3-2-10 by dugan
While the end game on health care legislation sucks up the available news space, proposals to curb greenhouse gas emissions are being picked to shreds by power companies, coal companies, oil interests, large agribusiness and… senior citizens? The first member group that pops up on the website of Energy Citizens, an organization solely aimed at killing climate legislation, is a group called "The 60-Plus Association." It’s a name that sticks in memory, because it’s all over the member lists of anti-reform groups in the health care battle, sort of the anti-AARP.
The group’s front page is pretty much all health reform hysteria, all the time, and it seems to exist to issue press releases, though the only contact listed on the releases is a Republican PR firm, the Blackrock Group. The photo gallery on the website hasn’t been updated since 2003, and nearly all the photos are of 60-plus President (now Chairman) Jim Martin. The group’s history traces to Richard Viguerie, a conservative direct-mail genius of the 70s, who needed to feed his business’s appetite for fresh mailing lists.
No membership numbers are on the website, though one news release lists a suspicious "5 million" supporters. If that’s just the total of people who have ever clicked the membership button on the website, that includes me.
An AARP investigation in 2005 concluded that the group was largely funded by the pharmaceutical industry. The group’s tentative entry into the climate change battle is its first peep on energy since about 2004, so pardon me for thinking money has changed hands. The 60-plus argument against a climate change bill is that it would be "a huge new energy tax on farmers, truckers, small businesses and
America’s families and imperil millions of U.S. jobs." Not exactly a senior issue, but right in sync with the Energy Citizens/Heritage Foudation/American Petroleum Institute message.
A few years ago, the 60-Plus Association popped up at a legislative hearing I attended, defending a bill written by AT&T and aimed at deregulating caple services in California, to the detriment of consumers. 60-Plus and the other "citizen" groups testifying at the hearing were sitting with and shepherded by the AT&T lobbying/PR folks. There’s no digital trace of that testimony now, but 60-Plus and the Tea Party progenitors of Freedom Works also backed a nearly identical bill in Indiana and other states. It’s just what seniors had been begging for, right? Telecom deregulation.
I don’t mean to just pick on 60-Plus. But it’s such a perfect example of a confusingly named tax-exempt nonprofit group that seems to exist to issue messages that might attract corporate donations.