Party of One by Michael Harris Read Free Book Online Page B

be just as potent in Canada, and nobody knew that better than Stephen Harper. These organizations take in approximately $26 million per year in Canada, with the Fraser Institute—a Harper favourite—commanding roughly a third of the market. Think-tanks here receive 30 percent of their income from corporations. By comparison, their counterparts in the United States draw just 10 percent of their budget from that source.
    It is the ultimate “You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” relationship. The corporations donate money in the expectation that their interests will be promoted. The “think-tanks” are set up as non-profit “research institutes” with no obligation to publish their list of donors or members. The US-based Donner Foundation gives money to the Macdonald-Laurier, Fraser, and C.D. Howe institutes in Canada, as well as to a group called the Frontier Centre. The Montreal Economics Institute, which pushed to make unions open their books to the public, receives 42 percent of its income from businesses. When the reports and studies of these think-tanks are made public, news organizations such as Sun Media, The Globe and Mail , and CanWest featured their work as hard news. It is a little like Noam Chomsky’s notion of manufacturing consent.The stories go mainstream, but the institutions remain hidden behind their undisclosed donor lists.
    Both the Fraser and C.D. Howe institutes have campaigned against the Canada Health Act, which was music to Stephen Harper’s ears. (In 2001, he had proposed to Alberta’s premier Ralph Klein that he get rid of medicare, the RCMP, and the Canada Pension Plan.) Almost all of these think-tanks on the right stand broadly for the same things: unencumbered operation of free markets, lower taxes on corporations, and privatized health care. Many of their donors are Canadian—people such as gold entrepreneur Peter Munk and the Weston family. But they are not the only source of corporate money.
    The Fraser Institute also receives money from the ultra-right-wing Koch brothers of Wichita, Kansas, who run the secondlargest private company in the United States, with annual revenues of over $100 billion. 7 The Kochs and their Conservative friends spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 US election. Non-profit organizations set up as trusts reduce public reporting requirements and disguise the flow of money from one group to another, creating layers of anonymity. These entities operate without the public knowing who is actually in charge. All told, the Fraser Institute has received over $600,000 from these politically active American neo-conservatives. Despite the source of their donations, all of these institutes don the same camouflage— the cloak of fierce independence.
    The fountainhead of Canada’s right-leaning think-tanks (which also have their progressive equivalents now) was the fertile brain of Friedrich Hayek, an Austrian free-market thinker who won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1974. Hayek came up with the idea of setting up organizations like the Fraser Institute to supply a steady stream of studies to demonstrate the superiority of free markets over governments when it comes to solving society’s problems.Despite the fact that these organizations inspired by Hayek often serve the interests of business people and political parties, they register as charities and are permitted tax-free fundraising.
    Stephen Harper addressed the thirtieth anniversary celebration of the Fraser Institute in 2004, sporting his silk Adam Smith tie. He liked the organization and came by his enthusiasm honestly. At the University of Calgary, he had studied the free-market philosophy of Hayek, the man widely credited with weaving economic and social conservatism together. Like Margaret Thatcher, Harper was a follower of Hayek and the Austrian school of economics—the supply side rules, interest rates have to be high enough to control the money supply, and debt is death. Hayek