If you throw water on a dog and it yelps, the water must be scalding to the dog. The interesting question, as in the case of the hue and cry emanating from leftist special interests over a proposed Louisiana Public Service Commission transparency rule, is why what seems lukewarm to everybody else feels radioactive to them.
At its next meeting, the PSC is expected to approve a rule requiring intervenors in cases to reveal in broad terms whether they receive funding from entities outside of Louisiana including foreign governments and if so the proportion. Additionally, money from foreign governments or entities that they control received over the past five years would have to be specified, including whether domestic donors to organizations received money from these sources. The rule would apply to any entity that comments on a case, all the way from climate alarmist organizations to corporations, including regulated utilities, who have a potential monetary interest in an outcome, including lobby groups.
It's not like this information is hard to come by. Corporations or cooperatives have to file tax forms that draw upon this information, and nonprofits, even those designated as charitable, also have to collect information on donors to satisfy reporting requirements such as indicating sufficiently large donations or determining whether they meet a public support standard to qualify as tax exempt.
Even the pass-through foreign entity stricture poses minimal problems. If an entity receives a donation from another nonprofit, the appropriate 990 or other similar form of the donor will contain that information. For example, the Louisiana climate alarmist group Alliance for Affordable Energy (which fronts as a consumer protection agency) in its latest filing reveals it received about $2 million that year – interesting, about a third more than it lists in total donations – from 13 other organizations, only one of which representing about one percent of the intake comes from Louisiana. All 13 donors file similar forms from which money from foreign governments and their proxies may be traced.
This exercise takes little effort but has a big payoff. A recent report from the Pelican Institute in part about climate alarmist lobbying in Louisiana showed since 2020 at least $115.5 million flowed into the state from out-of-state entities going to groups sympathetic to that cause, with some passing through coming from a foreign adversary as defined in federal and state law (in fact, the proposed rule tracks state transparency law for third-party litigation financing and is less restrictive than statute’s prohibition of involvement by foreign adversaries).
In short, the rule illuminates whether intervenors have a financial incentive to serve as mouthpieces of out-of-state, if not foreign, entities whose agendas do not emanate from the genuine desires of Louisianans, regardless of the degree of association. That information can prove very informative to the commissioners when deciding on matters regrading Louisianans.
Which is why groups like the AAE screech about the potential rule, alleging it will have a chilling effect on their participation, impugn their credibility, and “trap” them in some fashion. But, how? It’s all dispersed information either already public or easily revealed made conveniently available at virtually no cost to the organizations, and, as noted above, for a relevant reason. And that should have no bearing on any testimony and filings that are factual in basis, where the inclusion of the disclosure merely alerts commissioners to the possibility that a dependency on funding on non-Louisiana interests may mean data received from these organizations may not be impartial and are shaped in a way incongruent to the best interests of Louisianans. Plus, there’s no favoritism as all intervenors would have to comply with this.
Such leftist protestations ring hollow. Bluntly, these groups fear being revealed as Astroturf organizations almost exclusively dependent on out-of-state or out-of-country money by donors with little interest in Louisianans but with a great interest in imposing an ideological agenda on the state. That information should be part of any decision calculus that the PSC utilizes.
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