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see petraeus

icn

But even among peer organizations, Climate Defiance stands out for its tactic of birddogging the prominent people it targets and its rapid rise to notoriety. Since its inception last spring, the group has made frequent headlines and racked up millions of social media views, pursuing heavy hitters like Vice President Kamala Harris, White House national climate advisor Ali Zaidi, Senator Joe Manchin, Federal Reserve Bank Chair Jerome Powell, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and President Joe Biden.

:{:{Most recently, the group—alongside partner organization Planet Over Profit—confronted former CIA director David Petraeus at a book talk in New York City on Friday, criticizing his firm’s involvement with the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline in Canada and the excessive force and surveillance tactics used against pipeline opponents by Canadian police. Petraeus is chairman of the Global Institute at private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co, which is a majority stakeholder in the project.}:

https://www.desmog.com/:{2022/02:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:/16/private-equity-fossil-fuels-blackstone-kkr-carlyle-dapl/

Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams. Originally published on Common Dreams.

A report published Tuesday by a pair of nonprofits shines a light on the “Wall Street heavyweights” at private equity firms who “burnish their reputations through hundreds of millions of dollars in philanthropy, even as their investments help drive climate catastrophe.”

“The private equity industry largely evades public scrutiny, despite investing billions in fossil fuel investments.”

The new analysis from LittleSis and Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) — entitled Private Equity’s Dirty Dozen: 12 Firms Dripping in Oil and the Wealthy Executives Who Run Them — highlights that as asset managers and big banks face rising scrutiny for their climate-wrecking conduct, “private equity firms and the billionaires and multi-millionaires who lead them have largely escaped scrutiny.”

“This needs to change,” the document declares. “Private equity firms are fueling the climate crisis and environmental injustice with investments in fracked gas, oil pipelines, coal plants, and offshore drilling. These damaging investments mirror private equity’s other destructive impacts in other areas of the economy like in retail, restaurants, healthcare, and incarceration.”

Meanwhile, executives at these firms “are some of the most influential people in the world,” the analysis continues. “They are chummy with powerful elected officials, to whom they donate piles of money. They hold prestigious trusteeships at elite universities and cultural institutions. Buildings are named after them. They own professional sports franchises.”

“Between their yachts, mansions, and private jets, these private equity executives live some of the lushest lives of anyone on the planet,” the report adds. “But in many cases, they sustain their wealth and status by steering their firms’ investments into — among other dubious things — dirty energy.”

LittleSis and PESP targeted:

While some of the firms didn’t respond to requests for comment from the Guardian — which was granted exclusive access to the report — others pushed back, with spokespeople for Blackstone and KKR pointing to each firm’s investments in the global energy transition.

Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm, “has one of the most substantial portfolios of fossil fuel assets across its various funds,” the report says, specifically noting its nearly 7 percent stake in the company that owns the Dakota Access Pipeline, which has provoked years of Indigenous-led protests met with brutal crackdowns by law enforcement and private security. [TWT]

Dubbed “Wall Street’s top political donor,” Schwarzman “is a top ally, donor, and fundraiser” for former President Donald Trump, the analysis says, pointing out that the Blackstone executive reportedly “even defended Trump’s election denialism at a CEO meeting shortly after the 2020 election.”

Schwarzman — the firm’s chairman, CEO, and co-founder — has also “doled out hundreds of millions to get prestigious buildings named after him” and “is a current or past member of some of the most powerful business, policy, and think tank boards,” the report notes.

Report co-author and LittleSis research director Derek Seidman said in a statement that “it’s a serious problem when superrich private equity executives who invest billions in harmful fossil fuels can greenwash their reputations through acquiring coveted board seats at prestigious universities and cultural institutions.”

“This helps these Wall Street billionaires hide the fact that they’re among the world’s biggest oil and gas barons,” Seidman said.

For each executive, the groups put together graphics that illustrate their ties to powerful institutions and people as well as their firm’s investments in the fossil fuel industry. Schwarzman’s chart reveals connections to prestigious universities along with controversial fossil fuel projects.

A screenshot from the report illustrates Blackstone Group CEO, chairman, and co-founder Stephen Schwarzman’s connections to fossil fuels.

The other profiles continue in a similar fashion. The Carlyle Group section states that “no other private equity buyout firm—not Blackstone, not KKR—is currently as bullish on oil and gas as Carlyle,” and “few private equity tycoons have bought as much influence—and are as waist-deep in dirty fossil fuels—as billionaire David Rubenstein,” its co-founder.

In addition to holding positions at various other institutions, KKR co-founder and co-chairman Kravis is a “director of the Palm Beach Civic Association alongside other hedge fund billionaires, and the city’s main performing arts center bears the Kravis family name,” the report says. “He owns a beachside mansion alongside a slew of other Wall Street billionaires like Stephen Schwarzman (Blackstone), Carl Icahn (Icahn Enterprises), Ken Griffin (Citadel), and Nelson Peltz (Trian).”

“Private equity threatens to undermine our hard work to tackle the climate crisis and advance environmental justice.”

“KKR owns dozens of energy companies, with over 80% of its energy holdings in the extraction, transportation, or burning of climate-destroying fossil fuels,” according to the document. “Moreover, from racist and colonial pipelines to toxic oilfield development, KKR is behind some of the dirtiest and most controversial oil and gas projects around.”

Along with pouring money into activities that heat the planet, “Kravis and KKR have no qualms about pillaging companies or investing in unethical products in order to turn a profit,” the analysis adds, noting that “the firm helped oversee the notorious raid of Toys ‘R’ Us that devastated the company’s workers.”

Responding to the report, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) — a member of the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs — tied its findings to criticism of the private equity industry’s broader practices.

“By plowing money into dirty coal plants, offshore drilling, and deforestation, private equity threatens to undermine our hard work to tackle the climate crisis and advance environmental justice,” she told The Guardian. “It’s just another page from private equity’s standard playbook: boost short-term profits at the expense of the long-term well-being of communities.”

Reiterating that “the private equity industry largely evades public scrutiny, despite investing billions in fossil fuel investments that have spewed greenhouse gases from pipelines, fracking operations, and power plants across the globe,” report co-author and PESP research director Alyssa Giachino advocated for a swift shift across the industry.

“Private equity should move away from fossil fuels,” she said. “It’s necessary to help mitigate climate change and it’s necessary for environmental justice.”

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https://theconversation.com/tc-energys-name-change-rebooting-canadian-pipeline-empires-132295

Canada, the recent oil price crash has distracted attention from the controversial Coastal GasLink pipeline project. Buried in that dispute is the recent history of TC Energy, Coastal GasLink’s parent firm.

TransCanada changed its name to TC Energy just after the January 2019 Unist'ot'en stand-off between the RCMP and land defenders in support of a Coastal GasLink injunction. It was also within 10 days of the Unist’ot’en house group of the Wet'suwet'en First Nation alleging violations of their territorial rights at the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples.

TC Energy’s name change also overlapped with the renegotiation of controversial TransCanada pipeline contracts in Mexico.

While TransCanada says the change would better represent its increasing activities in Mexico and the United States, it also distanced the firm from controversial projects, among them the Keystone XL project that aimed to expand the Keystone pipeline system in Canada and the U.S.

Keystone XL a flashpoint

Keystone XL has been a key target of global environmental activism against the oilsands and, for a time, resulted in Alberta oil being labelled the Earth’s most carbon-intensive and dirtiest fossil fuel. It also turned public attention to the violation of Indigenous territorial rights in which North American pipeline projects are mired.

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tC Energy now acknowledges that Keystone XL may never be built.

As opposition to Alberta’s oilsands, associated pipelines, environmental injustice and carbon emissions have ramped up in Canada over the past 15 years, so has North American production of natural gas for energy and export. In this shift, TC Energy’s role as a conduit for U.S. natural gas to Mexico is notable.

TC Energy’s name change also dissociates the firm from Canada. In Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, Canada’s human rights reputation has plummeted due to violence associated with Canadian mining companies.

Negative image

Canada’s negative brand image in Latin America emerges from a long history of the Canadian government backing its extractive sector at home and abroad. TC Energy’s activities across North America are heavily financed by Canadian entities, including Export Development Canada, private banks and a network of influential board members who lobby the Canadian government for financial and diplomatic support.

Read more: The role of Canadian mining in the plight of Central American migrants

Mexicohad been a net exporter of hydrocarbons to the United States for three decades. But the U.S. shale-gas boom and Mexican energy reform shifted energy trade dramatically and helped foster Mexico’s increasing dependence on American natural gas.

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The pattern is reminiscent of Mexico’s abrupt dependence on U.S. maize following the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Mexico shifted from being self-sufficient in this food staple to becoming dependent on imports. The same process has transpired in hydrocarbons, compromising Mexican energy sovereignty.

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The privatization of Mexico’s energy sector, which proceeded at a slow creep for decades and accelerated drastically in 2013, has been a flashpoint for protest throughout the country due to high fuel costs.

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Helped AMLO get elected

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It helped elect opposition leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador to the Mexican presidency in 2018 and factored into the renegotiation of NAFTA.

Read more: Why Mexico's historic elections may bring about big change

TC Energy is among the firms facilitating the growing American and Canadian involvement in the Mexican oil and gas sector. A TransCanada representative was the co-chair of the intergovernmental Canada-Mexico Partnership’s energy sub-committee in 2016.

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While TransCanada described a welcoming environment when it shifted activities to Mexico, this has soured with increasing opposition, including Indigenous mobilization, against pipeline projects in Mexico.

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Shared risks across the continent

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Shortly after López Obrador’s election in 2018, but before he took office, TransCanada suspended pipeline projects in four states due to protests. López Obrador has renegotiated terms associated with various pipeline contracts, including TC Energy, reportedly saving Mexico US$4.5 billion dollars.

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In both Canada and Mexico the ecological and financial risks of pipeline projects are shouldered by local residents and pension holders.

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As Canadian investment in Mexico’s energy sector has increased, the global financial hazards of locked-in hydrocarbon consumption, which are risky given their financial implications for carbon mitigation measures, have also been more broadly distributed to Mexicans.

In northeastern British Columbia, earthquakes from natural gas fracking threaten dams and pose a risk to the area’s residents, according to the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. The carbon emissions from the first phase of the LNG Canada project that would receive fracked gas via Coastal GasLink are estimated at 3.45 megatonnes per year.

This is a large portion of the province’s future emissions. British Columbia has said it would cut emissions by 80 per cent by 2050, to about 13 megatonnes.

The Coastal GasLink project also poses risks to those whose pensions finance the project if the project is unable to proceed.

In December, TC Energy sold a 65 per cent interest in Coastal GasLink to a consortium involving AIMCo (Alberta Investment Management Corp.) and KKR, a private U.S. financial company operating in partnership with the National Pension Service of Korea. AIMCo manages the funds that secure future income for more than 368,000 public sector employees and pensioners in Alberta and the rest of Canada.

Read more: Coastal GasLink and Canada's pension fund colonialism

In recent years, the inter-governmental Canada-Mexico Partnership has promoted Alberta’s approach to securing “right of way from Indigenous peoples to Mexico. This entails replicating the divisive model that industry has used to get consent from Indigenous peoples in Canada in Mexico.

Given TC Energy’s trajectory over the past decade this is problematic.

TC Energy’s behaviour in Wet'suwet'en has resulted in a nationwide crisis. The Canadian government and Canadian firms should not facilitate the export of those behaviours to Mexico.

tags: Indigenous

Mexico

Keystone XL pipeline

First Nations

Andrés Manuel López Obrador

Wet'suwet'en First Nation

TransCanada

Wet'suwet'en

Coastal GasLink

Alberta oilsands

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omfg fire whistleblower

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/heres-what-wall-street-doesnt-want-you-to-know-about-its-grip-on-emergency-rooms/

no lnx

Here’s what Wall Street doesn’t want you to know about its grip on emergency rooms

Written by Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt / Independent Media Institute April 3, 2020

Doctor Ling Min is the first emergency room doctor to be fired for going public with his concerns about poor hospital emergency room safety practices and shortages of medical supplies and protective gear for health workers.

He won’t be the last.

Like many hospitals in the US, PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center in Bellingham Washington, where Ling Min worked for the past 17 years as an emergency room doctor, has outsourced the management and staffing of its emergency room.So, Min works on-site at the hospital’s ER, but he is employed by a physician staffing firm that runs the ER. These staffing firms are often behind the surprise medical bills for ER services that patients receive after their insurance company has paid the hospital and doctors, but not the excessive out-of-network charges billed by these outside staffing firms.

About a third of hospital emergency rooms are staffed by doctors on the payrolls of two physician staffing companies—TeamHealth and Envision Health—owned by Wall Street investment firms. Envision Healthcare employs 69,000 healthcare workers nationwide while TeamHealth employs 20,000. Private equity firm Blackstone Group owns TeamHealth, Kravis Kohlberg Roberts (KKR) owns Envision.

Care of the sick is not the mission of these companies; their mission is to make outsized profits for the private equity firms and its investors. Overcharging patients and insurance companies for providing urgent and desperately needed emergency medical care is bad enough. But it is unconscionable to muzzle doctors who speak out to advocate for the health of their patients and co-workers during the global pandemic that is rapidly spreading across the US.

Yet, that is what Blackstone-owned TeamHealth just did. Why would an experienced ER doctor be fired in the middle of a pandemic?One clue may be that Blackstone’s CEO, Stephen A. Schwarzman, is part of President Trump’s inner circle. He may not want to risk that relationship by allowing TeamHealth’s doctors to inform the public about Washington’s mishandling of the allocation of supplies and protective gear. The president might conclude that TeamHealth doctors didn’t appreciate him enough, and where would that leave Schwartzman?

PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center may have the distinction of being the first hospital to have a doctor outsourced from a physician staffing firm unceremoniously fired for telling the public the truth. But it won’t be the last. Hospitals are now telling doctors treating coronavirus patients they will be fired if they speak to the press.

The American Academy of Emergency Medicine protested Dr. Min’s ouster and questioned how TeamHealth is allowed to provide hospital services when the law requires that physician practices must be owned by a licensed medical practitioner. TeamHealth skirts the law by owning all the assets of the physician practices it acquires—the real estate, offices, equipment, supplies, inventory, and even accounts receivable.

On paper, the physician practices are owned by a doctor-led organization that TeamHealth has set up to comply with the law. But what does it mean to own a physician practice if the practice has no assets and no possibility to exist on its own?

The furor over patients hit by surprise medical bills revealed that TeamHealth controls the billing for the doctors it supplies to hospital emergency rooms. The firing of Doctor Ling Min pulls back the curtain and reveals that TeamHealth controls the doctors as well.

Eileen Appelbaum is the Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and visiting professor, School of Management, University of Leicester, UK.

Rosemary Batt is the Alice Hanson Cook Professor of Women and Work, Cornell University ILR School.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

2x?

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/08/us/politics/think-tanks-research-and-corporate-lobbying.html

no many links

How Think Tanks

Amplify Corporate

America’s Influence

Think tanks are seen as independent, but their scholars often push donors’

agendas, amplifying a culture of corporate influence in Washington.

By ERIC LIPTON and

BROOKE WILLIAMS

WASHINGTON — As Lennar Corporation, one of the nation’s largest home builders, pushed ahead with an $8 billion plan to revitalize a barren swath of San Francisco, it found a trusted voice to vouch for its work: the Brookings Institution, the most prestigious think tank in the world.

“This can become a productive, mutually beneficial relationship,” Bruce Katz, a Brookings vice president, wrote to Lennar in July 2010. The ultimate benefit for Brookings: $400,000 in donations from Lennar’s different divisions.

Think Tanks Inc.

Articles in this series examine how research institutions have become part of the corporate influence machine in Washington.

Think Tank Scholar or Corporate Consultant? It Depends on the Day

The think tank began to aggressively promote the project, San Francisco’s biggest redevelopment effort since its recovery from the 1906 earthquake, and later offered to help Lennar, a publicly traded company, “engage with national media to develop stories that highlight Lennar’s innovative approach.”

And Brookings went further. It named Kofi Bonner, the Lennar executive in charge of the San Francisco development, as a senior fellow — an enviable credential he used to advance the company’s efforts.

“He would be a trusted adviser,” an internal Brookings memo said in 2014 as the think tank sought one $100,000 donation from Lennar.

Photo

Kofi Bonner, then a regional vice president for Lennar Corporation, at Hunters Point in San Francisco in 2008. The Brookings Institution named him a senior fellow in 2014. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Think tanks, which position themselves as “universities without students,” have power in government policy debates because they are seen as researchers independent of moneyed interests. But in the chase for funds, think tanks are pushing agendas important to corporate donors, at times blurring the line between researchers and lobbyists. And they are doing so while reaping the benefits of their tax-exempt status, sometimes without disclosing their connections to corporate interests.

Thousands of pages of internal memos and confidential correspondence between Brookings and other donors — like JPMorgan Chase, the nation’s largest bank; K.K.R., the global investment firm; Microsoft, the software giant; and Hitachi, the Japanese conglomerate — show that financial support often came with assurances from Brookings that it would provide “donation benefits,” including setting up events featuring corporate executives with government officials, according to documents obtained by The New York Times and the New England Center for Investigative Reporting.

Similar arrangements exist at many think tanks. On issues as varied as military sales to foreign countries, international trade, highway management systems and real estate development, think tanks have frequently become vehicles for corporate influence and branding campaigns.

U.S. & POLITICS By A.J. CHAVAR and ERIC LIPTON 1:43

‘This Is Thinly Disguised Lobbying’

Video

‘This Is Thinly Disguised Lobbying’

Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, explains how some think tanks engage in “thinly disguised lobbying” to influence lawmakers. By A.J. CHAVAR and ERIC LIPTON on Publish Date August 7, 2016. . Watch in Times Video »

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“This is about giant corporations who figured out that by spending, hey, a few tens of millions of dollars, if they can influence outcomes here in Washington, they can make billions of dollars,” said Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, a frequent critic of undisclosed Wall Street donations to think tanks.

Washington has seen a proliferation of think tanks, particularly small institutions with narrow interests tied to specific industries. At the same time, the brand names of the field have experienced explosive growth. Brookings’s annual budget has doubled in the last decade, to $100 million. The American Enterprise Institute is spending at least $80 million on a new headquarters in Washington, not far from where the Center for Strategic and International Studies built a $100 million office tower.

The shift has occurred as nonprofits in general have been under increasing pressure from their donors to meet specific goals. But for think tanks, that pressure can threaten their standing as independent arbiters in policy debates in Congress, the White House and the news media.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to go back to the greatest generation, in the post-World War II era of philanthropy, where they said, gosh, ‘Here is $1 million; spend it how you wish,’” Kimberly Churches, the managing director at Brookings, said in an interview.

Think tank executives reject any suggestion that they are tools of corporate influence campaigns and say they are simply teaming up with donors that have similar goals, like helping cities with economic development.

“We do not compromise our integrity,” said Martin S. Indyk, Brookings’s executive vice president. “We maintain our core values of quality, independence, as well as impact.”

But he acknowledged that the arrangement to appoint the Lennar executive as a senior fellow had created the “appearance of a conflict of interest.” And he said that Brookings, in the interest of transparency, had recently decided to prohibit corporations or corporate-backed foundations from making anonymous contributions.

At think tanks like Brookings, the majority of reports and events, with titles like “Five Evils: Multidimensional Poverty and Race in America” or “India at the Global High Table,” have no obvious link to corporate donors.

Still, the benefits afforded to corporations looking to cloak themselves with the authority of think tanks are strikingly evident, according to a review of documents from more than a dozen institutions.

...

The likely conclusions of some think tank reports, documents show, are discussed with donors — or even potential ones — before the research is complete. Drafts of the studies have been shared with donors whose opinions have then helped shape final reports. Donors have outlined how the resulting scholarship will be used as part of broader lobbying efforts. The think tanks also help donors promote their corporate brands, as Brookings does with JPMorgan Chase, whose $15.5 million contribution is the largest by a private corporation in the institution’s history.

Despite these benefits, corporations can write off the donations as charitable contributions. Some tax experts say these arrangements may amount to improper subsidies by taxpayers if think tanks are providing specific services.

“People think of think tanks as do-gooders, uncompromised and not bought like others in the political class,” said Bill Goodfellow, the executive director of the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “But it’s absurd to suggest that donors don’t have influence. The danger is we in the think tank world are being corrupted in the same way as the political world. And all of us should be worried about it.”

A group of Democratic state attorneys general is investigating whether Exxon Mobil worked with certain think tanks in past decades to cover up its understanding of fossil fuels’ impact on climate change, in part by financing reports questioning the science, a suggestion the company rejects.

Document: Brookings Institution and Its Corporate Donors

Executives at Brookings, the Center for Strategic and International Studies and other think tanks say they have systems in place to ensure that their reports are based on scholars’ independent conclusions.

“We strongly believe in our model of seeking solutions to some of our country’s most difficult problems,” John J. Hamre, the chief executive at C.S.I.S., said in a written reply to questions. “We gather stakeholders, vet ideas, find areas of agreement and highlight areas of disagreement.”

Yet researchers at think tanks are seeing corporate influence firsthand. Rachel Stohl, a senior associate at the Stimson Center in Washington, said she had been quizzed by potential donors as she tried to raise money for research on the military’s use of armed drones.

“‘Are you going to say drones are bad?’” she recalled one potential financial backer asking. “‘We are not interested in funding something that says drones are bad.’”

Donations and Rewards

The confidential Brookings spreadsheet had an unassuming title: Corporate Overviews Tracking. It listed nearly 90 corporations, from Alcoa to Wells Fargo, providing a glimpse of the vast electronic file that Brookings maintained on donors and prospects, and the benefits it might offer.

The database, along with thousands of pages of emails, solicitations for money and memos on meetings with corporate officials, highlighted Brookings’s practice of assuring that donors would see results from their contributions.

The Brookings Institution, which operates on a $100 million annual budget, twice what it was a decade ago. Credit Greg Kahn for The New York Times

The files included company priorities and a tally of donations. General Electric wanted to fund work on rail networks and clean energy programs — both critical parts of its business — and Brookings then featured G.E. executives, joined by officials from the White House and Congress, at events that focused on these industries.

In 2004, Brookings established its Metropolitan Policy Program, devised to stimulate economic growth in cities. As the country was emerging from recession, Brookings bolstered its ties to corporate donors in 2010 by naming Marek Gootman, a lobbyist from Patton Boggs, as its first director of strategic partnerships. He was assigned to work with “a national network of elected, business and civic leaders engaged in city and metropolitan area policy development and implementation.”

From the start, the program blended a variety of insights on urban matters, including from corporate, nonprofit and government sources. And Mr. Indyk noted that any reports issued were made public.

Donations to the program exploded, from $4.3 million in 2005 to $12.5 million in 2013, nearly 20 percent of Brookings’s overall program spending that year.

K.K.R., after starting special funds around 2010 to invest in real estate and other infrastructure projects, donated $450,000 to Brookings, some of it as the institution agreed to set up meetings for a top K.K.R. executive with community leaders in Philadelphia and Detroit, where the company was considering real estate projects. Brookings separately produced a report, published on K.K.R.’s website, promoting one of the company’s infrastructure projects in New Jersey, after the company executive suggested such a piece.

In advance of a 2014 event Brookings officials attended with corporate executives including Henry R. Kravis, a co-chairman of K.K.R., one memo marked as confidential noted: “K.K.R. has given a total of $350K to Brookings. Last gift came in on 3/27/2014 for $150K to Metro; Henry has donated $75K to Brookings, most going to the individual unrestricted fund.”

The tally demonstrates the important distinction that Brookings makes between “unrestricted” donations, which the think tank can spend on any research, and project-based funding restricted to specific topics that the donor has a particular interest in.

Photo

Marek Gootman, center, with Gina Luna, a JPMorgan Chase executive, in April. Formerly a lobbyist at Patton Boggs, Mr. Gootman was appointed in 2010 as Brookings’s first director of strategic partnerships. Credit Erin Hull for The New York Times

Lennar joined Brookings’s Metropolitan Leadership Council, established for the program’s top donors, in July 2010. That month, the company won approval to redevelop Hunters Point in San Francisco, turning the area into a more than 700-acre mix of housing, education and commercial development.

Brookings would later name the project one of the three most “transformative investments in the United States.”

The San Francisco project generated controversy from the beginning, with critics concerned about toxic waste left by the former Navy shipyard.

Lennar joined with Brookings as protests were escalating in 2010. One complaint, filed by area residents with the Environmental Protection Agency, said the San Francisco Health Department was “conspiring with Lennar Corporation to conceal the health threats of asbestos-laden dust.” The company was busy at the time looking for investors to help it complete the project, known as the San Francisco Shipyard.

A spokesman for Lennar, Glenn Bunting, disputed claims that the company had donated to Brookings out of self-interest — and said the alliance was not related to the protests.

“There was nothing needed in the way of assistance for Lennar to ‘buy’ from Brookings,” Mr. Bunting said in an email. Brookings, though, continued to promote the project.

“San Francisco’s Shipyard project is both physically and economically transformative for the Bay Area and globally significant,” Mr. Katz, the Brookings vice president, said in a news release issued by San Francisco’s mayor in 2011 as Lennar’s hunt for major investors intensified. “This project promises to set a new paradigm for successfully conceiving, financing and delivering transformative infrastructure projects in the United States.”

Follow-up memos were more explicit: Brookings, as it sought an additional $50,000 from Lennar in 2014, said it was prepared to “use our convening power, research expertise, network connections and knowledge of innovative practices to help further drive the ultimate impact and success” of Lennar’s project and to “provide public validation of San Francisco’s efforts through national and local media coverage.”

The think tank soon delivered.

In a July 2014 document, Brookings sought more money from Lennar while offering to help with its San Francisco project.

Mr. Katz made appearances alongside Mr. Bonner, the Lennar executive, to promote the project to government officials and business leaders in California. In 2014, around the time the think tank sought an additional round of money from Lennar, Brookings invited its new nonresident senior fellow, Mr. Bonner, who has a master’s degree in architecture and is a former government planner for several California cities, to appear at an event at its headquarters.

“I am working in San Francisco in a fabulous property,” Mr. Bonner said at the event, referring to Lennar’s Shipyard project.

In March, at a conference of real estate developers and investors in Cannes, France, Lennar sponsored a session in which Brookings researchers helped the company highlight the Shipyard.

“Kofi is what I would describe as the quintessential city builder,” Julie Wagner, a Brookings nonresident senior fellow, said as she introduced Mr. Bonner at an event where projects with no connection to donors were also featured.

At least some of the $400,000 Lennar has donated to Brookings since 2010 has come from its SunStreet Energy division, which sells rooftop solar systems, at the same time that Brookings’s metropolitan program has published research on the rooftop solar industry.

Mr. Indyk said the collaboration simply reflected shared goals of revitalizing cities. Brookings scholars promoted other real estate projects, he said, involving local governments, universities or even developers that were not donors — including one in Detroit backed by Dan Gilbert, the founder of Quicken Loans, and one in Seattle backed by Paul G. Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft.

But Mr. Indyk acknowledged that naming Mr. Bonner, who declined to be interviewed, a Brookings nonresident scholar had “created the impression that because Lennar was giving money, he was getting the title.” His post, which was unpaid, was not renewed.

Martin S. Indyk, the Brookings Institution’s executive vice president, said the think tank’s collaboration with Lennar to redevelop Hunters Point in San Francisco reflected a shared goal to revitalize cities. “We do not compromise our integrity,” he said. Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times

Hitachi has been another large donor to the metropolitan program, giving a total of $1.8 million to Brookings over the last decade, according to Brookings documents. The think tank reviewed the company’s corporate marketing and sales strategy targeting the United States, an internal memo shows. Brookings also organized public events that featured top Obama administration officials and allowed Hitachi executives to promote their products.

“Metro has held nine meetings and several conference calls in the past six months with executives from Hitachi’s water, transportation and data business lines and are collaborating more fully on defining what it means to be a ‘Smart City,’” a confidential Brookings memo said.

Officials at Brookings said they had not lobbied for Hitachi, and they provided examples of reports that they said included conclusions challenging the company’s position. “Helping a corporation’s for-profit agenda is not in any way our agenda,” Ms. Churches, the managing director, said.

Yet Ms. Churches also said the contract language with donors like Lennar and Hitachi was “inelegant,” although not improper.

When asked if the documents read like a fee-for-service agreement, she said, “It could be misconstrued.”

Mr. Indyk said Brookings had recently changed its policies so that “today, there is no way in which those words would be used in our documents.”

‘Growing the Economy’

When JPMorgan offered a major donation to the metropolitan program in 2011, Brookings created the Global Cities Initiative, complete with a new logo that called it a “joint project of Brookings and JPMorgan Chase.”

The project was premised on a common interest between the bank and the think tank. Brookings wanted to promote economic growth in cities by encouraging international trade, and JPMorgan wanted to gain new business by offering loans to companies in the same markets.

In contract documents, Brookings emphasized that it would control the conclusions of its reports and said it would “not directly or indirectly communicate with any party” to help get JPMorgan business.

Mr. Indyk and executives from JPMorgan said the company and the think tank simply agreed on a worthy agenda.

“This was about growing the economy, and we are incredibly proud of the results of this initiative,” said Peter Scher, the head of the corporate responsibility program at JPMorgan. “We believe it’s had a huge impact in more than 30 cities that are involved.”

At the same time, hundreds of pages of memos — status reports to JPMorgan, internal reports by Brookings staff to prepare for meetings with top bank executives, and formal documents soliciting more money — make clear that Brookings saw the Global Cities Initiative as a branding effort that could help JPMorgan bolster its standing in cities.

“Bottom line: Growing metro economies is good for the nation and for JPMC; also, many U.S. cities are JPMC clients — motivation to support them and their clients,” said one Brookings document dated July 2011, as officials from the think tank met with top bank executives to discuss a planned donation that eventually totaled $15 million.

The Global Cities Initiative, another document written by a Brookings senior fellow explained, “must mean a marriage between JPMC corporate interests” and “Brookings continued thought leadership.”

JPMorgan, in a document dated a month before the agreement was signed, said the pending donation to Brookings “deepens/extends relationships with important client base among business and civic leaders both in the U.S. and abroad.”

And Brookings was ready to do its part.

“Our events, which in part target these audiences,” said an internal 2014 Brookings memo, referring to the Global Cities Initiative and federal and state leaders, “have yielded 100+ media hits, with 97% of them referencing GCI and 90% referencing JPMorgan; by the end of this year, we will have held events in 13 domestic markets and 9 international markets.”

At times, Brookings officials seemed worried they were not doing enough for the bank.

Photo

One of hundreds of documents detailing confidential discussions between Brookings and JPMorgan in 2011 as the parties were negotiating a $10 million gift for the Global Cities Initiative.

“No one wants to create overt marketing opportunities for JPMC, but we need to carve out roles and thought leadership opportunity for market presidents,” said a 2013 Brookings memo, referring to a dinner with the bank’s executives. “We need to do a better job tying it back to JPMC.”

It remains difficult to assess whether the relationship helped the bank’s business, but Mr. Scher said that was not the goal.

“If the Global Cities Initiative strengthens the economic competitiveness of cities, it’s a win for small businesses, job creation and everyone involved in these communities, including us,” Mr. Scher said in a statement.

Donations from the corporations to Brookings are tax exempt based on the premise that the think tank’s work benefits the public good, not a company’s bottom line.

But two lawyers who specialize in nonprofit law — Miranda Perry Fleischer, a professor at the University of San Diego School of Law, and Clifford Perlman, a partner at a New York-based firm — said Brookings’s agreements raised questions.

“Tax deductions are subsidies that are paid for by all taxpayers,” Ms. Fleischer said. “And the reason the subsidy is provided is that the charitable organization is supposed to be doing something for the public good, not that specifically benefits the private individual or corporation in the form of providing them goods or services.”

Mr. Indyk said that opinion was “totally unfounded,” noting that Brookings had retained its own lawyers to review the documents and found no problems.

“Brookings’s conclusion that all of these activities it engaged in with these donors primarily benefited the public rather than the donors is consistent with the applicable federal tax standards,” Douglas Varley, one of the lawyers for Brookings, said in a statement.

Close Partnerships

Other think tanks have been even more closely aligned with corporate agendas.

FedEx teamed up with the Atlantic Council — a think tank that focuses on international relations, with annual revenue that has surged to $21 million from $2 million in the last decade — to build support for a free-trade agreement the company hoped would increase business.

Document: Atlantic Council and Corporate Donors

Six months before the Atlantic Council report was issued, FedEx and the think tank worked on plans to use the report as a lobbying tool.

“The impact and reach of the report would be maximized by a rollout event” including a “public report launch with member(s) of Congress from one of the relevant committees,” said a two-page summary drafted by the Atlantic Council months before the study was completed.

FedEx and the Atlantic Council, working with the European American Chamber of Commerce, also told companies being asked to participate in the study that the goal was to “emphasize the positive impact that a comprehensive agreement would have on American and European small businesses.”

When the report came out in late 2014, its conclusions mirrored arguments FedEx had been aggressively pushing on Capitol Hill, including recommending a reduction in trans-Atlantic tariffs and allowing more duty-free shipments.

An executive vice president at FedEx, Rajesh Subramaniam, attended an event at Atlantic Council headquarters in Washington to celebrate the release of the final report. So did a key supporter, Representative Erik Paulsen, Republican of Minnesota.

“This is very exciting,” Mr. Subramaniam said at the event, referring to the potential for more trade. “The upside opportunity is quite large.”

Frederick Kempe, the Atlantic Council president, said that FedEx had donated just $20,000 to help fund the effort and that the staff at the Atlantic Council had handled the research.

Photo

A 2013 Atlantic Council brochure detailed the benefits of membership in the think tank’s corporate program.

“There is no doubt the work of think tanks has more credibility than the work of lobbyists, but the only way we preserve it is through intellectual independence,” Mr. Kempe said.

‘We Do Not Lobby’

General Atomics, the California-based manufacturer of Predator drones, had a clear problem. Prospects for sales were falling as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq wound down. The company wanted the Obama administration to change its policy to allow for sales to other countries, a lucrative proposition.

“When the budgets are going down in the U.S., you would like to be able to export more,” Frank Pace, the president of the company’s aircraft systems group, told a Reuters reporter in late 2013 at an air show in Dubai.

At about that time, the industry turned to the Center for Strategic and International Studies for help, providing money that the think tank used to conduct a study on drone policy, including exports.

While defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin and Boeing have cumulatively donated at least $77 million since 2010 to two dozen think tanks, disclosure records show, General Atomics’s contribution to the Center for Strategic and International Studies was quite small — in the tens of thousands of dollars.

C.S.I.S. set up confidential meetings at its headquarters with company representatives, inviting top officials from the Navy, the Air Force, the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the State Department and the office of the defense secretary, according to emails and other documents obtained by The Times through open records requests.

Document: C.S.I.S. and the Military Drone Maker

“Our series will be unique in convening a much broader group of stakeholders than is typical,” Samuel J. Brannen, the think tank’s lead scholar, wrote in an email to Aaron W. Jost, one of the State Department officials in charge of regulating drone exports.

As a think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies did not file a lobbying report, but the goals of the effort were clear.

“Political obstacles to export,” read the agenda of one closed-door “working group” meeting organized by Mr. Brannen that included Tom Rice, a lobbyist in General Atomics’s Washington office, on the invitation lists, the emails show.

Boeing and Lockheed Martin, drone makers that were major C.S.I.S. contributors, were also invited to attend the sessions, the emails show. The meetings and research culminated with a report released in February 2014 that reflected the industry’s priorities.

“I came out strongly in support of export,” Mr. Brannen, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Kenneth B. Handelman, the deputy assistant secretary of state for defense trade controls.

But the effort did not stop there.

Mr. Brannen initiated meetings with Defense Department officials and congressional staff to push for the recommendations, which also included setting up a new Pentagon office to give more focus to acquisition and deployment of drones. The center also stressed the need to ease export limits at a conference it hosted at its headquarters featuring top officials from the Navy, the Air Force and the Marine Corps.

Mr. Brannen, who has since left C.S.I.S., declined to comment. The think tank insisted that its efforts to influence administration policy were not lobbying.

“C.S.I.S. will not represent any donor before any government office or entity, including congressional lawmakers and executive branch officials,” Mr. Hamre, the chief executive, said in his statement to The Times. “We do not lobby.”

One thing is clear: The result was a victory for General Atomics.

Photo

A Predator drone manufactured by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems. General Atomics helped fund a study that led the United States to ease restrictions on sales of drones to governments overseas. Credit Sandy Huffaker for The New York Times

In February 2015, almost one year after the C.S.I.S. report was issued, the State Department announced a clarification of its rules, easing final approval that month for General Atomics’s long-planned sale of unarmed Predator drones to the United Arab Emirates, the first such sale to a non-NATO nation. The think tank report was just one of many voices pushing for the change.

A State Department spokesman said that while the government officials involved in the review had received opinions from think tanks and industry officials, “at the end of the day, this is a considered U.S. government policy.”

Huntington Ingalls Industries had an equally clear objective: to create an elaborate public relations and lobbying campaign to convince Congress that the nation needed to confront an emerging threat from China by building more nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — at a cost of about $11 billion each. The clear beneficiary? Huntington, the lone builder of the ships.

As part of a broader communications effort, Huntington helped finance a think tank report that enhanced the company’s argument for more funding. Bryan McGrath, a former naval officer who had commanded a guided-missile destroyer, approached Huntington Ingalls and offered to write a study on a fee-for-service basis as a private industry expert. The company turned down his offer.

Later, after he had joined the Hudson Institute and helped create the Center for American Seapower, he approached Huntington officials again, and they were interested.

“A think tank has more prestige,” Mr. McGrath said.

Huntington Ingalls paid $100,000 to fund the work, a critical commitment for Mr. McGrath, who said he was paid by Hudson only if he could successfully solicit donations to support his research.

Mr. McGrath said he had always been a strong proponent of aircraft carriers, so the company was not buying his opinion.

“The Hudson Center makes no secret about being very pro-sea power,” he said. “If a company came that wanted us to write a piece that advocated for something other than that, the answer would be no.”

In exchange for Huntington Ingalls’s support, company officials were given regular briefings on the research and the opportunity to suggest revisions to early drafts, Mr. McGrath said.

Document: The Aircraft Carrier Industry’s Lobbying and Think Tank Plan

“We have an iterative process already laid out in which we will sit down with them and go through drafts and discuss where we are going,” Mr. McGrath said. He added that he had not accepted all of the company’s suggestions.

The report was released in October at the Rayburn House Office Building. Mr. McGrath received an introduction from one of the industry’s most important boosters, Representative J. Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia, the chairman of the House Armed Services subcommittee that oversees the Navy.

The report did not mention that Huntington Ingalls had helped pay for it. Asked about the failure to disclose the contribution, John P. Walters, Hudson’s chief operating officer, called it a mistake. The report was subsequently revised — months after it was released and the congressional event held — to disclose the donation.

A second industry-funded report, prepared by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, came out a month later with a similar urgent call for more money to build more ships and to base more ships abroad, although it did not mention that it had been funded by the Navy League of the United States, a nonprofit group whose large corporate donors include Huntington Ingalls.

“This report is yet another important tool for Navy Leaguers to use in the field when educating local leaders and lawmakers,” Skip Witunski, the Navy League president, wrote to the group’s members late last year.

The strategy — lining up think tank reports as lobbying tools that echoed each other — was backed up with a series of letters to the editor, dozens of posts on Twitter and Facebook, and op-ed pieces.

Mr. McGrath said he, too, wondered if this storm of industry-funded work might be threatening the integrity of the process.

“I see a lot of stuff that comes out in Washington,” Mr. McGrath said, “and I got to scratch my head and say, ‘That guy must be on the payroll."

==

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nick turse:

For his part, after putting his extramarital affair behind him,Petraeus became a partner at the private equity firm Kohlberg, Kravis, Roberts & Co. L.P. (KKR), where he also serves as the chairman of the KKR Global Instituteand, according to his bio, “oversees the institute's thought leadership platform focused on geopolitical and macro-economic trends, as well as environmental, social, and governance issues.”  His lieutenants include a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and campaign manager for President George W. Bush, as well as a former leading light at Morgan Stanley.

:{KKR’s portfolio boasts a bit of everything, from Alliant Insurance Services and Panasonic Healthcare to a host of Chinese firms (Rundong Automobile Group and Asia Dairy, among them).  There are also defense firms under its umbrella, including TASC, the self-proclaimed “premier provider of advanced systems engineering and integration services across the Intelligence Community, Department of Defense, and civilian agencies of the federal government,” and Airbus Group’s defense electronics business which KKR recently bought for $1.2 billion.

}:

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbarians_at_the_Gate:_The_Fall_of_RJR_Nabisco

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco is a book about the leveraged buyout (LBO) of RJR Nabisco, written by investigative journalists Bryan Burrough and John Helyar. The book is based upon a series of articles written by the authors for The Wall Street Journal. The book was later made into a made-for-TV movie by HBO, also called Barbarians at the Gate. The book centers on F. Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, who planned to buy out the rest of the Nabisco shareholders.

Those opposed to Johnson's bid for the company, Henry Kravis and his cousin George R. Roberts, were among the pioneers of the leveraged buyout. Kravis was the first person Johnson talked to about doing the LBO, and feels betrayed after learning that Johnson wants to do the deal with another firm, American Express's former Shearson Lehman Hutton division. Ted Forstmann and his Forstmann Little buyout firm also played a prominent role.

After Kravis and Johnson are unable to reconcile their differences, a bidding war takes place which Johnson will eventually lose. The unfortunate side effect of the augmented buyout price to the shareholders is the creation of a worrying level of debt for the company.

In 2008, Harper Collins re-released "Barbarians" to mark the two-decade anniversary of the RJR deal. Media columnist Jon Friedman at MarketWatch opined on the occasion that it was "the best business book ever." Friedman spoke with the authors about the two-decade history of the book and of their ensuing careers (the two undertook no further joint projects).[1] Business reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times wrote in his book Too Big to Fail that this is his favourite business book of all time.

Contents

Important personalities

Film adaptation

The book was adapted by Larry Gelbart for a 1993 television movie of the same name directed by Glenn Jordan.

Publishing information

References

1.

  1. "'Barbarians at the Gate' authors reflect" by Jon Friedman, MarketWatch, 11-21-08. Retrieved 2-7-09.

External links

Categories:

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They're inventing Wall Street-type tools to profit off commodities that could soon be in short supply.

Private equity firm KKR -- perhaps best-known for recently landing disgraced General David Petraeus (pictured above) as an employee -- bought a 25 percent stake in Nephila Capital a Bermuda hedge fund that trades weather derivatives, according to Businessweek. Other firms like Water Asset Management, which buys water rights and invests in water treatment plants, and Land Commodities, which advises wealthy clients on investing in Australian farm that they say will become more valuable as temperatures rise, use similar tactics to profit off global warming.

==

Investors Seek Ways to Profit From Global Warming

By Matthew Campbell and Chris V. Nicholson on March 07, 2013

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-03-07/investors-seek-ways-to-profit-from-global-warming

Investing in climate change used to mean putting money into efforts to stop global warming. Morgan Stanley (MS), Goldman Sachs (GS), and other firms took stakes in wind farms and tidal-energy projects, and set up carbon-trading desks. The appeal of cleantech has dimmed as efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions have faltered: Venture capital and private equity investments fell 34 percent last year, to $5.8 billion, according to Bloomberg 

New Energy Finance.

Now some investors are taking another approach. Working under the assumption that climate change is inevitable, they’re investing in businesses that will profit as the planet gets hotter. (The World Bank says the earth could warm by 4C by the end of the century.) Their strategies include buying water treatment companies, brokering deals for Australian farmland, and backing a startup that has engineered a mosquito to fight dengue, a disease that’s spreading as the mercury climbs.

Derivatives that help companies hedge against abnormal weather and natural catastrophes are drawing increased interest from some big players. In January, KKR (KKR) bought a 25 percent stake in Nephila Capital, an $8 billion Bermuda hedge fund that trades in weather derivatives. (The firm is named after a spider that, according to local folklore, can predict hurricanes.) “Climate risk is something people are paying more and more attention to,” says Barney Schauble, managing partner at Nephila Advisors, the firm’s U.S. arm. “More volatile weather creates more risk and more appetite to protect against that risk.”

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=KKR

KKR & Co. L.P. (formerly Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) is a New York City-based private equity firm which is going public in a $1.25 billion initial public offering (IPO). The company has refurbished its hostile takeover image and is now seen as a kinder, gentler firm with a buy-and-build strategy. "The firm assembles funds from institutional and wealthy investors and profits from management fees and its direct interests. An active investor, it often supervises or installs new management and revamps strategy and corporate structure, selling underperforming units or adding new ones." In 2006, it had sales of $4.4 billion and profits of $1.1 billion.

[1]

Contents[hide]

Tobacco involvement

(Acquired RJR Nabisco in 1989): RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp. was organized by Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. to effect the acquisition of RJR Nabisco Inc., which was completed in April 1989 (Value Line 5/20/94). See RJR Nabisco Holdings Corp., RJR Nabisco Inc., and TTLA Almanac - Names.

Energy Involvement

In February 2007, Teaxs energy company TXU announced its acquisition by an investor group led by private equity firms KKR and Texas Pacific Group (registered under TPG Capital LP).[2] In July 2007, TXU announced that its power generation and related businesses would now be assigned to the Luminant name.[3] Both TXU and Luminant would be owned by Energy Future Holdings (EFH), a Dallas-based, privately held energy company led by KKR and TPG Capital, as well as global investment bank Goldman Sachs.[4]

Political contributions

In the 2004 presidential election, Henry R. Kravis, Founding Partner, Co-Chairman and Co-CEO of Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, was a Bush Pioneer, having raised at least $100,000 for Bush. [5]

In the 2006 election, the top three executives gave as follows: [6]

Lobbying

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts spent $540,000 for lobbying in the first half of 2007. Lobbying firms used were Covington & Burling, Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, and OB-C Group. [7]

Personnel

Key executives: [8]

Selected KKR Senior Advisors: [9]

Contact details

Ninth West 57th Street

Suite 4200

New York, NY 10019

Phone: 212-750-8300

Fax: 212-750-0003

Web: http://www.kkr.com

References

  1. ↑ KKR Profile, Hoovers, accessed September 2007.
  2. ↑ "TXU to Set New Direction As Private Company", press release, February 26, 2007.
  3. ↑ "Luminant Name Adopted for TXU Corp.’s Power Generation and Related Businesses", press release, July 10, 2007.
  4. ↑ "Energy Future Holdings Corp.: Our Owners" Energy Future Holdings Corp., accessed July 2010.
  5. ↑ Bush Pioneer Henry Kravis, Texans for Public Justice, accessed September 2007.
  6. ↑ Query By Individual Contributor, FEC, accessed September 2007.
  7. ↑ Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co lobbying expenses, Open Secrets.
  8. ↑ KKR Key People, Hoovers, accessed September 2007.
  9. ↑ Senior Advisors, KKR, accessed September 2007.

This article may include information from Tobacco Documents Online.

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