Unfortunately, Boston has a new entry into the dark money politics game, the Boston Policy Institute (BPI). If you are concerned about how the power of unaccountable money erodes our politics, this is more bad news.
Gintautas Dumcius of CommonWealth Beacon just did a fine piece on BPI The shadowy think tank fighting Boston City Hall: Nonprofit stirring the pot on property taxes won’t reveal donors so go read that and I’ll keep this brief. Here’s a telling paragraph from Dumcius:
The Boston Policy Institute, launched in December by two 37-year-old Democratic insiders, says its goal is to shine a light on the city budgeting process, development policy, and other top issues. But the organization’s refusal to make public its sources of funding – coupled with the not altogether happy history one of its founders shares with Wu – has prompted whispers of grudge-settling and rumors of who could be behind an effort to bring fresh scrutiny of City Hall as Wu readies for a 2025 reelection campaign.
BPI’s founder Greg Maynard told CW that blowback from City Hall on the report is exactly why BPI has to hide its donors. They’d like to remain able to make money dealing with the city without making the mayor mad. Well, boohoo.
This reminds me of what Justice Scalia had to say in the case of Doe v. Reed, a case about Washington State requiring the names of petition signers to be public. In his concurrence in the decision, Scalia wrote “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed.”
Here’s something to ponder: BPI apparently has two people working for it, Maynard and Joseph Caiazzo, who are described as “two 37-year-old Democratic insiders.” They are field organizers, not usually the folks you put in charge of policy. Moreover, BPI is organized under IRS section 501c4, not 501c3. That is telling because a c4 can engage in all sorts of political activities barred to a c3. A c4 is not tax deductible to the donors, and a c3 is. It is harder for dark money researchers to uncover c4 donors than to reveal c3 donors. For a think tank, a c3 is usually by far the better choice.
The study at issue here was written not by Maynard or Caiazzo, but by Evan Horowitz of Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis. Another BPI study on education was handed over to a staffer at anti-union Democrats for Education Reform (funded by such famous Democrats as the Walton family and Rupert Murdoch). So again, if you are a public policy institute, why do you have to outsource all the policy analysis because the two guys running the policy institute are “two 37-year-old Democratic insiders” who are unqualified to do policy analysis?
There’s lot of juicy politics too so for that read Gintautas Dumcius’s The shadowy think tank fighting Boston City Hall: Nonprofit stirring the pot on property taxes won’t reveal donors.
In the darkness of secrecy, sinister interest and evil in every shape, have full swing. . . . Publicity is the very soul of justice.”—Jeremy Bentham
Full disclosure: as a (now retired) educator in the UMass system, I am a union member. I write about dark money, democracy, and oligarchy. My book, Dark Money and the Politics of School Privatization, is now in print.]