Reply #21: Here are what appear to be some specifics: [View All]

How the DLC Does It
By Robert Dreyfuss
Issue Date: 4.23.01
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While the DLC will not formally disclose its sources of contributions and dues, the full array of its corporate supporters is contained in the program from its annual fall dinner last October, a gala salute to Lieberman that was held at the National Building Museum in Washington. Five tiers of donors are evident: the Board of Advisers, the Policy Roundtable, the Executive Council, the Board of Trustees, and an ad hoc group called the Event Committee--and companies are placed in each tier depending on the size of their check. For $5,000, 180 companies, lobbying firms, and individuals found themselves on the DLC's board of advisers, including British Petroleum, Boeing, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Coca-Cola, Dell, Eli Lilly, Federal Express, Glaxo Wellcome, Intel, Motorola, U.S. Tobacco, Union Carbide, and Xerox, along with trade associations ranging from the American Association of Health Plans to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America. For $10,000, another 85 corporations signed on as the DLC's policy roundtable, including AOL, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Citigroup, Dow, GE, IBM, Oracle, UBS PacifiCare, PaineWebber, Pfizer, Pharmacia and Upjohn, and TRW.

And for $25,000, 28 giant companies found their way onto the DLC's executive council, including Aetna, AT&T, American Airlines, AIG, BellSouth, Chevron, DuPont, Enron, IBM, Merck and Company, Microsoft, Philip Morris, Texaco, and Verizon Communications. Few, if any, of these corporations would be seen as leaning Democratic, of course, but here and there are some real surprises. One member of the DLC's executive council is none other than Koch Industries, the privately held, Kansas-based oil company whose namesake family members are avatars of the far right, having helped to found archconservative institutions like the Cato Institute and Citizens for a Sound Economy. Not only that, but two Koch executives, Richard Fink and Robert P. Hall III, are listed as members of the board of trustees and the event committee, respectively--meaning that they gave significantly more than $25,000.

The DLC board of trustees is an elite body whose membership is reserved for major donors, and many of the trustees are financial wheeler-dealers who run investment companies and capital management firms--though senior executives from a handful of corporations, such as Koch, Aetna, and Coca-Cola, are included. Some donate enormous amounts of money, such as Bernard Schwartz, the chairman and CEO of Loral Space and Communications, who single-handedly finances the entire publication of Blueprint, the DLC's retooled monthly that replaced The New Democrat. "I sought them out, after talking to Michael Steinhardt," says Schwartz. "I like them because the DLC gives resonance to positions on issues that perhaps candidates cannot commit to."

A key member of the event committee for the 2000 annual fall dinner was Mike Lewan, who runs a boutique lobbying house that has represented clients such as Oracle and BellSouth. In the late 1980s, Lewan, who joined the DLC because he was "one of those disaffected Democrats," went to work as Lieberman's chief of staff--and promptly introduced the Connecticut senator to the DLC. Today, Lewan helps recruit support for the DLC on K Street. "It's astonishing to me how much support the DLC is getting from the professional Washington people, the lawyers, the lobbyists," he says. "There's a relationship and a trust level that's been built up."

http://www.prospect.org/print/V12/7/dreyfuss-r.html

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