Should think-tanks be required to identify their sponsors?

Inspired by this article.

What organizations deserve the right to conceal who funds them? What organizations don't?

Any think tank that influences political/public opinion should be forced to identify their sponsors. I want to know whose funding Migrant Watch/Taxpayers Alliance.

Yes, and remove their tax exemption status too. Too often, "think-tanks" publish or promote fraudulent research on behalf of predator multinationals and other groups' covert agendas. Alongside PR firms, they are the attack dogs of the elite, and help to market agendas, lies, and policies to the general public under the pretences of expert authority.

It's unfortunate that your article chooses to target one of the more innocent think-tanks which has been scapegoated by much more powerful organisations which see its influence as a threat to their own agenda of population control.

Migration Watch and Taxpayers' Alliance are just as vilified by the Westminster inner circle. We should be far more concerned about Searchlight and the Fabian Society.

edited 12th Sep '11 3:29:01 PM by Shichibukai

Identifying businesses and organizations might be nice. For one thing, we'd know for certain that big scary companies are funding just about everyone. And if some Scientology offshoot is funding a study on psychiatry, for instance, it would be nice to know. Identifying individual people, on the other hand, would be a big fat invitation for the kind of people who call strangers with death threats because the Anonymous hive-mind has deemed it just.

Personally, I don't think anyone should be able to fund something covertly. Nobody with good intentions has any reason to hide their funding of an organization or study.

I dunno, I wouldn't want to give the Scott Roeders of the world access to the Planned Parenthood donation list.

Put a limit. If you provide under, say, 2,000 dollars, you're anonymous. Only applies to human individuals. Corporations are not people, friend.

You dang ninja. Also, its MY friend, not just friend.

hmmm...

require special considerations for it to be public, with a cumulative donation of more than some thousand dollars needed to get on the public donor list. Less than that and your donation cannot be accessed without court order.

edited 12th Sep '11 3:10:40 PM by Enkufka

If a corporation donates under two thousand dollars, I can't think they have much of a vested interest in that think tank.

Under the law, they are.

According to the US Surpreme count under Nixon they are.

I agree with Barkey, nothing should be funded anonymously, period.

You and Barkey are probably the kind of people who don't even bother with the token privacy measures Facebook provides. All very well for you, but should I need another job, I don't need a prospective employer seeing that I donated to The Israel Project, Tea Party Patriots and a local environmental advocacy group. I don't think there are many people who would be okay with all three. People generally compartmentalize their lives, and that's as it should be.

Actually, no. But organizations like that have an influence on politics, and government—including politics—are to be transparent. Can't be transparent if you don't know where money is coming from to put people in office.

And if the transparency extends to people like me who donate twenty bucks max, then intimidation will run rampant. What if I were in a union, for instance? I don't think they'd take kindly to that Tea Party donation.

Corporations are not people. This appears to be a simple enough concept.

The 2000 dollars and up stipulation would suffice for me just fine.

If you want to kick more than 2 grand towards those projects, then you do so at your own peril.

If anything, it could be a good thing. Go donate that money to something good, like Habitat for Humanity, and employers will see that on your resume.

edited 12th Sep '11 4:01:44 PM by Barkey

When people talk about their personal privacy, especially online, they're talking about how easy it is for criminals to exploit personal information for fraud and other illegal activities, thanks to online organizations having poor information security and gathering information that isn't directly relevant to their actual services.

When people talk about think tanks 'deserving' privacy, it's to keep think tanks from being exposed as obviously bought organizations that were bribed to give a specific set of results beforehand under the pretense of being scientifically objective.

Apple, meet orange.

Also, your example, of employers discriminating against employees based on personal politics, already happens right now, and is simply a good point for stricter regulation against bias in employee selection and the necessity of evening out the power gap between the employers and the employees.

I think this will probably have to be spun off into a new thread, but if by evening power disparity you mean something like the situation in France where every teen latte pusher has some kind of tenure, I hope you're not unemployed when that bill passes...

At any rate, I did say that organizations should be on record. (It's an amusing thought, but I don't think Philip Morris has enough savvy to start funding enemies just to besmirch their image.)

edited 12th Sep '11 4:10:49 PM by DomaDoma