covers the latest dimension to the Abramoff scandal in “Op-Eds for Sale,” which appears in the December 16, 2005 edition of BusinessWeek. In this article, James describes the relationship between Abramoff and Doug Bandow, who writes a column for the Copley News Service and was (until last week) a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. Over the past decade, Abramoff paid Bandow around $2,000 each for “12 to 24” columns that cast Abramoff’s lobbying clients and their policy positions in a favorable light. Bandow resigned from Cato last week, and claims that the think tank had no knowledge of his arrangement with Abramoff. Copley has suspended Bandow, pending its own investigation of the matter.
In the Institute for Policy Innovation case, Peter Ferrara, a senior policy adviser at the Institute, admits that he also received money from Abramoff to write op-eds that are favorable to Abramoff’s clients. According to James, Ferrara stated, “I do that all the time. I’ve done that in the past, and I’ll do it in the future.” Tom Giovanetti, the Institute’s president, agrees with Ferrara, stating this practice is not wrong or unethical. Hmmmm…what’s that saying about “absolute power…”?
