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pioneer? acton? sir anthony fisher

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see IEA

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AI Overview

British entrepreneur Sir Antony Fisher founded the Atlas Network (originally the Atlas Economic Research Foundation) in 1981 to build a global network of free-market think tanks. He was directly inspired by, and acted upon the advice of, Austrian School economist F. A. Hayek. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

The Hayek Connection

In 1945, a post-WWII Fisher met with Hayek at the London School of Economics, seeking advice on how to stop the march of socialism. Fisher wanted to run for political office, but Hayek advised against it. Instead, Hayek urged him to focus on the "second hand dealers in ideas"—influencing the intellectual class, journalists, and academics by providing scholarly, objective research on market economics. [1, 2, 3, 4]

The Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA)

Following Hayek's blueprint, Fisher successfully founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London in 1955. The IEA laid the foundational classical liberal and free-market policies that eventually influenced Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's economic transformation of Britain in the 1980s. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Founding the Atlas Network

Seeing the massive success of the IEA, Fisher moved to the United States and established the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1981. His goal was to replicate the think-tank model globally to champion Austrian and classical liberal economic principles. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Austrian Economics

Hayek, alongside Ludwig von Mises, is one of the most prominent figures of the Austrian School of Economics. This economic school of thought emphasizes: [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

• Individual Liberty & Free Markets: A deep skepticism of government intervention, price controls, and central planning. [1]

• The Business Cycle: The theory that artificial government expansion of the money supply leads to unsustainable booms and inevitable busts (Austrian Business Cycle Theory). [1, 2]

• Price Mechanisms: The idea that free-market prices effectively communicate knowledge and allocate resources spontaneously, making central planning highly inefficient. [1, 2]

While Hayek and Mises differed slightly on some academic details, Fisher utilized their overarching theories of market supremacy to fuel his global activism and think tank expansions. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

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Jeremy-Walker-CCS-27-Sept-2023

Silencing the voice of Indigenous Australia: The fossil-funded Atlas Network and the Vote No disinformation campaign against the referendum on constitutional recognition Jeremy Walker Climate, Society & Environment Research Centre (C-SERC), University of Technology Sydney, Australia https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0789-3457

Abstract: On the 14th of October 2023, Australians will vote in a referendum on a minimalist constitutional amendment to finally recognise the First Nations of Australia in its 1901 Constitution and to establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polls suggested the referendum proposal of the Uluru Statement enjoyed over 60% support. Since the Vote No campaign was launched, polling suggests the Yes vote has declined to around 40%. This article argues that the Vote No operation is being organised on behalf of self-interested fossil fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back more than half a century. They don’t want Indigenous Australians to gain this long overdue constitutional recognition because they believe it will contribute to reining in the polluting industries that are driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.

Led by pop-up campaign unit Advance Australia, the No campaign is coordinated across the the Australian branch of the little-known, highly influential global infrastructure of the Atlas Network of ‘free-market thinktanks’– which includes the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and Liberty Works.

Based on publicly available evidence, I examine the role of oil companies and key actors in this highly integrated network of organisations, demonstrating that the No campaign shares the same aims and methods as the longstanding disinformation campaign against climate policy operated by the Atlas Network: to immunise transnational business profits from democratic parliaments.

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:{For research on my book (coming next year!), I took a couple of trips to an archive containing decades worth of records from the Atlas Network, a global network of more than 500 "free market" think tanks. One of the many interesting things I found there was a box labeled ":{Potential Intellectual Entrepreneurs." It was a fascinating window into how Atlas, which helped to start Donors Fund (often described as the right's "dark money ATM") and counts many of the organizations involved in Project 2025 as members,}: finds, cultivates, and sustains talent. Intake forms note whether the person in question has come to Atlas seeking a grant or been found by the organization's leadership or someone in their network.

They note what sorts of things this person is doing, where they're located in the world, and what kind of support might make the most sense. Various other forms and reports track their progress, note connections that might be useful to them, ensure they're connected with the right funders and so forth. Several of the climate-denying reply guys I've been dealing with for more than 20 years were in there. While they were being supported throughout those decades, encouraged to keep doing and saying the same things over and over and over again, I have had to continuously prove myself, come up with new ideas and projects all the time, prove the value of journalism in general, produce projects for half the budget any other media house would and on and on. Why does "the left" require endless sacrifice while the right endlessly rewards any win? Another great question to be asking instead of "who is the Joe Rogan of the left?"}:

Instead of receiving the sort of committed, long-term backing that allows folks like Charlie Kirk or Jordan Peterson to thrive, churning out an unbelievable volume of content and leveraging technology (and relationships with tech platforms) to amplify it, independent creators are either constantly working on crowd-funding or caught in an endless cycle of grant applications and reporting, leaving us with less and less time to create content, less stability, and an increasing amount of legal and financial risk. How the fuck is anyone supposed to spend three hours a day smoking weed and engaging in "thought exercises" under those circumstances?

If you're wondering what this has to do with addressing the climate crisis, the answer is quite a bit. In its most recent report, the IPCC noted for the first time the role media plays in either driving or obstructing the political will required to act on climate. The media “shapes the public discourse about climate change and how to respond to it,” the report noted. And this “shaping” power can usefully build public support to accelerate climate mitigation – the efforts to reduce or prevent the emission of the greenhouse gases that are heating our planet – but it can also be used to do exactly the opposite, which is largely what’s been happening since the 1970s.

Lead author Max Boykoff, the researcher responsible for the IPCC’s increased understanding of the role of media in climate policy, told me the media plays a fundamental role in shaping both policymakers’ and the public’s understanding of climate issues. “People aren't picking up the IPCC report or peer-reviewed research to understand climate change,” he said. “People are reading about it in the news. That’s what shapes their understanding.”

These days they are also reading about it in newsletters, watching videos about it on YouTube or TikTok, and listening to podcasts about it, but more on that in a minute.

Technofascists have fully captured the information ecosystem.

If you have not read Cyberlibertarianism yet, I highly recommend doing so. And sorry but no, Technofeudalism—while a fine book and a decidedly shorter and easier read—is not cutting it. One was written by a tech guy turned academic who's been keyed into the technofascists and the threat they pose since the early aughts, the other by the former finance minister of Greece, for whom these dudes are a comparatively new phenomenon. (Relatedly, also highly recommend The Age of Surveillance Capitalism). A key theme* Cyberlibertarianism* raises is the regularity with which tech execs compare the advent of the Internet and social media to the arrival of the printing press, wrapping it in the same trappings of democratization as that storied machine and arguing that digital technology renders the press obsolete.

Ties to the Atlas Network

All of these organisations identify as ‘free-market’ thinktanks, and are coordinated — to an extent — through the Atlas Network.

Atlas is a Washington, D.C.-based outfit that works with more than 450 organisations across the world, connecting them “to the ideas and resources needed to advance the cause of liberty”, according to its website.

Atlas was founded by Antony Fisher in 1981 with the goal of bringing “innovative, market-based perspectives to issues of public policy.” Fisher also founded the IEA.

The Guardian revealed that more than a fifth of the organisations comprising the network “either argued against controls in some way, took industry donations, or both”. Of those organisations, DeSmog has identified 28 that also took donations from the fossil fuel industry.

Atlas itself has received substantial tobacco and fossil fuel industry backing.

The Guardian reports that Atlas received donations from British American Tobacco in 2015 and 2016, and Japan Tobacco International in 2016. According to PR Watch, tobacco giant Philip Morris contributed over $475,000 to Atlas in 1995 alone.

Among the fossil fuel industry donations Atlas has received, according to ExxonSecrets, ExxonMobil has given a total of $1,082,500 to the network since 1998.

When approached to comment for this story, a spokesperson for Atlas directed DeSmog to an FAQ for journalists. That document states that the network’s “views on donor transparency are informed by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service and the guidelines they provide, which we follow faithfully without exception.”

“Any reporting that claims or implies that Atlas Network is secretive or operates with anything short of complete fidelity to the legal requirements governing nonprofit organizations such as ours is patently false and indefensible,” the document says.

Atlas claims to operate in 90 countries. Wherever Atlas goes, there are organisations pushing  back against established science, where such science undermines the case for industry deregulation.

In the UK, DeSmog has previously revealed how Atlas is at the heart of a network of organisations pushing for a hard Brexit. It increased its spending in Europe fivefold between 2015 and 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum — with spending increasing from $340,000 in 2015 to $1.7 million the following year.

The Ever-Looming Influence of the Kochs

In the background of all this are the Koch brothers.

Koch Industries is the largest privately owned energy company in the United States. Co-owners of a vast petrochemical and industrial empire, billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch are major funders of libertarian political organisations in the US and abroad.

Of the 28 organisations that accepted both tobacco and fossil fuel money, 23 also received donations from the Kochs.

Atlas took donations from the Kochs totalling $101,658 in 2016, up from $82,426 in 2015. According to data collected by Greenpeace USA, Atlas has received $348,560 in combined donations from Koch-related foundations between 1998 and 2015.

The Kochs are also major donors to the Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation, Heartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, and American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — all organisations that have taken both tobacco and fossil fuel industry money.

UK organisations lobbying for a hard Brexit have also been indirect recipients of Koch money, often through Donors Trust— a foundation described by Mother Jones as the “dark money ATM of the conservative movement”, which has received sizable donations from the Kochs — or Epicenter, which acts as the Atlas Network’s European offshoot.

And DeSmog recently revealed that the Kochs were the source of the dark money behind a shadowy group of well-connected ‘free speech advocates’ pushing libertarian ideology and climate science denial in the UK.

The Kochs’ far-reaching funding can have major consequences, Hsu says.

“Organisations, a lot of them funded by the Koch network, have used the tax advantages of philanthropic organisations to first recoup tax advantages and second to use them as an influencing mechanism on the public debate.”

“A lot of these so-called thinktanks or philanthropic organisations are thought of as perhaps more neutral than they really are. They really do reflect the Koch brothers’ agenda.”

The British online magazine Spiked, which features climate denial, is funded by the Koch brothers through the Charles Koch Foundation.

TAGS: Institute Economic Affairs (IEA)cato instituteheritage foundationAdam Smith InstituteAtlas Economic Research Foundationkoch industrieskoch family foundationTaxpayers AllianceDonald TrumpBritish American TobaccoTobacco Playbook

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off bs re matt tyr JOK bannon 1020

A firm believer in the impact of independent think tanks, Antony Fisher founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1981.

Antony Fisher never knew his father. He was killed by a sniper’s bullet in Gaza during World War I when Antony was two-years old. Antony and his brother Basil served as pilots in the Royal Air Force in World War II, part of “the few” in Winston Churchill’s memorable phrase about the Battle of Britain: “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few.”

“Without Fisher, no IEA; without the IEA and its clones, no Thatcher and quite possibly no Reagan; without Reagan, no Star Wars; without Star Wars, no economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a chain of consequences for a chicken farmer!”

After victory came at last in the war against Germany’s National Socialism, Fisher was distraught to see the British people elect a Labor Party government that set the country on a socialist course: nationalizing industries and using central planning to run the economy. He came across an abridged edition of F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, which posits that central planning inevitably erodes individual liberty and enables tyranny. Fisher was motivated to seek out Hayek, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics. Fisher told Hayek that he agreed with every word in the book, and was going to go into politics to save Britain from socialism.

Several years later, after achieving success as an entrepreneur (creating the first factory-style chicken farm in Britain), Fisher decided the most effective way to act on Hayek’s advice would be by establishing an independent research institute that would bring innovative, market-based perspectives to issues of public policy. In 1955, he founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London, which gradually gained credibility and laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution.

Fisher lived in San Francisco in 1981 when, with the help of his second wife Dorian, he founded the Atlas Economic Research Foundation to institutionalize this process of helping start up new think tanks. Friends like Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and Margaret Thatcher applauded the idea of replicating the IEA model far and wide.

Fisher died in 1988, just weeks after being honored with knighthood by Queen Elizabeth. British MP, Oliver Letwin later commented on the incredible influence of this RAF pilot turned chicken farming entrepreneur turned think tank pioneer: “Without Fisher, no IEA; without the IEA and its clones, no Thatcher and quite possibly no Reagan; without Reagan, no Star Wars; without Star Wars, no economic collapse of the Soviet Union. Quite a chain of consequences for a chicken farmer!”

OUR APPROACH

Atlas Network’s “Coach, Compete, Celebrate” model — coaching through training programs, fostering friendly competition via grants and awards, and then celebrating partners’ achievements at our world-class events — inspires higher levels of innovation and effectiveness throughout the freedom movement.

from entine ggl doc:

...After Fischer founded Institute for Economic Affairs, he went to US and then commonwealth (Acton was part of Atlas, which spawned CTT all over the world). These inhabited different ideological as well as geographical niches in the “ecosystem.” For example, Acton (est 1990) combined free market faith with Christian faith

Blundell

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your pre-COP climate denial inoculation

Climate denialists and inactivists are as active as ever, experts and activists warn. David Williams reports

American climate scientist Michael Mann has proved as adept at predicting the behaviour of climate deniers and purveyors of disinformation as he was at using data to prove anthropogenic climate change.

His famous temperature graph, known as the “hockey stick” for its steep rise in the 20th Century showing the influence of humans, attracted fierce attacks, especially after 2001, when it was published in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) third assessment report.

The attacks were scientifically invalid, Mann told :{Scientific American:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;outline:0px;vertical-align:baseline;background-image:initial;background-position:initial;background-size:initial;background-repeat:initial;background-attachment:initial;background-origin:initial;background-clip:initial"):}: in 2005, and used “disengenuous arguments and untruths”.

“I imagine it will go on, just as it went on for years and years with tobacco until it was no longer tenable.”

the attacks have persisted, including false claims the hockey stick was proved wrong. (As if problems with a single graph could undo all evidence of climate change, anyway.)

As a Reuters fact check said last year, Mann’s graph shows temperatures rapidly rising since the 20th century, and “multiple studies and independent climate scientists support the findings depicted”.

Some temperatures have been altered and corrected, using more robust reconstruction methods. And as more data has been added the stick head has grown taller – as predicted – underlining the original graph’s reliability.

Just as reliable have been the actions of the merchants of misinformation, deniers, and the promoters of climate delay, whose tactics, often funded by the fossil fuel industry, were on display earlier this week.

“Greta finally gets it!” a headline shrieked on the website Climate Depot, run by well-known denialists the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, or CFACT. (See what they did there?)

CFACT’s director of communications, Marc Morano – who, for some reason, is attending the latest United Nations climate negotiations in Egypt, starting this coming Sunday – disingenuously celebrated climate activist Greta Thunberg’s “moment of clarity”.

“We welcome Greta now understanding that these summits have nothing to do with the climate.”

This is a gross distortion.

Thunberg did dismiss the climate summit, known as COP27, as an opportunity for “people in power ... to [use] greenwashing, lying and cheating”.

The high-profile Swede called the meetings a “scam”, not because they’re about something other than climate but because they “are not really going to lead to any major changes”. “These systems are failing us,” she said at an event in London to promote her book.

Another important reason she’s not going is because of Egypt’s human rights record, and the limited space for civil society groups at COP27.

(A troubling distraction, perhaps, is the controversial appointment of US PR firm Hill+Knowlton, previously accused of greenwashing for oil companies, as communications manager at the Egyptian climate conference.)

Climate Depot also misused Thunberg’s quote, “Blah, blah, blah”, to sum up the last COP, in Glasgow, Scotland.

Earlier this week, on Twitter, Mann, the climate scientist, called Morano “one of the most prominent industry-funded climate change deniers”.

He tells Newsroom via email: “It’s textbook. They can’t deny that climate change is real any more, but they’re sure working hard to prevent anything being done about it.”

Morano has been called the king of the skeptics. He used to work as a producer for shock-jock Rush Limbaugh, and is the former communications director of well-known denier Senator James Inhofe, of Oklahoma.

In 2012, Morano was named Climate Change Misinformer of the Year by Media Matters, and he has said climate scientists “deserve to be publicly flogged”.

In 2009, just before the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen, Morano’s site Climate Depot helped whip up a media storm by promoting a manufactured scandal. Based on emails – stolen from England’s University of East Anglia – between climate scientists, including Mann, the disinformation campaign tried to cast doubt on climate science by claiming data had been falsified.

The claims were eventually discredited but it cast a shadow over the Copenhagen conference, which ended in disarray.

“The goal is always the same – delay climate action.”

– John Cook

It’s got to be a hard gig being a denier right now, surely, in the face of unequivocal evidence of climate change. It’s not just piling up in academic journals, the evidence might be gushing through the window.

Think of Pakistan’s record floods, the alarming warming in Europe, or melting of the Greenland ice sheet.

But climate experts and activists are still warning about misinformation and disinformation ahead of the climate negotations in Egypt.

John Cook is a post-doctoral research fellow with Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub.

He’s written books like Cranky Uncle vs Climate Change,to give the public the tools to understand and respond to climate science deniers.

Given the weight of evidence showing human-induced climate change, we asked Cook if denial and disinformation tactics are diminishing or changing?

“Over the last few decades, climate misinformation has been steadily transitioning from science denial to attacks on climate solutions,” he says via email. “As the scientific evidence has accumulated, it’s become more untenable to deny the science. But the goal is always the same – delay climate action.”

Motivations differ, Cook says. Fossil fuel companies want to maintain profits. Conservative groups oppose some proposed solutions such as regulating polluting industries. Political groups go on the attack because the public is becoming polarised – often, no doubt, thanks to disinformation.

“Climate misinformation will continue to persist so long as there are people who oppose climate action.”

(Misinformation, it’s said by academics, is when someone unwittingly spreads false rumours, while disinformation is intentionally starting or spreading those false rumours, maliciously.)

Connor Gibson is a former Greenpeace USA staffer who recently compiled a climate misinformation field guide for journalists, through the group Climate Action Against Disinformation (of which Greenpeace is a member).

Gibson’s specialty is opposition research into individual and corporate donors to anti-climate-change groups – such as Charles and David Koch.

He says deniers are just as active as they’ve ever been.

“It’s pretty much the same group of mostly old white men, mostly in the US, who are still perpetuating the same tired set of lies that they have for decades now.”

Since the election of Donald Trump as US president in 2016, and “a fascist wave swept the world”, there has been more outright denial of climate science, he says. But there are a range of tactics – from arguing humans aren’t the main driver of planetary warming, to tapping into economic pragmatism, or pushing a narrative of hopelessness.

“That menu of rhetorical arguments has always existed, but which ones are more effective during different eras, and in different regions of the world, that’s what has shifted over the years.”

Seeding disinformation is easy and relatively cheap when it’s coordinated, he says, and many of these groups have been working together for years.

Some of the more egregious actors Gibson calls out are the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, the Heartland Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. Many key people in the climate denial machine have links to tobacco and oil companies.

He also mentions the Atlas Network as a worldwide funder of free-market think tanks, whose affiliates and funders have been involved in climate denial.

The website DeSmog reports: “Atlas has cosponsored numerous Heartland Institute events dedicated to the proposition that climate change is not a crisis.”

Greenpeace describes Atlas as a “Koch Industries climate denial front group”.

It turns out Atlas has New Zealand connections.

Its archived webpage shows its list of partners include theNew Zealand Initiative think tank (which earlier this year published a report Pretence of Necessity, Why further climate change action isn’t needed and won’t help) and the right-wing Taxpayers’ Union.

In a recent podcast about charging farmers for greenhouse gas emissions, Taxpayers' Union board member Casey Costello said “climate emissions stuff” was “at risk of a distraction”.

“At the end of the day, when people are struggling to put food on the table, and everything’s really expensive, that’s the highest priority – quality of life, and protection of our most vulnerable, should take precedence over the high ideals of a few.”

Jordan Williams, Taxpayers' Union’s executive director, says via email: “I was not aware Atlas has any interest in climate change policy – I’ve attended about a dozen of their events and I am a graduate of their Think Tank MBA programme and, subsequently, the Smith Fellowship programme.

“Not once have I heard climate change come up as an issue. We have never worked with or been funded by Atlas on a climate change project.”

Oliver Hartwich, NZ Initiative’s executive director, is more succinct: “We haven’t received money from Atlas and haven’t had any interactions with them on climate change.”

Newsroom asked climate experts to dispel some popular myths.

Cook, of Monash University, focuses on an argument the climate has always changed.

“The logic is that climate changed naturally before humans so what’s happening now must be natural as well.

“This argument commits single cause fallacy, arguing that whatever caused climate change in the past must be the same cause now, when in fact, climate can be driven by multiple causes and human activity is now the dominant cause.

“This argument is like arguing that people died of cancer before cigarettes were invented, so cigarettes can’t cause cancer.”

New Zealand climate scientist Professor James Renwick, of Victoria University of Wellington, sits on the Climate Change Commission and has been a lead author of IPCC assessment reports. He’s never been to a COP meeting.

We put to Renwick a skeptical view that warming isn’t as bad as early climate models predicted.

“The changes in temperature we’ve seen since the IPCC got going 30 years ago have been in line with the model projections.”

No model is perfect, he says, and model predictions are only as good as the assumptions plugged into them.

“It’s easy enough to find simulations from 30 years ago that had much more warming than we’ve experienced because they had much more in the way of greenhouse gas emissions, and it’s easy to be disingenuous about all of this and say, ‘Oh, look, what really happened was way less than what this model was saying’.

“And that’s because that model was forced with very high CO2 emissions. So when you match up the actual emissions to the modelled emissions you find that model temperatures follow the actual temperatures pretty closely. And the same goes for sea level rise.”

In terms of the seemingly perverse situation of negotiators, politicians, activists, and media taking flights to climate conferences, Renwick says that doesn’t invalidate the arguments that emissions reductions are urgent.

“You don’t have to be a carbon Jesus to talk about climate change.”

Climate action supported

Renwick says he doesn’t think anti-establishment groups vocal during Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates have shifted led to an uptick in climate denialism in New Zealand.

“I know that some of the main people involved in the Voices for Freedom and so on are anti-climate-change, but I don't have the sense that, that that's really changed the public conversation much.”

Looking beyond our shores, Bronwyn Hayward, a professor of political science and international relations at University of Canterbury, says there’s been a political shift since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2015.

“While there’s a storm of social media debate, the fundamentals are that governments and businesses, banks and insurance companies recognise that climate change is a really significant risk now for doing business and for human life and infrastructure. And that's a huge and fundamental shift.”

Public surveys also show support for emissions cuts.

The new denialism, she says, is an emphasis on only adapting to climate change, and not continuing to cut emissions. A sort of doomism that suggests the situation is so bad there's nothing we can do. It’s not true, she says, adding: “Every effort that we make does make a major difference.”

Yet, the need for deep cuts is urgent and the picture of a future warmed world is worrying.

A United Nations Environment Programme report released last week said on current emissions reduction pledges, the world was likely on track for 2.6C of warming on pre-industrial levels.

Incremental change is no longer an option, the report warned. What’s needed is a “wide-ranging, large-scale, rapid and systemic transformation”.

Hayward says any increase over 2C would be dangerous.

“There's millions more people who will be affected by water shortages, heat stress, and storms and sea-level inundation.”

Renwick, of Victoria, hopes policymakers understand the urgency of the problem.

“They’ve been told this over and over again, through the IPCC and any number of other avenues, but I don’t have the sense that it’s really got through.

“You can argue that the political processes are slow, and that can be a good thing. But, boy, this is a problem we need fast action on, and I would love to see some real moves coming from the governments of the world to really start to reduce emissions as fast as we possibly can.”

Confronting the facts

Back in 2009, during the Copenhagen climate summit, I had my own brush with CFACT, at its Climate Sense Conference. As I said in my article for Stuff, it was “really a chat with a few dozen Scandinavian students, bolstered by American imports”.

The “large and prestigious” CFACT delegation of “experts and advisors” included Marc Morano, of Climate Depot. I didn’t meet him, but I interviewed S Fred Singer, the godfather of the skeptic movement, who told me: “We look at the data, we tend to believe what the atmosphere tells us and then disbelieve what the models say.”

Singer, a physicist, said 31,000 scientists agreed with his “realist” views. But they’re not climate scientists? No, but one-third have PhDs. “They know how to read graphs, they know statistics – that’s really all you have to know.”

Then he changed tack – if the science is settled, why spend more money on it? Perhaps to better understand the processes behind the climate.

After taking a deep breath, Singer said: “Yeah, OK.”

And with that, the interview was over.

While they were in Copenhagen, the CFACT delegation was happy to talk to media about the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia.

Some were written by climate scientist Mann, he of the hockey stick graph, who accused the email leakers of cherry-picking and citing scientists out of context.

Weeks later, in San Francisco, addressing an American Geophysical Union meeting, Mann said: “Scientists must play a key role in combating the disinformation effort, presenting a positive case for science and turning lemons into lemonade, while readily acknowledging the real uncertainties and distinguishing them from manufactured ones.”

Seeding doubt, it seems, is a great deal easier than explaining the complex and nuanced climate science

Julian Morris was the handsome, charming and well spoken son of a chemical engineer from Epping. He first became interested in free market economics when he was a 22-year-old student completing an MA at the highly regarded Edinburgh University in 1991.

He read a startling and challenging article in the Financial Times which was based on a monograph by professor Sir Douglas Hague published by the IEA which called for the privatisation of universities.

Morris also read free-marketeer Friedrich von Hayek's The Use of Knowledge in Society And attended events at the IEA, where he met Blundell and Linda Whetstone, the daughter of IEA founder, Antony Fisher.

Naive Environmentalist

“I was myself a naive young environmentalist,” Morris wrote some years later. “I had just written a paper on how to establish a global system for restricting emissions of carbon dioxide and was about to embark on a masters course in environment and resource economics run by Professor David Pearce at University College London.”

At the time, there was much buzz about a conference due to take place in Rio de Janeiro that was being hailed as the 'Earth Summit' and global warming was a hot item on the agenda.

It was during his masters at UCL that Morris became close friends with Bate and became increasingly immersed in free market ideas and the think tank world.

“I am not dogmatic in my approach”, Morris told me. “I care deeply about the environment.”

Blundell would later arrange for Morris to fly out to the United States through the Charles G Koch Foundation, taking up a short internship at the Atlas Foundation - both of which Blundell worked for.

“Charles and David Koch are two of the finest, most upstanding businessmen and philanthropists in the world,” Morris told me during an email interview.

While in the US, Morris completed his research for his IEA monograph The Political Economy of Land Degradation in 1995. On his return, he set up shop as a consultant economist and worked for the European Environment Agency, Save the Rhino International and the World Wildlife Fund.

But over the coming years Morris would make considerably more money running think tanks that challenged the science of climate change and attacked policies that would reduce carbon emissions.

Julian Morris and Roger Bate werelong-term friendsand started a company together,

Bate, however, retained very close ties with climate denier Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), fell out (in part over Okonski, on payroll?), Bate defected to US….The accounts for the IPN show that, in 2005, the IPN was paying Okonski £28,000 and that she claimed £4,448 in expenses. Another member of the IPN staff said: “This is rumour… but Bate had disagreements with Julian over Kendra.”

Then, in 2003, the dispute appears to have reached an impasse as Bate resigned as a director of the IPN and moved to the United States. The following year, he was earning$100,000 a year for a 30-hour week as chairman of Africa Fighting Malaria (AFM), which was receiving $30,000 from ExxonMobil for “climate change outreach”.

He was also hired as a fellow by the American Enterprise Institute, which enjoyed funding from Koch, Exxon and major tobacco companies, although he drifted away from the subject of climate change.

Morris:

naive enviro working on CO2, but bate helped him see where money was, plus meet daughter of Fischer?

Free Market Fire

The two met when Okonski was working as a research assistant for climate denier Fred Smith at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) – funded by Philip Morris, Dow Chemicals and ExxonMobil – after graduating from a free market college.

Okonski had gained a reputation, even among the free market zealots, as being “fiery” and determined.

Morris had been speaking at a conference called the Precautionary Principle held by American non-profit organisation Consumer Alert three years earlier, when Okonski was swept off her feet by his chiselled good looks and devotion to the free markets.

Smith recalls: “He was delivering a speech; he looked down at Kendra, with her big eyes, and thought: ‘scary’. It was a public policy marriage.”

Morris said: “Kendra is a beautiful, engaged and inspiring woman; she is the love of my life. We share a deep desire to improve the lot of humanity through the empowering institutions of a free society: property rights, markets and the rule of law. So far as I am aware, we came to those ideas independently, but I cannot speak for Kendra.”

==

CEI's President and Founder is Fred Smith. Its staff include Gregory Conko who is CEI's Director of Food Safety Policy. Via Conko CEI has played a key role in CS Prakash's AgBioWorld campaign .

The launch-pad for Prakash's campaign was a petition supporting the use of GM agriculture in developing countries. Prakash presented this as a Third World scientists' rallying point for fellow academics. However, CEI in its annual report (2000) says that it played 'a key role in the creation' of the petition as part of a wider campaign against 'death by regulation' - the same CEI campaign that has been directed against government efforts to discourage smoking because, according to the CEI, 'there are things more valuable than health'. More recently, Greg Conko has been acknowledged in AgBioWorld press releases as the co-founder of AgBioWorld .

Among CEI's long list of known sponsors are Philip Morris, Pfizer and Dow Chemicals. In 2000 CEI had a turnover of $3M+ a year with another million in assets.

CEI's 'Adjunct Scholars' include Henry Miller of the Hoover Institution and Fran Smith of Consumer Alert. Fran Smith is also on CEI's Board of Directors. She is also the wife of CEI's President and Founder. Another CEI 'Adjunct' is Roger Bate of the International Policy Network - a group whose Washington address is the same as that of the CEI.

Kendra Okonski of IPN also used to work for CEI. When ABC-TV's 20/20 program presenter John Stossel came under fire in August 2000 for citing nonexistent scientific studies in a 20/20 report attacking organic foods, Okonski organised a Save John Stossel website for the CEI to help Stossel keep his job.

--

Okonski (_CSR theme emerging?)  IPN Exxon funded climate denial with Morris;

dad Montana lumber baron, grew up in Chile (praises increase in water almost exactly coincide with Pinochet era, ~ Cochabamba?) econ at Hillsdale College,

married Morris, CEI site defending Stossel

Picking up on Gang of 5 80’s reagan we’re the true revolutionaries, she staged counter-protests, often masquerading as helping poor Third World countries (she’ll intersect with CORE Innis at----) e.g., Sustainable Development Network.

==

JoBurg Earth Summit:

For all that, there were some real farmers present as well. Mackinnon says he spotted some wearing anti-environmentalist t-shirts, with slogans like "Stop Global Whining." This aroused his curiosity, since small-scale African farmers are not normally to be found among those jeering the "bogus science" of climate change.  Yet here they were, with slogans on placards and T-shirts: "Save the Planet from Sustainable Development", "Say No To Eco-Imperialism", "Greens: Stop Hurting the Poor" and "Biotechnology for Africa". On approaching the protesters, however, Mackinnon discovered that all of the props had been made available to the marchers by the organizers. When he tried to converse with some of the farmers about their pro-GM T-shirts, "They smiled shyly; none of them could speak or read English."

…

And here lies the real key to the President of BIO's account of the march, and specifically to the attack on Vandana Shiva. Monsanto and BIO want to project an image of GM crop acceptance with a Southern face. That's why Monsanto's Internet homepage used to be adorned with the faces of smiling Asian children. So when an Indian critic of the biotech industry gets featured, as Shiva was recently, on the cover of Time magazine as an environmental hero, the brand is under attack, and has to be protected.

The counterattack takes place via a contrarian lens, one that projects the attackers' vices onto their target. Thus the problem becomes not Monsanto using questionable tactics to push its products onto a wary South, but malevolent agents of the rich world obstructing Monsanto's acceptance in a welcoming Third World. For this reason the press release for the "Bullshit Award" [varnished cowshit] accuses Shiva, amongst other things, of being "a mouthpiece of western eco-imperialism". The media contact for this symbolic rejection of neocolonialism? The American, Kendra Okonski. The mouthpiece denouncing an Indian environmentalist as an agent of the West is a Western mouthpiece.

==

Conko often co-author with Miller:

Conko's many publications include papers promoting GM foods and free trade and attacking the precautionary principle, co-authored with CS Prakash, Henry I. Miller, Fred Smith and Kendra Okonski. Among these is "Cloudy horizons in a brave new world", originally published on the European Science and Economic Forum website. In it Conko suggests that concerns about the safety of GM food are merely a cover for "trade protectionism" and "anti-science fearmongering".[4]

What Miller is most notorious for are his unusual public positions.In 2003, Miller penned an op-ed for the New York Times defending DDT and arguing for its resurrection. This prompted a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) response pointing out the estimated "increase in infant deaths that might result from DDT spraying."

a director of Consumer Alert BERMAN

a director of American Council on Science and Health

an Adjunct Scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute; and a

scientific advisor to the George C. Marshall Institute

Another individual on the ACSH board of trustees is pro-GMO advocate Henry Miller, who also founded the FDA Office of Biotechnology.7 His deceptive PR tactics during the California GMO labeling campaign have been discussed in previous articles.

Miller also supported the now defunct Advancement of Sound Science Coalition,8 which was formed to support the tobacco industry by discrediting claims that smoke is harmful. The group also advanced other industry-friendly positions on a wide range of topics, including global warming, phthalates, and pesticides.

--

Miller helped found the tobacco industry front group“The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which is now defunct.

Co-author in Forbes with Chassy

Miller is a member of the UN's Codex Alimentarius committee on GM foods. He is also a key figure in the network of right-wing pro-biotech lobby groups in the U.S. He is an 'adjunct scholar' at the [Competitive Enterprise Institute, a director of the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) and a director of Consumer Alert. He was also part of the pro-GM/anti-organic 'No More Scares' group with Michael Fumento, Steven Milloy and ACSH's Elizabeth Whelan.]

OZ hit:   Signatories to the letter Miller drafted to Columbia include one Gilbert Ross, acting president and director of ASCH, an organization that defends the fracking industry and also has the mission of keeping GMO labels off of food in the state of California. Dr. Ross is a convicted criminal and Medicaid fraud artist who was “convicted of racketeering, mail fraud and conspiracy,” and was “sentenced to 47 months in jail, $40,000 in forfeiture, and restitution of $612,855” in a scheme to defraud the Medicaid system, reports the U.S. Right to Know campaign in a page describing ACSH practices

He has also co-authored a number of articles with Greg Conko of the Competitive Enterprise Institute which suggest that concerns about the safety of GM food are really due to "trade protectionism" and "anti-science fearmongering" and that GMOs require, if anything, less regulation, not more.[[8]](http://powerbase.info/index.php/Henry_I._Miller#cite_note-7)

alternet

end entine ggl doc extract

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PPkRCl98kqsVGTPK2p7mOMdv68eAFjtIIrWi-vpgCFM/edit

==

ref 2 desmog

https://www.desmog.co.uk/2019/11/18/how-climategate-laid-foundations-fake-news-era

lord Lawsonstepped to the curb hailing a taxi. We had both been at an event in a swish Fleet Street hotel discussing illegal phone hacking by journalists. I had followed him out onto the pavement and asked whether thehacking of scientists' emails from the servers of the British university had been unethical — as well as criminal. “It was a whistleblower,” he scowled. The black taxi took off, leaving me in a cloud of diesel.

Another Lord, though of a different stripe, Lord Monckton, I have met many times. The one that comes to mind is when he was the star turn during a fringe event of climate deniers near the Vatican in April 2015. I began by asking whether he, as a Catholic, believed the Pope could in fact be fallible when pronouncing climate change the challenge of our age. Before I knew where we were, the faux peer was accusing Barack Obama of being the centre of a global Communist-Fascist conspiracy.

Dr S Fred Singer I interviewed at a Heartland Institute conference in Las Vegas, the United States, back in 2014. He spoke quietly and softly, explaining his role in recruiting Lawson, the former British chancellor, to the climate denial cause. This mattered because Singer is the grandfather of the denial of climate science, and has been associated with both tobacco and oil companies.

These three men were influential in turning Climategate into an international scandal 10 years ago now.

Creating a storm

The illegal hacking of thousands of private emails between climate scientists, both at the University of East Anglia and elsewhere, and their publication in November 2009 was supposed to be the smoking gun which proved that hundreds of highly respected, indentured university scientists working around the world had conspired together to exaggerate the risks from climate breakdown.

The target of the hack attack had been Pennsylvania State University Professor Michael Mann, the author of the first ‘Hockey Stick’ graphwhich showed a dramatic uptick in average global temperatures following hundreds of years of a fairly stable climate. Professor Phil Jones was collateral damage: accused of academic dishonesty, hauled in front of a powerful Parliamentary committee to answer these trumped up charges, his life’s work unfairly called into question. He considered suicide.

Climategate should have been a storm in a teacup. The emails revealed nothing new. A few choice phrases were taken out of context, twisted, and presented as damning evidence. It was Lord Lawson who turned it into a crisis for climate science.

He launched the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) in Parliament just in time to make best use of the faux scandal, toured the newspaper offices using his reputation as Thatcher’s one time chancellor to persuade editors to take the event seriously, and called on his Tory friends to open their cheque-books to fund his opaque think tank.

The GWPF scored some initial successes. Lawson is said to have persuaded his former friend, Lionel Barber, until recently the editor of the Financial Times, to take the Climategate fiasco seriously. This in turn likely influenced the Guardian in its decision to run day after day of coverage of the hacked emails, and its reporters’ fruitless attempt to find the hacker.

Lawson was also influential in the decision of the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons to launch its investigation — trapping Professor Jones under the cameras and the hot lights to answer evidently preposterous allegations. Lawson, even during a hearing which he had been influential in being opened, refused to say who was funding his new thinktank.

Manufacturing denial

Alongside Lawson, Singer and Monckton were also there from the very beginning and had significant roles to play in the development of the GWPF.

Singer was among the first climate deniers in the world, indeed when he entered the fray most climate scientists were aware of the complexity and contingency in the research. It was firmly established that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused heating, and that the amount pumped out through the use of fossil fuels was inextricably rising. But issues like the sensitivity of the atmosphere to change and how quickly this would change was still hotly debated.

Singer worked with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation (now Atlas Network) in the United States. The foundation was primarily concerned with promoting free market, neoliberal economics. Friedrich von Hayek was the intellectual inspiration. He argued that any regulation would distort the market, leading to hardship.

This ideology was very much in the ascendancy around the world: Lord Lawson has been its “chief architect” in the UK and as chancellor had torn apart the regime of financial regulations. But as well as causing economic collapse in many of the economies where it was tested, neoliberalism now faced the challenge posed by climate science — which would inevitably lead to calls to stop (or regulate, or tax) fossil fuel use.

[pix clatham hse]

The Atlas Foundation turned to Singer for help. The physicist had previously worked with the tobacco industry deliberately creating smoke and mirrors around the increasing scientific consensus that smoking caused cancer. The foundation received money from the oil industry, including Koch Industries and ExxonMobil, and was instrumental in founding the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in the UK. It was a trustee of the IEA — David Henderson — who first approached Lord Lawson at an event hosted by the London School of Economics and persuaded him to take up the cause of climate denial.

Lord Monckton also had a part to play. A viscount, Monckton was born into money, but despite his rather eccentric denials, actually missed out on becoming a member of the House of Lords when hereditary peers were abolished. The viscount worked for a very short period for Thatcher’s policy unit. He later lost £1m in prize money when he launched a puzzle betting no-one could crack it. They could.

Monckton became something of a hero to the climate denier community when he published a two-page rant in the Sunday Telegraph claiming that he alone had exposed the fatal flaw of the science of climate change. The rather eccentric ramblings had originally been drafted as a report for a private investor (with an historic interest in**fracking**).He was also instrumental in formulating talking points from the Climategate scandal for climate science deniers across the world.

[pix congress?!]

Monckton — if you believe his side of the story — advised Lawson to establish the GWPF and take up his new climate denier cause — attacking science rather than policy. He also claimed to have recommended Dr Benny Peiser — who wrote his dissertation on whether people are more athletically active in the summer — as the head of the charity. Peiser denied this version of events, desperate to distance Lawson and the think tank from the discredited and conspiracy-prone Monckton.

Political game

Lawson once boasted that he was responsible for what he (modestly) called Lawson’s Law: he advised the Tory party not to fight elections based on what the electorate actually cared about, but instead to persuade the electorate to care about what the Tory party could win an election on.

Lawson did not advise fake news, but it encouraged a distortion of reality that has seriously undermined our politics. It opened the floodgates.

Along the way, the GWPF has gotten into bed with the wildest of right-wing neoliberal think tanks, becoming intimately entwined with those responsible for serious spin and corporate lobbying around Brexit.

Lawson himself was instrumental in the Vote Leave campaign (before applying for residency in France). He was happy to appeal to reactionary populism to settle scores within the Tory party.

One consequence of this is that Nigel Farage long ago adopted the tactics of his namesake. Farage has dabbled in climate denial. He has gone further in stirring up populism. He is the master of scapegoating. And he is forever throwing “dead cats” into the political arena, keeping us constantly focused on our relationship with the EU. And in doing so, his Brexit Party — a party riddled with a Lawsonian brand of climate science denial — came close to destroying Lawson’s Tory party while continuing to push the UK towards the hardest of Brexits.

Moving on

Lawson, Monckton, and Singer have all quietly fallen off the radar. But their legacy, honed through the manufactured scandal of Climategate, lives on.

Lawson made himself chairman of the GWPF for life, but age has — with the same inevitability as climate breakdown — taken its toll and he has retired from climate politics to hisbeautiful mansion in the south of France. The GWPF lost the argument. It is now ineffective, losing support, and should soon be defunct. Singer has long retired from his think tank. Monckton is still attacking the Pope, but to no effect.

From climate denial and the fakest of fake news, to corporate lobbying and media spin — you reap what you sow.

==

==

http://www.alternet.org/world/what-have-we-got-here-looks-some-us-libertarians-are-supporting-overthrow-venezuela

If you've never heard of the Atlas Network, The Intercept's recent story, "Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians are Remaking Latin American Politics," will certainly be an eye opener. The Atlas Network aims to rid Latin America of leftist-led governments, limit the organizing wherewithal of unions, and liberal and progressive movements, and reshape Latin America in ways the Koch Brothers, and like-minded US-based right-wing billionaires support.

The existence, and recent successes, of the Atlas Network might help explain why from seemingly out of nowhere, President Donald Trump recently took time away from taking time away, watching Fox News, and his latest tweet storm threatening North Korea with "fire and fury," to bombastically throw Venezuela into the conversation. "We have many options for Venezuela, including a possible military option if necessary," Trump said.

As Lee Fang, the author of The Intercept's piece, recently explained, the Atlas Network is a "libertarian network, which has reshaped political power in country after country, [and] has also operated as a quiet extension of U.S. foreign policy, with Atlas-associated think tanks receiving quiet funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a critical arm of American soft power."

Rather then helping to calm the situation in Venezuela, which is in the midst of a political and economic crisis, Trump's remarks appear to have made the situation more problematical. As businessinsider.com's Christopher Woody noted, "Just as Trump's remarks sent a chill through a region that was growing stronger in its condemnation of [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro, the president's words have left the Venezuelan opposition in an unfavorable position."

Not only did Trump's off-the-cuff comments force the opposition to speak out against any US military intervention, it also allowed two other Latin American leaders and critics of Maduro -- Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos and Argentine President Mauricio Macri – to speak out against US military interference.

"It forced them to speak out against the threat of US intervention at a time when they'd much rather be focusing criticism on Maduro," Geoff Ramsey, the associate for Venezuela at the Washington Office on Latin America, told Business Insider. In addition, Ramsey added, "Maduro continues to capitalize on the US threat to help rally his base and recover his slipping support among the Chavista coalition," Ramsey told Business Insider. "This is red meat for them."

If the opposition hopes that there would be an insurrection by the Venezuelan military, those hopes were at least temporarily dashed by Trump's comments. "I also think it's clear that Trump's remark makes it even less likely that disaffected elements military will break from Maduro," Ramsey told Business Insider.

"The armed forces' leadership is doing its best to equate turning against Maduro with allying with a foreign aggressor," he said. "This makes it far harder to justify coming out against the government."

By threatening US military action Trump, as is his wont, went too far. But hold on, wait a minute. Trump's talk about Venezuela may not have merely fallen from the sky. Someone on Team Trump may be paying attention to the Atlas Network (formerly known as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation), a string of libertarian think tanks financed by big-buck libertarians, who have specifically targeted Venezuela.

The Atlas Network

Fang, a journalist examining the influence of organized interest groups and wealthy donors on politics, pointed out that "The Atlas Network spans dozens of other think tanks across the region, including prominent groups supporting right-wing forces behind the unfolding anti-government movement in Venezuela…"

A Freedom of Information Act by author and activist Eva Golinger, and whistleblower Chelsea Manning's disclosures, "reveal U.S. policymakers' sophisticated effort to use Atlas think tanks in a long-running campaign to destabilize the reign of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez."

Fang:

According to Alejandro Chafuen, who heads up the Atlas Network, "When there is an opening, you have a crisis, and there is some demand for change, you have people who are trained to push for certain policies.""As early as 1998, Cedice Libertad, Atlas's flagship think tank in Caracas, Venezuela's capital, received regular financial support from the Center for International Private Enterprise. In one grant letter, NED funds marked for Cedice are listed to help advocate "a change in government." The director of Cedice was among the signatories of the controversy 'Carmona Decree' supporting the short-lived military coup against Chávez in 2002.

"A 2006 cable laid out a strategy from U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield for funding politically active nonprofits in Venezuela: '1) Strengthening democratic institutions, 2) penetrating Chávez's political base, 3) dividing Chavismo, 4) protecting vital U.S. business, and 5) isolating Chávez internationally.'

"In Venezuela's current crisis, Cedice has promoted the recent spate of protests against … Maduro, Chávez's embattled successor. Cedice is closely affiliated with opposition figure María Corina Machado, one of the leaders of the massive anti-government street demonstrations in recent months. Machado has publicly recognized Atlas for its work. In a videotape message delivered to the group in 2014, she said, 'Thank you to the Atlas Network, to all freedom fighters.'"

Fang noted that "Chafuen pointed to numerous Atlas-affiliated leaders now in the spotlight: ministers in the new conservative government in Argentina, senators in Bolivia, and the leaders of the Free Brazil Movement that took down Dilma Rousseff's presidency, where Chafuen's network sprang to life before his very eyes."

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement.

==

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/8/11/lee_fang_on_how_a_little

A new investigation published by The Intercept exposes how a libertarian think tank called the Atlas Network is remaking Latin American politics with the help of powerful conservative institutions and funders in the United States, some of whom you may recognize, such as the Koch brothers. The Intercept reports the Atlas Network is behind dozens of prominent groups that have supported right-wing forces in the anti-government movement in Venezuela, as well as those who ousted Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff. We are joined by The Intercept’s Lee Fong, who covers the intersection of money and politics. His new piece is tilted, Sphere of Influence: How American Libertarians Are Remaking Latin American Politics.

ref

FOR ALEJANDRO CHAFUEN, the gathering this spring at the Brick Hotel in Buenos Aires was as much a homecoming as it was a victory lap. Chafuen, a lanky Argentine-American, had spent his adult life working to undermine left-wing social movements and governments in South and Central America, and boost a business-friendly version of libertarianism instead.

It was a lonely battle for decades, but not lately. Chafuen was among friends at the 2017 Latin America Liberty Forum. The international meeting of libertarian activists was sponsored by the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a leadership-training nonprofit now known simply as theAtlas Network, which Chafuen has led since 1991. At the Brick Hotel, Chafuen was reveling in recent victories; his years of work were starting to pay off, thanks to political and economic circumstances — but also because of the network of activists Chafuen has been working for so long to cultivate.

Over the past 10 years, leftist governments have used “money to buy votes, to redistribute,” said Chafuen, seated comfortably in the lobby. But the recent drop in commodity prices, coupled with corruption scandals, has given an opportunity for Atlas Network groups to spring into action. “When there is an opening, you have a crisis, and there is some demand for change, you have people who are trained to push for certain policies,” Chafuen noted, paraphrasing the late Milton Friedman. “And in our case, we tend to favor to private solutions to public problems.”

Chafuen pointed to numerous Atlas-affiliated leaders now in the spotlight: ministers in the new conservative government in Argentina, senators in Bolivia, and the leaders of the Free Brazil Movement that took down Dilma Rousseff’s presidency, where Chafuen’s network sprang to life before his very eyes.

“In Brazil, I have been in the street demonstrations, and I’m like, ‘Hey, this guy I met when he was 17, 18 — he is up there on the bus leading this. This is crazy!’” Chafuen said, excitedly. Those in Atlas’s orbit were no less excited to run into Chafuen in Buenos Aires. Activists from various countries stopped Chafuen intermittently to sing his praises as he walked through the hotel. For many, Chafuen, from his perch at Atlas, has served as a mentor, fiscal sponsor, and guiding beacon for a new political paradigm in their country.

Ousted Honduras' President Manuel Zelaya, left, looks down inside a car on his way to the airport where he will board a flight to Nicaragua on the outskirts of San Jose, Sunday, June 28, 2009. Soldiers seized Honduras' national palace and sent the President Zelaya into exile in Costa Rica on Sunday, hours before a disputed constitutional referendum. Zelaya, an ally of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, said he was victim of a coup. Honduras' Congress sworn in Sunday congressional leader Roberto Micheletti as the country's new President. (AP Photo/Kent Gilbert)

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, left, looks down inside a car on the outskirts of San Jose on his way to the airport to board a flight to Nicaragua, June 28, 2009. Photo: Kent Gilbert/AP

A RIGHTWARD SHIFT is afoot in Latin American politics. Triumphant socialist governments had once swept the region for much of the 21st century – from Argentina’s Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to land reform populist Manuel Zelaya in Honduras– championing new programs for the poor, nationalizing businesses, and challenging U.S. dominance in hemispheric affairs.

In recent years, however, leftist leaders have fallen one after another, sometimes in spectacular fashion. Zelaya was led from the presidential palace in his pajamas in a military coup; in Argentina, a real-estate baron swept to the presidency and Kirchner was indicted for corruption; and in Brazil, the ruling Workers’ Party, facing a growing corruption scandal and a mass protest movement, was swept out of office via impeachment over charges of budget chicanery.

This shift might appear as part of a larger regional rebalancing, merely economic circumstances taking hold. And yet the Atlas Network seems ever-present, a common thread nudging political developments along.

The story of the Atlas Network and its profound impact on ideology and political power has never been fully told. But business filings and records from three continents, along with interviews with libertarian leaders across the hemisphere, reveal the scope of its influential history. The libertarian network, which has reshaped political power in country after country, has also operated as a quiet extension of U.S. foreign policy, with Atlas-associated think tanks receiving quiet funding from the State Department and the National Endowment for Democracy, a critical arm of American soft power.

Though recent investigations have shed light on the role of powerful conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers, in developing a business-friendly version of libertarian thought, the Atlas Network, which receives funding from Koch foundations, has recreated methods honed in the Western world for developing countries.

The network is expansive, currently boasting loose partnerships with 450 think tanks around the world. Atlas says it dispensed over $5 million to its partners in 2016 alone.

Over the years, Atlas and its affiliated charitable foundations have provided hundreds of grants to conservative and free-market think tanks in Latin America, including the libertarian network that supported the Free Brazil Movement and organizations behind a libertarian push in Argentina, including Fundación Pensar, the Atlas think tank that merged with the political party formed by Mauricio Macri, a businessman who now leads the country. The leaders of the Free Brazil Movement and the founder of Fundación Eléutera in Honduras, an influential post-coup neoliberal think tank, have received financial support from Atlas, and are among the next generation of political operatives that have gone through Atlas’s training seminars.

The Atlas Network spans dozens of other think tanks across the region, including prominent groups supporting right-wing forces behind the unfolding anti-government movement in Venezuela and the campaign of Sebastián Piñera, the right-of-center candidate leading the polls for this year’s presidential election in Chile.

FILE - In this Dec. 2, 2015 file photo, people demonstrate against the government as they take part in protest in favor of impeaching Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff, in front of the National Congress, in Brasilia, Brazil. The country has seen a vicious circle of ballooning crises over the past year. Major scandals, some of which are connected to Rousseff, have combined with tanking commodity prices to deliver blows to the powerhouse economy, including credit-rating downgrades, a sharp currency devaluation and 10-percent annual inflation. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres, File)

People demonstrate in favor of impeaching Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff in front of the National Congress in Brasilia, Brazil, Dec. 2, 2015. Photo: Eraldo Peres/AP

NOWHERE HAS THE Atlas method been better encapsulated than in anewly formed network of Brazilian free-market think tanks. Recently formed institutes worked together to foment anger at socialist policies, with some cultivating academic centers, while others work to train activists and maintain a constant war in the Brazilian media against leftist ideas.

The effort to focus anger solely at the left paid dividends last year for the Brazilian right. The millennial activists of the Free Brazil Movement, many of them trained in political organizing in the U.S., led a mass movement to channel public anger over a vast corruption scandal against Dilma, the left-of-center president popularly known by her first name. The scandal, nicknamed Operação Lava Jato, or Operation Car Wash, is a still-unfolding tale of bribery involving leading politicians from all of Brazil’s major political parties, including the right-wing and center-right parties. But the social media-savvy Free Brazil Movement, known by its Portuguese initials, MBL, managed to direct the bulk of outrage squarely at Dilma, demanding her ousting and an end to the welfare-centric policies of her Workers’ Party.

The uprising, which has drawn comparisons to the tea party movement, especially considering the quiet support from local industrial conglomerates and a new conspiracy-minded network of far-right media voices, ended 13 years of rule by the Workers’ Party by removing Dilma from office through impeachment in 2016.

The landscape that MBL sprang from is a new development in Brazil. There were perhaps three active libertarian think tanks 10 years ago, said Helio Beltrão, a former hedge fund executive who now leads Instituto Mises, a nonprofit named after the libertarian philosopher, Ludwig von Mises. Now, he said, with the support of Atlas, there are close to 30 such institutes active in Brazil, all working collaboratively, along with groups, such as Students for Liberty and MBL.

“It’s like a soccer team. Defense is the academia. The forward guys are the politicians. We’ve scored a few goals,” he said, referring to Dilma’s impeachment. The midfield, he said, are the “cultural guys” that shape public opinion.

Beltrão explained that the think tank network is hoping to privatize the national post office in Brazil, calling it “low-hanging fruit” that could lead to a larger wave of free-market reforms. Many of the conservative parties in Brazil embraced libertarian campaigners when they showed they could mobilize hundreds of thousands of people to protest against Dilma, but haven’t yet adopted the fundamentals of supply-side theory.

Fernando Schüler, an academic and columnist associated with Instituto Millenium, another Atlas think tank in Brazil, made the case another way.

“Brazil has 17,000 unions paid by public money, one day of salary per year goes to unions, completely controlled by the left,” said Schüler. The only way to reverse the socialist trend has been to out-maneuver them. “With technology, people could by themselves participate, organize at low cost — WhatsApp, Facebook, YouTube, using networks, a kind of public manifestation,” he continued, explaining the way libertarian organizers mobilized a protest movement against left-leaning politicians.

Organizers against Dilma had created a daily barrage of YouTube videos mocking the Worker’s Party government, along with an interactive scoreboard to encourage citizens to lobby their legislators to support impeachment.

Schüler noted that the Free Brazil Movement and his own think tank receive financial support from local industrial trade groups, but the movement had succeeded in part because it is not identified with the incumbent political parties, most of which the general public views with suspicion. He argued that the only way to radically reshape society and reverse popular sentiment in support of the welfare state was to wage a permanent cultural war to confront left intellectuals and the media.

ONE OF THE founders of Schüler’s Instituto Millenium think tank, Brazilian blogger Rodrigo Constantino, has polarized Brazilian politics with hyperpartisan rhetoric. Constantino, who has been called the “Breitbart of Brazil” for his conspiratorial views and acidic right-wing commentary, chairs yet another Atlas think tank, Instituto Liberal. He sees the Brazilian left’s every move as a veiled attempt at subverting democracy, from the use of the color red in the country’s World Cup logo to the Bolsa Família cash assistance program to poor families.

Constantino is credited with popularizing a narrative that Worker’s Party supporters are limousine liberals, wealthy hypocrites that flock to socialism to claim the moral high ground while snubbing the working classes they claim to represent.

The Breitbartization of public discourse is but one of the many ways the Atlas network has subtly influenced political debate.

“It’s a very paternalistic state. It’s crazy. It’s a lot of state control, and that’s the long-term challenge,” said Schüler, adding that despite recent victories, libertarians had a long way to go in Brazil. He hoped to copy the model of Margaret Thatcher, who relied on a network of libertarian think tanks to push unpopular reforms. “This pension system is absurd. I would privatize all education,” Schüler, rattling off a litany of changes he would make to society, from defunding labor unions to repealing the law that makes voting compulsory.

Yet the only way to make all that possible, he added, would be to build a network of politically active nonprofits all waging separate battles to push the same libertarian goals. The existing model — the constellation of right-wing think tanks in Washington, D.C., supported by powerful endowments — is the only path forward for Brazil, Schüler said.

Atlas, for its part, is busy doing just that. It gives grants for new think tanks, provides courses on political management and public relations, sponsors networking events around the world, and, in recent years, has devoted special resources to prodding libertarians to influence public opinion through social media and online videos.

An annual competition encourages Atlas’s network to produce viral YouTube videos promoting laissez-faire ideas and ridiculing proponents of the welfare state. James O’Keefe, the provocateur famous for needling Democrats with his undercover videos, has appeared before Atlas to explain his methods. Producers from a Wisconsin group that worked to create online videos to discredit teacher protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s law busting public sector unions have also provided instructions for Atlas’s training sessions.

Crowd members burn a puppet of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez at Plaza Altamira in protest against the government. Photo: Lonely Planet Images/Getty Images

AMONG ITS OTHER exploits of late, Atlas has played a role in a Latin American nation roiled by the region’s most acute political and humanitarian crisis: Venezuela. Records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by author and activist Eva Golinger, as well as State Department cables disclosed by whistleblower Chelsea Manning, reveal U.S. policymakers’ sophisticated effort to use Atlas think tanks in a long-running campaign to destabilize the reign of Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez.

As early as 1998, Cedice Libertad, Atlas’s flagship think tank in Caracas, Venezuela’s capital, received regular financial support from the Center for International Private Enterprise. In one grant letter, NED funds marked for Cedice are listed to help advocate “a change in government.” The director of Cedice was among the signatories of the controversy “Carmona Decree” supporting the short-lived military coup against Chávez in 2002.

A 2006 cable laid out a strategy from U.S. Ambassador William Brownfield for funding politically active nonprofits in Venezuela: “1) Strengthening democratic institutions, 2) penetrating Chávez’s political base, 3) dividing Chavismo, 4) protecting vital U.S. business, and 5) isolating Chávez internationally.”

In Venezula’s current crisis, Cedice has promoted the recent spate of protests against President Nicholás Maduro, Chávez’s embattled successor. Cedice is closely affiliated with opposition figure María Corina Machado, one of the leaders of the massive anti-government street demonstrations in recent months. Machado has publicly recognized Atlas for its work. In a videotape message delivered to the group in 2014, she said, “Thank you to the Atlas Network, to all freedom fighters.”

Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado has recognized Atlas for its work: “Thank you to the Atlas Network, to all freedom fighters,” she said in 2014.

AT THE ATLAS Network’s Latin American Liberty Forum in Buenos Aires, young leaders buzzed back and forth, sharing ideas on how to defeat socialism at every level, from pitched battles on college campuses to mobilizing an entire country to embrace impeachment.

Think tank “entrepreneurs” from Peru, the Dominican Republic, and Honduras competed in a format along the lines of “Shark Tank,” an America reality show where start-up businesses pitch to a panel of wealthy, ruthless investors. Instead of seeking investments from a panel of venture capitalists, however, the think tank leaders pitched policy marketing ideas for a contest that awarded $5,000. In another session, strategies were debated for attracting industry support to back economic reforms. In another room, political operatives debated arguments “lovers of liberty” can use to respond to the global rise of populism to “redirect the sense of injustice many feel” toward free-market goals.

One young leader from CADAL, a think tank in Buenos Aires, presented on an idea to rank each Argentine province using what he called an “economic liberty index,” which would use the level of taxation and regulation as the main criteria to generate buzz for free-market reforms. The idea is consciously modeled on similar strategies from the U.S., including the Heritage Foundation’s “Index of Economic Freedom,” which measures countries based on criteria that includes tax policies and regulatory barriers to business formation.

Think tanks are traditionally associated with independent institutes formed to develop unconventional solutions. But the Atlas model focuses less on developing genuinely new policy proposals, and more on establishing political organizations that carry the credibility of academic institutions, making them an effective organ for winning hearts and minds.

Free-market ideas — such as slashing taxes on the wealthy; whittling down the public sector and placing it under the control of private operators; and liberalized trade rules and restrictions on labor unions — have always struggled with a perception problem. Proponents of this vision have found that voters tend to view such ideas as a vehicle for serving society’s upper crust. Rebranding economic libertarianism as a public interest ideology has required elaborate strategies for mass persuasion.

But the Atlas model now spreading rapidly through Latin America is based on a method perfected by decades of struggle in the U.S. and the U.K., as libertarians worked to stem the tide of the surging post-war welfare state.

Map of Atlas group locations in South America. Map of Atlas group locations in South America. Map: The Intercept

ANTONY FISHER, A BRITISH entrepreneur and the founder of the Atlas Network, pioneered the sale of libertarian economics to the broader public. The tack was simple: Fisher made it his mission to, in the words of an associate, “litter the world with free-market think tanks.”

The basis for Fisher’s ideals came from Friedrich Hayek, a forbearer of modern thought on limited government. In 1946, after reading the Reader’s Digest version of Hayek’s seminal book, “The Road to Serfdom,” Fisher sought a meeting with the Austrian economist in London. As recounted by his close colleague John Blundell, Fisher suggested Hayek enter politics. But Hayek demurred, replying that a bottom-up focus on shifting the public discourse could better shape society.

Meanwhile, in the U.S., another free-market ideologue, Leonard Read, was entertaining similar notions after leading the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Los Angeles branch into bruising battles with organized labor. To counter the growth of the welfare state, a more elaborate response would be necessary to share popular debates around the direction of society, without the visible link to corporate interests.

Fisher was propelled forward by a fateful visit to Read’s newly formed nonprofit, the Foundation for Economic Education, in New York, which was founded to help sponsor and promote the ideas of free-market intellectuals. There, libertarian economist F.A. Harper, at the time working at FEE, advised Fisher on methods for creating his own nonprofit in the U.K.

During the trip, Fisher also traveled with Harper to Cornell University to observe the latest animal industry breakthrough of battery cages, marveling at the sight of 15,000 chickens housed in a single building. Fisher was inspired to bring the innovation home with him. His factory, Buxted Chickens, grew rapidly and made Fisher a substantial fortune in the process. Some of those profits went into the other goal fostered during his New York trip: In 1955, Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs.

IEA helped popularize the once-obscure set of economists loosely affiliated with Hayek’s ideas. The institute was a place to showcase opposition to British society’s growing welfare state, connecting journalists to free-market academics and disseminating critiques on a regular basis through opinion columns, radio interviews, and conferences.

Businesses provided the bulk of funding to IEA, as leading British industrial and banking giants — from Barclays to BP — pitched in with annual contributions. According to “Making Thatcher’s Britain,” by historians Ben Jackson and Robert Saunders, one shipping magnate remarked that, since universities were providing ammunition for the unions, the IEA was an important source of bullets for business.

As the economic slowdown and rising inflation of the 1970s shook the foundations of British society, Tory politicians gravitated more and more to the IEA to provide an alternative vision — and IEA obliged with accessible issue briefs and talking points politicians could use to bring free-market concepts to the public. The Atlas Network proudly proclaims that the IEA “laid the intellectual groundwork for what later became the Thatcher Revolution of the 1980s.” IEA staff provided speechwriting for Margaret Thatcher; supplemented her campaign with policy papers on topics as varied as labor unions and price controls; and provided a response to her critics in the mass media. In a letter to Fisher after her 1979 victory, Thatcher wrote that the IEA created “the climate of opinion which made our victory possible.”

“There’s no doubt there’s been enormous progress in Britain, the Institute of Economic Affairs, which Antony Fisher set up, made an enormous difference,” Milton Friedman once said. “It made possible Margaret Thatcher. It made possible not her election as prime minister but the policies that she was able to follow. And the same thing in this country, the developing thought along these lines made possible Ronald Reagan and the policies he was able to follow.”

IEA had come full circle. Hayek set up an invitation-only group of free-market economists called the Mont Pelerin Society. One of its members, Ed Feulner, helped found the conservative Washington think tank the Heritage Foundation, drawing on IEA’s work for inspiration. Another Mont Pelerin member, Ed Crane, founded the Cato Institute, the most prominent libertarian think tank in the U.S.

Austrian-British economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek (1899 - 1992) with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. (Photo by Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images) Austrian-British economist and political philosopher Friedrich Hayek with a class of students at the London School of Economics, 1948. Photo: Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images

IN 1981, FISHER, who had settled in San Francisco, set out to develop the Atlas Economic Research Foundation at the urging of Hayek.Fisher had used his success with IEA to court corporate donors to help establish a string of smaller, sometimes regional think tanks in New York, Canada, California, and Texas, among other places. With Atlas, though, the scale for Fisher’s free-market think tank project would now be global: a nonprofit dedicated to continuing his work of establishing libertarian beachheads in every country of the world. “The more institutes established throughout the world,” Fisher declared, “the more opportunity to tackle diverse problems begging for resolution.”

Fisher began to fundraise, pitching corporate donors with the help of letters from Hayek, Thatcher, and Friedman, including an urgent call for donors to help reproduce the success of IEA through Atlas. Hayek wrote that the IEA model “ought to be used to create similar institutes all over the world.” He added, “It would be money well spent if large sums could be made available for such a concerted effort.”

The proposal was sent to a list of high-level executives and soon, money began pouring in from corporate coffers and Republican mega-donors, including Richard Mellon Scaife. Companies, such as Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, and Shell, all gave to Atlas. But their influence would need to remain cloaked for the project to work, Fisher contended. “To influence public opinion, it is necessary to avoid any suggestion of vested interest or intent to indoctrinate,” Fisher noted in a proposal outlining the purpose of Atlas. Fisher added that IEA’s success hinged on the perception that it was academic and impartial.

Atlas grew rapidly. By 1985, the network featured 27 institutions in 17 countries, including nonprofits in Italy, Mexico, Australia, and Peru.

And the timing could not have been better: Atlas’s international expansion came just as the Reagan administration was doubling down on an aggressive foreign policy, hoping to beat back leftist governments abroad.

While in public, Atlas declared that it received no government funding (Fisher belittled foreign aid as just another “bribe” used to distort market forces), records show the network quietly worked to channel government money to its growing list of international partners.

In one 1982 letter from the International Communication Agency, a small federal agency devoted to promote U.S. interests overseas, a bureaucrat at the Office of Private Sector Programs wrote to Fisher, in response to an inquiry about acquiring federal grants. The bureaucrat said he was barred from giving “directly to foreign organizations,” but could cosponsor “conferences or exchanges with organizations” hosted by groups like Atlas. He encouraged Fisher to send over a proposal. The letter, sent one year after Atlas’s founding, was the first indication that the network would become a covert partner to U.S. foreign policy interests.

Memos and other records from Fisher show that, by 1986, Atlas had helped schedule meetings with business executives to direct U.S. funds to its network of think tanks. In one instance, an official from the U.S. Agency for International Development, the principal foreign aid arm of the federal government, recommended that the head of Coca-Cola’s subsidiary in Panama work with Atlas to set up an IEA-style affiliate think tank there. Atlas’ partners also drew funding from the coffers of the National Endowment for Democracy, a government-charted nonprofit, founded in 1983, that is funded largely by the State Department and USAID to build U.S.-friendly political institutions in the developing world.

Alejandro Chafuen, of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, back right, shakes hands with Rafael Alonzo, of Venezuela's Freedom Center for  Economic Studies, CEDICE, left, as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa applauds during the opening of the "Freedom and Democracy" international  forum in Caracas, Thursday, May 28, 2009.(AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos)

Alejandro Chafuen, of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, back right, shakes hands with Rafael Alonzo, of Venezuela’s Freedom Center for Economic Studies, CEDICE, left, as Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa applauds during the opening of the “Freedom and Democracy” international forum in Caracas, May 28, 2009. Photo: Ariana Cubillos/AP

WITH CORPORATE AND U.S. government funding pouring in, Atlas took another fortuitous turn in 1985 with the arrival of Alejandro Chafuen. Linda Whetstone, Fisher’s daughter, remembered in a tribute that, in 1985, a young Chafuen, then living in Oakland, showed up to Atlas’s San Francisco office “and was willing to work for nothing.”

The Buenos Aires-born Chafuen hailed from what he described as “an anti-Peronist family.” They were wealthy and, though raised in an era of incredible turmoil in Argentina, Chafuen lived a life of relative privilege. He spent his teenage years playing tennis, dreaming of becoming a professional athlete.

Chafuen credits his youthful ideological path to his appetite for devouring libertarian texts, from Ayn Rand to booklets published by FEE, the Leonard Read group that had originally inspired Fisher. After studying at Grove City College, a deeply conservative Christian liberal arts school in Pennsylvania, where he served as the president of the student libertarian club, Chafuen returned to his home country. The military had stepped in, claiming a threat from communist revolutionaries. Thousands of students and activists would be tortured and killed in the crackdown on left-wing dissent following the coup d’etat.

Chafuen remembers the time in a mostly positive light, later writing that the military had acted out of necessity to prevent a communist “takeover of the country.” While pursuing a teaching career, Chafuen encountered “totalitarians of every style” within academic life. After the military coup, he wrote that he noticed that his professors became “gentler,” despite their differences with him.

In other Latin American countries, too, libertarianism was finding a receptive audience among military governments. In Chile, after the military swept out the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende, Mont Pelerin Society economists quickly flocked to the country, setting the stage for widespread libertarian reforms, including the privatization of industry and the country’s pension system. Throughout the region, under the watch of right-wing military leaders that had seized power, libertarian economic policies began to take root.

For his part, Chafuen’s ideological zeal was on display as early as 1979, when he published an essay for FEE titled “War Without End.” He described the horrors of leftist terror, “like the Charles Manson family, or in regimental strength, like the guerilla troops in the Middle East, Africa, and South America.” There was a need, he wrote, for the “forces of individual freedom and private property” to fight back.

His enthusiasm garnered attention. In 1980, at age 26, Chafuen was invited to become the youngest member of the Mont Pelerin Society. He traveled to Stanford, an opportunity that put him in direct contact with Read, Hayek, and other leading libertarians. Within five years, Chafuen had married an American and was living in Oakland. He began reaching out to Mont Pelerin members in the Bay Area, including Fisher.

Throughout the region, under the watch of right-wing military leaders that had seized power, libertarian economic policies began to take root.

According to Atlas’s board meeting notes, Fisher told his colleagues he had made a $500 ex gratia Christmas payment that year to Chafuen, and hoped to hire the young economist full-time to develop Atlas think tanks in Latin America. The following year, Chafuen organized the first Atlas summit of Latin American think tanks in Jamaica.

CHAFUEN UNDERSTOOD THE Atlas model well and worked diligently to expand the network, helping to launch think tanks in Africa and Europe, though focusing his efforts in Latin America. Describing how to attract donors, Chafuen once noted in a lecture that donors cannot appear to pay for public surveys because the polls would lose credibility. “Pfizer Inc. would not sponsor surveys on health issues nor would Exxon pay for surveys on environmental issues,” Chafuen noted. Libertarian think tanks, such as the ones in Atlas’s network, however, could not only present the same survey with more credibility, but do so in a way that garnered coverage in the local media.

“Journalists are very much attracted by whatever is new and easy to report,” Chafuen said. The press is less interested in quoting libertarian philosophers, he contended, but when a think tank produced a survey people would listen. “And donors also see this,” he added.

In 1991, three years after Fisher died, Chafuen took the helm of Atlas and would have the opportunity to speak to donors with authority about Atlas’s work. He quickly began to rack up corporate sponsors to push company-specific goals through the network. Philip Morris contributed regular grants to Atlas, including a $50,000 contribution to the group in 1994, which was disclosed years later through litigation. Records show that the tobacco giant viewed Atlas as an ally for working on international litigation issues.

Journalists in Chile, however, found out that Atlas-backed think tanks had worked to quietly lobby against smoking regulations without disclosing their funding from tobacco companies, a strategy similar think tanks repeated across the globe.

Corporate giants, such as ExxonMobil and MasterCard, were among Atlas’s donors. But the group also attracted leading figures in libertarianism, such as the foundations associated with investor John Templeton and the billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch, which lavished Atlas and its affiliates with regular contributions.

Chafuen’s fundraising prowess extended to the growing number of wealthy conservative foundations that were beginning to flourish. He was a founding member of Donors Trust, a secretive donor-advised fund that has doled out over $400 million to libertarian nonprofits, including members of the Atlas Network. He also serves as a trustee to the Chase Foundation of Virginia, which was founded by a Mont Pelerin Society member and similarly sends cash to Atlas think tanks.

Another wellspring of money came from the American government. Initially, the National Endowment for Democracy encountered difficulty setting up U.S.-friendly political nonprofits. Gerardo Bongiovanni, the president of Fundación Libertad, an Atlas think tank in Rosario, Argentina, noted during a lecture with Chafuen that the early seed money from NED’s grant partner, the Center for International Private Enterprise, totaled $1 million between 1985 and 1987. The think tanks that received those initial grants quickly folded, Bongiovanni said, citing lack of management training.

Atlas, however, managed to turn U.S. taxpayer money coming through the NED and Center for International Private Enterprise into an important source of funding for its growing network. The funding vehicles provided money to help boost Atlas think tanks in Eastern Europe, following the fall of the Soviet Union, and, later, to promote U.S. interests in the Middle East. Among the recipients of the Center for International Private Enterprise’s cash is Cedice Libertad, the group thanked by Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado.

WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 09:  White House Deputy Assistant To The President Sebastian Gorka participates in a television interview outside the White House West Wing June 9, 2017 in Washington, DC. A former national security editor for Breitbart, Gorka has hard-line stands on Islam and terrorism and past involvement in right-wing Hungarian politics.  (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Sebastian Gorka, White House deputy assistant to the president, participates in a television interview outside the West Wing on June 9, 2017, in Washington, D.C. Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

AT THE BRICK HOTEL in Buenos Aires, Chafuen reflected on the last three decades. Fisher “would be overall pleased, and he would not believe how much our network grew,” Chafuen said, noting that perhaps the Atlas founder would not have expected the level of direct political engagement the group is involved in.

Chafuen lit up when U.S. President DonaldTrump came up, offering praise for the president’s appointees. And why not? The Trump administration is littered with alumni of Atlas-related groups and friends of the network.Sebastian Gorka, Trump’s Islamophobic counterterrorism adviser, once led an Atlas-backed think tank in Hungary. Vice President Mike Pence has attended an Atlas event and spoken highly of the group. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and Chafuen were close through their leadership roles at the Acton Institute, a Michigan think tank that develops religious arguments in favor of libertarian policies — which now maintains an affiliate in Brazil, the Centro Interdisciplinar de Ética e Economia Personalista.

Perhaps Chafuen’s most prized figure in the administration, however, is Judy Shelton, an economist and senior fellow at the Atlas Network. After Trump’s victory, Shelton was made the chair of the NED. She previously served as an adviser to the Trump campaign and transition effort. Chafuen beamed when he talked about it. “There you have the Atlas people being the chair of the National Endowment for Democracy,” he said.

Before ending the interview, Chafuen intimated that there was more to come: more think tanks, more efforts to overturn leftist governments, and more Atlas devotees and alumni elevated to the highest levels of government the world over. “The work is ongoing,” he said.

Later, Chafuen appeared at the gala for the Latin America Liberty Forum. Along with a panel of Atlas experts, he discussed the need to ramp up libertarian opposition movements in Ecuador and Venezuela.

Listen to reporter Lee Fang discuss his investigation of the Atlas Network on our podcast Intercepted:

==

the ur-ctt?:

Sir Antony Fisher (1915 - 1988) was one of the most influential background players in the global rise of libertarian think-tanks during the second half of the twentieth century, founding the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Through Atlas, he helped establish up to 150 other think-tanks worldwide. The most prominent include:

• Fraser Institute
• Manhattan Institute
• Pacific Research Institute
• National Center for Policy Analysis
• Centre for Independent Studies
• Adam Smith Institute

Fisher was a key node in the web of connections. Of his many foundations, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation based in Virginia has a massive reach and is hyperactive in promoting and supporting free-market economics and social conservatism.

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher. After having founded the Institute of Economic Affairs in London in 1955, Fisher had helped in the establishment of the Fraser Institute, the Manhattan Institute and the Pacific Research Institute in the 1970s. Fisher conceived of Atlas as a means of institutionalizing his work to replicate the "independent think tank" model all over the world.

Today, it convenes workshops, runs prize programs, and provides advisory services in order to continue growing and strengthening an informal network of more than 250 think tanks that exist in 70 different countries.

...

http://www.havingtheircake.com/content/3_Consequences/4_Reform/fact%20and%20opinion/Spreading%20the%20True%20Faith.php

international: http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/climate-deniers-atlas-foundation

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher.

History

For over two decades, a Virginia-based organization has been quietly working as the Johnny Appleseedof conservative think tanks. With a modest $4 million dollar budget in 2003 and a staff of eight, Atlas Economic Research Foundation is on a mission to populate the world with new "free market" voices. In its 2003 review of activities, quaintly titled its "Investor Report," Atlas boasted that it worked with "70 new think-tank entrepreneurs from 37 foreign countries and several states of the U.S.,"including Lithuania, Greece, Mongolia, Ghana, the Philippines, Brazil and Argentina.

The mission of Atlas, according to John Blundell (president from 1987 to 1990), "is to litter the world with free-market think-tanks."

Named after the Greek god condemned to bear the heavens on his shoulders, Atlas identifies, screens and offers initial support to individuals and groups who want to create local think tanks. "Our ideal 'intellectual entrepreneur,'" says Atlas, is "someone who communicates effectively with businessmen, academicians and the general public." By facilitating the establishment of local think tanks, Atlas increases both the reach and local credibility of their "free market" message, thereby having "the most cost-effective impact."

Since its formation in 1981, Atlas has funnelled over $20 million in grants to think tanks that have passed its screening process. Atlas aims, it says, to "increase that amount tenfold in the next decade." In 2003, a little over $2 million of Atlas's 2003 budget was passed on to other think tanks. While the large conservative foundations take the approach of making large sustained and often untied grants, Atlas believes less is more, providing new think tanks with only small grants of $5,000 or less. Atlas weans their fledgling projects off this modest annual funding within five years, making exception only for specific innovative projects.

Atlas' think tanks, Chaufen continued, have "remarkable successes" even though they were often faced with "unsympathetic local traditions and ideas. Still, these think tanks have become one of the first places opinion leaders and policy makers go when they are looking for market-based solutions to difficult social, economic or environmental problems".

While Atlas calculates that its "family" comprises approximately one-third of the world's 470 "market oriented" think tanks, it worries that "many young think tanks lack know-how regarding reaching the media and communicating a message effectively." To help build skills, Atlas recruited Vince Breglio, co-founder and senior executive with the market research and public relations company Wirthlin Worldwide.

At its mid-August conference in Salt Lake City, Breglio gave PR tips in a two-hour workshop titled "communicating the message of liberty." A veteran of the 1980 and 1984 Reagan Presidential campaigns, Breglio is no stranger to helping sell unpopular ideas. Internal tobacco industry documents reveal he advised both R.J. Reynolds and Philip Morris on public opposition to smoking.

According to an Atlas report on the conference, Breglio told participants in the two-hour workshop that building a larger supporter base depends on "persuading by reason, motivating by emotion".[4]

"Breglio showed the workshop a methodical approach to identifying the "emotional drivers" that motivate individuals on a given issue, and then developing a communications strategy that links a product or idea to the needs of an audience," the conference report stated. Download pdf copy of presentation - 450k file

Atlas has cosponsored:{**Heartland Institute**:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:events dedicated to the proposition that climate change is not a crisis and has supported organizations such as the:{**John Locke Foundation**:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:which has attacked efforts by state elected officials working on climate solutions with the Center for Climate Strategies.^[1]

Green Imperialism?

In 2003, Paul Driessen, a senior fellow at the free market Atlas Economic Research Foundation, published his book Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death.

Affiliations

Some of the other organisations that Atlas has supported include:

• Fraser Institute
• Manhattan Institute for Policy Research
• Pacific Research Institute
• National Center for Policy Analysis
• Center for the Dissemination of Economic Information in Venezuela
• Centre for Independent Studies
• Adam Smith Institute
• Hispanic American Center for Economic Research
• Acton Institute
• African Research Institute for Public Policy and Market Process in Kenya
• Free Market Center, Belgrade, Serbia
• Civic Institute in Prague
• Centre for Civil Society
• Circle of Tradition and Progress, London
• Liberty Institute, New Delhi
• Liberty Institute, Romania
• Unirule, Beijing

Closely affiliated organisations include:

• State Policy Network
• International Policy Network
• Institute for Economic Affairs

They have a database called Freedom Directory with basic information about 600+ think tanks and similar organizations.

Personnel

Staff

• Alejandro Chafuen, President and Chief Executive Officer
• Colleen Dyble, Associate Director of Institute Relations
• Jo Kwong, Director of Institute Relations
• Leonard Liggio, Executive Vice President - Academics
• Brad Lips, Chief Operating Officer and Secretary/Treasurer
• Chris Martin, Associate Director of Programs
• Elena Ziebarth, Associate Director of Public Affairs
• Joyce Schroeder, Office Manager
• Priscilla Tacujan, Assistant to the Executive Vice President

Board of directors

• William Sumner, Chairman
• James Arthur Pope, Vice Chairman
• John Blundell
• Timothy Browne
• Alejandro Garza Lagüera
• George Pearson
• René Scull
• Linda Whetstone
• Curtin Winsor

Funding

The foundation's funding comes from corporate and institutional sources. During 2002, $193,500 of the organisation's funding came from the Earhart Foundation, $100,000 from the Sarah :{Scaife :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:Foundation, and $50,000 from the Carthage Foundation. The Earhart Foundation has given more than $1m since 1995. [5]

Known corporate donors include ExxonMobil, which according to the Greenpeace website ExxonSecrets.org., has contributed over $500,000 since 1998. Exxon itself discloses contributions of $65,000 in 1998 (then Exxon) [6] and $50,000 during 2002. [7]

Ironically, Atlas requires its protégé think tanks to be "independent." "That is, independent of corporations, independent of governments, independent of political parties and even independent of universities," Atlas President Alejandro A. Chaufen said in an April 1999 interview

In a May 1998 fundraising pitch to tobacco giant Phillip Morris, Chaufen explained that keeping its think tanks off the dole of political parties, universities, government agencies and lobbies "helps keep their ideas and recommendations untainted by real or perceived political or organizational ties" and "helps protect them and us against potential scandal. Think tanks tied to politicians and parties can easily become instruments of corruption. Indeed, in several instances, public officials have enriched themselves and their allies through the 'think tanks' they control," Chaufen wrote.[8]

In 1995 alone Philip Morris contributed $475,000 to Atlas according to an internal budget document released as part of the settlement of the legal action brought by several U.S. states' attorneys general. In 1997, despite a tight budget, PM staff recommended Atlas receive $150,000 because of the organization's ability, through its events and public advocacy work, to "positively impact the regulatory environment, particularly in Latin America." The think tanks fostered by Atlas, PM staff wrote approvingly, results in "an improved operating environment for all PM businesses."

More recently, Atlas has gained financial support the British mutual fund businessman, John Templeton. The Templeton foundation - in conjunction with Atlas - has established the Templeton Freedom Prizes for Excellence in Promoting Liberty. The prizes, $10,000 for the winner and $5,000 for the runner up are for "market-oriented poverty programs; for ethics and values; for social entrepreneurship and for student outreach". Under the awards it is planned that $1.25 million will be distributed between now and 2007.

The Charles G:{. Koch:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: Foundation and the Claude R. Lambe Foundation both support the Atlas Economic Research Foundation.^[2]$113,800 received from Koch foundations 2005–2008 Total Koch foundation grants 1997–2008: $122,300 ^[3]

Other SourceWatch resources

• Center for Opening and Development of Latin America - Argentine Counterpart
• Think tanks
• Philip Morris
• Wirthlin Worldwide

Contact information

Atlas Economic Research Foundation

4084 University Drive, Suite 103

Fairfax, VA 22030

Phone: (703) 934-6969 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting              (703) 934-6969      end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Email: atlas AT atlasusa.org

Web: http://www.atlasusa.org

External links

• Alejandro Chafuen, Letter to Matt Winokur (Philip Morris), Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Bates Number: 2065243814/3816, December 1998
• Richard Cockett, Thinking the unthinkable: think-tanks and the economic counter-revolution, 1931-1983, Fontana Press, 1995. (This book has a brief section on the role of Atlas in spawning and supporting emerging think-tanks around the world pages 307-8).
• Eli Lehrer, The Atlas Foundation Shoulders the World (Interview with Chafuen), Insight on the News, April 19, 1999
• David R. Sands, "Fighting the war", Washington Times, June 7, 2004.
• Atlas Economic Research Foundation, "Communicating the Ideal of Liberty", undated, accessed November 2004.
• Bob Burton, "Atlas Economic Research Foundation: the think-tank breeders", PR Watch, Volume 11, No. 3, Third Quarter 2004.
• "Atlas Offspring Used U.S. Funds to Oppose Chávez", PR Watch, Volume 11, No. 3, Third Quarter 2004.
• Russ Barnes, "Planting Seeds Worldwide", Philanthropy, Philanthropy Roundtable, March/April 2005.

References

1. ↑ "[1]"
2. ↑ "Page 13 [2]"
3. ↑ "[3]"

Retrieved from "http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Atlas_Economic_Research_Foundation"

Categories: Tobaccowiki | Think tanks | Tobacco industry | Tobacco documents organizations | Co-sponsor of the Heartland Institute's International Conference on Climate Change (2009)

Mojo

http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/climate-deniers-atlas-foundation?page=1

Climate Change Deniers Without Borders

American oil money is pumping up climate change skeptics abroad. Could they kneecap a post-Copenhagen accord?

By Josh Harkinson | Tue Dec. 22, 2009 7:59 AM EST

Writing two weeks ago in Poland's most popular tabloid, the Super Express, an economic analyst named Tomasz Teluk claimed that a potential climate agreement in Copenhagen might double Poles' electricity bills, hobble his coal-dependent country, and even lead to one-world government. Fortunately, he wrote, the "'global warming' scare" has been hugely overblown: "As each of us learned in elementary school, carbon dioxide is a gas essential to the development of life, not a poison, so you do not have to eliminate it at any price."

Teluk, the founder of the Globalization Institute [1], a libertarian think tank, is Poland's most prominent climate change skeptic. He has become a hero to Polish conservatives, who have convinced their government to resist strong emissions cuts and block the European Union from giving climate change assistance to developing nations. A leading Polish financial newspaper recently named his institute the country's best think tank. But Teluk is hardly a homegrown climate skeptic. Much of his rhetoric, such as his claim that CO [2]_2 [2]is good for you [2], echoes the well-worn claims of American skeptics [3]. And much of Teluk's newfound visibility can be traced back to his long-standing ties with conservative patrons and energy interests in the United States.

Americans have provided Teluk with jobs, fellowships, professional contacts, and money. This year, the Globalization Institute won a $10,000 grant from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation [4], a Washington, DC-based think-tank incubator that's funded by ExxonMobil [5]. Teluk isn't alone. The Globalization Institute is part of a loose network of some 500 similar organizations in dozens of countries that are often bankrolled by American foundations that are, in turn, backed by carbon-spewing American industries. The foreign groups' finances are opaque, yet an Atlas Foundation spokesman acknowledges that some of them wouldn't exist without dollars being pumped in. In the coming months, these groups will lead the fight in their own countries to derail the shaky deal made in Copenhagen [6]—which will likely prompt American skeptics to cite widespread international opposition to taking action on climate change.

With US-backed overseas think tanks parroting denier talking points in dozens of languages, the echo chamber is already up and running. "The correct policy approach to [the] non-problem [of climate change] is to have the courage to do nothing," writes British skeptic Lord Christopher Monckton [7] in an article summarized in Chinese on the website of the Beijing-based Cathay Institute for Public Affairs. As the United States stonewalled sub-Saharan African countries' demands for more climate-related foreign aid in Copenhagen, the IMANI Center for Policy and Education in Ghana and three other African think tanks backed by American interests signed on to a letter blaming poor nations for invoking "the climate change scapegoat to explain hunger, sickness, and climate vulnerability."

This September, after President Obama repeatedly cited Spain's success creating green jobs, congressional Republicans flew in Gabriel Calzada, president of Spain's Instituto Juan de Mariana, to present a study claiming that each green job created in his country destroyed another 2.2 jobs. "Europe's experience actually suggests that this is precisely the wrong approach," he testified before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. (The study was debunked by the Spanish government.)

At the center of this feedback loop is the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, which has supported more than 30 other foreign think tanks [8] that espouse climate change skepticism. Atlas has given the Instituto de Juan Mariana more than $100,000. In 2008, it gave the IMANI Center for Policy & Education a $100,000 grant. It has also funded skeptic groups in the four nations whose governments just inked a controversial, last-minute climate deal with the United States in Copenhagen: the Cathay Institute in China, the Liberty Institute in India, the Free Market Foundation in South Africa, and the Instituto Liberdade in Brazil.

Founded in 1981 and named after Ayn Rand's free-market amorality tale, Atlas Shrugged [9], the Atlas Foundation has spent more than $20 million seeding some 200 libertarian think tanks across the globe as part of its Atlas Network. Much of its money has come from Phillip Morris; foundations tied to the Koch family,oil magnates who are leading funders of denier groups; and the Earhart Foundation, which was created from the profits of the now-defunct White Star Oil Company. Since 1998, ExxonMobil [5] and its foundations have given Atlas nearly $1 million. Between 2002 and 2008, the last year for which tax records are available, Atlas' budget more than tripled, nearly hitting $7 million, with the largest single portion going to grants for "think tanks in different regions of the world." [8]

The Atlas Network overlaps with other international networks that share its climate change skepticism and fossil fuel funders. Foundations linked to ExxonMobil, the Koch family, and other conservative interests have donated more than $1 million to Canada's Fraser Institute, which in turn supports a network of think tanks in 71 countries that promote "economic freedom." Exxon, the Kochs, and other foundations tied to American oil money have also helped bankroll the British-based International Policy Network. In 2007, IPN created the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [10], a group of 59 "independent civil society organizations" from 40 countries, "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change."

Some US companies and climate denial groups have taken a more targeted approach to funding their foreign allies. In 2004, ExxonMobil gave $80,000 to the Centre for the New Europe-USA for its "global climate change education efforts." In 2007, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute [11], which has received money from Exxon, granted $135,000 to four skeptic think tanks in Canada and New Zealand, followed by $182,000 to foreign groups in 2008, according to tax filings (it didn't say which groups received the money). The Washington, DC-based Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow [12] supports a German affiliate, CFACT-Europe [13], which put on a conference for climate change skeptics in Berlin earlier this year and protested the climate talks last week. "We want to get rid of this whole climate topic to focus on environmental problems again," CFACT-Europe director Holger Thuss said before marching with about 30 other demonstrators through downtown Copenhagen.

Thuss is reluctant to admit his ties to American donors. "We are not funded by the same people [as CFACT-US]," he said, though CFACT's president told Mother Jones that he gives the European group "a little bit of support when we can." Other leaders of foreign think tanks are similarly dodgy. Emmanuel Martin, who edits the French-language website Un Monde Libre [14] and frequently disputes climate science on his blog for the newspaper Le Monde, at first told me that "Atlas has not given me any orders or any financing on anything to do with the subject" of climate change. When told that an Atlas employee in Washington had described him to me as "our editor" and said that "he gets a lot of support from Atlas," Martin clarified that "Atlas effectively finances a good part of our events" but maintained that his writings are entirely his own.

Yet Martin's Un Monde Libre website is part of the Atlas Global Initiative for Free Trade, Peace, and Prosperity, a program that operates websites in 14 languages. (Atlas inherited the program from the libertarian Cato Institute in January.) Martin and other local "intellectual entrepreneurs," as Atlas calls them, translate and syndicate Atlas-generated content, such as a recent interview about Climategate with Cato's resident global warming skeptic. "We provide the literature and ideas," says Global Initiative general director Tom Palmer in a recent video promoting the program. "We go and find the entrepreneurs, and then we can slot them right into all of the flagship programs that have made Atlas so successful."

"There are some [think tanks] that wouldn't be able to survive without us," says Austin Petersen, Atlas' new media program manager. "But they get grants from all kinds of different places, not just from Atlas. There is no way we'd be able to support the whole network by ourselves."

In an email, Teluk of Poland's Globalization Institute writes that direct financial support from American funders "was not crucial" to launching his group. Yet he's clearly benefitted from their support in other ways. Teluk says he was first exposed to free-market think tanks at a conference in Rome hosted by the International Society for Individual Liberty, a libertarian group based in Arizona. He later won a scholarship at George Mason University's Institute for Humane Studies, a haven for climate change deniers that receives funding from the Koch family foundations. In 2003, while working toward his doctorate in philosophy in Krakow, Teluk got a job with TCS Daily, an online opinion journal published by the DCI Group, a PR firm known for its corporate Astroturf campaigns. TCS received $95,000 for "climate change support" from ExxonMobil that year. "Quite frankly, someone that doesn't have their PhD, they aren't a noted academic yet," says Todd Kruse, who hired Teluk while serving as a vice president at DCI, "and getting published on a journal like that gets them noticed and helps them branch out."

Recounting his professional history on the Atlas website this summer, Teluk thanked Kruse for helping to launch his career. He also mentioned current DCI vice president Henrik Rasmussen and TCS founder James K. Glassman, a former Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy in the previous administration who now leads the George W. Bush Institute at Southern Methodist University. (Neither responded to requests for comment.) Teluk wrote that "it would have been impossible to create" his own organization without them.

In 2005, Teluk founded the Globalization Institute in Gliwice, a small city near the Czech border. Shortly before international climate negotiators gathered in Poland for a final round of pre-Copenhagen negotiations in late 2008, the Globalization Institute published a book in Polish titledThe Mythology of the Greenhouse Effect. The book spawned more than a dozen articles in leading Polish media outlets; several were op-eds penned by Teluk under headlines such as "Environmentalists Cause the Greenhouse Effect." More recently, the Globalization Institute and its allies circulated an open letter to the Copenhagen negotiators demanding "Free trade, no climate taxes!" and calling climate change "nothing more than a scientific hypothesis." The institute's science advisory board includes Cato Institute and Heritage Foundation staffers.

Teluk is confident that he's helping keep Poland out of a global suicide pact. "We are one of the most recognized groups opposing 'global warming' hysteria," he writes in an email. "We are present in all mainstream media, dailies, TV, radio and Internet. Decision-makers read our reports, books and comments." He adds: "There is no scientific evidence that current global warming is caused by humans. CO₂ is a gas of life, not a poison. We believe that a movement that calls a gas of life 'a poison' is a movement against human life."

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation [4] has supported more than 30 foreign think tanks that espouse skepticism about the science of climate change. Groups in this list promote climate change skepticism or are members of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [10], which was organized "as a response to the many biased and alarmist claims about human-induced climate change." 

Argentina: La Fundación Atlas 1853 [15]

Australia: Institute of Public Affairs [16]; Centre for Independent Studies [17]

Brazil: Instituto Liberdade [18]

Bulgaria: Institute for Market Economics [19]

Burkina Faso: Le Centre des Affaires Humaines [20]

Canada: Frontier Centre for Public Policy [21]

China: Cathay Institute for Public Affairs [22]

Chile: Libertad y Desarrollo [23]

Costa Rica: Asociación de Consumidores Libres [24]

Czech Republic: Liberální Institut [25]

Denmark: Center for Political Studies [26]

Ecuador: Instituto Ecuatoriano de Economía Política [27]

Georgia: New Economic School [28]

Ghana: IMANI Center for Policy and Education [29]

Honduras: Instituto Veritas [30]

Hong Kong: Lion Rock Institute [31]

India: Liberty Institute [32]

Israel: Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies [33]

Italy: Instituto Bruno Leoni [34]

Lithuania: Lithuanian Free Market Institute [35]

Nigeria: Initiative for Public Policy Analysis [36]

Pakistan: Alternate Solutions Institute [37] 

Paraguay: Centro Paraguayo Para la Promoción de la Libertad Económica y la Justicia Social [38]

Peru: Instituto de Libre Empresa [39]

Poland: Globalization Institute [1]

Slovakia: Institute of Economic and Social Studies [40]

South Africa: Free Market Foundation [41]

Switzerland: Liberales Institut [42]

Turkey: Association for Liberal Thinking [43]

Venezuela: Centro de Divulgación de Conocimiento Económico Para la Libertad [44]

Mother Jones reporter Kate Sheppard contributed reporting to this story.

Source URL: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/climate-deniers-atlas-foundation

Links:

[1] http://www.globalizacja.org/en/

[2] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-07-plants-need-c02

[3] http://motherjones.com/special-reports/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial

[4] http://atlasnetwork.org/

[5] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-exxon

[6] http://motherjones.com/politics/2009/12/copenhagen-decoded

[7] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-10-lord-christopher-monckton

[8] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/deniers-without-borders?page=3

[9] http://motherjones.com/media/2009/07/and-rand-played

[10] http://csccc.info/

[11] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-06-heartland-institute

[12] http://motherjones.com/environment/2009/12/dirty-dozen-climate-change-denial-05-committee-constructive-tomorrow

[13] http://cfact.eu/

[14] http://www.unmondelibre.org/

[15] http://www.atlas.org.ar/

[16] http://www.ipa.org.au/

[17] http://www.cis.org.au/

[18] http://www.il-rs.org.br/ingles/home_ing.php

[19] http://www.ime-bg.org/en/

[20] http://atlasnetwork.org/networknews/tag/le-centre-des-affaires-humaines/

[21] http://www.fcpp.org/

[22] http://www.chinaipa.org/

[23] http://www.atlasusa.org/V2/files/others/TFA%20announcement-final.htm

[24] http://www.consumidoreslibres.org/

[25] http://libinst.cz/stranka_en.php?id=2

[26] http://atlasnetwork.org/networknews/2009/.../fvg-winner-cepos-denmark/

[27] http://www.ieep.org.ec/

[28] http://www.nesg.net/

[29] http://imanighana.org/

[30] http://www.institutoveritas.org/

[31] http://www.lionrockinstitute.org/

[32] http://indefenceofliberty.org/

[33] http://www.jims-israel.org/

[34] http://www.brunoleoni.it/

[35] http://www.lrinka.lt/n/index.php?lang=2

[36] http://ippanigeria.org/

[37] http://asinstitute.org/

[38] http://www.ceppro.org.py/ingles/Financiamiento.htm

[39] http://www.ileperu.org/

[40] http://www.iness.sk/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=7

[41] http://www.freemarketfoundation.com/

[42] http://www.libinst.ch/?i=home--en

[43] http://atlasnetwork.org/networknews/2000/04/25/2000-fisher-award-winners/

[44] http://www.cedice.org.ve/

http://www.powerbase.info/index.php/Atlas_Foundation

The Atlas Economic Research Foundation (AERF) was founded in 1981 by Antony Fisher. Its vision is: "to achieve a society of free and responsible individuals, based upon private property rights, limited government under the rule of law and the market order". Or in more colourful terms used by John Blundell (president from 1987 to 1990), the mission of Atlas is "... to litter the world with free-market think-tanks."

Atlas promotes international development of free market think tanks and provides support and networking opportunities for existing organizations. Atlas brings "freedom to the world" through workshops, publications, awards, and a global directory of conservative/free market think tanks. Atlas is a member of both the Cooler Heads Coalition and the State Policy Network. Atlas is funded by conservative foundations, including the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Earhart Foundation and the Carthage Foundation

Chapters

2002

On 2 August 2002, AERF wrote to President Bush, discouraging him from attending the UN Summit on Sustainable Development. Bush did not attend.^[1]

Funding

Atlas Economic Research Foundation has received $680,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998.

People

• Jo Kwong Director of Institute Relations ^[1]
• Leonard Liggio Executive VP ^[2]
• **:{Paul Driessen:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:** Senior Fellow Source: **:{Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:** ^[3]
• **:{Charles H. Koch:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:** Large Donor
• **:{Becky Norton Dunlop:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:** Senior Fellow

Board

Circa 2004

• Alejandro Chafuen President, CEO ^[4]
• Bradley Lips VP, COO ^[5]
• John Blundell Director ^[6]
• Timothy Browne Director ^[7]
• Alejandro Garza Laguera Director ^[8]
• Linda Whetstone Director ^[9]
• George Pearson Director ^[10]
• James A. Pope Director ^[11]
• Rene Scull Director ^[12]
• William Sumner Chairman, Board of Directors ^[13]
• Curtin Winsor Member, Board of Directors ^[14]

Circa 2011

Chuck Albers | John Blundell | Timothy Browne | Alejandro Chafuen | Dan Grossman | Abby Moffat | George Pearson | Andrea Millen Rich | René Scull | William Summer | Linda Whetstone | Curtin Winsor

Staff

Circa 2011

• Katya Akudovich - assistant editor,inliberty.ru

• Eva Andraskova - institute relations associate

• William Arnold - director of programs

• Jean Baugh - vice president of communications

• Diogo Costa - editor, ordemlivre.org

• Cindy Cerquitella - Institute relations associate director

• Alejandro A. Chafuen - President (1991-2009)

• Kristina Crane - operations manager, global initiative

• Peshwaz Faizulla - editor, chiraiazadi.org/ managing editor, cheragheazadi.org

• Stephanie Giovanetti - manager, meetings and events

• Erin Grant - director of development

• Ali Hellberg - assistant to the president

• Antonie Hodge - institute relations associate

• Joseph Humire - institute relations director

• Anna Krasinskaya - program manager, global initiative/ editor, inliberty.ru

• Leonard P. Liggio - vice president of academics

• Brad Lips - chief executive officer

• Romulo Lopez - business operations director

• Cassy Loseke - marketing support manager

• Fernando Menéndez- vice president of institute relations

• Tom G. Palmer- vice president for international programs

• Anca Rusu - events/office support

• Gonzalo Schwarz - program associate for awards

• Luke A. Seidl - publications editor & outreach

• Elle Speicher - web & social media manager

• Matthew Szewczyk - new media manager

• Priscilla Tacujan - academic programs coordinator

• Matt Warner - director of U.S. programs

References, Resources and Contact

Contact

4084 University Drive Suite, 103 Fairfax, VA 22030Phone: 703-934-6969Fax: 703-352-7530Web: atlasnetwork.orgInternet Archive: atlasnetwork.org (from 2008 to present)Internet Archive of previous website: www.atlasusa.org (archive from 2000-2007)

Resources

Funding of Atlas

• Bridge Project Atlas Economic Research Foundation, accessed 28 August 2013.
• "Corporate-funded Lobbyists Aimed to Sabotage Johannesburg Summit," Africa News, 8/19/2002
• ExxonMobil Foundation 2000 IRS 990

Exxon pages

None of the pages below are available on the internet or in the Internet Archive (because of Robots.txt exclusions)

• ExxonMobil 2001 Annual Report
• ExxonMobil 2002 Annual Report
• ExxonMobil 1998 grants list
• ExxonMobil 2003 Corporate Giving Report
• Exxon Giving Report 2004
• ExxonMobil 2005 DIMENSIONS Report (Corporate Giving)
• XOM Foundation and Corporation donations in 2005 to worldwide organizations.

References

1. ↑ "Corporate-funded Lobbyists Aimed to Sabotage Johannesburg Summit," Africa News, 19 August 2002.

Categories: 

• Think Tanks
• Neoliberal Organisation

Antony Fisher (1915-1988) was a member of the Mont Pelerin Society and the founder of the libertarian think tank, the Institute of Economic Affairs.

Brian Wheeler writes about Fisher's founding of the Institute for BBC Online:

It may be the dominant political force of our times, but the economic creed that came to be known as Thatcherism was born in obscure circumstances. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, politics was dominated by a single philosophy. Central planning and state control of industry was seen by both Labour and Conservatives as the only sensible way to run Britain's economy... It fell to outsiders such as Antony Fisher - an Old Etonian chicken farmer - to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy; even if, initially, they were written off as cranks or dangerous ideologues. Fisher, who made his fortune by pioneering battery farming techniques, founded a think tank, The Institute of Economic Affairs, in the mid 1950s to spread his free market philosophy.^[1]

Affiliations

• Mont Pelerin Society
• Institute of Economic Affairs
• Manhattan Institute

Connections

• Linda Whetstone, daughter | Michael Fisher, son | Francis Whetstone, son-in-law | Rachel Whetstone, grand-daughter |

Resources

Paul Labarique The Manhattan Institute, Neoconservatives’s Lab, Voltaire Net, 15 September 2004. Fisher speaks from the grave.

References

1. ↑ Brian Wheeler Tory! Tory! Tory! (Part one) BBC Online, Last Updated: Wednesday, 8 March 2006

Category: 

• Think Tanker

http://books.google.com/books?id=Cbl7YugSoSMC&dq=William+Hammett+the+Manhattan+Institute&source=gbs_navlinks_s

The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: The Conservative Ascent to Political Power

Sidney Blumenthal

Union Square Press, 2008 - Political Science - 345 pages

wiki

Sir Antony Fisher (1915–1988) was a British businessman and philanthropist. He participated in the formation of various libertarian organisations during the second half of the twentieth century, including the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation. Through Atlas, he helped establish up to 150 other institutions worldwide.

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Biography
  • 1.1 Early life
  • 1.2 Younger adult life
  • 1.3 Later years
  • 1.4 Think tanks
  • 1.5 Personal life
  • 1.6 Death
• 2 References
• 3 External links

Biography

Early life

Antony Fisher was born on 28 June 1915. He was only two years old when his father was killed by a sniper in Gaza during World War One.^[1]

He was educated at Eton College.

Younger adult life

During the Second World War, he served in the Royal Air Force alongside his younger brother, who was killed in the Battle of Britain. These events profoundly affected him and he dedicated his life to what he saw as the fight against totalitarianism.^[2]

After World War II, he was alarmed by the election of a Labour government, the nationalisation of industry, and the introduction of central economic planning.^[1] In 1945 Fisher had read Road to Serfdom by Austrian economist F. A. Hayek which influenced his thinking.^[2] Fisher sought out Hayek at the London School of Economics where he taught and talked about his plans to go into politics. Hayek, however, convinced him that think-tanks were the best medium for effecting political change.^[2]

In 1952, he undertook a study trip to the United States, where he visited the new Foundation for Economic Education (FEE). F. A. Harper of the FEE introduced Fisher to former colleagues from the Agriculture Department of Cornell University, who showed him intensive chicken farming techniques with which Fisher was very impressed.^[2] He returned home to start England's first battery cage chicken farm, Buxted Chickens, which eventually made him a millionaire.

He used his fortune to set up the influential Institute of Economic Affairs with Ralph Harris in 1955.

Later years

Some of Fisher's other business ventures did not succeed (including a turtle-farming operation).

In 1971 Fisher founded the International Institute for Economic Research, which went to spawn both the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1980 and the International Policy Network in 2001. Through these operations, Fisher provided financial and operational support for a huge number of fledgling think-tanks, most of which would not exist without his influence. It was through the Atlas Economic Research Foundation that Fisher was able to extend his beliefs worldwide. By 1984, Fisher was watching over eighteen institutions in eleven countries. [1] Today, Atlas supports and works with around 400 free-market think-tanks in over 90 different countries.

In his book Thinking the unthinkable, Richard Cockett sketched Fisher's role in supporting other emerging think-tanks around the world. Cockett wrote, "On the strength of his reputation with the IEA, he was invited in 1975 to become co-director of the Fraser Institute in Vancouver, founded by the Canadian businessman T. Patrick Boyle in 1974. Fisher let the young director of the Fraser Institute, Dr Michael Walker, get on with the intellectual output of the Institute (just as he had given free rein to Seldon and Harris at the IEA) while he himself concentrated on the fund-raising side". Cockett explained that after his success at the Fraser Institute, Fisher went to New York where in 1977 he set up the International Center for Economic Policy Studies (ICEPS), later renamed the Manhattan Institute. "The incorporation documents for the ICEPS were signed by prominent attorney Bill Casey, later Director of the Central Intelligence Agency". Cockett comments that "under the directorship of William Hammett the Manhattan Institute became probably Fisher's greatest success after the IEA".

In 1977, Cockett wrote, Fisher moved to San Francisco "with his second wife Dorian, who he had met through the Mont Pelerin Society, and founded the Pacific Research Institute in 1979" and Fisher and Milton Friedman lived in the same apartment block in San Francisco during the 1980s. In the late 1970s, Fisher assisted Greg Lindsay in the development of the Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Cockett wrote, "In 1981, to co-ordinate and establish a central focus for these institutes that Fisher found himself start up all over the world, he created the Atlas Economic Research Foundation which in 1987 joined up with the Institute for Humane Studies (IHS) (founded by the Mont Pelerin member F. A. Harper in 1961) to provide a central institutional structure for what quickly became an ever-expanding number of international free-market think-tanks or research institutes". According to Cokett, "Fisher used the local and international gatherings of the Mont Pelerin Society to find personnel, fund-raisers and donors for many of the Atlas Institutes" as the international think-tanks proliferated.

He was knighted four weeks before his death.

Think tanks

The most prominent think tanks founded by Fisher include:

• Fraser Institute
• Manhattan Institute
• Pacific Research Institute
• National Center for Policy Analysis
• Centre for Independent Studies
• Adam Smith Institute

Through the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, Fisher helped establish up to 150 other think-tanks worldwide.

Personal life

He was the father of Linda Whetstone, who has been involved with many of Fisher's think tanks, and the grandfather of Rachel Whetstone, formerly Political Secretary to Conservative leader Michael Howard, now global head of communications and public policy for Google, who is married to David Cameron's Director of Strategy Steve Hilton.

Death

He died on 8 July 1988.

References

1. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher#cite_ref-Atlas_1-1) Founder's Story, Atlas Economic Research Foundation
2. ^ :{Jump up to::(style="top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important;-webkit-user-select:none"):}:^a ^b(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher#cite_ref-tory_2-1) ^c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher#cite_ref-tory_2-2) ^d(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Fisher#cite_ref-tory_2-3) "Tory! Tory! Tory!". BBC Television. 2006.

• Cockett, Richard,Thinking the unthinkable: think-tanks and the economic counter-revolution, 1931–1983, Fontana Press, 1995, ISBN 0-00-637586-3
• Frost, Gerald, Antony Fisher, Champion of Liberty, Profile Books, Great Britain, 2002.
• Kwang, Jo (2008). "Antony Fisher (1915–1988)". In Hamowy, Ronald. The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE; Cato Institute. p. 177. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151.OCLC 750831024.

External links

• John Blundell, "Hayek, Fisher and *The Road to Serfdom* in Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom: the condensed version of the Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek as it appeared in the April 1945 edition of Readers Digest, Institute of Economic Affairs, 1999.
• John Blundell, Waging the War of Ideas, speech to the Heritage Foundation, January 1990
• Article by Adam Curtis about think tanks, featuring Antony Fisher from the BBC

This article uses content from the SourceWatch article on Antony Fisher under the terms of the GFDL.