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America and lost his party on this episode of BookNotes Plus with our host Brian Lamb. | |
| BookNotes Plus is available on the C-SPAN Now free mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. | ||
| Democracy. | ||
| It isn't just an idea. | ||
| It's a process. | ||
| A process shaped by leaders elected to the highest offices and entrusted to a select few with guarding its basic principles. | ||
| It's where debates unfold, decisions are made, and the nation's course is charted. | ||
| Democracy in real time. | ||
| This is your government at work. | ||
| This is C-SPAN, giving you your democracy unfiltered. | ||
| A conversation now on think tank funding with Ben Freeman. | ||
| He's a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. | ||
| And Ben Freeman, we should probably start this conversation by explaining what the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft is. | ||
| Are you a think tank? | ||
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unidentified
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We are indeed. | |
| And first of all, thank you so much for having me. | ||
| And the Quincy Institute is a, it is a think tank. | ||
| It is a nonprofit, nonpartisan. | ||
| We sometimes call ourselves an action tank because we're not just there thinking, we're trying to get stuff done. | ||
| And really our purpose is to reduce the militarization of U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| And critical to our discussion today, we try to call out some of the special interests that are driving U.S. foreign policy. | ||
| How is the Quincy Institute funded? | ||
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unidentified
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We are funded in a lot of different ways. | |
| We have a lot of small donors. | ||
| We have big donors. | ||
| We have foundations. | ||
| Critically for our purposes, we are not funded by foreign governments. | ||
| We are not funded by the U.S. government. | ||
| And we are not funded by defense contractors. | ||
| And so this really frees us up, we think, to offer kind of a clear, unbiased view of the U.S. foreign policy process. | ||
| Is that unusual? | ||
| Are most think tanks taking money from one of those three places you just mentioned? | ||
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unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| We are, in many cases, we are on an island at the Quincy Institute. | ||
| We're surrounded by other think tanks in D.C. who do take money from foreign governments, the U.S. government, and defense contractors. | ||
| Many think tanks take considerable amount of funding from all three of those entities. | ||
| What is the think tank funding tracker? | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you so much for asking that. | |
| To me, it's a labor of love. | ||
| It's something we've been working on for almost a year now. | ||
| And it's a publicly available website where anybody, any of our viewers here, our friends in the media and friends in Congress can go to find out how the top think tanks in the U.S. are being funded. | ||
| It provides painstaking details about that funding, what year funding was received, which specific, if it's a foreign government, which foreign government that is, what branch of that foreign government that money came from, and whenever possible, the exact dollar amount of that funding. | ||
| What should viewers know about the Atlantic Council? | ||
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unidentified
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Many, many things. | |
| But I think what they can find in the Think Tank Funding Tracker about the Atlanta Council is that they're heavily funded by foreign governments. | ||
| We actually found that the Atlanta Council receive more money from foreign governments than any other think tank in the U.S., more than $20 million from foreign governments in the past five years. | ||
| They're also one of the top recipients of Pentagon contractor funding, too. | ||
| They get a lot of money from the very top defense contractors. | ||
| And sort of what we see with the Atlanta Council is this huge money, huge amount of money coming in from some of these foreign governments and some of these defense contractors. | ||
| And what we tried to do a little bit was to trace that back to work the Atlanta Council was doing. | ||
| And what we found was in some cases, it appeared that the Atlantic Council was making recommendations that would benefit some of those funders. | ||
| Who are the foreign governments that give the most money to American think tanks? | ||
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unidentified
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By and large, it's America's allies. | |
| It's our Democratic friends. | ||
| It's our friends in NATO. | ||
| It's places like the United Kingdom, Canada are some of the top donors. | ||
| If you look at the top 10 most generous donors, it's mostly filled with democratic regimes that are allies of the U.S. | ||
| However, the very top foreign government donor to think tanks was the United Arab Emirates. | ||
| They gave more than any U.S. allies. | ||
| And the UAE is an authoritarian regime. | ||
| It's been complicit in war crimes in Yemen and in Sudan, too. | ||
| They're helping to fund the RSF there, which was recently declared a genocide. | ||
| So in many cases, the UAE is a very destabilizing regime. | ||
| And yet we see them donating millions and millions of dollars every single year to the top foreign policy think tanks in the U.S. | ||
| We also see in that list too, other authoritarian regimes like Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And the third highest foreign government donor to think tanks was actually the government of Qatar, which is another authoritarian regime in the Middle East. | ||
| It's got its own human rights issues to deal with, its own destabilizing behavior. | ||
| You know, both Qatar and the UAE have been caught red-handed, illegally meddling in the U.S. political process, too. | ||
| And yet Qatar, just like the UAE, is giving millions of dollars every year to think tanks in the U.S. | ||
| So we think it's important for folks to know about this and to have a clear-eyed vision of all the cards on the table when they're looking at analysis coming from think tanks that receive funding from these authoritarian regimes. | ||
| The numbers from your report, and this is available at quincyinst.org, this report that we're talking about, the United Arab Emirates over the course of a four-year period, nearly $17 million given to U.S. think tanks. | ||
| The United Kingdom, $15.5 million. | ||
| Qatar, $9 million. | ||
| Canada, $8.6 million. | ||
| Germany, $8.5 million. | ||
| How were you able to track this money? | ||
| How easy was it to come up with these numbers? | ||
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unidentified
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It was anything but easy. | |
| It was painfully hard, in fact. | ||
| Here's the thing about think tank funding is that think tanks aren't actually required to disclose their funding. | ||
| And we actually found, we looked at the top 50 think tanks and we found that more than a third, 18 of them, they disclose absolutely nothing about their funding. | ||
| We call these dark money think tanks. | ||
| And, you know, we see that as very problematic. | ||
| But amongst the think tanks who do disclose this information, in most cases, we get sort of a partial transparency that they might release the names of their funders, but no dollar amounts, or they might release some dollar amounts, but you get these wide ranges. | ||
| You don't really know exactly how much funding is coming in. | ||
| But to get that information, we had to scour their websites, annual reports, financial documents. | ||
| You named it, anything that they've released that was publicly available where we could track down this information. | ||
| We did. | ||
| And at thinktankfundingtracker.org, you can even see some of our sources there. | ||
| For every one of these donations, you can see the source where we got this information. | ||
| But it was really, really hard to do. | ||
| And as I mentioned, this whole process took almost a year to put together. | ||
| And so one of our big goals with this is we'd like your viewers to be able to not take a year to unearth some of these conflicts of interest, to be able to very quickly just go to our website. | ||
| And if they have a suspicion about somebody might have a conflict of interest, might have some baggage, they can really quickly go to our website and look that up in a hurry. | ||
| So they don't have to be a nerd like me and pour through all these annual reports. | ||
| A few minutes ago, we mentioned the Atlantic Council. | ||
| The Atlantic Council has a donor acceptance policy. | ||
| This is how it reads. | ||
| Acceptance of any contribution is at the discretion of the Atlanta Council. | ||
| Accordingly, each is subject to a condition, which is reflected in a written acceptance letter for any contribution of $250 and above that stipulates that the Atlantic Council is accepting such contribution on the condition that the Atlanta Council retains intellectual independence and control over any content funded in whole or in part by the contribution consistent with the Council's intellectual independence policy. | ||
| What do you make of that? | ||
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unidentified
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It's noble of them to put out a disclosure like that. | |
| Those intellectual independence policies are not unique to the Atlantic Council. | ||
| We see this at most of the top think tanks. | ||
| However, we also know a lot of these think tanks, they'll put out those policies, and yet they'll allow donors to preview research before it's published, to make comments on that research, and in some cases, provide line edits for that research. | ||
| And we also know that some of these top think tanks, they are doing what we call pay-for-play research, where a donor pays a specified amount of money to get a specific report done or a bank created. | ||
| So in other words, they're literally paying for the products that some of these think tanks are doing. | ||
| The Atlanta Council, for example, through leaked emails, we learned that the UAE ambassador had advance access to some of the Atlanta Council's reports before they were published and had the opportunity to provide his comments to the scholars in advance of the publication of those reports. | ||
| Our concern is that when donors are given that kind of opportunity, it really allows them to play censor. | ||
| And if they come back to those scholars and they have unfavorable recommendations for the report, we worry that some of this research might be bent to the whims of some of these foreign funders. | ||
| It's 9.30 on the East Coast. | ||
| Ben Freeman is our guest with the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. | ||
| He's the director of the Democratizing Foreign Policy Initiative there. | ||
| Phone lines for you to call in. | ||
| It's split by political party as usual. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| He's with us till the end of our program, 10 a.m. Eastern this morning. |