In 2006, the California legislature passed AB 32, the "Global Warming Solutions Act," which requires the state to bring its greenhouse gas emissions down to 1990 levels by the year 2020. Since then, a coalition with the helpful-sounding name the "AB 32 Implementation Group" has appeared, claiming to represent green businesses and a broad section of California interests focused on global warming regulations. The Implementation Group's Web site features photos of white clouds and flowers, and the organization is being managed by a big public relations firm, Woodward & McDowell. In truth, the Group actually represents 22 of California's biggest carbon polluters (as ranked by the California Air Resources Board), and, according to environmentalists and lawmakers, is engaged in a steady campaign to undermine the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006. Even some of its own member businesses were surprised to learn that the group was trying to negatively impact the global warming law. The PR firm Woodward & McDowell has a history of working with the tobacco industry to defeat clean indoor air laws and working with polluting industries to defeat environmental measures. In the 1990s, it helped defeat California's Proposition 128, also known as "Big Green," which would have enacted a number of environmentally-friendly measures related to pesticides, water quality and old-growth forests. The Group's co-chair said in an interview that she supports suspending AB 32, saying "It will add significant costs to manufacturing, particularly in the electricity side." A chief sponsor of the Group is California's Chamber of Commerce, and its membership includes the Western States Petroleum Association, which represents ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, Tesoro, Valero and BP.

Wal-Mart creates front groups such as Working Families for Wal-Mart and also hires hidden public relations operatives to create the appearance of grassroots support. Kevin Robinson of Chicagoist.com, a Web site about Chicago, reports that in Chicago, support for Wal-mart

"... is being manufactured by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, a local PR powerhouse, and by Wal-Mart itself. A few weeks ago, a series of posts that I wrote attracted the attention not only of our regular readership, but also people that don’t normally visit our site on a regular basis. One reader in particular, going by the login 'Chatham,' took issue with the subject matter of the posts, but also with the arguments that Wal-Mart opponents have made. ... I checked out the URL that was associated with Chatham’s comments (OurcommunityOurChoice.com) and discovered it's a website promoting the opening of a Wal-Mart in Chatham ... . Then I looked up the IP address and found the comments were made from an IP address associated with Serafin and Associates ... the Chicago-based consulting firm that Wal-Mart has retained to manage its public relations campaign in Chicago. That includes push polling done last summer in Chicago. ... Michael Mini, the Government Relations Director at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce ... told me that Wal-Mart is indeed a member of the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce ... I asked him if he was familiar with Serafin and Associates. 'Yes, we have worked with them in our strategy sessions. We’ve worked with [Thomas] Serafin and his team.' When I told him that our site had gotten comments from the email address that led me to him and asked if he knew that it was being used to comment on blogs, he said 'no, not that I’m aware of.' Are you surprised that an IP address from Serafin was being used that way? 'No, not in particular.' Why not? 'I really can’t comment without looking into it further.' ... While Wal-Mart certainly has the right make its case to Chicago, the way they’ve gone about this -- creating a fake community group that purports to represent a community's residents and interests - is sneaky and underhanded."

Reporter Dan Eggen quotes CMD in a review of how special interests have attempted to influence health reform: "It's sort of like money-laundering their PR," said Lisa Graves, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, the group that operates PRWatch.org "A lot of these groups are heavily funded by corporations and then don't reveal it. They try to imply that they are funded primarily by individuals, but that's clearly not the case." As Eggen notes, interest groups working to influence health reform legislation have jointly contributed a record $200 million to advertising campaigns to sway lawmakers, but figuring out just who these groups represent is often tricky. Many purposely adopt names that obscure their origins, and the law requires they only reveal minimal information, like overall revenue and expenses. Support for these groups is coming from industries with a financial stake in the debate, unions or charitable foundations with a political bent, helping enrich previously obscure groups. The Institute for Liberty, for example, was previously a one-man operation that in 2008 pulled in under $25,000 in revenue and had only a post office box. Now it operates out of a downtown D.C. office and is running a $1 million anti-health care reform advocacy campaign. The group's president, Andrew Langer, refused to offer any information about the group's leap in funding. The Parternship to Improve Patient Care was created by the drug industry in 2008 to oppose medical effectiveness studies that might help determine what health insurance companies must cover. The Center for Medicine in the Public Interest is an offshoot of the Pacific Research Institute, which has taken money from Philip Morris, Pfizer, and the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA). The anti-government group Americans for Prosperity, that was instrumental in organizing the raucus "tea party protests," has been connected with the conservative Koch Family, owners of the largest private energy company in the U.S Click on this next link to see who else makes up the Tea Party movement .

The Campaign for a U.S.-Afghanistan Partnership is being exposed as an insidious pro-war front group. Aram Roston reports in the The Nation magazine that "As President Obama prepares a massive military buildup in Afghanistan, a House subcommittee has launched an investigation into whether Defense Department contractors are paying off the Taliban to protect American supply lines. ... One of the contractors under investigation is NCL Holdings, a U.S. firm headed by Hamed Wardak, the Afghan-American son of Afghanistan's defense minister, General Abdul Rahim Wardak. ... Parallel to his business ventures, he's been running an aggressive foreign policy campaign in Washington to keep the U.S. heavily vested in Afghanistan. A confidential lobbying memo obtained by The Nation shows that Wardak commissioned a blue-chip lobbying firm to push for an extended U.S. presence in Afghanistan -- a potentially lucrative outcome for NCL. Earlier this year Patton Boggs LLP, Washington's most monied lobbying firm, established a nonprofit front group (Campaign for a U.S. - Afghanistan Partnership) on Wardak's behalf to act as the 'face' of a campaign for increased US engagement in Afghanistan, according to confidential legal records." Blogger Steve Hynd first reported critically on this front group in a posting on October 29, 2009.

According to the Associated Press, "Americans for Quality and Affordable Healthcare" (AQAH) is a "secretive" group that organizes "below-the-radar" activities to drum up opposition to health care reform. AQAH is opposed to a government-run public health insurance option, but supports a mandate to require all citizens to purchase health insurance -- views that happen to exactly match those of the health insurance industry. The group's Web site contains no address, telephone number or other contact information. AQAH is operated by one of the largest law firms in North Carolina, Moore and Van Allen. A spokesman for the law firm, Matthew French, refused to disclose the group's funders, and would say only that "They want to stay in the background and off the front page ... They want the message to be the important thing."

The pharmaceutical industry-funded front group Center for Medicine in the Public Interest (CMPI) is helping its corporate funders fight health care reform by disseminating misinformation and orchestrating campaigns to generate fear about health care reform. CMPI arose out of the Pacific Research Institute, a corporate front group that worked with Philip Morris in the past to fabricate academic support for the tobacco industry. CMPI has been sponsoring anti-Obama Tea Party protests, producing attack ads against health care reform and creating Web sites that feature "horror stories" about citizens in countries that offer universal health care. CMPI is headed by Peter Pitts, the head of global health care for the international corporate public relations firm Porter Novelli, which specializes in helping drug companies evade FDA marketing restrictions by using stealth marketing techniques, like creating fake, unbranded "public service ads" nominally to raise awareness of diseases, but that really drive people to drug-company funded Web sites that advertise drugs.

Former Greenpeace activist turned industry PR consultant, Patrick Moore, regularly appears as an opinion columnist or interviewee in news outlets around the world. Frequently these columns and stories don't disclose that the group Moore co-chairs, the Clean and Safe Energy Coalition (CSEC), is a front group for the Nuclear Energy Institute. In an opinion column for the Oregon-based Statesman-Journal, Moore writes that "now may be the right time for this state to consider putting nuclear energy back to work on behalf of clean air and economic growth. I understand Oregon's reservations. I once had them, too. But after four decades as an active environmentalist, studying the facts, my views have evolved — and I'm not alone." The biographical note at the end of Moore's column -- as has been noted before -- omits any indication that Moore is a consultant for the U.S. nuclear industry's lobby group. Instead, the note describes the CSEC as a "grassroots coalition which promotes the economic and environmental benefits of nuclear power as part of a green energy economy."

Television ads from a new Montana-based group called CO2 Is Green claim: "There is no scientific evidence that CO2 [carbon dioxide] is a pollutant. In fact higher CO2 levels than we have today would help the Earth's ecosystems." The ads urge voters to contact their Senators and Representative, "and remind them CO2 is not pollution." The ads are meant to stoke opposition to climate change legislation. Not surprisingly, the man behind the ads, the lobbying group CO2 Is Green and a related "educational" group called Plants Need CO2 is "a veteran oil industry executive." H. Leighton Steward was a director at EOG Resources, which was previously named the Enron Oil and Gas Company, and is an honorary director of the American Petroleum Institute. "Now retired, [Steward] says he wants to 'get the message out there' that carbon dioxide, which the Supreme Court has ruled a pollutant and which most [sic] scientists regard as a dangerous greenhouse gas, 'is a net benefit for the planet.'" Steward co-founded the new groups with Corbin J. Robertson Jr., the "chief executive of and leading shareholder in Natural Resource Partners, a Houston-based owner of coal resources."

The Center for Economic and Entrepreneurial Literacy (CEEL) is one of lobbyist and serial corporate front man Rick Berman's "more recent creations," writes Daniel Schulman. "CEEL's surveys -- designed to show that Americans don't know diddly about finances and therefore deserve some of the blame for the current economic tumult -- have been quoted on the nightly news and are frequently cited in newspapers. And CEEL has also promoted payday loans as a lifeline for desperate borrowers." While "there is no evidence that CEEL is bankrolled by the finance industry or payday lenders ... some of its talking points are strikingly similar to the ones that payday lenders have been repeating for years." CEEL is running pro-payday loan ads in the Washington, DC Metro, suggesting "a brewing federal fight. A pending bill sponsored by Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) would essentially preserve the status quo for payday lenders -- a top source of his past campaign contributions. But another, championed by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), would impose a 36 percent cap on interest rates."

The Guardian notes the cashroots behind right-wing Astroturf: "When Obama beat Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primaries, FreedomWorks studied how he did it and then copied him. ... A plethora of groups have jumped on board, with exotic names such as Tea Party Patriots, Grassfire, Conservatives for Patients' Rights, 60 Plus, all loosely working together, with FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity probably the leading partners. ... FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity are sister groups who came from the same parent body -- a campaign called Citizens for a Sound Economy, which split in two in 2004. It was set up by one of America's richest men, David Koch, an oil tycoon who has funded rightwing causes for decades. FreedomWorks receives funding from the tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris, as well as from Richard Scaife, another business tycoon, who for years helped fund dirt-digging investigations into Bill Clinton. Local branches of Americans for Prosperity have also received tobacco money; the group has opposed smoke-free workplace laws and cigarette taxes. ... ExxonMobil was a sponsor of Citizens for Sound Economy, and both FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity have campaigned vigorously against Obama's plans to reduce CO2 emissions through a cap and trade scheme, working closely with the American Petroleum Institute. 'This is the same old, same old,' says John Stauber of the Center for Media and Democracy, which investigates corporate lobbying. 'Yes there are some new names and new causes, but these anti-government front groups have been around for a long time.' " See who else is in the Tea Party Movement.