Donors Trust koch

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NO MERRI

17 TAGS 4 26

sort of interesting that this was big deal then dropped off radar?

NOPE STILL HUGE (BRULLE OUTED?)

6/16 NEW NODE 2

CTT --> DENIAL

see DAF (schwab, fidelity) tag dnrs

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2025

https://ecollections.law.fiu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1743&context=lawreview

Uncharitable Think Tanks 207

Institution—also led in the earlier one, with only slight shifts otherwise.229 • From 2010 on, the top funders were Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, and the Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations. The Devos family foundations rose to join the ranks of the top ten. • Grants channeled through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund accounted for 13.7% of the total. • 74% of all contributions came from completely unidentified sources. • }:}:

After AEI, Heritage and Hoover, the largest recipients were Cato, the Manhattan Institute, the Hudson Institute, the Mercatus Center, the Acton Institute, the State Policy Network, the Reason Foundation, Heartland, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation. From 2003 to 2018, Brulle and his co-authors tallied total gifts to this cohort of $9.77 billion 230—a sum that refutes the mistaken notion that charitable giving is small dollars, and influential only at the margin. Now for the thought experiment.

Brulle RJ, Hall G, Loy L, Schell-Smith K. 2021. “Obstructing action: foundation funding and US climate change counter-movement organizations,” Climatic Change. 2021;166(1):17.

Obstructing action: foundation funding and US climate

change counter-movement organizations

Robert J. Brulle1 & Galen Hall1 & Loredana Loy2 & Kennedy Schell-Smith1

Received: 1 February 2021 / Accepted: 28 April 2021/

The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2021

In a 2016 congressional hearing on the climate crisis, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) held

up a book entitled Why Scientists Disagree About Climate Change and asked: “Who funded

this phony climate science denial textbook that the Heartland Institute published and mailed to

thousands of schoolteachers around the country? ... We know it costs a lot of money to print

[but] we don’t know who paid for it!” (SDC 2019). The publisher of the “textbook” was the

Heartland Institute, a central organization in the Climate Change Counter-Movement (CCCM).

The CCCM is a complex network of organizations that functions to obstruct climate action

(Brulle 2020). Senator Whitehouse’s question points to the extensive network of anonymous

funders that supports the CCCM. This anonymous funding allows unaccountable, unknown

entities to promote climate misinformation and obstruct climate action. Several analyses have

shown that this deliberate and organized effort to misdirect and distort public discussion of

climate change drives widespread misunderstanding of climate science and legislative gridlock

on the issue (NRC 2011, p. 35).

For these ongoing efforts to continue, it is imperative that CCCM organizations mobilize

sufficient financial resources (Jenkins 1983). Thus, an examination of the funding sources of

the CCCM can provide a deeper understanding of the institutional dimensions of this effort.

The effort to understand the financial support of the CCCM has been the topic of scholarly

concern (Brulle 2014; Farrell 2015, 2016, 2019). The most extensive analysis was that of

Brulle (2014).In his analysis, he found that over the time period 2003 to 2010, the majority of

identifiable CCCM funding came from several conservative philanthropies and, increasingly,

through Donors Trust, a donor-directed philanthropy designed to preserve funders’ anonymity.

In this research, we revisit and update Brulle’s initial analysis. We double the timespan of the

prior study, analyzing data from 2003 to 2018, add an analysis of the amount of unidentifiable

funds supporting the CCCM, and considerably sharpen prior estimates by approximating the

proportion of this funding that directly supports work on climate change.

...

2 Findings

A small group of foundations constitute the core of financial support for the CCCM. Figure 1

shows the top grant makers and recipients in the CCCM by total grants given or received. The

top 1% of grant makers account for 67% of grants, and the top 10% of grant makers account

for 94% of grants. Similarly, seven CCCM organizations (5%) receive 50% of all grants. The

top three grant recipients—the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the

Hoover Institution—have remained unchanged since Brulle’s (2014) analysis, with some shifts

in the order of smaller grant recipients. The top grant makers have changed slightly: the

network remains dominated by the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund (DCF) and the

Scaife, Bradley, and Koch family foundations, with the Devos family foundations now among

the top ten as well. Donors Trust and DCF alone account for 13.7% of grants.

These

organizations are Donor Advised Funds (DAF), with a central role in coordinating donations

to CCCM and conservative organizations while keeping their core donors anonymous.

Alongside donations through DAFs, 74% of all contributions to CCCM organizations over

the sample period come from completely unidentified sources. Figure 2 shows a sociogram of

the top 1% of grant makers and recipients in the network by total grants given/received, where

each line represents all grants between two actors over the sample period, with contribution

...[graphs]

totals less than $5000 removed for clarity. Unidentified contributions are represented by a

single node to demonstrate their prevalence, although they come from many anonymous

donors. Individual organizations received between 25 and 100% of their contributions from

unidentified sources, with no strong (p < 0.05) correlations with organizational assets,

revenues, or the proportion of documents relevant to climate change.

Overall, the funding of organizations that make up the CCCM grew steadily between 2003

and 2018 in terms of both total contributions and foundation grants. Figure 3a displays yearly

total contributions to the 128 recipient organizations, with grants from the top 100 donors

distinguished by the category of the grant maker. Contributions increased steadily over the

sample period, from $357 million in 2003 to $808 million in 2018, with a peak at $811 million

in 2012. 

....

Our analysis also supports the finding that funding strategies differ between progressive and

conservative philanthropists.We find a striking stability in funding over the 16-year time

period. The funding strategy of the conservative movement was laid out in the so-called Fat

Memo (Miller 2005), which informed the giving practices of the Olin Foundation, the first

major conservative philanthropy, and subsequent conservative donors. These funding efforts

focus on the development and promulgation of a clear conservative viewpoint. To realize that

effort, conservative philanthropies have funded a range of organizations that act to realize that

goal on a long-term basis. This strategy focused on the creation and maintenance of conservative

think tanks, development of public intellectuals (“thought leaders”), and promulgation

of a consistent ideological message. Additionally, conservative foundations focus on building

institutional capacity in organizations with strong communications capabilities (Covington

1997; Barley 2010).

This consistent and long-term funding strategy has enabled the development of a cohesive

institutional network of conservative organizations that work collectively to promulgate a

consistent message. This strategy stands in marked contrast to the funding strategy of

progressive foundations, which focus on individual research projects and short-term efforts.

Consequently, the progressive activist organizations and think tanks form a very loose and

disconnected network(Barley 2010, p. 792). This differs significantly from the very tight

network of organizations and think tanks that comprise the conservative movement. The

analysis confirms the long-term stable funding that maintains the CCCM.

This analysis still leaves Senator Whitehouse’s question unanswered. The source of over

three-quarters of the funding of the CCCM cannot be identified.While some of this funding

could come from small donations, the existing IRS disclosure rules do not enable any further

investigation in this area. Further research is needed to develop new means to extend our

understanding of the unidentified funders that created and maintain the CCCM.[refs]

see greenpeace report 2013?

https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/wp-content/uploads/legacy/Global/usa/planet3/PDFs/Donor's%20Trust%20-%20Laundering%20Climate%20Denial%20Funding.pdf

Donors Trust Funding to Top Twenty Climate Denial Recipients

(2002-2011)

DENIAL ORGANIZATION DONORS TRUST FUNDING

American Enterprise Institute (AEI) $ 19,840,954

Heartland Institute $ 14,496,497

Americans for Prosperity (AFP) $ 12,241,961

Federalist Society $ 10,854,463

State Policy Network $ 10,059,051

Hudson Institute $ 5,222,000

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) $ 4,165,978

Americans for Limited Government $ 3,950,000

Independent Women's Forum $ 3,387,604

Institute for Humane Studies $ 3,349,662

Texas Public Policy Foundation $ 2,630,758

Institute for Religion and Democracy $ 2,340,000

Mercatus Center $ 2,258,650

NFIB Legal Foundation $ 2,093,500

Illinois Policy Institute $ 1,895,707

Philanthropy Roundtable $ 1,822,560

Independence Institute $ 1,727,000

Freedom Foundation (Evergreen Freedom Foundation) $ 1,716,555

Cato Institute $ 1,535,207

Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy

Alternatives $ 1,473,300

==

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/media/press-releases/exposed-academics-hire-agree-not-disclose-fossil-fuel-funding-20151208

EXPOSED: ACADEMICS-FOR-HIRE AGREE NOT TO DISCLOSE FOSSIL FUEL FUNDING

Last edited 8 December 2015 at 2:39pm

Leading climate sceptic who agreed to suggestion of secret Middle East oil cash is set to speak at Ted Cruz Senate hearing today

8 December, 2015

A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.

Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.

The Professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.

Citing industry-funded documents - including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles - Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

The leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.

Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in US Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

In emails to reporters he also revealed Peabody energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money going to a climate-sceptic think-tank.

The investigation also found:

• US coal giant Peabody Energy paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.

• The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.

• Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil funded report through a similar review process after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.

• A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by influential columnist Matt Ridley -a senior figure in the organisation.

The full story and all the documents have been published on*http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/*

The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, a prominent academic exposed in a New York Times investigation as having accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers.

Reporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies looking to commission ‘independent’ research.

Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologist from Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the WHO’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”. He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8-10 page paper

Asked whether he would need to declare the source of the money, Professor Clemente said: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.” He then shared examples of a testimony and an op-ed, explaining: “Note that in none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Clemente also disclosed that for another report on “the Global Value of Coal” he was paid $50,000 by Peabody Energy - the sponsorship was mentioned in the small print of the paper, but the amount has not been disclosed until now.

The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in its submission requirements that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”

The investigation has also revealed a system by which foreign oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.

When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe, a former Exxon lobbyist. He suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the“Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.

When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust, if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he replied that, although the Trust would like the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’sAcademic Advisory Council, was also asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry-funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.

He added: “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.

GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist_{ Matt Ridley, who }is{ also a }_GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been “thoroughly peer reviewed”.

Commenting on the investigation, Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said:

“This investigation exposes a network of academics-for-hire and a back channel that lets fossil fuel companies secretly influence the climate debate while keeping their fingerprints off. Our research reveals that professors at prestigious universities can be sponsored by foreign fossil fuel companies to write reports that sow doubt about climate change, and that those professors will keep that funding secret from the public. The question now is very simple. Down the years, how many scientific reports that sowed public doubt on climate change were actually funded by oil, coal and gas companies? This investigation shows how they do it, now we need to know when and where they did it. It’s time for the sceptics to come clean.”

He added:

“Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) has serious questions to answer. Does it condone a member of its academic council agreeing to be secretly sponsored to write a report by a group purporting to be from a Middle Eastern oil company? Have reports by senior figures in Lawson’s foundation been secretly paid for by the fossil fuel industry? Would they have agreed to Professor Happer’s suggestion that the ‘oil-funded’ report be put through a 'similar review' process to the GWPF's own ‘peer-review’ process? Does it accept that the foundation’s so-called ‘peer review’ process is flawed, given Professor Happer’s revelations about how it operated on an earlier report? And does the foundation stand by its academic advisor, Viscount Ridley, who described that earlier report as ‘thoroughly peer-reviewed’?”

ENDS

Article tagged as:Climate Deniers, Climate Skeptics, Investigation, Republican Party, Ted Cruz:{

}::{

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6/15 uk guardian (beware malish ware)

The secretive funders behind America’s conservative movement directed around $125m (£82m) over three years to groups spreading disinformation about climate science and committed to wrecking Barack Obama’s climate change plan, according to an analysis of tax records.

The amount is close to half of the anonymous funding disbursed to rightwing groups, underlining the importance of the climate issue to US conservatives

The anonymous cash flow came from two secretive organisations – the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – that have been called the “Dark Money ATM” of the conservative movement.

The funds, which when channelled through the two organisations cannot be traced to individual donors, helped build a network of thinktanks and activist groups. These worked to defeat climate bills in Congress and are mobilising against Environmental Protection Agency rules to reduce carbon pollution from power plants which are due to be finalised this summer. In many cases, the anonymous cash makes up the vast majority of funding received by beneficiaries – more than comes openly from the fossil fuel industry.

“The conservative thinktanks are really the spearhead of the conservative assault on climate change,” said Riley Dunlap, a sociologist at Oklahoma State University who studies environmental politics. “They write books, put out briefings and open editorials, bring in contrarian scientists ... They are an immense megaphone that amplifies very, very minority voices.”

Organisations funded through the secretive donors operations are also working to roll back measures promoting wind and solar power and block planning for future sea-level rise in state capitals.

To trace how the money was spent, the Guardian obtained annual tax filings made to the US Internal Revenue Service by the Donor’s Trust and Donor’s Capital Fund and cross-checked grantees with organisations associated with the climate change counter-movement.

In 2011, 42% of funding, or $35.7m, went to groups promoting climate denial and opposed to environmental regulations, according to the tax filings.

In the last presidential elections in 2012, when Obama fended off a challenge from Mitt Romney, that figure jumped to 51% of the funds directed through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund – a total of just over $49m.

...?

2013, the last year for which tax records are available, 46% of anonymous funding to conservative groups through the two Donors channels, or just over $41 million was spent that way.

Robert Brulle, a professor at Drexel University who first exposed the conservative network of think tanks and activist groups of the climate change counter-movement, said those funds helped hone opposition to regulations.

“It is a well-oiled, complicated, cultural and political machine of the right wing of the conservative movement,” he said.

In 2013, the two organisations took in just over $152m, distributing $90m to a constellation of groups. However, the ultimate sources of those funds were untraceable, an important consideration for companies or individuals wanting to avoid bad publicity for rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change.

“All these corporations that were getting bad press realised they can still fund conservative thinktanks,” Dunlap said. “Exxon or BP can still fund one of these things while doing all these great things on climate change to reduce emissions etc.”

Whitney Ball, the chief executive of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, said the funds were set up to “promote liberty and help like-minded donors preserve their charitableintent”. She said that grants were made at the request of account holders, not the Donors Trust or Donors Capital Fund. “Our role is to ensure that recommended grants are to IRS-approved public charities, and we require that the charities do not rely on significant amounts of revenue from government sources,” she said.

Almost all of the thinktanks and activist groups on the Donors rolls work on a broad range of topics – and in most cases there was no way of tracking what portion of funding went to climate change related work.

But all of the groups have a record of rejecting climate science and fighting environmental regulations.

“You don’t have to be an outright science denier to try to prevent action on climate change,” Brulle said.

“You’ve got gradation – it’s not real; it’s real but we are not sure how much humans are contributing to it; I am not a scientist. There are all sorts of strategies.”

Funds sent through Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund were allocated to 92 organisations that deny climate change or oppose environmental regulations – but only 24 organisations got donations of $1m or more over the past three years.

By far, the biggest overall beneficiary was the Franklin Centre for Government and Public Integrity, which received $22m over the three years. According to its website, the centre “trains and supports journalists working to detect and expose corruption and incompetence in government at the state and local levels”. It runs a network of online conservative websites in state capitals which are generally hostile to clean energy and pro-coal.

In 2011, the anonymous funding through Donors Trust amounted to 95% of Franklin’s budget, according to an investigation by the Centre for Public integrity.

Erik Telford, the president, denied that there was a conflict between the Franklin Centre’s watchdog mission, and its failure to disclose the ultimate source of its funds.

“As is the case with almost any news outlet in America, we have an editorial perspective, with a mission to expose government misdeeds, advance liberty, and look out for the taxpayers’ interest,” he said. “We welcome the support of citizens who believe in our mission, and afford them the right to privacy as established in the supreme court’s 1958 NAACP v Alabama decision.”

The Federalist Society, a networking group for conservative lawyers and justices which calls on states to reject the EPA authority to regulate carbon pollution, received $8.7m over the past three years.

pix: A member of the Boilermakers local 154 Pittsburgh holds a sign at a rally to support American energy and jobs in the coal and related industries at Highmark Stadium in downtown Pittsburgh, Wednesday, July 30, 2014. The rally is being held the day before the Environmental Protection Agency conducts public hearings on its new emissions regulations for existing coal fired power plants. Facebook Twitter Pinterest]

Another top recipient, the State Policy Network,a network of ultra-conservative thinktanks, received a total of $8.2m over the last three years.

Thinktanks allied with the State Policy Network have worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, a pro-business lobby, which has sought legislation to penalise homeowners who install solar panels.

The Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank whose climate expert opposes cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, took in $7.9m over three years. The Heartland Institute, which sent a delegation to Rome in April to try to upstage meetings between the Pope and the United Nations chief Ban Ki Moon on climate change, received $3.8m.

Another big beneficiary of the anonymous funds, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which has received $4.3m over three years, claims on its website that climate change is its biggest programme.

“CEI questions global warming alarmism,” the website reads. Last year, CEI sued the White House over a video linking the chill Arctic blasts of the polar vortex to climate change. The CEI has also tried – unsuccessfully – to sue climate scientists.

The thinktank would not respond to requests for comment.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, whose communications director is Marc Morano, took $3.7m from donors in 2012 – its most ever. A year later, however, the organisation received $325,000.

==

More than $470 million of cash flowing into a key funding arm of the climate science denial movement in the United States is untraceable, a DeSmog investigation has found.

Sister organisations Donors Trust [3] (DT) and Donors Capital Fund [4] (DCF) declared an income of $511 million between 2005 and 2012, tax records show.

But a DeSmog analysis of the sources of DT and DCF income finds that some $479 million of the income is “dark money” coming from individuals or groups who do not have to declare their donations.

The amount of untraceable cash moving through DT and DCF is likely to be increasing substantially.In 2013, the two groups had their biggest year to date with a combined income of $152m and cash assets of $138m.Donors Trust itself saw income more than doublefrom $46m in 2012 to $103m in 2013 even though the value of grants it handed out remained stable at about $40m each year.

While the role of DT and DCF in financing the climate science denial movement has been known for several years, DeSmog’s investigation reveals for the first time the true scale of untraceable money flowing through the two funds, which share an address in Virginia.

DeSmog’s investigation found just $32 million of donations to the two conservative-aligned funding arms originated with other non-profits that make tax records and details of donations available in public documents.

Both DT and DCF have funneled money to high profile advocacy groups that campaign against regulations to cut greenhouse gases and promote fringe and discredited views on climate science.

While Greenpeace analysis reviewed by DeSmog shows DT and DCF have given $170m over the years to fund other groups blocking climate change action, the source of the Donors' network income remains largely hidden.

DT and DCF have been described as the “dark money ATM [5]” of the conservative right in the United States, and are key funders for groups including the Heartland Institute [6] and the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow [7].

Many of the organisations funded by DT and DCF are known to have received cash from fossil fuel interests in the past.

Both DT and DCF say they only give money to projects that will explicitly promote “free markets” and “liberty” and that will lower government involvement in society.

A form on the DT website asks potential funders to declare that they “agree that it is wrong that the fortunes of successful Americans are being used to fund political and social causes that undermine the free market economy.”

The cash given through DT will “fund good conservative and liberty-oriented causes,” the form says.

One major known funder of DT is theKnowledge and Progress Fund (KPF) that donated $7.65 million from 2010 to 2013 — the only grants made by the foundation.

On the KPF board are oil billionaire and major Republican benefactor Charles Koch, his wife Liz and son Charles Chase Koch. 

Richard Fink, a Koch company director and long-standing aide to Charles Koch, is also a KPF director.

Dark Money Donor-Advised Funds

DT and DCF are both so-called “donor-advised funds” where cash is accepted from donors and placed in a dedicated account before being redistributed under the DT or DCF name.

This has the effect of hiding the identity of any individual donors and removes a direct association between a funder and an organisation or project.

For example, between 2002 and 2013, Greenpeace analysis shows that the Heartland Institute received more than $16 million from DCF.

The Heartland Institute organises regular conferences for climate science denialists and once compared people who accepted climate change science to mass murderers.

The Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, which promotes extremist views on climate change while denigrating climate scientists and renewable energy, has received more than $7 million from DT.

DT and DCF were among 100 groups targeted with letters from three US Democrat [8]ic senators “to determine whether they are funding scientific studies designed to confuse the public and avoid taking action to cut carbon pollution”.

Other groups to receive funding from DT or DCF include the State Policy Network, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Americans For Prosperity Foundation. 

Many of the conservative organisations funded by DT and DCF work across multiple issue areas and it is not possible to know how much is spent directly on their climate change and energy advocacy.

According to analysis from Greenpeace, between 2002 and 2013, DT and DCF funneled $170m to organisations that have worked to undermine action on climate change.

DT has also funded the work of fossil fuel-funded contrarian scientist Dr Willie Soon [9], who it emerged earlier this year had described his scientific studies as “deliverables” to funders at coal firm Southern Company and to DT.

DeSmog analysed the tax returns of DT and DCF and found declared income from donations and grants worth $511m between the two organisations.

DeSmog used data from Conservative Transparency [10], a website which tracks money flows between conservative groups and foundations, and found that from 2005 to 2012 only $32m came from organisations required to disclose who they fund. This means $479m of the money handed to DT and DCF came from unknown sources.

A study by Professor Bob Brulle, of Drexel University, published in 2013 examined the funding of the “climate change counter-movement” and found that DT and DCF were likely the “single largest funder.”

In the journal Climatic Change [11], Brulle wrote of DT and DCF: “Because contributions to a donor directed foundation are not required to be made public, their existence provides a way for individuals or corporations to make anonymous contributions. In effect, these two philanthropic foundations form a black box that conceals the identity of contributors to various CCCM (climate change counter movement) organizations.”

Brulle’s study found that DT and DCF werefunding an increasingly large share of the movement. In 2003 DT and DCF were funding just 3.3 per cent of the movement, but by 2010 this had risen to 23.7 per cent. 

Commenting on DeSmog’s findings, Brulle said: “DT/DCF are a major funder of the conservative organizations that fight against climate change.  But there are also others.  I think it is safe to say that they are a major funder among a number of others, such as the Scaife or Bradley Foundations.  They are one among a dozen or so major funders.

“I think it is vital that all contributions to advocacy organizations, regardless of their viewpoint, should be fully transparent.”

A new funder to DT is the foundation of billionaire “vulture capitalist” and hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who donated $1.5m in 2012. Singer was revealed by DeSmog [12] to have funded the think tank of Danish climate contrarian Bjorn Lomborg.

The Charles Koch Foundation has some $63 million invested in one of Singer’s hedge funds, according to that foundation’s tax returns [13].

==

Mr. Milloy and Mr. Borelli (and Mrs. Borelli too, via her husband) have worked together and in parallel since at least 1993, manipulating science to serve their ideological and political ends. During that time they’ve been funded by Philip Morris, Exxon Mobile, and some of the largest conservative foundations in the United States.

But while they may not have worked alongside each other for much of that period, they do now: Mr. Milloy and Mr. Borelli are not only co-directors of the FEEI, but they’re both advisers for their politically conservative mutual fund,:{the Free Enterprise Action Fund:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ (:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:FEAFund:{):(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:.

As advisers to the FEAFund, Mr. Milloy and Mr. Borelli split a 1.25% commission. According to the FEAFund’s annual report for 2006, the commission was just over $75,000. While this is a significant amount of money, it’s in addition to the $355,000 Mr. Milloy earned via FEEI and to the estimated $130,000 earned annually by the law and business consulting firm “Steven J. Milloy Inc.” (data available from Manta.com). When combined, Mr. Milloy’s approximately $500,000 income would be more than sufficient for him to “self-fund” both JunkScience.com,DemandDebate.com, and all his other web projects out of his own personal wealth. Whether he actually does so is an open question.

As mentioned above, Mr. Milloy earned a hefty “consulting fee” from CFIS that was largely paid by ExxonMobil. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to dig deeper into “Steven J. Milloy Inc.” to find out whom Mr. Milloy’s legal and consulting clients are. At least, not yet. But because it’s federal law that the identities of a mutual fund’s principle investors are public information, and because I hadn’t ever seen these investors detailed during my research, I chose totrack down the main sponsors of Mr. Milloy’s FEAFund. Their backing is what enables Mr. Milloy to earn an advisory commission on the FEAFund’s assets, and as such they qualify as indirect backers of Mr. Milloy’s efforts via JunkScience.com and DemandDebate.com.

As of April 1, 2007, SEC documents show that there were eight investors who held more than 5% of the Free Enterprise Action Fund, of which seven held 9% or greater. These seven are William Dunn (19%), Arthur Dantchik (10%), Thomas L. Phillips (10%), Robert A. Levy (10%), the Claws Foundation (9%), The Randolph Foundation (9%), and Donors Capitol Fund (9%). These seven investors control a combined total of 76% of the total assets of the fund.

The largest shareholder, William Dunn of Stuart, Florida, is the director of Dunn Capitol Management and the founder of Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking. William A. Dunn of Stuart, Florida is also a director of the Competitive Enterprise Institute. In addition, he is a Director and a member of the Board of Trustees for the Reason Foundation and a Director of the Property and Environment Research Center (PERC). If you’ll recall from yesterday’s post, Mr. Milloy’s associate Kenneth P. Green (currently of the American Enterprise Institute) used to work for the Reason Foundation and Mr. Milloy himself works with the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Dunn’s Foundation for the Advancement of Right Thinking gave away over $3 million in grants in 2004 alone, with much of that money going to organizations associated in some way with Mr. Milloy or people he knows: $445,000 to the CEI, $370,000 to the Institute for Justice (see Arthur Dantchik below), $370,000 to PERC, $308,000 to the Reason Foundation, $185,000 to the Cato Institute, and $25,000 to the AEI. Some of the other backers for both the CEI, PERC, and Reason Foundation have been the Charles G. Koch and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundations. The Charles G. Koch foundation funds the CEI and PERC to the tune of almost $60,000 and $15,000 respectively. The David H. Koch foundation granted $315,000 to the CEI between 1995 and 2001 and over $1.5 million to the Reason Foundation between 1986 and 2001.

The next largest shareholder in the FEAFund is Arthur Dantchik of Bela Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. Mr. Dantchik is one of the founders of the Susquehanna Investment Group and is a Director for the Institute for Justice. He works with fellow FEAFund shareholder and Cato Institute director/senior fellow Robert A. Levy (see below) at the aforementioned Institute for Justice. In addition, he is on the board of directors for another FEAFund shareholder, the Claws Foundation. According to Claws Foundation’s 2006 IRS Form 990-PF, one of Mr. Dantchik’s fellow Claws Foundation directors is a co-founder of the Susquehanna Investment Group and director of the Cato Institute, Jeffrey Yass. The other director of the Claws Foundation is Alan P. Dye, a director ofFreedom House and legal counsel to the Ron Paul for President campaign. The Claws Foundation itself is not a political organization – it exists largely to fund medical research.

Since 1999, Mr. Dantchik has given over $263,000 to conservative causes, including approximately $22,000 to 2004 congressional candidates outside of his own state of Pennsylvania. Mr. Dantchik’s Institute for Justice has received a total of $265,000 in donations from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation from 1986 through 2005, another $1.35 million from the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation between 1995 and 2001, and over $1.1 million from the Sarah Scaife Foundation between 1992 and 2005. The Institute for Justice also received over $2 million from The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation between 1992 and 2005, a massive conservative foundation that has also given extensively to the AIE (over $17 million between 1987 and 2005), the National Center for Policy Analysis (nearly $1.5 million), the Reason Foundation (nearly $1 million), the Cato Institute (about $860,000), the CEI (about $770,000), PERC (about $600,000), and the Thomas L. Phillips’ Philips Foundation (about $560,000), all between the mid 1980s and 2005.

Thomas L. Phillips, creator of the Thomas L. Phillips Revocable Trust of McLean, Virginia, is another principle investor. Mr. Phillips has donated some money to local McLean, VA political races and is the CEO of Phillips International, the parent company to the Phillips Foundation, Eagle Publishing, and Healthy Directions LLC(formerly Phillips Health). The Phillips Foundation is a non-profit foundation that offers journalism fellowships for journalists “who share the Foundation’s mission to advance constitutional principles, a democratic society and a vibrant free enterprise system,” with special fellowships for writing on the environment from a free-market perspective. Most of the Phillips Foundation trustees are associated with Phillips International in some way. Thomas Phillips is obvious, but the president of conservative uber-publisher Regnery Publishing, Alfred S Regnery, is another trustee, as is Eagle Publishing director Thomas A. Fuentes. Eagle Publishing is the parent company for Regnery Publishing, the publisher of the “Politically Incorrect Guides” and books like Unfit for Command and Men in Black. Eagle Publishing also publishes the Evans-Novak Political Report, conservative “news” source Human Events (which counts Ann Coulter as the legal affairs editor and Ms. Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Pat Buchanan, Robert Novak, Sen. James Imhoffe, Rush Limbaugh, Phyllis Schlafly, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, and other conservative luminaries as commentators), and runs the Conservative Book Club. In addition, Mr. Phillips has given significant support to the National Conservative Campaign Fund (NCCF), a group whose directors and advisory board are composed of Phillips and most of the rest of the leaders of the Phillips Foundation. Mr. Phillips’ connections at the NCCF are good enough to have had Vice President Dick Cheney to come over for an NCCF reception at the Phillips’ home.

Mr. Phillips has donated over $124,000 in support of conservative causes and elections since 1996, and his National Conservative Campaign Fund has given approximately $532,000 to Republican candidates since the 2000 election cycle (Source: Opensecrets.org). In 2006, the Phillips Foundation raised $68,000 from Phillips International, $10,000 from Foundation trustee Robert Novak, and $5,000 from the Randolph Foundation, another significant investor in the Mr. Milloy’s FEAFund, and it has also received over $107,000 from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation from 2002 to 2005.

http://www.scholarsandrogues.com/2007/11/28/we-berate-you-deride-a-look-at-steven-j-milloys-current-affiliates-and-backers/

As I mentioned above, the Randolph Foundation is another significant investor in Mr. Milloy’s FEAFund.Randolph Foundation trustee James Q. Wilson is also Chairman of the AEI’s Council of Academic Advisers. The Randolph Foundation is a relatively new conservative foundation, so there’s not a lot of information on them available, but the 2005 Form 990 shows that the Foundation is a significant donor to the AEI ($50,000) and the CEI ($18,000) and, as mentioned above, a minor donor to the Phillips Foundation.

And while we’re on the topic of the AEI, we should probably point out that another major conservative fund, theSarah Scaife Foundation, gave the AEI $575,000 in 2006, along with $60,000 for the Cato Institute, $350,000 for the CEI, $125,000 for the National Center for Policy Analysis (where Mr. Milloy’s associate and AEI “briber”Ken Green is an environment expert), and another $125,000 to the Reason Foundation.

The second to last of the major investors is Robert A. Levy LLC, a business founded of Silver Spring Maryland. Robert A. Levy, formerly of Silver Spring and presently residing in Florida, is the Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies and a member of the Board of Directors at the Cato Institute. Mr. Levy gaveCongressional testimony regarding the :{global tobacco settlement:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:, specifically suggesting that the settlement was “a shameful document, extorted by public officials who have perverted the rule of law to tap the deep pockets of a feckless and friendless industry.” Given that Mr. Levy still works for the Cato Institute with Dr. Michael Gough, and Dr. Gough is associated with Mr. Milloy through CFIS, it’s not unreasonable that Mr. Levy would be in a position to become a major shareholder in the FEAFund.

The last major investor is Donors Capital Fund (DCFund), a large fund associated with Donors Trust, a group that professes to be “the sole donor-advised plan dedicated to promoting a free society and serving donors who serve that purpose.” Several of the directors of DCFund have connections to groups that are related to Mr. Milloy directly or through other avenues. For example, two of the directors are associated with the American Enterprise Institute, namely AEI’s President, Christopher DeMuth, and Steven F. Hayward, the F.K Weyerhaeuser Fellow in Law and Economics. DCFund co-founder and Executive Director Whitney L. Ball once served as the Director of Development for the Cato Institute, is presently associated with The Philanthropy Roundtable and, via that association is also connected to Philanthropy Roundtable Vice-Chairman and Randolph Foundation director Heather R. Higgins. Director Walter H. Mellor is the co-founder and President of the Institute for Justice, the same organization that fellow FEAFund principle investor Arthur Dantchik is a director of. The President of Donors Trust, Kimberly O. Dennis, is also the Executive Director of the Searle Freedom Trust, is Secretary for the Philanthropy Roundtable, and is a Director of PERC alongside fellow FEAFund principle investor William Dunn.

In addition to all the personal connections between the various investors and the DCFund, the DCFund has also granted a total of $23,000 to the AEI, $44,000 to the Cato Institute, $36,000 to the Reason Foundation, and $12,000 each to the CEI and Institute for Justice in 2006 alone (from the 2006 Form 990).

These connections are what I could find via the various foundations’ websites and public FEC, SEC, and IRS documents. However, over the years there have been many more connections between Mr. Milloy and various corporations, conservative individuals, and conservative foundations. Given Mr. Milloy’s history of working for businesses who want to discredit profit-suppressing scientific data and his connections throughout the entire conservative money machine, it’s probably reasonable to guess that his financial backers for any particular project are the groups or individuals with the most to lose – ExxonMobil and Shell Oil vs. global heating, Philip Morris vs. second-hand tobacco smoke, Monsanto et al vs. Horizon Organic, etc.

Mr. Milloy’s connections to the tobacco lawsuits in the 1990s as an official supplier of deceit and “junk science” casts a long shadow over his credibility, but he could have escaped that shadow by now if he had ever chosen to do so. Instead, Mr. Milloy continues to associate with purveyors of scientific propaganda and disinformation such as Kenneth Green of the AEI, Thomas and Deneen Borelli of the National Center for Public Policy Research, Michael Gough of the Cato Institute, and both the Competitive Enterprise Institute and Fox News in toto. In addition, via what little we’ve been able to glean about who funds Mr. Milloy’s various websites and institutes, it’s obvious that he’s continued a pattern of working for corporations (and their direct representatives) who have a vested interest in manipulating and distorting science to their particular ends. As such, even ifDemandDebate.com’s survey of the IPCC “scientific consensus” were scientific, Mr. Milloy’s history and associations make him a dubious source for anything resembling real science, his publication of the ironically-titled JunkScience.com notwithstanding.

It’s important to understand that Mr. Milloy’s connections with the AEI, CEI, Cato Institute, Reason Foundation, and through them to the Randolph Foundation, Philanthropy Roundtable, Donors Capital Fund and Trust, the Phillips Foundation, PERC, et al doesn’t mean that Mr. Milloy is the guiding force behind these connections. He is a single thread, albeit an important one, in an intricate tapestry of denial and misrepresentation of science in the service of conservative ideology. Through the deep pockets of his various corporate and conservative supporters over the years, he’s become a very effective conservative soldier in the war for the minds, and votes, of the people.

Mr. Milloy’s connections and access to money fostered over years make him a very effective conservative soldier in the culture wars. And he’s not alone – the very same people who back Mr. Milloy also back Ken Green, Tom and Deneen Borelli, Michael Gough, John Yoo, C. Boyden Gray, to name just a few. Backed by money from corporations and wealthy conservative foundations, Mr. Milloy and his ilk attempt to use propaganda to further their own ideological ends, in this case by fostering a false sense of scientific uncertainty over global heating when in fact there is a great deal of certainty about the science of global heating. And they won’t go away just because President Bush leaves office in January 2009 – they have too much to lose, ideologically and financially, to just roll over and go away when their favorite President has finished his second term.

Next time you read about something from JunkScience.com, DemandDebate.com, StopLabelingLies.com, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, or watch Steve Milloy on Fox News, remember who the source is.

Monday: DemandDebate.com’s survey on the scientific consensus surrounding global heating

Yesterday: A closer look at the background of Steven J. Milloy, executive director of DemandDebate.com

Many of the sources below were created specifically to enable citizens and patriots like all of us to track the influence of money on politics at all levels. They are relatively simple to use and enable anyone who is concerned about the corrupting influence of money on politics to hold their various political representatives’ feet to the proverbial fire. I used each of them repeatedly and regularly in the process of researching this series.

• Sunlight Foundation’s list of Insanely Useful Sites
• SourceWatch.org
• The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library
• ExxonSecrets.org
• Guidestar
• OpenSecrets.org
• MediaTransparency.org

Related posts (automated):

1. *DemandDebate.com*">We Berate, You Deride – A closer look at the background of Steven J. Milloy, executive director of *DemandDebate.com*
2. *DemandDebate.com’s* survey on the scientific consensus surrounding global heating">We Berate, You Deride – *DemandDebate.com’s* survey on the scientific consensus surrounding global heating
3. An open letter to Steven Milloy
4. VIP Clinton backers want a white VP, apparently
5. Steve Milloy is still a fact fighter for hire

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The Free Enterprise Action Fund is a mutual fund set up by Steven Milloy and Thomas J. Borelli.^[1] Milloy is a climate skeptic and has been a Fox News commentator and a paid advocate for Phillip Morris, ExxonMobiland other corporations. He is the founder of JunkScience.com. Borelli was formerly a tobacco scientist at Phillip Morris and is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research. The Free Enterprise Action Fund aims to counter the trend by corporations to embrace corporate social responsibility and campaigns by activist groups seeking to shift corporate social and environmental policy.

On its website it states that the group aimed "to keep businesses focused on business rather than activist-defined CSR, the Fund aims to promote more generally our system of free enterprise. The Fund will direct advocacy and education efforts at corporate managements, institutional shareholders, the media and the public."

In the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change organized by the Heartland Institute, Milloy stated that the Fund aims to "be a problem for managements and shareholders", and that he and Borelli "primarily work through shareholder proposals" to "get the shareholders and CEOs to think about what they're doing". He also stated, "We have filed numerous shareholder proposals with companies in the US Climate Action Partnership".^[2]

During 2005, the Fund underperformed the S&P 500 index by more than 50%, while rewarding its managers with above-average management fees of 2%.[₁.5 above]

Finances

According to a January 26, 2006 report in the Chicago Tribune, "The fund's advocacy stance boils down to opposing many of the things supported by traditional 'social investment funds,' because issues like global warming or corporate governance distract business from its real role of operating in the best interests of shareholders." However, its performance as an investment has been less than stellar.

The Tribune called it the "Stupid Investment of the Week ... Strip away the rhetoric, and you're getting a very expensive, underperforming index fund, while Milloy and partner Thomas Borelli get a platform for raising their pet issues. ... An expense ratio capped at 2 percent--ridiculously high for a portfolio of corporate giants--makes stock market returns unrealistic. From inception on March 1 of last year through Dec. 31, Free Enterprise Action returned 2.32 percent; the S&P 500 returned 4.72 percent. That's ugly."^[3]

In 2006, the Independent noted that: "The fund has about $6m (£4m) under management at the moment but claims to be growing fast" and "is supported by a network of right-wing think-tanks including the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute."^[4]

Personnel

• Thomas J. Borelli
• Steven Milloy

Contact details

Free Enterprise Action Fund

P.O. Box 182490

Columbus, OH 43218-2490

Phone: 301-258-2852

Email: media AT freeenterpriseactionfund.com

Web: http://www.freeenterpriseactionfund.com

Other SourceWatch resources

• CSR Watch.com

Sources

1. ↑ Kate Sheppard, "Thank You for Global Warming," Mother Jones, November 22, 2010
2. ↑ "How to Stop Climate Change Legislation in the US", Steven Milloy, March 2008.
3. ↑ http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0601260062jan26,1,7543219.story**
4. ↑ http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article356920.ece**

External links

• Larry Kudlow, "Steven Milloy of the Free Enterprise Action Fund discusses his organization's work againstcorporate social responsibility", Kudlow & Company, CNBC, March 28, 2005.
• Kathleen Rhodes, "Free Enterprise Mutual Fund Seeks to Counter Leftist Influence", CNSNews.com, March 28, 2005.
• "Free Enterprise Action Fund Requests Audit Committee Review of JP Morgan Chase Capitulation to Social Activist Demands: Action Fund Management, LLC, the investment adviser to the Free Enterprise Action Fund, called for the Audit Committee review", Media Release, April 26, 2005.
• Free Enterprise Action Fund, "Free Enterprise Action Fund Prospectus and Privacy Policy", May 1, 2005.
• Chuck Jaffe, "When Making Money Takes Back Seat to Advocacy," Chicago Tribune, January 26, 2006.
• Simon English, "Tell Lord Browne that we are coming," The Independent (UK), April 10, 2006.
• Amity Shlaes, "Mr. Immelt, Explain Yourself, Fund Says", Bloomberg.com, April 5, 2006.
• Daniel Gross, "Thank You for Investing: A Very Curious Right-Wing Mutal Fund," Slate.com, May 4, 2006.

Published: 10 April 2006

Categories:

• Front groups portal
• Climate change
• Coal Issues
• Energy
• Front groups
• Global warming fronts
• Web fronts
• Consumer fronts
• Environment

==

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kim barker pro publ:

Libertarian billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch were among the first to grasp the political potential of social welfare groups and trade associations — nonprofits that can spend money to influence elections but don’t have to name their donors.

The Kochs and their allies have built up a complex network of such organizations, which spent more than $383 million in the run-up to the 2012 election alone.

Documents released in recent months show the Kochs have added wrinkles to their network that even experts well versed in tax law and campaign finance say they’ve never seen before — wrinkles that could make it harder to discern who controls each nonprofit in the web and how it disperses its money.

A review of 2012 tax returns filed by Koch network groups shows that most have been set up as nonprofit trusts rather than not-for-profit corporations, an unusual step that reduces their public reporting requirements.

It sounds complicated and arcane because it is. Some of the nation’s top nonprofit experts said they could only speculate on the reasons for the network’s increasingly elaborate setup.

“My guess is that we’re looking at various forms of disguise — to disguise control, to disguise the flow of funds from one entity to another,” said Gregory Colvin, a tax lawyer and campaign-finance specialist in San Francisco who reviewed all the documents for ProPublica.

Four other leading nonprofit experts and three conservative operatives with knowledge of the Koch network said the most likely reason that the Kochs and their inner circle are using this arrangement was to exert control over the groups without saying publicly who was in charge. In particular, they said, the Kochs likely wanted to prevent any of the groups that they help fund from going against their wishes — as happened with the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank the Kochs had long supported before they got into a dispute with its president, Ed Crane.

After a top Cato official ridiculed Charles Koch in a 2010 New Yorker article, the brothers pushed to put allies on the think tank’s board. The following year, they pressed Cato to provide “intellectual ammunition” for their oldest politically active nonprofit, Americans for Prosperity, Cato officials later alleged. The dispute was settled in 2012, with the departure of Crane and the installation of a traditional board. (Cato previously was controlled by four private shareholders, including the Kochs, an unusual setup for a nonprofit.)

Robert Levy, Cato’s board chairman, told ProPublica that while he didn’t disagree with the Kochs’ aims, Cato’s leaders were uncomfortable with serving as advocates for their political agenda.

“The Kochs had their notions about what they wanted to focus on, and those tended to focus on intellectual ammunition for what their political ambitions were,” Levy said in an interview last fall. “We didn’t disagree with that, but we didn’t want to operate at the direction of the Kochs. We’re not involved in electoral politics. We are strictly nonpartisan.”

The Kochs have disputed the allegation that they tried to force Cato to do their political bidding.

In this story, we define the Koch network as including 12 nonprofits active in 2012 — 11 social welfare nonprofits and one trade association. These nonprofits all shared the same attributes: They used LLCs, installed Koch allies at the helm and hired the same set of lawyers. (We did not include think tanks, foundations or other charities, nor the like-minded groups that are funded by the Kochs.)

Officials with Koch Industries and groups in the Koch network did not respond to calls or written questions from ProPublica.

When asked about his involvement with Americans for Prosperity in a rare interview with the Wichita Business Journallast month, Charles Koch downplayed his political activity, saying he and his brother did not have day-to-day involvement with the group.

“Listen, if I could do everything that’s attributed to me, I would be a very busy boy,” he told the Journal.

Here’s what we know so far about how the Koch network uses trusts and LLCs, as well as the advantages they may offer.

Disregarded Entities

As of 2012,all 12 Koch network groups had offshoots known as “disregarded entities” — LLCs that are “owned” by their parent nonprofits and are considered part of them for tax purposes.

The first such LLC sprang up in February 2010, when Sean Noble, the head of a Koch network nonprofit called the Center to Protect Patient Rights, formed SDN LLC, using the initials of his own name. (ProPublica wrote a story last month about Noble, the Koch network’s money man in 2010 and 2012.)

Koch network groups came to have a total of 19 disregarded entities, tax records show; Freedom Partners Chamber of Commerce, a trade association that distributed almost $236 million to other nonprofits in the year before the 2012 election, led the way with five.

Unlike corporations, LLCs set up in Delaware are not required to disclose who runs them. The only documentation available is the name of the person who creates them. In the Koch network, 11 of the disregarded entities were formed by the same Chicago trust lawyer, Jonathan Graber. Most had nonsensical strings of letters for names, likeSLAH, ORRA or DAS MGR. All were set up in Delaware.

Charities typically use disregarded entities to protect themselves from liability. For instance, they’ll hold property in a disregarded entity to shield the nonprofit from lawsuits over anything from environmental pollution to slip-and-falls.

But these LLCs appear to serve different purposes for the Koch network, experts said.

Before the 2012 election, two groups sat at the top of the Koch money spigot. TC4 Trust, which has since folded, and Freedom Partners, which remains on top of the Koch pyramid, shelled out more than $204 million to the network’s 10 other nonprofits. But instead of giving the money directly to the nonprofits, TC4 and Freedom Partners gave those millions to the groups’ disregarded entities.

That made the money more difficult to follow.

Consider the case of the LLC with the inscrutable name of TOHE. (No, that’s not a typo.) Records for TC4 Trust show that it gave a $1,968,500 grant to TOHE between July 2011 and June 2012.

So what’s a TOHE?

You would think you could go to the Internal Revenue Service web site, punch in the magic letters, and get an answer. But that’s not how it works.

Disregarded entities cannot be searched by name because their tax returns are filed as part of their parent nonprofit, which of course is exactly what you don’t know.

To solve the mystery, we searched IRS databases of recognized nonprofits by the names of lawyers known to work for the Koch network. We found one, Vets for Economic Freedom Trust, that seemed like a possible match for TOHE. Then we requested the group’s application from the IRS, which showed a leader, Wayne Gable,who had deep ties to the Koch brothers, earlier serving as a managing director at Koch Industries. But still, the application didn’t mention TOHE.

We had to wait for the group’s tax return, filed in August 2013, to become public, which took a couple of months. The return showed that Vets for Economic Freedom Trust was using a different name: Concerned Veterans for America. And it showed the group’s disregarded entity: TOHE. Concerned Veterans spent most of its money on ads criticizing the government for not doing more to help and for the rising.  

A more recent tax filing by Freedom Partners gave the names of the disregarded entities and their parent nonprofits when listing grants, dispelling some of the confusion.

The Center for Responsive Politics and The Washington Post have also written about how the Koch network has used disregarded entities to hide the money trail. But disregarded entities offer other advantages.

Donors to social welfare groups and trade associations have only become public in a handful of cases, but some corporate and individual donors still worry about scrutiny from stockholders or the IRS. One operative told ProPublica he’d heard a Koch network official suggest that a donor with such concerns write checks to disregarded entities rather than to better-known nonprofits.

“You don’t want to just create one layer of anonymity, because that layer could be breached, maybe just by accident — you know, the memo that’s left lying around kind of situation,” said Lloyd Hitoshi Mayer, a law professor and associate dean at the University of Notre Dame who specializes in nonprofits and campaign finance and who reviewed the groups’ available documents for ProPublica.

Further, while nonprofits are required to disclose their top administrators and boards in tax filings, disregarded entities can have separate managers who are not identified anywhere, said Ellen Aprill, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who has studied politically active nonprofits. Such a manager would be able to control how the money received by the LLC was spent.

Seven disregarded entities in the Koch network took in more than three-quarters of the money received by their parent nonprofits. POFN, the disregarded entity of a nonprofit called Public Notice, for instance, brought in more than 75 percent of its parent’s $6 million in revenue from May 2011 through April 2012. POFN’s manager — whoever that may be — would control how that money was spent, nonprofit experts said.

So far, the Koch network’s use of disregarded entities has been unique. ProPublica reviewed tax returns filed by more than 100 liberal and conservative nonprofits that reported spending money on elections in 2010 and 2012. No group unaffiliated with the Kochs had such offshoots.

Their use might be catching on: In July 2012, the American Future Fund, a dark money behemoth that received most of its money through the Koch network but is not part of it,formed its own disregarded entity, Franklin Squared.

Trusts

Social welfare nonprofits are typically formed as not-for-profit corporations, with boards that set their policies.

But nine of the 12 nonprofits in the Koch network were formed as trusts — an approach several tax experts said they had rarely, if ever, encountered. The first was TC4 Trust, which was established in August 2009 and folded in 2012. Eight more Koch-affiliated groups were set up as trusts in 2010 and 2011.

Trusts are subject to little outside oversight. They don’t have to file incorporation papers or annual reports to the state. Any documents filed with the IRS take effort and time to get. “It keeps it out of the public eye a little longer,” said Lawrence Katzenstein, a lawyer in St. Louis who has formed charitable trusts.

Trust agreements rarely have to be filed publicly, but since most of the Koch-connected trusts have been recognized by the IRS as social welfare nonprofits, their trust agreements are available from the agency. ProPublica examined six trust agreements for groups that are still active.

The trust agreements are all “irrevocable,” meaning the trustee cannot change them, except for changing the trust’s name or anything necessary to maintain the group’s tax-exempt status. Two of the trustees are longtime Koch insiders; a third used to be a lawyer for the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation. Two other trustees are relatively new to the Koch fold but have long conservative pedigrees.

Despite those credentials, the trustees can be axed at any time. Each trust agreement gives an LLC — not a disregarded entity, but a different one with a similarly nonsensical string of four letters for a name — power to remove the trustee for any reason. For instance, Daniel Garza, the trustee for the LIBRE Initiative Trust, can be removed by an LLC called THGI.

Tax experts say that this means that someone behind that LLC can actually control the nonprofit. “It’s someone having control, and it’s that someone going to great lengths to avoid being known,” said lawyer Marcus Owens, who used to run the Exempt Organizations division of the IRS.

Little else is known about these LLCs except that they, too, were formed by Graber in 2010 and 2011 in Delaware, a state that requires virtually no disclosure.

Giving someone the power to remove the trustee is increasingly common, said Charles Durante, a Delaware lawyer who does work with trusts, nonprofits and LLCs. But it’s typically a named individual, he said, not an anonymous LLC.

“That is not customarily how people structure their trusts,” he said.

One employee of a nonprofit with ties to the Kochs, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said the LLC arrangement fit in with the brothers’ desire to keep a tight grip on their organizations.

“Their level of degree to which they insist on control is truly spectacular,” he said.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kevin-grandia/new-report-finds-shadowy-_b_2017779.html

A new report released last week on DeSmogBlog unravels a scheme that funnels money from the notorious Koch Brothers and the reclusive Chicago industrialist Barre Seid through a third party organization, which in turn makes anonymous donations in the millions to right-wing policy think-tanks.

In a nutshell, the 200+ page report by Silicon valley scientist Dr. John Mashey shows in great detail how the Koch brothers and Barre Seid flow money through two organizations calledDonor Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which in turn passes that money on to major right-wing think-tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity.

This money is then used for coordinated efforts to fight things like environmental regulations and the scientific realities of climate change.

In total over $311 million has been put through the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund with much of that coming from David and Charles Koch and Barre Seid.

Here's a summary of findings:

• The report presents evidence that confirms the speculation that Chicago Industrialist Barre Seidhas pumped millions into the Heartland Institute's "global warming projects" to boost their efforts to fight climate change science [page 57].
• Money from Barre Seid was pushed through Donors Trust to funded a major expansion of the Heartland Institute to help in their public relations efforts to deny the realities of climate change.
• Shows how the majority of the Donors Capital Board is made up of right wing think tanks heads that also were heavily involved in the fight for Big Tobacco in the 1990's
• Exposes another philanthropic vehicle established by the Koch Brothers called the "Knowledge and Progress Fund" - this fund has moved over $7m through Donors Trust [page 71].
• All funds that go through Donors Trust become tax deductions for the donors with much of that money going to political causes and policy fights.
• Other major recipients of Donors Trust money are: Americans for Prosperity, American Enterprise Institute, Acton Institute, Cato Institute,Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy and the Media Research Center.

4MB PDF version of the Mashey report here.

Fakery 2: More Funny Finances, Free Of Tax

by John Mashey

Follow the money. October 23, PBS Frontline's Climate of Doubt gave viewers an hour's coverage of the tactics of climate anti-science, its advocates and a quick look into the funding behind it. Read on to follow the money deeper into the funny finances, all free of tax.

Last February, Fake Science, Fakexperts, Funny Finances, Free Of Tax explored some of those issues in detail. More information has been unearthed since, especially on DONORS TRUST, which Robert Brulle discussed with Frontline. Charles Koch and others use DONORS TRUST to anonymize their funding of policy/advocacy groups. The attached revision exposes more detail of the $311 million given through DONORS between 2002-2010, managed by Whitney Ball.

1. Heartland Institute's Fakeducation from fakexperts is now integrated (Appendix Y.3).

2. Heartland Financials (H.1) is augmented with data from the February Heartland Exposed documents. It was known that much of Heartland Institute's funding came via DONORS, and that there was one large donor, speculated by some to be reclusive Chicago businessman Barre Seid. The combination of IRS Form 990s, February documents, and other information proves his identity, as the numbers simply do not work otherwise. (H.1.4-1). More detail on donations (H.1.5) shows explicit funding of climate anti-science activities whose tax-free status seems dubious.
3. DONORS TRUST (and DONORS CAPITAL FUND) have been studied in more detail. Robert Brulle found another Charles Koch fund, Knowledge and Progress, which seems to give money only to DONORS. Added to the others he controls (Charles Koch and Claude Lambe), money can flow through three separate funds. Then some of it goes through DONORS TRUST and DONORS CAPITAL FUND, which anonymize it, as Whitney Ball actually writes the checks. Some "Kochtopus" tentacles are difficult to see.

Some of this tax-advantaged money lands at George Mason University, including its Mercatus Center or even better Institute for Humane Studies ... Chaired by Charles Koch. See Funding and A.5-A.6 in the report there.

DONORS' grants have been analyzed in detail (I.4). Of ~500 "charities" examined 2002-2010, the Top 40 (I.4.2-1) got 66% of the total, and of that $205M, all but $43M went to policy organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute ($17M) Heartland Institute ($14M), or Americans for Prosperity Foundation ($11M). About 75% of the $311M given over those 9 years went to policy groups, all tax-free, with real donors anonymized. They must like this, as 2007-2010 accounted for $265M, following a big expansion in 2007.

Finally, in "Whitney Ball, her brother and her father" (I.5) some strange history is explored. Barre Seid funds and Chairs the Chicago Freedom Trust, C/O John Ball (Whitney's brother), located in Salt Lake City. Trustees include Whitney Ball and Adam Myerson, who Chairs DONORS CAPITAL FUND. In tracking all this, I also found discussion of their father, a lawyer whose repeated financial manipulations lost him the right to practice law in West Virginia.

==

extensive report, history XL http://kochcash.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/Embargo_Report.pdf

hume at heritage; whitney ball main fundraiser for cato (was to be called koch inst)

pjt for fair representation overturned cr act 1965

==

william hume

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

**DonorsTrust** is a charitable501(c)(3) donor advised fund that provides funding to a variety of non-profits and conservative causes. ^[1] These include political advocacy groups, think tanks, and universities.^[2][3] It also donates to groups that support climate change denial.^[4] [5] DonorsTrust offers anonymity to wealthy donors who do not want to make their donations publicly.^[6][7][8] The organization assures its conservative donors that their donated funds will never be used to support liberal causes.^[7]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 History
• 2 Board of Directors
• 3 References
• 4 External links

History

DonorsTrust was established in 1999 with a stated goal of "supporting organizations that promote liberty". It relies on donors from charitable foundations and independent individuals and funds numerous projects, including the Franklin Center.^[9] As of 2013, the DonorsTrust has distributed more than $400 million to over 1,000 conservative and libertarian groups.^[6]

Board of Directors

• Whitney L. Ball, President & CEO of DonorsTrust.^[10]
• Kimberly O. Dennis, Chairman; President of the Searle Freedom Trust.^[10]
• James Piereson, Vice Chairman; President of the William E. Simon Foundation.^[10]
• William J. Hume, Chairman of the Board of Basic American Foods.^[10]
• Jeffrey C. Zysik, Secretary-Treasurer; Chief Financial Officer & Chief of Information Technology of DonorsTrust.^[10]

References

1. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ http://www.publicintegrity.org/2013/02/14/12181/donors-use-charity-push-free-market-policies-states Public Integrity
2. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ http://www.guidestar.org/organizations/52-2166327/donors-trust.aspx Guidestar
3. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ http://www.livescience.com/26618-climate-change-denial-koch-donors-trust.html Livescience
4. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ Suzanne Goldenberg (14 February 2013). "How Donors Trust distributed millions to anti-climate groups". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 February 2013.
5. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ http://www.livescience.com/26618-climate-change-denial-koch-donors-trust.html Livescience
6. ^ :{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/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-businessinsider1_6-1) Walter Hickley (12 February 2013). "Inside The Secretive Dark-Money Organization That's Keeping The Lights On For Conservative Groups". Business Insider. Retrieved 14 February 2013.
7. ^ :{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/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-Guardian021413_7-1) Suzanne Goldenberg (14 February 2013). "Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 February 2013.
8. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (1 January 2003). *The American enterprise*. American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Retrieved 11 September 2011.
9. :{Jump up:(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"):}:^ Suzanne Goldenberg (February 15, 2013). "Media campaign against windfarms funded by anonymous conservatives: Secretive funding network channeled millions to stop state governments moving towards renewable energy". The Guardian. Retrieved February 16, 2013.
10. ^ :{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/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-boardofdirectors_10-1) ^c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-boardofdirectors_10-2) ^d(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-boardofdirectors_10-3) ^e(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DonorsTrust#cite_ref-boardofdirectors_10-4) Board of Directors

External links

• Official site

==

It was started in 1933 by Jaquelin Hume and his brother Bill Hume as a dehydration processing plant in Vacaville, California.^[1][3] In the 1950s, they established a potato processing plant in Blackfoot, Idaho, whereby potato powder could be turned into mashed potatoes by adding boiling water.^[1] This technique was used by brands such as Potato Pearls, Golden Grill, Classic Casserole and Savory Series.^[1] In 1986, they invented the same technique for beans, for brands such as Santiago Refried Beans and later Santiago Black Beans and Santiago Quick-Start Chili.^[1] The company holds forty patents for food production.^[1]

The company is led by Jack and Bill Hume's sons, George and Jerry.^[1] It is headquartered in Walnut Creek, California.^[2][3]

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/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-1) ^c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-2) ^d(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-3) ^e(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-4) ^f(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-5) ^g(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-official_1-6) Official website, Our History
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/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-yahoo_2-1) Yahoo!
3. ^ :{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/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-businessweek_3-1) ^c(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_American_Foods#cite_ref-businessweek_3-2) Bloomberg BusinessWeek

External links

• Official website

==

donor trust 14%

scaife 7%, bradley 5 plus 1% ed, koch 5, howard charitable fdn 4, john w pope 4, searle 4, templeton, dunn's fdn for the adv of rt thinking 2, smith richardson 2, vanguard 2, ...annenberg

GreenPeace  list 2013  https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/784391-donors-capital-donors-trust-funding-2002-2011.html

Acton Institute Alabama Institute Alaska Policy Forum American Conservative Union FoundationAmerican Council on Science and HealthAmerican Enterprise InstituteAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilAmericans for Limited Govt Res. Fdn Americans for Prosperity Foundation America's Future Foundation America's Majority Foundation Atlas Economic Research FoundationAyn Rand InstituteBeacon Center of Tennessee Beacon Hill Institute Capital Research Center Cascade Policy Institute Cato InstituteCenter for Independent ThoughtCenter for Study of CO2 and Global ChangeClaremont Institute Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow DCF Grassroots Institute of Hawaii Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternative Competitive Enterprise Institute Donors Trust Drexel University* Ethan Allen InstituteFederalist SocietyFocus on the Family:{Free to Choose Network, Inc. Freedom Foundation Freedom Foundation (Evergreen Freedom Fdn) Freedom Works Foundation Frontiers of Freedom Georgia Public Policy Foundation GMU Foundation Law and Econ Center Goldwater Institute

Heartland Institute Heritage Foundation Hudson Institute Illinois Policy Institute Independence Institute Institute for Humane Studies Institute for Justice Institute for Religion and Democracy International Policy Network US, Inc. James Madison Institute for Public Policy John Locke Foundation Judicial Watch Landmark Legal Foundation Leadership Institute Mackinac Center for Public Policy Maine Heritage Policy Center Manhattan Institute Maryland Public Policy Institute Media Research Center Mercatus Center at George Mason University Montana Policy Institute Mountain States Legal Foundation National Center for Policy Analysis National Center for Public Policy Research, Inc. National Legal & Policy Center National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, Inc. National Taxpayers Union Nevada Policy Research Institute NFIB Legal Foundation North Dakota Policy Foundation Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs Oregon Better Government Project Pacific Legal Foundation Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy Palmer R Chitester Fund Philanthropy Roundtable Platte Institute for Economic Research Public Interest Institute Reason Foundation Rio Grande Foundation State Policy Network Students for Liberty Sutherland Institute Tennessee Center for Policy Research Texas Public Policy Foundation}:Thomas Jefferson Institute:{Virginia Institute for Public Policy Washington Legal Foundation Washington Policy Center

Wyoming Liberty Group Young America's Foundation

older

Acton Institute American Council on Science & Health American Enterprise Institute American friends of IEA American Legislative Exchange Council Americans for Limited Government Research Foundation Americans for Prosperity Foundation Americans for Tax Reform Foundation America's Majority Foundation Ashbrook (John M) Center for Public Affairs, Ashland University Atlas Economic Research Foundation Beacon Center of Tennessee Capital Research Center Cato Institute Center for Independent Thought Citizens Economic Research Foundation Claremont Institute Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow Commonwealth Foundation for Public Policy Alternatives Competitive Enterprise Institute Discovery Institute Donors Capital Fund E Pluribus Unum Films Empower Texans Foundation Federalist Society Foundation for Rational Economics &EducationFoundation for Research on Econ & Environment (FREE) Free to Choose Network, Inc Freedom Alliance Freedom Foundation (Evergreen Freedom fdn) FreedomWorks Foundation frontiers of Freedom Institute GMU Foundation (Econ) GMU Foundation (Law & Econ Center) Goldwater Institute Grassroots Institute of Hawaii Harvard-Smithsonian Center or Astrophysics Heartland Institute Heritage Foundation ...

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/784391-donors-capital-donors-trust-funding-2002-2011.html

}:

video http://videos.huffingtonpost.com/the-truth-behind-the-denial-of-global-warming-517677114 why rule out koch? am chem council, energytomorrow.org, ebell, mccluskey ctr ed freedom = cato, o'toole, sam kazman cei

mojo update

Exclusive: Donors Trust, The Right's Dark-Money ATM, Paid Out $30 Million in 2011

2/11/13

http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/02/donors-trust-2011-dark-money-heritage-cato-unions

==

Secret Climate Denial Finance: Koch and Others Hide tens of Millions through Donors Trust & Donors Capital Fund

cgibson | 14 February 2013 | 12:13 PM

For those familiar with the effort of ExxonMobil and the Koch brothers to bankroll a network of organizations denying basic climate science, a new article in the Guardian offers some revelatory information on the secret funding network that outweighs even top denier sugar daddies like Koch and Exxon. 

Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund, based out of the DC suburb of Alexandria, VA, have sent $118 million to the 'climate denial machine' from 2002-2010, according to a Greenpeace analysis featured in the Guardian. The graph above, from the article, illustrates the significance of this money as compared to giants like Koch and Exxon.

Of course, the Koch brothers are part of the Donors Trust network, using the DONORS groups to hide their own giving to a variety of corporate front groups. Because of the obscurity provided by DONORS, we don't know exactly who is getting exactly how much of the Koch payments to Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

An accompanying article by the Guardian shows how the DONORS groups provide large portions of organisations' entire budgets, such as the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow, which even among climate deniers is notably anti-scientific.

The support helped the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (Cfact), expand from $600,000 to $3m annual operation. In 2010, Cfact received nearly half of its budget from those anonymous donors, the records show.

The group's most visible product is the website, Climate Depot, a contrarian news source run by Marc Morano. Climate Depot sees itself as the rapid reaction force of the anti-climate cause. On the morning after Obama's state of the union address, Morano put out a point by point rebuttal to the section on climate change.

CFACT is among over a dozen organizations that get 30%-70% of their total budgets from the two DONORS groups. As we reported on PolluterWatch last October using 2010 IRS tax filings:

• Americans For Prosperity Foundationgot $7.6 million from DONORS groups in 2010,43% of its budget. AFP Foundation is chaired by David Koch and has received millions in direct funding from Koch foundations since the Koch brothers founded it.
• **Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow** (CFACT) got $1.3 million from DONORS in 2010,45% of its budget.
• Cornwall Alliance (through the James Partnership) got $339,500 from DONORS in 2010, 75% of its budget.
• **Heartland Institute** got $1.6 million from DONORS in 2010, 27% of it's budget, which came from Chicago billionaire Barre Seid(see p. 67).
• [State Policy Network](http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/koch-industries/state-policy-network-spn/?utma=1.834972712.1309880319.1345044157.1345047894.336&utmb=1.6.10.1345047894&utmc=1&utmx=-&utmz=1.1345047894.336.247.utmcsr=google|utmccn=%28organic%29|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=%28not%20provided%29&utmv=-&utmk=19481784&utma=1.1950733693.1348600277.1350935718.1351183817.23&utmb=1.5.10.1351183817&utmc=1&utmx=-&utmz=1.1350490624.17.10.utmcsr=google|utmccn=%28organic%29|utmcmd=organic|utmctr=%28not%20provided%29|utmcct=/imgres&utmv=-&utmk=208761874) got 36% of its 2010 budget ($4.8 million) from DONORS. SPN members include just about every climate-denying organization and every conservative think tank in the country,including AFP and Heartland.

Koch is clearly embarrassed by the negative publicity (see press roundup below). Koch "Facts," the company's PR website that lashes back at unfavorable reporting on Koch, attempted to respond to the flood of press on the DONORS groups without mentioning them by name. Similarly, Donors Trust president Whitney Ball has done her best to keep Donors Trust and Koch from being synonymous. To be clear--they are not, but the Kochs and their operatives are key players in the Donors network, with people like Arthur Brooks of theAmerican Enterprise Institute and Steven Hayward of the Pacific Research Institute helping oversee DONORS operations, including millions in funding to their own organizations.

Greenpeace has more coming on Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund, Koch Industries and the ongoing misinformation pumping out of the climate denial machine. Stay tuned. Key articles on Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund:

• John Mashey/DeSmogBlog report: Fakery 2: More Funny Finances, Free Of Tax
• The Guardian: Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial think tanks
• The Guardian: How Donors Trust distributed millions to anti-climate groups
• Mother Jones: Donors Trust, The Right's Dark-Money ATM, Paid Out $30 Million in 2011
• Mother Jones: Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement
• Center for Public Integrity: Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states
• International Business Times: Koch Family Uses Fund To Channel Millions To Anti-Climate Science Groups: Report
• U.K. Daily Mail: Revealed: Secretive funding organization 'providing millions to climate change counter-movement on behalf of fossil fuel industry'
• The Independent: Billionaires Secretly Fund Attacks on Climate Science
• PBS FRONTLINE: _Climate of Doubt_ interview with Drexel University's Robert Brulle

http://www.polluterwatch.com/category/freetagging/whitney-ball

==

Modern anti-science was created by the tobacco industry in the 1950s and then used against climate science, often by the same well-experienced think tanks and individuals.  Tobacco anti-science is strangely entangled with climate anti-science, as the attached report shows in detail involving Fred Singer's SEPP, Joseph Bast's Heartland, and more.

S. Fred Singer is President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), but has done almost all the work himself for 20 years., including help for tobacco in the early 1990s. Research for Weird Sciencesent me on a  trek through his and other IRS Form 990s, which unearthed many curiosities of strange governance, fakery and funny finances, all tax-free.

Singer claimed Frederick Seitz as Chairman for two years after his demise and 20 years after a Philip Morris staffer had written in 1989:

“Dr. Seitz is quite elderly and not sufficiently rational to offer advice.”

SEPP’s finances were curious.SEPP paid no salaries, even for Singer’s 60-hour workweeks.  Money flowed oddly.  Asset trades often exceeded normal income and they accumulated to $1.5M, tax-free.   Then one money trail led to Heartland.

Heartland Institute’s Joseph Bast staunchly defended “Joe Camel,” the infamous campaign to addict younger children.  Heartland got tobacco funding for many years, along with a Philip Morris Board member.

Whitney Ball’s DONORS TRUST funded a major expansion of Heartland climate anti-science.  Singer collected old associates to help write “NonGovernmental International Panel on Climate Change“ (NIPCC) reports, filled with unsupported claims and long-refuted anti-science.

He was helped by Craig Idso, of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (CDCDGC), whose money flows also seem unusual.  Robert Ferguson’s Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) was a website and a  PO Box in a UPS store and he was actually a CSCDGC employee.

Under Jay LehrandJames Taylor, anti-science permeated Heartland’s Environment and Climate News (E&CN) sent mostly to elected officials.  Heartland incessantly touted its access and influence with such officials, but its tax forms claimed no lobbying.  It ran “fake science” conferences, paying for government staff attendance.  It sent money to foreign non-charity advocacy groups, sent anti-science handbooks to school boards and urged parents to complain.  It has been criticized inNature and Science.

Free speech allows people to express opinions, even lie about facts, but tax-free operation is a revocable privilege.  Spreading factual untruths and confusion about smoking or climate science is neither research nor education in the public interest.

Read the report, at least the first 21 pages, backed by nearly 200 of detailed backup.

This report was scheduled to be published in a few days,  and by astonishing coincidence, just today we see Heartland Institute Exposed.  The report was done entirely from public sources, but today's new information is quite consistent and fills some holes.  However, the unnamed large Anonymous donor is now seen to be someone hiding behind DONORS TRUST, and some of the smaller ones dedicating funds appear in pp.57-59, with red itemizations. We also see some of the actual payments I had to infer.

03/11/12 CORRECTION:  p.58 omitted a DONORS CAPITAL item for 2008: “For media materials $100,000”, which should be added to various subtotals, making them consistent with the $4,610,000 reported on p.57, Fig. H.1.4.  H/T to Michael Fisher.

10/25/12 UPDATE: A major revision has been posted, with much more information on Barre Seid, DONORS TRUST and other funding issues.

Attachment	Size
fake.pdf	4.99 MB

==

pbs climate of doubt:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/environment/climate-of-doubt/robert-brulle-inside-the-climate-change-countermovement/

A sociologist at Drexel University, Robert Brulle’s research focuses on the strategy and funding patterns of what he calls “the climate change countermovement.” Brulle says that since the late 1980s, “this movement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act” on the issue of global warming. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Sept. 30, 2012.

Tell us how you decided to enter into this research and what you did.

… Despite rigorous scientific evidence of the nature of climate change, the world has yet to act in a significant way, and in particular the United States has been a real laggard in this area. So my concern was, why is that occurring, and how do we understand this?

As a sociologist, we look at the political process as a conflict among different parties with different political and ideological agendas. So in trying to understand this process from a sociological viewpoint, you look at both the proponents of action on climate change, which we would call the climate change movement or the environmental movement, and then the climate change countermovement, which is the movement to try to stop any kind of political action on climate change.

So the proper research procedure here is to start looking at these two different components of the political process to see where their funding comes from, to see what viewpoints they espouse, and to see how they try to influence the political agenda.

This is part one of a three-part project that I’m working on, is to look at the climate change countermovement first, and then I’m going to look at the environmental movement or the climate change movement. Then the third part is to do a comparison between the two. …

What surprised you about what you found?

…What surprised me about the analysis was really the comprehensive nature of the climate countermovement. This is an extremely well-organized political movement that has a number of different components that are loosely coordinated but all act along the same lines. You have organizations that focus on development of ideas, such as think tanks, media outlets, advertising for public opinion, scholarly activities at universities.

I think what’s important to understand is to see this movement in context with the larger conservative political movement in the United States. The climate change countermovement, as I call it, is really an add-on to the already-existing conservative movement in the United States.

Starting after World War II, there has been a comprehensive effort to build established think tanks and intellectual outlets to advance progressive viewpoints. So by the mid-80s, there was already a well-established network of think tanks and organizations. But climate change wasn’t one of their focuses. Climate change was added on to an already-existing network of organizations as one of their major issues.

Starting in 1988, we can see the first appearances of these organizations in climate change hearings, and then it expanded rapidly in the 1990s and through the 2000s. …

Now, what you can see in the movement itself is that it has two real roots. One is in the conservative movement itself, in that you see a lot of conservative foundations that had been funding the growth of the conservative movement all along now appear as funding the climate countermovement. You also can see dedicated industry foundations that come in to start funding the climate countermovement.

So it’s kind of a combination of both industry and conservative philanthropies that are funding this process, and what they did was they borrowed a great deal of the strategy and tactics that came out of the tobacco industry’s efforts to prevent action on the health impacts of smoking.

“The tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first, and now they’re being applied to the climate change movement.”

What you see is the tactics that this movement uses were developed and tested in the tobacco industry first, and now they’re being applied to the climate change movement, and in fact, some of the same people and some of the same organizations that were involved in the tobacco issue are also involved in climate change.

Can you give an example of that?

The tobacco industry was faced with a real problem in that the scientific evidence that smoking was related to cancer was very clear, and that if that was applied, that basically would devalue their product immensely. So they formulated the strategy of sowing doubt about the scientific validity of the connection between smoking and cancer.

They had their own experts testifying about the doubts and the incompleteness of the scientific data regarding smoking and lung cancer, and they developed organizations that would promulgate these ideas through the media. They developed the initial strategy of selling doubt in the face of scientific certainty to prevent action.

That strategy is exactly what you see in the climate countermovement. They use the same organizations, the same tactics, and try to sow doubt about climate change as a real, serious environmental issue.

… What is the climate [change counter]movement? How do you define it?

What we mean by a countermovement is a movement against change. On one side, you have the climate movement that wants mandatory actions to deal with climate change, such as a cap and trade or a tax on carbon or something like that. In opposition to that you have a countermovement. The objective of [that] movement is to maintain the status quo and to not have change.

When you look at the climate countermovement, you can see a range of arguments that start out with just flat-out climate denial, that climate change is not occurring, it’s not real, the scientific evidence is just not true. So that’s kind of like the starting viewpoint.

That can range all the way up to, “Sure, climate change is occurring, but it’s not serious enough to merit action,” “Climate change is occurring, but we’re not quite sure how much is caused by humans,” “Climate change is occurring, but it’s too expensive to deal with,” or, “Climate change is occurring, but technology will fix it; we don’t need to worry about any kind of mandatory action; voluntary action will solve it.”

All of those arguments define the range of arguments that are used to delay action on climate change, and the end result is that 20 years after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, we’re well on our way to exceeding 2 degrees; that is, [it's] basically impossible to stay below 2 degrees. And we’re on our way to embracing dangerous if not catastrophic climate change.

So this movement has had a real political and ecological impact on the failure of the world to act in this area. I don’t think it’s the only cause why we failed to act, but I think it’s a significant cause in delaying action to address climate change.

How well funded is this movement?

This movement is fairly well funded. What’s interesting is that in comparison to the environmental movement, it actually doesn’t have as much money. The environmental movement actually has more funding, but it’s the nature of the spending that makes the difference.

When you look at what the environmental movement spends its money on, it actually tries to spend its money on developing solutions to climate change, such as developing a solar panel industry in China, making sure everybody in India has an appropriate solar oven to reduce CO2 emissions, things like that. And they spend hardly anything on political or cultural processes. The climate change countermovement spends all of its money there.

So you end up with this great difference between the two movements. As one movement is actually out there trying to develop technological solutions on the ground, the other is engaged in political action to delay any kind of action. …

When it comes to looking at the funding, what you find is that the organizations that make up the climate change countermovement are really for the most part already-existing conservative think tanks and organizations such as that. So when you do the analysis of the funding, all you can say is, “So many dollars went to this organization.” You can’t say how many dollars went from this foundation to this organization specifically for climate change, because most of the grants that come to the climate countermovement organizations have no conditions. They’re for general support, so we don’t know how much the organization is actually spending.

All we can say at this point with any kind of empirical credibility is that we know that this foundation gave this much money to this organization.

… My analysis of the funding flows shows that over the period from 2003 to 2010, there was about half a billion dollars went to the organizations that we defined as climate countermovement organizations. So it had varied that in the beginning, 2003, 2004, it wasn’t as much. You see a ramp-up of the funding in 2008 and 2009 and 2010. It increased greatly over that time period.

Who is the biggest single donor that you found for climate [counter] change?

… It is no surprise that the funders of the climate countermovement organizations are the same funders that fund the overall conservative think tanks across the board. …

The leading funders over that 2003-to-2010 time period have been, of course, the Koch Foundation — was a major player early on, not so much now — the Scaife Foundation and theSierra Foundation.

What’s interesting and I think the most relevant is the rise of the two foundations, the Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, which have the same address, and I treat them as simultaneously the same organization, or “Donors.” They started out very low, 3 percent in 2003, and by 2009, about one-quarter of the funding of the climate countermovement is from the Donors Trust, Donors Capital Fund.

What is Donors Trust?

Donors Trust and Donors Capital, which I’m going to just call Donors, are two foundations that are basically donor-directed foundations that the foundation receives money from an individual with the understanding that it’s going to a particular organization. So the money comes in to Donors as a contribution and goes out the door as a grant to a particular organization that the donor directed it to be. …

What do we know about Donors Trust?

… We don’t know a whole lot about the Donors foundations other than they do a lot of pass-through funding. We don’t know who their donors are, except in a couple of cases where we find information in the databases about who funds them.

So a lot of it is just the mystery of who is funding it. But what you see is that as the contribution of Donors has increased over the 2003-to-2010 timeframe, the contribution of other foundations has declined. Koch went from a high of 9 percent of the funding flow in 2008 to 1 percent in 2010.

We do know that the Koch brothers have made significant contributions to Donors Trust through their foundation called the Knowledge and Progress Fund. They gave $1.25 million in 2007, $1.25 million in 2008, and then $2 million in 2010 to Donors. We don’t know where it went after it goes to Donors, because it’s not necessarily a one-for-one giving.

How do we know it came from the Koch brothers?

If you look at the board of directors of the Knowledge and Progress Fund, it’s the Koch family. It’s certainly no surprise that it’s all the Koch family running the board, and their executive director is a longtime employee of the Koch family, so I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that this is fairly dominant, the Koch Foundation.

What does this tell you?

What this trend shows me is that the funding of climate countermovement organizations has become more politically controversial. We see less and less attributable funding to these organizations and more anonymous giving through the Donors Trust or Donors Capital Foundation, so that people don’t necessarily want to be clearly identified with a politically controversial organization such as [the] Heartland Institute.

… I think that that’s problematic in that we really have anonymous giving and unaccountable power being exercised here in the creation of the climate countermovement; that there is no attribution, no responsibility for the actions of these organizations to their funders.

So if you want to protest what the Heartland is doing and write their funders, you don’t know who they really are. It’s the Donors Capital, Donors Trust, which is basically a black box as far as research goes. I mean, we have a little clue here and there, but we really don’t have a good understanding of how Donors Trust and Donors Capital operate other than it’s secret.

It seems to me that if we’re going to have democracy and public accountability of our institutions, we need to at least identify who these funders are so that we can understand who is really funding the different spokespersons in the climate countermovement.

So it’s a total mystery?

It’s not a total mystery. Donors Trust and Donors Capital are not a total mystery, but it is certainly a black box with a few little clues coming out here and there, but no real image that’s really reliable can be formed yet.

… It used to be Exxon funded all these organizations. …

There’s been a lot of focus on ExxonMobil as funding the climate countermovement. Our data shows that they’ve funded about, at their height, 4 percent of the total. And it also shows quite clearly that ExxonMobil got out of this business. By 2009, it was not funding any climate countermovement organizations.

… The American Petroleum Institute at the same time started a grant program funding climate countermovement organizations. Now, whether this is a coincidence or is not, I don’t want to go there. I don’t want to speculate on that. But what I want to say is that we see a shift in funding from ExxonMobil. … You see this shift from attributable funding to anonymous funding. And for me, that is as ExxonMobil caught more political heat, they did not want to be openly associated with these organizations. And so we see the Koch brothers actually becoming more anonymous in their giving through Donors Trust. …

After Donors Trust, what are the types of funders? Is it libertarians? Is it fossil fuel? … [Has] it really shifted more to an ideological thing? …

I think after Donors Trust and Donors Capital, the major funders of the climate countermovement are, as they’ve always been, ideologically driven foundations that are very much concerned about conservative values and worldviews. They really operate on a philosophy of neoliberalism, and they want to encourage market solutions to social problems and to keep the government intervention into the economy at an absolute minimum, if none at all.

So they are very much, I would say, neoliberal foundations. There are some libertarian foundations, but they are not anywhere near as prominent as what I would consider to be traditional conservative foundations. The funding of the countermovement organizations from the oil and gas interests is actually, when you look at the foundations of those organizations, fairly minimal. So it really is driven by these ideologically focused organizations, which is no surprise, because they’ve been building a conservative movement now for 40, 50 years, and they have these organizations that they’ve created and sponsored and helped develop over that period of time. So what they did was alongside of all of the other conservative issues — affirmative action, English as the official language, the Defense of Marriage [Act], these sorts of issues — they added on climate change as an additional dimension to the conservative movement’s issue agenda.

… This isn’t just a stray person here and there disputing climate change. It’s an institutionalized effort that we know about from documents that have leaked from planning sessions such as the American Petroleum Institute’s efforts in 1998. We know that this is a comprehensive institutional effort. It’s not just a few people here and there, but rather it’s part of a larger conservative movement.

I think they often like to point out that coalition disbanded. So what makes it still an institutional movement? 

Institutional movements really function through what we would consider to be informal arrangements and weak coordination. So in the case of the climate countermovement, what you see is that the conservative movement coordinates itself quite well, that when you look at the funding flows you can go and look at the dynamics of the Philanthropy Roundtable, which is where these sorts of issues of funding flows are discussed.

And I’m certain that there is informal talk among different components of the conservative movement, just as do the environmental movement funders have a similar kind of interaction at the Environmental Grantmakers Association [EGA]. These are not secret things. People talk to each other. They have conventions together. They know each other. They work loosely with each other.

So just because there isn’t a formal alliance doesn’t mean that there isn’t a coordination function going on. We know that Koch brothers organized an annual meeting where they strategize about political and foundation funding and different activities, and we know that [executive director of Donors Trust] Whitney Ball gets to go to that every year. We have evidence that she attended one year, so we know that there is a coordination function at that level, too.

It’s just like any social movement. It’s not a group of particular people, but it’s a number of people that have weak, informal links with each other that have a general coordinated strategy, or at least generally coordinated goals and values and things that they work on together, and so in that sense there is a conservative movement.

It is quite interesting to contrast this with the environmental movement and the climate movement, [which] has multiple strategies, multiple networks, and not a coordinated image whatsoever. It’s a much more disparate and fragmented movement than the conservative movement.

How so?

Well, the conservative movement has at least general adherence to clear goals about what they want, whereas the environmental movement ranges everywhere from Environmental Defense Fund, which wants to have cap and trade, to Earth First!, which wants to transform capitalism. And there is no real coordination or continuity in that movement itself in that it has multiple centers, multiple viewpoints, and there is not common adherence to goals or strategies whatsoever. …

So as a social movement scholar, you look at the contrast between the two, and you really have to be impressed by the scope, scale and capacity of the conservative movement in the United States. There is no doubt that this is [an] extremely well-organized, focused, well-funded and ideologically consistent social movement. And as a social movement scholar, you can’t help but be impressed.

What impresses you about it?

Just the general coordination and capacity is really quite extraordinary, and to be able to retain focus for this long of a period of time on clearly identified goals is very impressive. There is no counterpart on the left that’s equivalent.

… Overall, what’s the story of the shift of trends … and who funds, right? … Who funds Heartland? Who funds CEI [Competitive Enterprise Institute]?

… Donors Trust and Donors Capital aren’t the only sort of donor-directed funding. There’s also the Vanguard Charitable [Endowment Program] foundation, which is a donor-directed one. It’s small; it’s like 1 percent of the overall total.

But it’s not unusual to see that kind of donor-directed funding. … The Vanguard Charitable foundation must give to several thousand different organizations, so donor-directed is not unusual.

What’s unusual I think about Donors Trust and Donors Capital is the scale of the dollars and that it has grown as others have declined. And I think the growth of donors [coincides] with the publicity that Union of Concerned Scientists and Greenpeace brought to the Koch brothers’ funding and ExxonMobil funding is that as those two organizations got more publicity, those organizations stop giving, and you see the rise [in] anonymous givingthrough Donors Capital and Donors Trust, which in a way insulates the giver from any kind of political fallout from their giving and removes actually an organizing target.

People were organizing around: “Oh, evil ExxonMobil. Oh, evil Koch brothers.” Now it’s Donors Trust, Donors Capital. Who are they? They get money; they give it out. It’s not connected to anything other than this kind of amorphous institution, not much more than a halfway house. The money comes in, it goes out, and it’s not connected to any kind of corporation or individual that you can say, “Oh, look at this evil person.”

So it removes the personalization or the ability to identify a concrete entity as creating and maintaining the climate countermovement. Politically, it’s a very skillful strategy.

… You looked at a larger scope than just the people who are expressing skepticism about the science. Why is that?

Skepticism about climate science is only one of many different rhetorical strategies you can employ to delay action, and it’s becoming increasingly unviable. Recently one of the climate skeptics did a study funded by the Koch brothers and came to the conclusion that climate change was real.

The scientific evidence is pretty overwhelming, so if you want to delay action, you say, “OK, climate change is real, but…” Fill in the blank: It’s too expensive. It’s really not all that serious. The voluntary action will solve it.

There is a whole range of other ways that you can accept the basic premises of climate science but still try to argue for delaying action, and so the countermovement actually sort of does them all.

Simultaneously you end up with the Heartland Institute or [a] hard-line climate denier saying climate science is just not true, others saying, well, we’re not quite sure how much is climate change versus natural climate change. That’s Romney’s position. Other positions, George Bush wanted to create the hydrogen economy; you know, we’ll have technology fix [it] sometime down the road and not have to address real actions now. So there is a range of strategies, a range of rhetorical approaches that the countermovement can deploy.

… I think the outright climate-denier component is probably atrophying, but you’re going to sort of see more of the technology-can-fix-this approach rhetoric, and a voluntary action through technological innovation or some sort of things like that will replace the outright climate denial as that becomes less and less viable.

But again, the result is still the same: We don’t do anything. So you have no legislative change, you have no mandatory requirements, and CO2 emissions continue to build up in the atmosphere.

The end result is the same, which is what the countermovement is all about, is to delay action. And they have been enormously successful. It’s been 20 years since we signed the treaty saying that we were going to try to prevent — that we’re going to go over 2 degrees. Well, as Dr. Phil says, “How is that working for you?” It’s not.

You mentioned that the fossil fuel organizations are still involved, but they’re taking a different approach in terms of changing the frame with the advertising.

I think what’s very important to recognize is that not all of the activities of the climate countermovement take part through these think tanks. But that takes place actually more directly. If you look at the American Petroleum Institute, they spend millions of dollars on advertising campaigns. Then if you turn on CNN any day, you’ll see two or three commercials extolling the virtues of increased energy production and using all of our energy resources to create American jobs.

This is a really clever rhetorical approach. What you’re trying to do is you never mention the words “climate change.” You never mention denying the science or anything like that. You just change the frame to focus on something that all Americans would generally support — and of course they’ve tested these through focused groups — is energy development and more economic growth and more jobs.

It’s kind of hard to be against economic growth and more jobs when you’re in the middle of a recession, and what they say is we need all of America’s energy resources. Oh, they don’t say the “tar sands”; they say the “oil sands.” So you get this very convincing argument that what we need to do is develop all of our energy sources simultaneously, including coal, gas, petroleum so that we could have economic growth.

And that’s a well-developed, focus group-tested approach to convince people that we really don’t want to mess with the energy mix except to have more development of all of these energy resources. So it’s interesting that the Obama administration has kind of adapted that rhetoric and that its energy strategy is all of the above. They’re adding renewable to the regular carbon products, but their energy strategy is all the above.

So it’s a very clever way, and the end result is that if you’re developing all of the above, you’re not doing anything about climate change, because if you’re developing coal, if you’re developing tar sands, if you’re developing more natural gas, those all emit more carbon. … It’s a redirection rhetorical approach. …

So they are part of the climate change countermovement?

Yeah, so they are part of the climate change countermovement, and so the American Petroleum Institute hires advertising firms to carry this out, and you see it every day on your TV. And those have an effect on the public concerns and the issue agenda of Congress.

What we see now is that climate change is virtually unspoken in both the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign. Neither of them can bear to say the words “climate change.” And Obama says he’s worried about climate change, but his energy strategy actually contradicts that. It’s that [the] actions of his secretary of the interior [Ken Salazar] have been to open up more areas for drilling. … What he says and what he does are contradictory. …

“Climate change is virtually unspoken in both the Romney campaign and the Obama campaign. Neither of them can bear to say the words ‘climate change.’”

… I think it would be really interesting to see who actually contributes to Donors, and I actually believe that in the interest of having open public debate in a democracy, we really do need to know who is funding these organizations. …

We have really unaccountable funding flows to these organizations from unknown sponsors trying to influence public policy in an enormous way, and that really runs counter to the whole notion of democracy and open debate.

Instead we have sort of secret plutocratic funding of the climate countermovement, and [we need] at least a little bit of transparency, at least to get us to understand what’s really going on here with these countermovement organizations.

… And the secret plutocracy is what, a knowledge of trust?

It’s the whole process. Plutocracy is government by the rich, and so you have a whole process here where vested interests with large amounts of money fund and try to direct public policy in accordance with their particular interest.

Now, they have every right to do that. This is –

Free country?

Yeah, it’s a free country. But the question of really seeing the transparency of who’s trying to do what openly so we can actually evaluate the credibility of the arguments coming from these different organizations, I think it would be a crucial part in a democratic dialogue.

Instead, we have this money influencing the political process in ways that really have blocked action in the face of what I consider to be one of the most robust scientific conclusions that I’ve ever seen.

There really is absolutely no doubt about climate change in the refereed press, and the stakes are very high involved with climate change. And to see that delayed really through the exercise of what I consider to be private economic power for vested interest over the collective good of humanity for the next thousand years, it’s really quite problematic, in my viewpoint, at best.

We really need to be able to get to understand what’s going on here so that we can try to shape our public discourse about climate change in a much more open and democratic way, and that’s not what I see happening. I see private, secret economic power being used to direct us away from any action.

What is the significance to you of so many of these different organizations, like the Heartland climate conference [International Conference on Climate Change] has all these free-markets sponsors? What’s the significance of having so many different organizations instead of just one big organization, from a sociological standpoint as well?

What you see in the number of sponsorships in the Heartland conference is the attempt to build a worldwide climate countermovement. So you see a lot of organizations from different countries: Italy, New Zealand, Australia. You see a lot of sponsorships from those kinds of countries, and the more organizations you have, the more legitimate the conference looks.

Instead, if you just have one big funder, you know, it’s the Donors Trust Foundation funding X. When we’ve got 500 organizations all contributing to our effort, it’s a large-scale effort by all of these people. So the more organizations you have, the more legitimate you look.

So you want to have a whole lot of sponsors even if they only give a little bit. It makes for, I think, good political theater. … This is sponsored by these 25 organizations. Wow, 25 organizations got together to sponsor this; they must be significant. Two organizations got together, one organization got together, not anywhere near as politically legitimate.

So you can try to create the impression that you have a movement going here because you’ve got all these new organizations spring[ing] up all over the world. Look at all this! Why, we’re really growing.

The environmental movement does the same thing. … They’re both social movements, and they have a lot commonality in their strategies and what they actually try to do. Their end results are quite different, but they try what’s [within the] allowable parameters of political action in our society, and so they are sort of constrained and forced into the similar patterns of action. So it’s not surprising that you can change out the goals and you see some very similar sorts of processes going on. There’s still a social movement.

… In 2008, you had two candidates that were saying we’re going to take action, and today … [there's] tremendous polarization. What does your research find? What’s the reason for that? What’s going on here?

First you have to understand public opinion on climate change. This is a peripheral issue. This is not one of the burning issues in the American public’s mind. It’s that the Gallup poll goes around every month and asks, “What’s the most important problem facing the United States right now?” And of course, 80 percent [say] the economy, jobs, maybe war. Somewhere down around 1, 2, 3 percent, in comes environment, crime, things like that.

So these are very peripheral issues. They are not what most people worry about on a constant basis, OK? …

The other thing that the literature on public opinion chose is that when you call up people and ask them for their opinion on a peripheral issue, they will search their memory to try to come up with an answer, and they will probably go to the most recent thing they saw on TV, or the most recent thing they read in the newspaper or something in the media and say, “Oh, yeah, this,” and they’ll come up with an opinion about it.

So what you find is that the public opinion on climate change is largely driven bymedia coverage. … And there’s actually a pretty quick decline function,[which means] that if people don’t see it week in and week out, something else is going to pop into their mind, and the concern about climate change is going to [be], “Oh, I saw a FRONTLINE last night; I’m concerned about it today,” and next week, “Oh, Kim Kardashian got divorced; you know, I’m all about that.”

It’s replaced. You have this decay function, very quick. Some people say it’s about 30 days. You know, it depends. Certainly quarter to quarter that we were testing, there is no carryover; it’s gone in a quarter for sure.

So what that means is that in order to have levels of concern about climate change high, you have to have a lot of media coverage of it, and it has to be constantly repeated over and over again, and that will raise levels of concern in public opinion.

So what gets media coverage? Well, fights among elites usually bring a lot of media coverage. So if you have a presidential [candidate] debate one side on climate change, the other side against climate change, you get a lot of media coverage. You have disagreeing elites, you’re going to get more media coverage.

What has been the media coverage? What did you find?

Media coverage on climate change peaked in 2007 and 2008, and it’s been declining back to about 2002 levels in the current time. So you see a great big sort of hump as public opinion went up, media coverage went up.

What we were able to explain is, what drives media coverage? And we looked at a number of factors. Weather disasters, nope — doesn’t affect public opinion at the national level. It might affect that locality, but you’ve got a lot of weather all over the place in the United States, so weather has had no significant impact on climate change public opinion.

Scientific information promulgation about climate change has done nothing but go up and up and up, and climate change public opinion has gone up and down. So while information increases, public opinion goes up and down. There is no statistical relationship between providing information about climate change and levels of public concern.

I know that that’s a big blow to a lot of people in the climate change communication field, but that’s what we found: no relationship.

… One major factor that drove a lot of concern about climate change was Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth. That really got a lot of media coverage. It put it into the public agenda in a very big way.

It wasn’t the number of people that saw it, that actually went to the movie theater, but it was the media coverage pump that climate change got in response to Al Gore’s movie. We know that Al Gore’s movie drove that pump, and so we know that that movie had a really significant impact on climate change concern in the United States.

The other thing that has a lot of impact are what we call “elite cues.” People have certain ideological beliefs, and they look to opinion leaders on matters that they don’t have direct experience [with] for guidance. So people that trust and listen to Rush Limbaugh hear [him] say that global climate change is a hoax. “Well, I trust Rush; I believe him.” And so their opinion follows it, and you call them up and you say, “What do you think about climate change?,” and they say, “I think it’s a hoax.” Or they believe Al Gore and know it’s real. They follow their ideological leaders, or their thought leaders have this big, big impact, so what we call elite cues.

The president stands up and says, “Climate change is real, and we have to do something about it,” and several senators stand up and say, “We have to do something about it,” [that] has a big impact on public opinion.

What was especially impactful is when Republicans would stand up and say, “We have to do [something] with climate change,” because you get a [Sen.] John McCain [R-Ariz.] standing up and say[ing], “Climate change is real, and we need to deal with it,” suddenly the Republicans are like, “Oh, he is our party leader; I guess this is true,” and it overcomes. The elite cue is, “Climate change is real; we need to get onboard with this,” and people’s opinions follow.

Now, what can drive it down? Elite cues going the other way. … Other things drive it down, things like our economy collapses, … like the Great Recession that drove it way down; the number of war deaths, the war in Iraq, the war in Afghanistan. We’re having all these wars; we have all of these people dying in these wars. That replaces and pushes out climate change concern.

So what we see is this dynamic that really tells us that we need to focus on having elite cues, or the elites coming to some sort of agreement that climate change is real, that we need to address it, before you’re going to see public opinion is going to change. …

In a nutshell, media coverage has fallen off, and people are talking about it. If they had to sum it up, what would you say?

… What we have now, since the media isn’t covering it and the elites aren’t talking about it, is we have levels of concern that approach a similar period around 2002-2003. Now it goes up and down and bounces around a little bit, and everybody jumps on these little blips, but statistically it’s pretty much the same thing.

… [The] 2009 levels of concern aren’t any different than 2010 levels of concern; they are both about statistically the same, which is to be expected, because we’re not talking about it, and so we’re not having factors that are going to change.

You have the committed populations on both sides of the issue that are attentive publics that have their core beliefs, that it’s real and we have to do something about it, or it’s not real or it’s a hoax, so we don’t have to do something about it. And those remain relatively stable.

But the people in the middle that are going to change their opinions are basically just, “Huh?” They are not paying attention to it because it’s not a major issue, and so when you call them up, you just get a random distribution, so you end up with no change.

So you end up with pretty stable public opinion on climate change now. … The sociology term is, our political science stream is punctuated equilibria [until] we have some event that shifts the whole nature of the debate. I … expect that it will remain pretty much where it is for a while unless we have unexpected events or something like Al Gore’s movie comes along again.

But I think that was kind of one out. I don’t think [you're going] to get a climate change movie that gets that kind of attention anymore.

… The media coverage is what, off the mat?

I’ve been charting television coverage of climate change in the major news networks — NBC, ABC, CBS — since 1980, and what we’re seeing in 2011, which is the last four years, I have it back at the levels that it was in 2002. It’s almost virtually no coverage or very, very little coverage of climate change in the major news media, and that’s pretty much paralleled in The New York Times, the major press media and the major magazines.

… The mass American public [is] really just not thinking about it. It’s not in the media. It’s not in the presidential campaign. So it’s really gone back to its very peripheral status and will remain there until some sort of factor changes it. Now, it could be an intervention by social movement; it could be actual physical events. It could be the upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] report that’s due out in 2014, [which] will refocus attention on it.

Historically those haven’t worked; they get kind of a media blip and then it goes away. The scientific information argument is really quite thin, so that I don’t expect that that’s going to have this major impact. Maybe if the Arctic Sea completely melts or the Arctic Ocean ice pack completely melts, maybe that will have an impact. But we really don’t know, and the sociology is not very good at predicting those kinds of events.

… What is the function really of CEI and Heartland and all of these different think tanks?

A good social movement or countermovement needs to develop effective rhetorical approaches that resonate with the public. So what a lot of these think tanks do is these are the places where they develop new ideas, new approaches and test them out. This is basically intellectual research and development where they test out the themes, they run focus groups, they see how they fly in different political debates, political forums.

This is where these ideas are developed and guys like Frank Luntz work with his little dials and work the best arguments. They test these things out in focus groups, and they get the message developed that they then promulgate through either new climate change books — which a lot of these think tanks print — the magazine articles that they print, or op-eds that they write to try to get into the major media. So these people do a lot of media outreach.

But then also you have to have the mass marketing of these things, so these ideas then can get picked up by advertising agencies and promulgated in a mass-message format, like in the advertisements that we spoke of earlier about the framing. You don’t talk about climate change; you talk about jobs, energy and economic growth in the same sentence, and we need all of the above. That’s a well-developed, focus group-tested message that resonates a lot with current American concerns, obviously. And that forms the basis for these multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns that you see every night on your TV if you turn on any of the news channels.

So it’s the intellectual development and then mass marketing of these kinds of ideas that’s a real political genius of the conservative movement. It’s been that development and ability to do that in a consistent way over and over and over and over again, and consistently sending out the same message that’s going to have an impact on public opinion, and that if public opinion decays as quickly as it does, you need to keep every night being reminded of how good the American Petroleum Institute and energy development is. Every night you see those ads on CNN. They don’t let up.

So you have this really well-developed, well-funded countermovement messaging strategy, and the counterpart of the movement strategy is Al Gore ran a few commercials I remember back in 2008, but you don’t see commercials talking about climate change at all. They are just not there.

So you have this really one-sided debate. It’s that you end up having a news story, let’s say about natural gas, and you have, “Well, natural gas is not as bad as coal.” Oh, no, it’s as bad as coal. And you have competing experts brought to you by America’s Natural Gas and how wonderful that is, and they will run more commercial time about how wonderful America’s Natural Gas is than the news itself.

So the effect on public opinion, nobody measures this. This is one of the great problems in the public opinion thing is nobody measures this whatsoever. I’ve searched high and low for papers on this. Nobody knows. …

… The top donors of the climate change [counter]movement, describe what they are. 

The top donors of the climate countermovement are the traditional conservative foundations that have built and maintained the conservative movement in the United States. And this is just one more dimension of that activity. …

It’s ideologically motivated giving by these family foundations, and it’s their particular predilection to give to conservative causes, just as George Soros gives to liberal causes.

So it’s the same type of giving, but what you see is that the preponderance of the climate change countermovement funding comes from exactly those kind of people, … and that the petroleum industry, I guess I would say the carbon industry foundations are really not where the real money is. …

The majority of these think tanks are tax-deductible institutions. They are charitable institutions that you can deduct your contribution to them. What’s interesting is that there have been some cases where the rules for what constitutes a charitable organization have been brought into question; that if you are a charitable organization, you are supposed to comply with certain IRS guidelines to maintain your tax-free charitable donation status, such as you tell the truth in your educational outreach efforts, that you don’t slander particular individuals, that you don’t engage in openly political activities.

The Sierra Club lost its tax-exempt status in 1970 because it was seen as being too overtly political. If you apply the criteria that were applied to the Sierra Club to some of these organizations in the climate countermovement, I think you would end up with similar results.

Why?

I don’t think that you can claim that, for instance Climate Depot, run by the charitable institution the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow [CFACT] and [Director of Communications] Marc Morano, is engaged in honest, nonpartisan, objective reporting of scientific fact.

I think that a good case could be made quite the contrary. Yet they’re tax-deductible. They have every right to say what they’re saying, but they don’t have the right to be designated as a tax-deductible charity engaged in nonpartisan educational activities. …

I turn on the TV, I’ll see a very sort of touchy-feely Chevron commercial, a guy with a very tender voice talking about how they’re working with local communities to solve this and that. Is that part of this operation and this countermovement by them describing all of the different things that they are up to? And what are we to make of those [ads]?

One of the key components of preventing climate change legislation is how the public perceives the image of the corporation, is that if the corporate image is one of being environmentally irresponsible, culturally irresponsible, exploiting their own workers, the probability of legislation to change the activities of that corporation increases.

So the more a corporation can foster its image as a socially responsible actor, it decreases its potential for legislation. Walmart has done a great deal to green its image and also to say that it’s a good employer of people. BP had its whole big campaign about Beyond Petroleum, but it never really actually changed its practices. It just talked a lot about these changes in practices.

So what they’re trying to do with those kinds of corporate relations commercials is to foster their corporate images as a good, trusted, socially responsible corporation that can be trusted to do the right thing, that we don’t need legislation. We don’t need to have these impositions on these already good people.

And they try to provide evidence that they are indeed acting in that way, and so their corporate profile increases and their brand value goes up where people feel good about this company, and they are much less likely to have punitive legislation against them. The expenditure of corporate funds for basically corporate image development and expansion is a well-developed field of public communications and corporate PR.

And they know exactly what they’re doing. There’s actually data that’s given out about the best ranked corporations in America, and you certainly don’t want to be on the bottom of that as the worst ranked corporation in America, because [of] the possibility that it’s much easier to mobilize people to take action around a corporation that’s seen as irresponsible and callous to the different social issues than it is to mobilize around issues that, “Oh, look, they’re really good actors.”

It’s a calculated business decision to fund those kinds of advertising. … You certainly will spend millions and millions of dollars to foster and improve your corporate image. And that’s what brings us CNN.

Now, there’s been some interesting discussions as to whether the fact that CNN is sponsored by these same corporations affects their news operation. Do they bite the hand that feeds them? I haven’t seen any real periodical literature on that, but there’s been some very interesting discussions about whether that’s going on or not.

I don’t think that we know, but that’s kind of another interesting question is to see, do they change their coverage of an issue if they have sponsorship by that company? We have no clue. …

Anew study conducted by Dr. Robert Brulle,a professor of sociology and environmental science in Drexel University's College of Arts and Sciences, along with Jason Carmichael of McGill University and J. Craig Jenkins of Ohio State University, set out to identify the informational, cultural and political processes that influence public concern about climate change. http://www.pages.drexel.edu/~brullerj/  eh

http://www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org/sites/default/files/ssn_basic_facts_brulle_on_the_climate_change_counter-movement.pdf

brulle:

Organizations and Funders

Public doubts have been deliberately stoked, but

how? Previous scholarship has documented

publications and publicity effort

s by individual authors who ha

ve written books and reports

denying climate-science findings. This

is fine as far as it goes, but

does not reveal the organized

basis for sustained efforts to undermine faith in

science. My research goes deeper to document

the organizational underpinnings and fundi

ng behind climate-change denial.

To discover how the denial campaign was built

and maintained, I developed a listing of 118

important climate denial organizations in the

United States. Then I c

oded data on philanthropic

funding for each organization, combining informati

on from the Foundation Center with financial

data submitted by organizations to the Internal

Revenue Service. Hefty sums have been donated

• $235 million in 2010 alone. Here are my key fi

ndings about funding flows from 2003 to 2010:

Conservative foundations have bank-rolled denial.

The largest and most consistent funders

of organizations orchestrating climate change denial are a number of well-known conservative

foundations, such as the Searle Freedom Trust,

the John William Pope Foundation, the Howard

www.scholarsstrategynetwork.org January 2013

Charitable Foundation, and the Sarah Scaife Foundation. These foundations promote ultra-free-

market ideas in many realms.

Koch and ExxonMobil have recently pulled back from publicly visible funding.

From

2003 to 2007, the Koch Affiliated Foundations and the ExxonMobil Foundation were heavily

involved in funding climate-change denial organizations. But since 2008, they are no longer

making

publicly traceable

contributions.

Funding has shifted to pass through untraceable sources.

Coinciding with the decline in

traceable funding, the amount of funding given to denial organizations by the Donors Trust has

risen dramatically. Donors Trust is a donor-directed foundation whose funders cannot be

traced. This one foundation now provides about 25% of all traceable foundation funding used

by organizations engaged in promoting systematic denial of climate change.

Most funding for denial efforts is untraceable.

Despite extensive data compilation and

analyses, I have learned that only a fraction of the hundreds of millions in contributions to

climate change denying organizations can be specifically accounted for from public records.

Approximately 75% of the income of these organizations comes from unidentifiable sources.

greenpeace:

REVEALED: Donors Trust is the secret ATM machine for climate deniers

A new Greenpeace analysis released today shows that Donors Trust, a shadowy funding vehicle, has laundered $146 million in climate denial funding from 2002 to 2011. Yesterday’s article in the Guardian referenced part of the Greenpeace analysis. **Today’s report** is now up to date with the latest available funding from 2011. As climate denial funding from traceable Big Oil sources like Exxon and the Koch brothers is declining, the anonymous money funneled through Donors Trust is skyrocketing.

This interesting coincidence is illustrated in the graph from the Greenpeace report:

Big Oil funding of climate denial declines... "Anonymous" funding through Donors Trust skyrockets. Interesting.

In addition to today’s Greenpeace analysis, yesterday a Center for Public Integrity report detailed the efforts of Donors Trust to set up conservative media megaphones in state capitals. Today, the Guardian reported that these ideological media outlets have been instrumental in anti-climate fights at the state level. These include state and regional attacks against wind power, solar power, and carbon pollution reduction programs.

The key findings of the Greenpeace analysis on Donors Trust:

• Donors Trust and its associated organization, Donors Capital Fund, have funded 102 climate-denial organizations since 2002.
• From 2002 to 2011, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund have provided $146 million to climate denial groups.
• In 2010, a dozen climate denial groups received between 30% to 70% of their funding from Donors Trust, including the Koch-founded Americans for Prosperity, as well as Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT)
• Additional climate denial organizations that have received major funding in recent years by Donors Trust include theHeartland Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Cato Institute and the James Partnership (Cornwall Alliance).

Wait, so what is Donors Trust, exactly? It’s a shadowy funding operation for anti-government extremists and climate deniers. The mission of Donors Trust is to provide ultra-conservative funders a way to support their controversial pet-causes without leaving fingerprints on the grants.

But don’t take our word for it – here’s an excerpt from the Donors Trust FAQ webpage:

Who is behind this untraceable money? It’s impossible to track all of the big-pockets hiding behind Donors Trust. One notable individual is Charles Koch, the secretive oil billionaire who was discovered to have funneled $8 million through Donors Trust from two of his foundations. And that’s only the amount that we can track – we don’t know the full extent of the Koch’s account with Donors Trust.

As posted yesterday on our blog and detailed in another great Guardian article, several climate denial organizations rely on Donors Trust for a large share of their budgets. The Heartland Institute, creator of the famously reviled “Unabomber billboard” and coordinators of the annual Denial-palooza conference, relies heavily on a single anonymous donor that sends money through Donors Trust. According to internal Heartland plans leaked to the public, this Anonymous Donor has been responsible for up to 60% of the organization’s annual revenue, with the majority of fund earmarked to “global warming programs.” Even though the leaked documents prove this money is specific for climate projects, the Donors Trust tax forms only disclose the funding’s purpose as “general operations.”

The deep dependence on Donors Trust by climate deniers goes far beyond the Heartland Institute. Marc Morano’s organization, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, has received between 40% and 46% of its budget through Donors Trust in recent years. Morano was named 2012 “Climate Misinformer of the Year,” often found as a denying that human activity is affecting the climate. In response to the President’s 2013 State of the Union address, Morano published a point by point rebuttal to the section on climate change.

CFACT is among over a dozen organizations that get 30% to 70% of their total budgets from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Other noteworthy groups include Americans for Prosperity Foundation, the Cornwall Alliance (James Partnership), and the State Policy Network.

This entry was posted in About us, Global warming, Oil industry and tagged big oil, Carbon Emissions, climate change, climate denial, donor trust, extreme weather, Exxon, global warming, koch brothers, polluter watch, Quit Coal by Aliya Haq. Bookmark the permalink.

--

DN

AARON MATÉ: While Donors Trust has given money to a variety of right-wing causes, denying climate change appears to be its top priority. An analysis by the environmentalist group Greenpeace reveals Donors Trust has funneled at least $146 million to more than 100 climate change denial groups over the past decade. In 2010, 12 of these groups received between 30 to 70 percent of their funding from Donors Trust. Some of the recipients include Americans for Prosperity, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

AMY GOODMAN: Although many Donors Trust funders are unknown, at least two of its members include foundations bankrolled by the billionaire Charles Koch, a leading backer of climate denial. According to the most recent figures, the Koch-funded Knowledge and Progress Fund gave Donors Trust nearly $8 million through 2011.

For more on Donors Trust and the denial of global warming, we’re joined in Washington, D.C., by Suzanne Goldenberg, U.S. environment correspondent for The Guardian. She has written a series of articles detailing the ties between Donors Trust and opponents of climate change science.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: Well, basically, what you see is that—over the last decade or so, you see a concerted effort by wealthy conservatives, conservative billionaires, to fund up and prop up a whole series of institutions that could work to undermine the science behind climate change and also work to undermine any kind of effort to pass legislation to deal with climate change. This money is going to think tanks. It’s going to activist groups. It’s going to so-called "scholars." It’s going to a wide range of individuals, you know, more than a hundred different organizations.

And, you know, the goal here is to create this illusion, this idea that there is, you know, a really strong movement against the science of climate change and against action on climate change. In fact, that’s actually, to an extent, become a reality now: You see that opposition to action on climate change is central to Republican thinking.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the different groups.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: You’ve got lots. You know, you’ve got sort of blue-chip think tanks in Washington, D.C., some of the really big institutions like the American Enterprise Institute. You’ve got organizations that really wouldn’t exist or wouldn’t, you know, make much of an impact at all if they didn’t get half their budget from Donors Trust. In that category, I would put the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.One of its main activities is to run a website that’s like a clearing house for articles that try and discredit the science behind climate change or, you know, launch personal attacks against people like Al Gore or climate scientists, you know, people who speak up against climate change. So you’ve got lots of different efforts going on. I mean, you’ve seen—I don’t know if you remember, a few years back, there was this organization called the Energy Citizens that was launched by Americans for Prosperity, you know, grassroots activists against action on climate change. That, it now turns out, had funding from Donors Trust, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Donors Trust declined our request to join us on today’s show, but the group’s president and CEO, Whitney Ball, provided us with a statement. She wrote, "DonorsTrust was established to promote liberty and help like-minded donors preserve their charitable intent. We follow the same rules and operate in the same manner as other donor-advised funds which include the Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Jewish federations, local community foundations, and the left-of-center Tides Foundation, just to name a few. Donor-advised funds are classified as public charities, and thus are not required to disclose their donors. I do not know of a donor-advised fund that makes their donor lists public. The press has referred to us as a 'black box,' labeled our funding as 'dark money,' and [Suzanne] Goldenberg described us as 'secretive.' These characterizations are unfair and misleading. How is it that the Tides Foundation, which has a record of funding environmental causes and does not publish donor lists, is never characterized in the same way by these same reporters?" Your response, Suzanne Goldenberg, as she names you?

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: Well, oh, sure. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Well, you know, I talked to Whitney Ball. I asked her flat out, "Can you tell me who gives to you, what kind of people give to you?" And she said, "No. I mean, that in fact is the purpose of this trust, to make the giving anonymous, to give—to allow these conservative billionaires to remain hidden." And I think, you know, she’s trying to cast this as, look, the right have their organizations, the left have their organizations.

I think there’s something really different here and that comes into play, in that these organizations being supported by Donors Trust are actually working to spread information that is factually incorrect, that is untrue. You know, it’s as if you’re sort of funding groups to go around saying, "Oh, you can get the HIV virus from toilet seats." You can’t draw this equivalence here. These organizations are—you know, were funded for the express purpose, many of them, of spreading disinformation.

AARON MATÉ: Now, Suzanne, one of the climate denialists funded by Donors Trust is a group called the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow.

AARON MATÉ: They run the website :{Climate Depot:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:, which consistently attacks scientists and environmentalists who call for taking on global warming. Now, the head of Climate Depot, Marc Morano, appears frequently on Fox News and also mainstream outlets like CNN. On Monday, the day after tens of thousands of people rallied against the Keystone XL pipeline on the National Mall, Morano appeared on Fox News to warn that Keystone opponents could resort to, quote, "ecoterrorism." And he cited as their inspiration the NASA climatologist James Hansen.

MARC MORANO: So, the leaders at NASA—and, you know,I call him NASA’s resident ex-con—is inspiring these people to potential acts of ecoterrorism. These people believe in this doomsday prophecy. And don’t think they won’t act. I mean, when I was in the U.S. Senate Environment Committee, we had to deal with ecoterrorism when it came to animal rights. We had to deal—there’s been ecoterrorism when it deals with property rights out in Colorado. So it’s a very real thing—torching SUVs. This movement, if it gets frustrated, particularly frustrated with a Democratic president, Obama, who’s supposed to be their standard bearer, and actually goes ahead and approves the pipeline, there are going to be a lot of angry people, not the least of which is probably the NASA scientist going to jail again, James Hansen.

AARON MATÉ: That’s Marc Morano of Climate Depot appearing on Fox News.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: You know, I wish I’d—

AARON MATÉ: Suzanne Goldenberg, if you could talk about his group.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: Well, I wish I would seen. I mean, that’s quite incredible. Just let’s get back to the truth here, is that, yes, James Hansen was arrested, in fact as recently as last week, and what he was doing was just using plastic twist-tie handcuffs to handcuff himself to the gates of the White House and, you know, in an agreement arranged in advance with the D.C. police, arranged to be arrested in a nonviolent fashion with 40-something other activists, you know, to make a symbolic protest against the Keystone pipeline. So I do not know how you can describe these kind of acts, which, you know, were preceded by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and other, you know, peaceful resisters—I don’t know how you can call that ecoterrorism.

But I think it’s really—it’s really interesting and important to see what Marc Morano is doing here, and which is that he’s deliberately spreading misinformation and lies, really, about what happened and about the means of protest that are taking place against the Keystone pipeline. And this is crucial because it helps create this sort of confusion about what people are doing to oppose the pipeline, and in that confusion, it makes it difficult for people to make an informed choice about what is right, what is wrong, and it makes it really hard for people in Congress or people in government agencies and in state agencies to actually act on a very urgent problem, because there’s so much confusion and controversy surrounding it.

AMY GOODMAN: Suzanne, the Donors Trust-backed Heartland Institute sparked controversy last year after it paid for a billboard advertisement in Chicago likening those who accept the reality of global warming to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: The billboard featured a picture of Kaczynski and the words "I still believe in global warming. Do you?" Talk about the Heartland Institute, this ad.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: That’s interesting. I just want to add, briefly, first, you know, I asked Whitney Ball about that advertisement, and she laughed. And she said, "Look" — and, you know, I was asking, "Well, did your donors like what Heartland did?" And she said, "Some of them did; some of them didn’t."

I think that ad was really interesting, because, in a way, it was—you know, it really exposed Heartland Institute and exposed the way that they see—you know, exposed the lengths they will go to to try and defend their cause, right? I mean, you know, for a lot of people looking at that, that was really an extreme kind of action. And I think that’s true. I think what Heartland and these other groups are promoting is a really extreme view and a wrongheaded view of the science of climate change, of the need for action on climate change. That billboard, for many people, crystallized that extreme view.

To go back there, the reason why Heartland put up that billboard was because they were feeling besieged and under attack because of a disclosure of information about their finances, which showed that they were being heavily financed by the Koch brothers and by conservatives like Donors Trust. So, they had been the victim of a sting, which sort of laid bare all their financials, laid bare their strategy, and they fought back and sort of went overboard with this extremist ad about the Unabomber. DEMONIZE

AARON MATÉ: Now, Suzanne, we’ve talked already about the actions of Donors Trust on the state level, and you’ve written about their funding of groups trying to fight windfarming in several states. We have 30 seconds.

SUZANNE GOLDENBERG: Yeah, I think that’s their new focus, is not to look at trying to oppose action in Washington on climate change, because it’s not happening, but they’re going to go out into the states and oppose efforts to increase the amount of renewable energy, like wind farms and solar farms. I would also look at them to oppose action for—by city councils in coastal communities to protect themselves from climate change in future development planning.

AMY GOODMAN: Suzanne Goldenberg, we want to thank you for being with us, U.S. environment correspondent for The Guardian. Her article, most recently, "Secret Funding Helped Build Vast Network of Climate Denial Thinktanks," and we’ll link to it at democracynow.org. This is Democracy Now! We’ll be back in a minute.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/19/the_atm_for_climate_denial_secretive#transcript

Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks

Anonymous billionaires donated $120m to more than 100 anti-climate groups working to discredit climate change science

• How Donors Trust distributed millions to anti-climate groups

• Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
• The Guardian, Thursday 14 February 2013 08.39 EST

Climate sceptic groups are mobilising against Obama’s efforts to act on climate change in his second term. Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Conservative billionaires used a secretive funding route to channel nearly $120m (£77m) to more than 100 groups casting doubt about the science behind climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The funds, doled out between 2002 and 2010, helped build a vast network of thinktanks and activist groups working to a single purpose: to redefine climate change from neutral scientific fact to a highly polarising "wedge issue" for hardcore conservatives.

The millions were routed through two trusts, Donors Trust and the Donors Capital Fund, operating out of a generic town house in the northern Virginia suburbs of Washington DC. Donors Capital caters to those making donations of $1m or more.

Whitney Ball, chief executive of the Donors Trust told the Guardian that her organisation assured wealthy donors that their funds would never by diverted to liberal causes.

  The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers.

"We exist to help donors promote liberty which we understand to be limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise," she said in an interview.

By definition that means none of the money is going to end up with groups like Greenpeace, she said. "It won't be going to liberals."

Ball won't divulge names, but she said the stable of donors represents a wide range of opinion on the American right. Increasingly over the years, those conservative donors have been pushing funds towards organisations working to discredit climate science or block climate action.

Donors exhibit sharp differences of opinion on many issues, Ball said. They run the spectrum of conservative opinion, from social conservatives to libertarians. But in opposing mandatory cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, they found common ground.

"Are there both sides of an environmental issue? Probably not," she went on. "Here is the thing. If you look at libertarians, you tend to have a lot of differences on things like defence, immigration, drugs, the war, things like that compared to conservatives. When it comes to issues like the environment, if there are differences, they are not nearly as pronounced."

By 2010, the dark money amounted to $118m distributed to 102 thinktanks or action groups which have a record of denying the existence of a human factor in climate change, or opposing environmental regulations.

The money flowed to Washington thinktanks embedded in Republican party politics, obscure policy forums in Alaska and Tennessee, contrarian scientists at Harvard and lesser institutions, even to buy up DVDs of a film attacking Al Gore.

The ready stream of cash set off a conservative backlash against Barack Obama's environmental agenda that wrecked any chance of Congress taking action on climate change.

Graphic: climate denial funding 

Those same groups are now mobilising against Obama's efforts to act on climate change in his second term. A top recipient of the secret funds on Wednesday put out a point-by-point critique of the climate content in the president's state of the union address.

And it was all done with a guarantee of complete anonymity for the donors who wished to remain hidden.

"The funding of the denial machine is becoming increasingly invisible to public scrutiny. It's also growing. Budgets for all these different groups are growing," said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace, which compiled the data on funding of the anti-climate groups using tax records.

"These groups are increasingly getting money from sources that are anonymous or untraceable. There is no transparency, no accountability for the money. There is no way to tell who is funding them," Davies said.

The trusts were established for the express purpose of managing donations to a host of conservative causes.

Such vehicles, called donor-advised funds, are not uncommon in America. They offer a number of advantages to wealthy donors. They are convenient, cheaper to run than a private foundation, offer tax breaks and are lawful.

That opposition hardened over the years, especially from the mid-2000s where the Greenpeace record shows a sharp spike in funds to the anti-climate cause.

In effect, the Donors Trust was bankrolling a movement, said Robert Brulle, a Drexel University sociologist who has extensively researched the networks of ultra-conservative donors.

"This is what I call the counter-movement, a large-scale effort that is an organised effort and that is part and parcel of the conservative movement in the United States " Brulle said. "We don't know where a lot of the money is coming from, but we do know that Donors Trust is just one example of the dark money flowing into this effort."

In his view, Brulle said: "Donors Trust is just the tip of a very big iceberg."

The rise of that movement is evident in the funding stream. In 2002, the two trusts raised less than $900,000 for the anti-climate cause. That was a fraction of what Exxon Mobil or the conservative oil billionaire Koch brothers donated to climate sceptic groups that year.

By 2010, the two Donor Trusts between them were channelling just under $30m to a host of conservative organisations opposing climate action or science.That accounted to 46% of all their grants to conservative causes, according to the Greenpeace analysis.

The funding stream far outstripped the support from more visible opponents of climate action such as the oil industry or the conservative billionaire Koch brothers, the records show. When it came to blocking action on the climate crisis, the obscure charity in the suburbs was outspending the Koch brothers by a factor of six to one.

"There is plenty of money coming from elsewhere," said John Mashey, a retired computer executive who has researched funding for climate contrarians. "Focusing on the Kochs gets things confused. You can not ignore the Kochs. They have their fingers in too many things, but they are not the only ones."

It is also possible the Kochs continued to fund their favourite projects using the anonymity offered by Donor Trust.

But the records suggest many other wealthy conservatives opened up their wallets to the anti-climate cause – an impression Ball wishes to stick.

She argued the media had overblown the Kochs support for conservative causes like climate contrarianism over the years. "It's so funny that on the right we think George Soros funds everything, and on the left you guys think it is the evil Koch brothers who are behind everything. It's just not true. If the Koch brothers didn't exist we would still have a very healthy organisation," Ball said.

mojo

Working out of an nondescript brick rowhouse in suburban Virginia, a little-known organization named Donors Trust, staffed by five employees, has steered hundreds of millions of dollars to the most influential think tanks, foundations, and advocacy groups in the conservative movement. Over the past decade, it has funded the right's assault on labor unions, climate scientists, public schools, economic regulations, and the very premise of activist government. Yet unlike its nearest counterpart on the progressive side, the Tides Foundation, a bogeyman of Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, Donors Trust has mostly avoided any real scrutiny. It is the dark-money ATM of the right.

Founded in 1999, Donors Trust (and an affiliated group, Donors Capital Fund) has raised north of $500 million and doled out $400 million to more than 1,000 conservative and libertarian groups, according to Whitney Ball, the group's CEO. Donors Trust allows wealthy contributors who want to donate millions to the most important causes on the right to do so anonymously, essentially scrubbing the identity of those underwriting conservative and libertarian organizations. Wisconsin's 2011 assault on collective bargaining rights? Donors Trust helped fund that. ALEC, the conservative bill mill? Donors Trust supports it. The climate deniers at the Heartland Institute? They get Donors Trust money, too.

Donors Trust is not the source of the money it hands out. Some 200 right-of-center funders who've given at least $10,000 fill the group's coffers. Charities bankrolled by Charles and David Koch, the DeVoses, and the Bradleys, among other conservative benefactors, have given to Donors Trust. And other recipients of Donors Trust money include the Heritage Foundation, Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, the NRA's Freedom Action Foundation, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, the Federalist Society, and the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, chaired (PDF) by none other than David Koch. 

In a recent interview, Ball, who calls herself a libertarian, went to great lengths to stress that she's no Koch brothers stooge, and that Donors Trust is not yet another appendage of the almighty "Kochtopus." She insists, "We were not created by them at all."

Donors Trust is a so-called "donor-advised fund," a breed apart from a family foundation like, say, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, which helped build the conservative movement over decades with donations totaling tens of millions of dollars. The people who donate to Donors Trust don't get final say over how their money is spent. But they get to recommend where their cash goes, and in exchange for giving up some control, they get a bigger tax write-offthan they would with a family foundation. (And those who wish it get anonymity.)

Ball says she travels all over the country courting wealthy conservatives and libertarians, and attends Koch donor retreats and Cato "shareholder" meetings. The crux of her pitch is this: Rich folks can give to Donors Trust and rest easy knowing that their millions will continue bankrolling the conservative movement long into the future, even after their death. They don't have to worry that, after they die, their heirs and trustees will use their bucks for causes they would never support. Ball points to the Ford Foundation as one example of a major charity that, in her view, drifted leftward over time and away from the ideals of man who started it, industrialist Edsel Ford. Donors Trust promises its funders that conservative money stays with conservatives. "Greenpeace won't get a dime from us," Ball told the National Review in 2001.

Donors Trust grew out of the fear among right-leaning donors that their family foundations might end up in the hands of those who would fund centrist or, even worse, left-of-center causes. At the behest of the late Bruce Jacobs, a Seattle-area businessman and "paleocon" who didn't want to underwrite a local community foundation, Ball and a conservative strategist named Kimberly Dennis created Donors Trust.

The amount of cash passing through Donors Trust has skyrocketed. In 2002, Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund took in $1.4 million and gave out $1.2 million. By 2010, $44 million was flowing in and $63 million heading out. Donors Trust's board of directors, which ultimately decides who gets funded, reads like a conservative who's-who directory: Arthur Brooks, president of American Enterprise Institute; John Von Kannon, vice president of the Heritage Foundation; William Mellor, president of theInstitute for Justice,a libertarian legal firm; and Kris Alan Mauren, director of the Acton Institute, a Michigan-based conservative think tank.

Donors Trust is the only honey-pot of its kind for right-leaning donors. But on the left, there's the Tides Foundation, which gives out tens of millions of dollars each year to thousands of left-leaning groups in the US and overseas (including Mother Jones' nonprofit arm, the Foundation for National Progress). Tides is a target of conspiracy theorists such as TV and radio host Glenn Beck, who has featured Tides on his infamous connect-the-dots chalkboard. But Donors Trust's strategic intent is far narrower and more coherent than Tides'. The groups funded by Donors Trust more or less pursue the same agenda—eliminate regulations, kneecap unions, shrink government, and transfer more power to the private sector.

Donors Trust keeps its contributors secret. Funders can ask Donor Trust to publicly identify their donations, but very few do, Ball says. The reasons for preferring anonymity are many. Some donors want to avoid attention; others don't want their mailboxes and inboxes filling up with unwanted solicitations for more money.

Tax records, however, reveal some of the sugar-daddies of the conservative and libertarian movement who funnel big money through Donors Trust. The Knowledge and Progress Fund, a charity bankrolled by Charles Koch, gave $2 million in 2010.The DeVos family charity, another pillar of conservative politics, contributed $1 million in 2009 and $1.5 million in 2010. And yet another long-time bankroller of conservative politics, the Bradley family, donated $650,000 through their charity between 2001 and 2010.

Donor Trust's increasingly important role in the conservative movement is perhaps most evident on the issue of climate change. The group has funded much of the climate-change denier movement—bankrolling, for instance, the Heartland Institute, a torchbearer in the denier movement. (It recently compared those who believe in climate change to terrorists.) At the same time, climate-denier funding from family and corporate foundations—say, Exxon's foundation—has declined, according to Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University who studies the climate change "counter-movement."

Across the conservative spectrum, Brulle found that Donors Trust is playing an ever larger role. In 2003, Donors Trust money was the source of 3 percent of the funding for more than 100 conservative groups whose financial records Brulle has studied. By 2010, that percentage had grown to 24 percent. Brulle surmises that financial underwriters of the climate counter-movement and the conservative agenda writ large give through Donors Trust to wipe their fingerprints off donations to Heartland and others. "We just have this great big unknown out there about where all the money is coming from," he says. And, in the years to come, the unknown will only get bigger.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/donors-trust-donor-capital-fund-dark-money-koch-bradley-devos

bs: Ms. Ball is President and Chief Executive Officer of DonorsTrust, a donor-advised fund and community foundation established to promote liberty through limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise. Before launching DonorsTrust, Ms. Ball served as Executive Director of The Philanthropy Roundtable, as well as Director of Development at the Cato Institute. She was also Director of Finance for the Education and Research Institute and Circulation Manager of Consumers' Research Magazine. Additionally, Ms. Ball has consulted with a number of nonprofit organizations and served on governing boards and committees of local volunteer organizations. Currently, Ms. Ball serves on the boards of Donors Capital Fund and the State Policy Network.

• Americans For Prosperity Foundation got $7.6 million from DONORS groups in 2010, 43% of its budget. AFP Foundation is chaired by David Koch and has received millions in direct funding from Koch foundations since the Koch brothers founded it.
• Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) got $1.3 million from DONORS in 2010, 45% of its budget.
• Cornwall Alliance (through the James Partnership) got $339,500 from DONORS in 2010, 75% of its budget.
• Heartland Institute got $1.6 million from DONORS in 2010, 27% of it's budget, which came from Chicago billionaire Barre Seid (see p. 67).
• State Policy Network got 36% of its 2010 budget ($4.8 million) from DONORS. SPN members include just about every climate-denying organization and every conservative think tank in the country, including AFP and Heartland.

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/10/11819/meet-network-hiding-koch-money-donors-trust-and-donors-capital-fund

http://www.scribd.com/doc/122214088/Donations-made-by-the-Koch-linked-Donors-Trust

How the Kochs funneled millions to climate deniers through a secretive nonprofit

By Philip Bump

Donors Trust, Inc. works “to help alleviate, through education, research, and private initiative, society’s most pervasive and radical needs, including those relating to social welfare, health, the environment, economics, governance, foreign relations, and arts and culture.”

Read that sentence twice. Unintentionally, Donors Trust is giving away its actual goal: Working to alleviate society’s most radical needs, including the environment. Alleviate the environment? That, according to a report from *The Independent*, it very much does.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

The Independent notes that the Koch-directed fund gave Donors Trust $4.5 million between 2007 and 2010. By 2010, the nonprofit was sitting on $18.4 million dollars, according to its IRS Form 990 filing. Over the course of that year, it paid out hundreds of grants to a number of organizations, including:

• $23,550 to the pro-oil, anti-fact American Enterprise Institute
• $7,577,000 to the Koch-linked Americans for Prosperity Foundation (right)
• $1,280,000 to the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, whose director called global warming “man-made hysteria”
• $58,200 to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which is being sued by climate scientist Michael Mann for defamation
• $41,000 to the anti-environment FreedomWorks Foundation
• $2,250 to the notorious climate-denying Heartland Institute
• $49,300 to the conservative Heritage Foundation
• $82,000 to the pro-fracking Manhattan Institute
• $21,500 to Montana’s Property and Environment Research Center, focused on “improving environmental quality through property rights and markets”
• $30,650 to the anti-wind Reason Foundation

Donors Trust also gave massive grants to libertarian organizations, nonprofits pushing to break down the separation of church and state, anti-labor organizations, and, unexpectedly, animal care nonprofits like “Feline Rescue.” We’ve uploaded the full set of recipients; feel free to see if you can find anything else interesting.

View this document on Scribd

This is the tip of the iceberg, one year’s worth of grants out of a decade. The role of Donors Trust appears to be, in part, to mask who’s doing the funding. The Independent:

The Donors Trust is a “donor advised fund”, meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash. …

[Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said,] “By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise.”

Donors Trust is clear on the scale of its investments.

To date, DonorsTrust has received over $400 million from these donors who are both dedicated to liberty and to the cause of perpetuating a free and prosperous society through philanthropic means. Since inception, DonorsTrust has granted out over $300 million to over 1000 liberty-minded charities.

Your definition of “liberty” — and, for that matter, “charity” — may differ.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/exclusive-billionaires-secretly-fund-attacks-on-climate-science-8466312.html?printService=print

Exclusive: Billionaires secretly fund attacks on climate science

Audit trail reveals that donors linked to fossil fuel industry are backing global warming sceptics

Steve Connor

Thursday, 24 January 2013

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate "counter movement" to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire CharlesKoch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

Some commentators believe that such convoluted arrangements are becoming increasingly common to shield the identity and backgrounds of the wealthy supporters of climate scepticism – some of whom have vested interests in the fossil-fuel industry.

The Knowledge and Progress Fund, whose directors include Charles Koch and his wife Liz, gave $1.25m to Donors in 2007, a further $1.25m in 2008 and $2m in 2010. It does not appear to have given money to any other group and there is no mention of the fund on the websites of Koch Industries or the Charles Koch Foundation.

The Donors Trust is a "donor advised fund", meaning that it has special status under the US tax system. People who give money receive generous tax relief and can retain greater anonymity than if they had used their own charitable foundations because, technically, they do not control how Donors spends the cash.

Anonymous private funding of global warming sceptics, who have criticised climate scientists for their lack of transparency, is becoming increasingly common. The Kochs, for instance, have overtaken the corporate funding of climate denialism by oil companies such as ExxonMobil. One such organisation, Americans for Prosperity, which was established by David Koch, claimed that the "Climategate" emails illegally hacked from the University of East Anglia in 2009 proved that global warming was the "biggest hoax the world has ever seen".

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.

The trust has given money to the Competitive Enterprise Institute which is currently being sued for defamation by Professor Michael Mann of Pennsylvania University, an eminent climatologist, whose affidavit claims that he was accused of scientific fraud and compared to a convicted child molester.

Dr Brulle said: "We really have anonymous giving and unaccountable power being exercised here in the creation of the climate countermovement. There is no attribution, no responsibility for the actions of these foundations to the public.

"By becoming anonymous, they remove a political target. They can plausibly claim that they are not giving to these organisations, and there is no way to prove otherwise."

Dr. John Mashey's report is posted exclusively on DeSmogBlog today. The report, exposing the right wing's money scrubbing scheme, is extensive in detail to say the least.

In a nutshell, the 200+ page report finds that wealthy donors like theKoch brothers and Chicago industrialist Barre Seid move money through two organizations called Donor Trust and Donors Capital Fund, which in turn passes that money on to major right wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Americans for Prosperity.

This money is then used for coordinated efforts to attack science, undermine environmental protections and cast doubt about the scientific realities of climate change.

Here's a summary of findings:

• The report presents evidence that confirms the speculation that Chicago industrialist Barre Seid has pumped millions into the Heartland Institute's "global warming projects" to boost their efforts to fight climate change science [page 57].

Read more: Key Findings From the Mashey Report on Donors Trust

==

Follow the money.  October 23, PBS Frontline's Climate of Doubtgave viewers an hour's coverage of the tactics of climate anti-science, its advocates and a quick look into the funding behind it. Read on to follow the money deeper into the funny finances, all free of tax.

Last February,Fake Science, Fakexperts, Funny Finances, Free Of Tax explored some of those issues in detail. More information has been unearthed since, especially on DONORS TRUST, which Robert Brulle discussed with Frontline. Charles Koch and others use DONORS TRUST to anonymize their funding of policy/advocacy groups.  The attached revision exposes more detail of the $311 million given through DONORS between 2002-2010, managed by Whitney Ball.

1. Heartland Institute's Fakeducation from fakexperts is now integrated (Appendix Y.3).
2. Heartland Financials (H.1)  is augmented with data from the February Heartland Exposed documents.  It was known that much of Heartland Institute's funding came via DONORS, and that there was one large donor, speculated by some to be reclusive Chicago businessman Barre Seid.  The combination of IRS Form 990s, February documents, and other information proves his identity, as the numbers simply do not work otherwise. (H.1.4-1).  More detail on donations (H.1.5) shows explicit funding of climate anti-science activities whose tax-free status seems dubious.
3. DONORS TRUST (and DONORS CAPITAL FUND)  have been studied in more detail.  Robert Brulle found another Charles Koch fund, Knowledge and Progress, which seems to give money only to DONORS.  Added to the others he controls (Charles Koch and Claude Lambe), money can flow through three separate funds. Then some of it goes through DONORS TRUST and DONORS CAPITAL FUND, which anonymize it, as Whitney Ball actually writes the checks. Some "Kochtopus" tentacles are difficult to see.

Some of this tax-advantaged money lands at George Mason University, including its Mercatus Center or even better Institute for Humane Studies ... Chaired by Charles Koch.  SeeFunding and A.5-A.6 in the report there.

DONORS' grants have been analyzed in detail (I.4).  Of ~500 "charities" examined 2002-2010, the Top 40 (I.4.2-1) got 66% of the total, and of that $205M, all but $43M went to policy organizations, such as the American Enterprise Institute ($17M) Heartland Institute ($14M), or Americans for Prosperity Foundation ($11M). About 75% of the $311M given over those 9 years went to policy groups, all tax-free, with real donors anonymized. They must like this, as 2007-2010 accounted for $265M, following a big expansion in 2007.

Finally, in "Whitney Ball, her brother and her father" (I.5) some strange history is explored.  Barre Seid funds and Chairs the Chicago Freedom Trust,  C/O John Ball (Whitney's brother), located in Salt Lake City.  Trustees include Whitney Ball and Adam Myerson, who Chairs DONORS CAPITAL FUND.  In tracking all this, I also found discussion of their father, a lawyer whose repeated financial manipulations lost him the right to practice law in West Virginia.

Next week, Frontline runs   "Dark Money" Group Central to Citizens United May Have Misled IRS, also connected with attacks on climate scientists via the American Tradition Institute, David Schnare, Chris Horner. Once again, tax-free 501(c)(3) status seems to be abused for the sake of anti-science attacks.

Keep following the money.

UPDATE 10/26/12:people have asked to see the spreadsheet behind Figure I.4.2, which showed the top 80 recipients of funds from DONORS.  The 480-recipient  version is now attached.  Besides TRUST+CAPITAL totals shown already, it has TRUST and CAPITAL separately, although people may want to HIDE columns.  It is interesting to SORT by state and guess where the actual donors live, i.e., small donations to local charities may be hints, whereas many donations to the numerous VA + DC groups likley originate elsewhere.

Desmogblog (http://s.tt/1qYof)

Whitney Ball’s DONORS TRUST funded a major expansion of Heartland climate anti-science.  Singer collected old associates to help write “NonGovernmental International Panel on Climate Change“ (NIPCC) reports, filled with unsupported claims and long-refuted anti-science.

Desmogblog (http://s.tt/1982E)

The Lambe Foundation's directors include several members of the Koch family.

Still, the largest bundle of money from a single source came from a conservative 501(c)(3) conduit group called Donors Trust: It was the source of $7.65 million in funds for the AFP Foundation in 2010. Donors Trust is a "donor advised" fund: donors deposit money in accounts they set up and recommend where they'd like it to go. But Donors Trust controls the money and actually makes the contributions to other organizations; it cannot guarantee it will give to the original donors' preferred recipients. 

The arrangement provides donors with the same tax-deductibility that they would be entitled to if they gave money directly to the groups they want to assist, according to tax lawyers. But it also provides a further layer of anonymity: not even the IRS knows where a particular donor's money goes after it gets to Donors Trust.

Donors Trust was established in 1999, according to its website, to "ensure the intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise." It's run by Whitney Ball, who used to serve as director of development at the Cato Institute, which Charles Koch helped start decades ago. (The Kochs recently filed suit to try to obtain greater control of Cato.) Ball also heads up a sister organization, Donors Capital, which gave $10,000 to AFP's Foundation in 2010, and transferred $2 million to Donors Trust.

In 2010, the same year it sent millions to AFP's foundation, Donors Trust gave to some entities that aren't tied to conservative ideology, such as the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation and the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, but many more that are: the Manhattan Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation and the National Right to Work Foundation, to name a few.

Donors Capital Fund

Donors Capital Fund (DCF) formed in 1999 "is an IRS-approved, 501(c)(3), 509(a)(3) supporting organization that is associated with DonorsTrust, a public charity and donor-advised fund formed to safeguard the charitable intent of donors who are dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise." ^[1]

Funding Islamophobia in the United States

Research from the Center for American Progress (CAP) indicates that DCF has funded various organizations and individuals contributing to an anti-Islamic hysteria in the United States. Between 2007 and 2009 the Donors Capital Fund contributed $21,318,600 to "groups promoting Islamophobia, some of which included the Middle East Forum, Clarion Fund, Investigative Project on Terrorism, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center. In 2008, Donors Capital contributions amounted to 96% of Clarion Fund's financial resources, which allowed the organization to distribute a controversial video called "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West," which attempted to persuade Americans of the supposed Islamist threat during the 2008 election cycle. ^[2]

Board

Accessed October 2010: ^[3]

• Adam Meyerson, Chairman - President, The Philanthropy Roundtable
• Kimberly O. Dennis, Vice Chairman - President, Searle Freedom Trust
• Whitney L. Ball, Director - President & CEO, DonorsTrust
• Christopher DeMuth, Director - D. C. Searle Senior Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
• Steven Hayward, Director - F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
• Kris Alan Mauren, Director - Executive Director, The Acton Institute
• William H. Mellor, Director - President, :{I:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{nstitute for Justice:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:
• Stephen Moore, Director - Economist
• John A. Von Kannon, Director - Vice President, The Heritage Foundation

Officers

• Whitney L. Ball, President - President & CEO, DonorsTrust
• Kimberly O. Dennis, Secretary - President, Searle Freedom Trust
• Steven Hayward, Treasurer - F.K. Weyerhaeuser Fellow, American Enterprise Institute
• Jeffrey C. Zysik, Assistant Treasurer - CFO & CIO, DonorsTrust

Founding Benefactor

• Bruce H. Jacobs, 1918-2010

Contact

URL: https://www.donorstrust.org

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

References

1. ↑ About, Donors Capital Fund, accessed October 28, 2010.
2. ↑ Wajahat Ali, Eli Clifton, Matthew Duss, Lee Fang, Scott Keyes, and Faiz Shakir, Fear Inc.: The Roots of the Islamophobia Network in America, CAB, August 2011. See specially pages 15-17.
3. ↑ Board, Donors Capital Fund, accessed October 28, 2010.

Categories: Foundations | United States

DonorsTrust Officers & Directors

Whitney L. Ball, President [read bio]

President & CEO, DonorsTrust

Kimberly O. Dennis, Chairman[read bio]

President, Searle Freedom Trust

James Piereson, Vice Chairman [read bio]

President, William E. Simon Foundation

:{Nathaniel C. Moffat [read bio]

Moffat & Company

}:

William J. Hume :{:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[read bio:{]}:

Chairman of the Board, Basic American, Inc.

Jeffrey C. Zysik, Secretary-Treasurer:{ :(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:[read bio:{]}:

Chief Financial Officer & Chief of Information Technology, DonorsTrust

DonorsTrust Staff

Whitney L. Ball[read bio]

President & Chief Executive Officer

Jeffrey C. Zysik[read bio]

Chief Financial Officer & Chief of Information Technology

Jason W. Pompilio [read bio]

Program Manager

Joy L. Simington [read bio]

Finance & Administration Director

Lauren B. Vander Heyden [read bio]

Client Services Coordinator

--

In 2009, a network of online media outlets began popping up in state capitals across the nation, each covering the news from a clearly conservative point of view. What wasn’t so clear was how they were funded.

“The source is 100 percent anonymous,” said Michael Moroney, a spokesman for the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, the think tank that created the outlets.

In fact, 95 percent of Franklin’s revenue in 2011 came from a charity called Donors Trust, according to Internal Revenue Service records.

Conservative foundations and individuals use Donors Trust to pass money to a vast network of think tanks and media outlets that push free-market ideology in the states — $86 million in 2011 alone. The arrangement obscures the identity of the donors wishing to keep their charitable giving private, especially “gifts funding sensitive or controversial issues,” according to the group’s website.

The $6.3 million donation to the Franklin Center was the second-largest gift made in 2011 by the group, a tax-exempt “public charity” that takes tax-deductible donations from donors “dedicated to the ideals of limited government, personal responsibility, and free enterprise,” according to its website.

Donors Trust includes 193 contributors, the majority of whom are individuals. “A lot of donors are flying totally under the radar,” says president and CEO Whitney Ball.

Donor-advised fund

Since its founding in 1999, Donors Trust and its affiliated organization, Donors Capital Fund, have distributed nearly $400 million, becoming major vehicles for tax-exempt giving from wealthy conservatives such as billionaire industrialist Charles Koch.

Koch is among an exclusive pool of donors who have used Donors Trust as a “pass-through,” says Marcus Owens, the former director of the IRS Exempt Organizations Division, now in private legal practice. “It obscures the source of the money. It becomes a grant from Donors Trust, not a grant from the Koch brothers.”

Ball helped found Donors Trust in 1999 as a “donor-advised” fund. Donors can open an account and protect their identity from the public and even the recipient of their grants.

In addition, donor-advised funds offer contributors an extra level of control over where their money ends up, which seeks to remedy what Ball sees as the tendency for foundation money to “drift left.”

This was a chief concern of Daniel Searle, the late philanthropist and pharmaceutical executive who was one of Donors Trust’s early board members.

In 1998, with help from Donors Trust co-founder and board chairman Kim Dennis, Searle established an endowment called the Searle Freedom Trust, now worth $114 million, which has in turn given generously to Donors Trust.

Following the Donors Trust money trail

Money Flowing In: Foundations

Donors Trust has injected nearly $400 million into free-market causes, thanks in large part to contributions by dozens of private foundations run by wealthy executives or their families. These foundations have often sought anonymity by passing their grants through Donors Trust, but a Center for Public Integrity review of IRS records reveals some of the largest backers of Donors Trust in recent years.

Money Flowing Out: Think Tanks

Donors Trust has given grants to three national organizations that coordinate free-market policy and media efforts in the states: the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network, and the Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity. In addition to these umbrella organizations, Donors Trust has directly funded at least 51 state-based think tanks in nearly every state since 2Knowledge and Progress FundFranklin Center for Government and Public Integrity Less than $100,000 $100,000 to $500,000 $500,000 to $999,999 $1,000,000 or more Contribution Size DONORS TRUST State Policy NetworkHeartland InstituteLucy Burns InstituteIllinois Policy InstituteIndependence InstituteMackinac CenterSouth Carolina Policy CouncilAmerican Legislative Exchange CouncilManhattan InstituteOklahoma Council of Public AffairsEmpower Texans FoundationCascade Policy InstituteRichard and Helen DeVos FoundationFarmer Family FoundationDonald and Paula Smith FoundationSearle Freedom TrustLynde and Harry Bradley FoundationJohn M. Olin FoundationRandolph FoundationThe GFC FoundationJaquelin Hume FoundationWilliam E. Simon FoundationRuth and Lovett Peters FoundationJM Kaplan FundWilliam Donner FoundationCastle Rock / Adolph Coors FoundationPhilanthropy RoundtableRose Marie and Jack R. Anderson FoundationEarhart FoundationJoe and Mary Moeller FoundationJohn William Pope FoundationCharles G. Koch FoundationAnschutz FoundationPaul Singer Family Foundation DONORS TRUST Click foundation or think tank name for more information

Politics

Discussing Donors Trust on 'Democracy Now!'

Center for Public Integrity politics editor John Dunbar talked to "Democracy Now!" about Donors Trust.

‘Great guys’

The Searle Freedom Trust is one of dozens of conservative foundations that have given tens of millions of dollars to Donors Trust from 2001 to 2011. Among the group’s donors is the Knowledge and Progress Fund, a Wichita, Kan.-based foundation run by Charles Koch.

The foundation gave almost $8 million to Donors Trust between 2005 and 2011.

Where those funds ended up is a mystery, though some Donors Trust recipients, including the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies based at George Mason University in Virginia, have also received major funding from foundations set up by Charles Koch and brother David.

Nearly half of the revenue for David Koch’s Americans for Prosperity Foundation came from Donors Trust in 2010, in the form of $7.6 million in grants.

Representatives for the Koch foundations did not return calls for comment.

Before Donors Trust, Ball was the director of development for the libertarian Cato Institute, which Charles Koch was instrumental in founding.

“We think they’re great guys,” she says of the Kochs, “but if they weren’t around, we’d still be successful.”

At a private Koch fundraising meeting in the summer of 2010, Donors Trust hosted cocktails and dessert for what Ball called a “target-rich environment” of wealthy donors.

Several wealthy conservatives who have attended Koch fundraising parties have Donors Trust accounts, including Amway co-founder and longtime booster of conservative causes Richard DeVos; hedge fund billionaire Paul Singer; and Philip Anschutz, owner of the conservative Examiner newspapers.

Dozens of other major conservative philanthropies have Donors Trust accounts, including the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation and the Coors family’s Castle Rock Foundation, according to IRS records.

One Donors Trust grant to Mackinac Center was earmarked for “statehouse reporting”  efforts. Mackinac put the money toward a media machine of blogs and research studies making the case for the state’s new “right-to-work” law.

Money in the states

For a decade, Donors Trust has bolstered the efforts of D.C.-based conservative think tanks, including Cato, the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute — whose president, Arthur C. Brooks, is on the Donors Trust board.

In recent years, it has taken a strong interest in the states, funding state-level think tanks and three national umbrella organizations that coordinate their activities:  the American Legislative Exchange Council, the State Policy Network (SPN), and the Franklin Center.

“Gridlock” at the federal level of government means donors see “a better opportunity to make a difference in the states,” says Ball, who sits on the board of the State Policy Network.

SPN has become a major recipient of Donors Trust money — receiving $10 million in the past five years.

In 2011, the nearly $2 million in grants from Donors Trust made up about 40 percent of SPN’s revenue for the year, according to tax records obtained by the Center.

In the past five years, Donors Trust money has gone to at least 51 state-level think tanks affiliated with SPN, located in nearly every state. Last year, SPN used the money to incubate think tanks in Arkansas, Rhode Island and Florida, where it hosted its yearly gathering in November.

Donors Trust grants, 2002-2011

One workshop toutedprivatization of state and local government services. Another featured anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist. A third focused on how “property rights and markets provide the best way to protect the environment.”

SPN also sponsors the American Legislative Exchange Council, another D.C.-based clearinghouse for state-level policymaking that gets support directly from Donors Trust.

A laboratory for corporate-friendly laws in the states, ALEC hosts closed-door meetings where corporate lobbyists and state legislators meet to hammer out free-market legislation.

Ten state-level think tanks got a total of $200,000 from Donors Trust to attend ALEC meetings in 2011 including the Michigan-based Mackinac Center and the Arizona-based Goldwater Institute, which introduced a raft of anti-union model bills at ALEC’s spring 2012 conference.

The Mackinac Center has gotten $2.4 million from Donors Trust since 2008, according to the Bridge Project, a liberal think tank.

One Donors Trust grant to Mackinac Center was earmarked for “statehouse reporting” efforts. Mackinac put the money toward a media machine of blogs and research studies making the case for the state’s new “right-to-work” law.

The Mackinac Center works closely with other Donors Trust recipients, including the Franklin Center, which counts Mackinac’s “media” outlets in Michigan as affiliates.

The Franklin Center, Mackinac and another major recipient of Donors Trust cash, Americans for Prosperity, co-hosted a day-long training for “citizen watchdogs” featuring speakers on “school choice” and “union reform” from the Mackinac Center and Republican state Rep. Tom McMillin, who is also an ALEC member.

Against the tide

The California-based **Tides Foundation**, which Ball calls the “ideological opposite” of Donors Trust, also operates donor-advised funds.

In 2011, Tides raised $91 million and made $96 million in grants, including $26 million to overseas recipients.

Tides gives grants to the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation and liberal groups like the Center for American Progress and the National Resources Defense Council.

Since 2010, the foundation has received $10 million from George Soros’ Foundation to Promote an Open Society, which has assets of $2.2 billion. Tides has assets of $142 million, and the Donors Trust funds have combined assets of $62 million.

The Center for Public Integrity has received funding from Soros’ Open Society Foundations and the Tides Foundation.

Soros’ foundation listed the specific recipient of its grants to Tides, including its largest gift, a $1 million grant for school nutrition programs. The largest foundations contributing to Donors Trust do not identify the ultimate recipient of their funds, records show.

Though its donors remain anonymous, the Franklin Center touts “transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility as its watchwords.”

Donor-advised funds offer private foundations created by wealthy individuals several tax advantages and a degree of anonymity, but there are also advantages for recipients.

The Franklin Center, for example, maintains a tax-exemption as a “publicly supported” entity.

If the organization were perennially accepting 95 percent of its funding from a handful of wealthy donors “it would not count as public support” and could jeopardize its tax status, Owens said.

Though its donors remain anonymous, the Franklin Center touts “transparency, accountability, and fiscal responsibility as its watchwords.”

Franklin has numerous ties to the Koch-connected Americans for Prosperity like board member Rudie Martinson, a former assistant state director for AFP’s North Dakota’s chapter, and Franklin’s vice president of strategic initiatives, Erik Telford, who was director of membership and online strategy at AFP for four years.

One of Franklin’s state-based blogs, New Jersey Watchdog, also received $50,000 from AFP in 2011, according to IRS records.

In 2011 alone, Donors Trust helped the Franklin Center expand by funding state-based reporting projects in Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, Ohio and Virginia.

Recurring themes on the Franklin Center blogs include “union bosses,” “Marxian” senators and the perils of renewable energy.

Franklin has noted that its journalists’ work had landed on major networks from Fox to MSNBC. The details of several stories offered by the Franklin-funded outlets have been called into question, however.

One report from a New Mexico affiliate housed at a free-market think tank also funded by Donors Trust garnered national attention when it reported that millions of dollars in federal stimulus money had been allocated to non-existent congressional districts.

The government database on stimulus spending had indeed listed non-existent districts as receiving funds, but the Associated Press reported that the problem was due to data errors and that “’phantom congressional districts’ are being used as a phantom issue to suggest that stimulus money has been misspent.”

When asked to comment on the criticism, Franklin Center spokesman Moroney said: “Franklin Center adheres to the highest degree of journalistic integrity and we stand by our Watchdog.org reporting 100 percent. In this case, the Associated Press had it wrong.”

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Finance, Taxation in the United States, United States, Fundraising, Center for American Progress, George Soros, Foundation, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, Nonprofit organization, Donor advised fund, Private foundation, Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity

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