TPPF 3 life powered

1/22

see roberts prez heritage --> project 2025

see offshore wind BS

see jason isaac ~ ESG primaried by chip roy, pal of cruz and paxton

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HOW DID MOTHERFRACKERS GET PULLED INTO TRUMP COUP?

SEE VOTER SUPPRESSION

BIG LIE

see dunn

SEE EASTMAN CLAREMONT INST

see war games

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fueling the Opposition

How fossil fuel interests are fighting to kill wind and solar farms before they are built

Click here to download the full report as a PDF

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The Energy and Policy Institute (EPI) has been working for more than ten years to research and document how fossil fuel interests are fighting to block new wind and solar farms by spreading disinformation about clean energy to try to undermine the strong, bipartisan support for renewable energy that exists among the public.

In this report, EPI reviews and summarizes key findings from this research in one place for the first time. We identify some of the major players involved in disinformation campaigns targeting renewable energy projects and technologies, including:

Funders from the coal, petroleum, and methane gas industries;
Networks of front groups and political operatives paid by these fossil fuel interests; and
The cadre of top anti-wind and anti-solar activists who have coordinated closely with these front groups and operatives for over a decade

This report helps to answer frequently asked questions about the role the fossil fuel industry has played in stoking opposition to renewable energy projects and comes at a time when many of these same opponents are escalating their attacks and seeking to derail the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic investment in renewables.

INTRODUCTION

A national political network that’s funded by fossil fuel interests is fighting to block renewable energy projects

The State Policy Network (SPN), a nonprofit that sits atop a 50-state network of think tanks and associated advocacy groups, recently announced that it will focus on working with state lawmakers in 2024 to prevent states from adopting renewable energy sources like wind and solar power. SPN organizations frequently receive funding from fossil fuel interests, right-wing donors, and donor-advised funds that help conceal the origins of a considerable amount of the money that flows into the network.

The announcement came after SPN think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation had already spent years fighting to block the deployment of renewable energy resources like offshore wind. Still, the move marks a surprisingly public shift in legislative priorities for a network that traditionally framed its opposition to renewable energy mandates and subsidies as being based on principles of limited government.

The move may be sparking dissension within SPN’s ranks. The Show-Me Institute, a SPN think tank in Missouri, came out against a bill that would impose new siting limits on solar farms in the state, albeit while criticizing solar.

“Nonetheless, interfering in the free market and banning the sale of land for solar energy projects seems like a step too far,” Avery Frank, a policy analyst for the Show Me Institute, said of the anti-solar siting bill in a blog post. “While there are ample concerns with solar energy, why is the state government limiting property rights and picking winners and losers in the energy market?”

EPI previously documented SPN’s campaigns against state renewable energy standards for electric utilities and net metering policies that support the growth of rooftop solar in in-depth reports that covered 2013-14 and 2015.

Following the money from the fossil fuel industry

The latest analysis of annual tax reports filed by the network of nonprofits controlled by Charles Koch by the Center for Media & Democracy continues to show millions of dollars going to SPN groups and other organizations involved in anti-renewable energy campaigns. Koch is the billionaire CEO and chairman of Koch Industries, which profits from multiple sectors of the fossil fuel industry, but Koch Industries is just one part of the story.

EPI’s research exposed longtime gas industry executives Karen Buchwald Wright and Tom Rastin, whose family owns the gas compressor manufacturer Ariel Corporation, as the backers of multiple entities involved in anti-renewables efforts in states like Ohio and Michigan. An unredacted list of SPN donors obtained by EPI shows Wright also contributed $700,000 to SPN in 2019 alone, making Wright one of SPN’s four largest listed donors that year. The couple did not respond to an email from EPI seeking comment on the funding.

EPI found $750,000 in contributions to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in annual IRS Form 990s filed by the foundation of Joseph Craft, the CEO and chairman of fossil fuel producer Alliance Resource Partners, for the years 2020-2022.

TPPF also received just over $2 million since 2011 from the Brigham Family Foundation, which is led by Ben “Bud” Brigham of the Brigham Exploration Company, an oil and gas company based in Texas. $837,000 of that money has been earmarked for TPPF’s Life:Powered Initiative, a pro-fossil fuels and anti-renewable energy campaign, in the Brigham Family Foundation’s annual tax filings since 2017.

Joseph Craft and Bud Brigham did not respond to emails from EPI seeking comment on their foundations’ funding of TPPF.

In a sign that some fossil fuel companies are feeling more emboldened in their opposition to renewables in today’s polarized political environment, Consol Energy is now publicly sponsoring the “Not So Fast” campaign resisting the rapid transition from coal and gas to renewables. The new campaign features a website with the blunt name thecoalhardtruth.com and related social media channels.

Earlier research by EPI helped to reveal how Cloud Peak Energy, Murray Energy, and Peabody Energy secretly funded multiple groups that deny established climate science and spread disinformation about renewables, based on mandatory disclosures these major coal producers had to make in their bankruptcy case. EPI also uncovered over $1 million in Murray Energy payments to an Ohio law firm involved in opposing multiple renewable energy projects.

We showed how ExxonMobil, Kinder Morgan, and Occidental Petroleum quietly backed the Texas Industrial Energy Consumers opposition to American Electric Power’s plan to bring power from its North Central Wind Energy project to Texas before the Texas Public Utilities Commission. While that project moved forward without Texas’s support, TIEC had previously helped to kill AEP’s major Wind Catcher project on behalf of U.S. Steel, which has several subsidiaries involved in the coal industry.

EPI was the first to begin to expose the secret money trail between the coal-burning utility FirstEnergy and Samuel Randazzo, a longtime attorney and lobbyist for the Industrial Energy Users-Ohio and anti-renewables activists in the Buckeye State. Randazzo was later indicted on multiple state and federal criminal charges in connection with millions of dollars he secretly received from FirstEnergy before his appointment as chairman of the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and Ohio Power Siting Board in 2019. New evidence continues to emerge in ongoing court cases and related regulatory investigations following Randazzo’s recent suicide.

Front groups for the fossil fuel industry have been coordinating with anti-renewables activists for well over a decade

Many of the arguments espoused today by anti-renewables activists can be traced back to the fossil fuel industry’s disinformation campaigns against climate science and global action to limit greenhouse gas emissions during the 1990s.

One example is a 1997 paper, “Renewable Energy: Not Cheap, Not ‘Green,’” authored by Institute for Energy Research (IER) president Robert L. Bradley and published by the Cato Institute. Both IER and Cato have deep ties to the Koch network. Lisa Linowes, today a top anti-renewables activist, described Bradley’s work as a “seminal policy paper” a decade later in 2007 on her website windaction.org.

Tom Tanton, an energy consultant who worked with fossil fuel industry front groups like IER, the Heartland Institute, and American Tradition Institute began to cultivate relationships with anti-wind activists by the 2000s.

What emerged was a tight-knit network of anti-renewables diehards who can’t exactly be described as Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) activists because they oppose all wind farms, regardless of location.

One Ohio-based anti-wind activist, Tom Stacy, eventually became a paid consultant for IER and the coal industry. Tanton still lists “friend” of Save Western Ohio (Stacy’s old anti-wind group) as his professional experience for 2009 on his LinkedIn profile. Stacy co-founded the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions and currently sits on the board of directors for the National Wind Watch, both clearinghouses for information utilized by anti-renewables activists nationally.

Other anti-renewables activists claim to be unpaid for their efforts, but have not been shy about publicly partnering with groups that do receive fossil fuel money:

John Droz, the co-founder of the Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions, a group that provides model local laws, strategic guidance, and information to anti-wind and solar activists, has held the title of fellow at the coal industry-backed American Tradition Institute. Droz has also been a regular contributor to IER’s blog MasterResource since 2009 and is a member of the CO2 Coalition, a climate skeptic group with a decades long record of accepting money from the fossil fuel industry.

Lisa Linowes, who currently helms the Industrial Wind Action Group, Save Right Whales Coalition, and Wildlife, Energy & Community Coalition, joined IER’s newly formed advisory committee in 2018. Linowes, whose work and writings have been promoted by IER on MasterResource since 2010, also served as a senior fellow at TPPF, where she authored two anti-wind reports.

Kevon Martis, the driving force behind the Michigan-based anti-renewables groups Interstate Informed Citizens Coalition and Our Home Our Voice, has been listed as a fellow at the Energy and Environmental Legal Institute (previously known as the American Tradition Institute) since 2016. IER has also featured Martis’s writings and efforts on MasterResource since 2012. Martis is now the public face of Citizens for Local Choice, a ballot initiative which seeks to overturn Michigan’s new law streamlining renewable energy siting, and received money from a longtime gas industry executive in Ohio.

These anti-renewables activists and the fossil fuel industry funded groups with whom they’ve teamed up represent some of the most prolific sources of information and strategies used by NIMBY activists in fights against wind and solar farms all over the country.

Opponents allied with the fossil fuel industry seek to use a mix of disinformation, litigation, exclusionary siting and zoning laws and ordinances, and moratoria and bans to block deployment of renewables. Opposition to renewable energy is also being fueled by the spread of disinformation and conspiracy theories online.

Local residents who choose to lease their land for wind and solar farms are often villainized by project opponents. In South Carolina, state law enforcement officials are investigating death threats received by members of the York County Council for supporting the construction of a solar panel factory.

People who are skeptical of renewable development, but independent of the fossil fuel industry – who may have legitimate concerns about how a wind or solar farm may impact views, wildlife, agricultural lands, and other aspects of their communities – may be more open to public education, dialogue, and reasonable compromises that allow projects to move forward. Public input can even result in improvements to project plans, such as the addition of innovative agrivoltaics approaches that enable dual use of land for agriculture and solar power generation.

Foes of renewables allied with the fossil fuel industry tend to support the expansion of coal, gas, and oil extraction and infrastructure, and oppose what they call government mandates aimed at limiting the environmental and public health impacts of fossil fuels. Local residents whose concerns about a particular renewable energy project are based on values like conservation, by contrast, often support wind and solar power in general and may be concerned about problems like climate change that are caused by fossil fuels.

Renewables opponents who are paid by the fossil fuel industry sometimes pose as NIMBY activists. For example, a media outlet owned by Metric Media, which is known for its right-wing bias, reported that the emcee of an anti-solar town hall meeting in Ohio was a local farmer. A local journalist soon revealed that the emcee was actually a chief strategist for a political consulting firm that worked for a front group for the gas industry.

Public opinion research has long shown deep distrust of the oil and gas industry among the public. A new national labs survey shows that people living near solar farms trust project neighbors, nonprofit and community organizations, and universities more than other sources for information about energy projects. Exposing the money behind fossil fuel industry front groups and political operatives who pose as NIMBY activists, think tanks, and experts is a critical step to helping the public know disinformation when they see it.

The forces aligned against renewables are powerful but not immune to public scrutiny and accountability, which is why fossil fuel interests generally seek to hide their support. For example, a spokesperson for The Empowerment Alliance once told a reporter that the pro-gas and anti-renewables group won’t disclose its funders because its donors don’t want to face public protests.

NIMBY activists have also retreated from formal alliances with SPN think tanks like the Caesar Rodney Institute (CRI) when the funding those groups have received from the fossil fuel industry creates controversy. For instance, a Nantucket-based group recently publicly disassociated itself from the CRI-backed anti-offshore American Coalition for Ocean Protection after research and reporting followed the money trail from CRI and ACOP back to the fossil fuel industry.

A WHO’S WHO OF RENEWABLE ENERGY OPPONENTS

Fossil Fuel Industry Funders:

Alliance Resource Partners:

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mma

Years of falsehoods from Fox News helped solidify offshore wind as a prime target for Trump

Against all evidence, right-wing media insist Trump is “saving the whales” and reducing energy costs through his nonsensical executive orders

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 02/04/25

One of President Donald Trump’s many January 20 executive orders paused permitting and leasing for offshore wind projects in the United States, a victory for anti-renewable energy activists who have vilified the technology for years.

The order follows years of Fox News bashing offshore wind farms based largely on falsehoods repeated by the president and self-proclaimed conservationists with ties to fossil fuel interests. In addition to his so-called conservation efforts, Trump has promised to halve energy costs in his first year in office, and he immediately declared a “national energy emergency” with the intent of doing so. Economists and energy experts say he won’t succeed.

Offshore wind opponents, contradicting insights from marine mammal experts, maintain that the development of offshore wind farms along the East Coast is causing large whale die-offs. This poorly understood phenomenon has affected several whale species in the area since 2016. Trump and Fox News personalities, and other right-wing media figures, have characterized these projects as particularly destructive to wildlife, including birds.

Yet while they are feigning concern for whales, right-wing media are not mentioning offshore drilling for oil and gas — an activity that Trump has encouraged, and one that harms marine life. During these segments praising Trump's move to pause wind projects, they also haven’t focused on the jobs that would likely be eliminated if new offshore projects fail to materialize, while job loss has been a key focus of theirs in coverage of former President Joe Biden’s 2021 cancellation of an extension on the crude oil Keystone pipeline.

## There is no evidence that offshore wind farms are responsible for killing large numbers of whales — a claim Trump used to justify his hostility toward the industry

- :{During his inaugural address, Trump amplified the baseless claim that “if you’re into whales, you don’t want windmills.”Trump specifically implied whale mortality events in New England were due to offshore wind projects in the region. The Washington Post, [1/21/25, :{Newsmax, The Record with Greta Van Susteren, 1:(style="background-color:#ffff00ff"):}:/21/25]}:

- Scientists say there is no evidence that offshore wind is contributing to whale deaths, but fishing gear entanglement, vessel collisions, and the changing migration patterns of whale prey could be contributing.The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution writes there is “no evidence” to support the claims that offshore wind projects are responsible for an uptick in whale deaths. “Of all the right whales that have died over the last several decades, the cause of death for juveniles and adults is always vessel strike or fishing gear entanglement,” according to Woods Hole whale biologist Mark Baumgartner. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports support these findings. Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, [5/9/24; Yale Environment 360, 3/8/23; Factcheck.org, 3/31/23; National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, accessed 2/3/25]

- Some types of sonar can harm marine life – but those technologies are not used for offshore wind surveying.As biologist Scott Travers explains for Forbes, seismic blasting used for oil and gas exploration can harm marine life because it is “loud enough to penetrate hundreds of miles into the ocean floor.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said that sound produced by high-resolution geophysical surveys used by offshore wind energy companies “produce much smaller impact zones because, in general, they have lower noise, higher frequency, and narrower beam-width.” According to Travers, the technology used for offshore wind surveying is less harmful because developers are “primarily interested in what’s on the seabed, not what’s beneath it.” National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, accessed [1/30/25; Forbes, 4/25/24]

- Scientists say climate change is harming whale populations. According to Woods Hole, scientists also suspect climate change has been “changing the distribution” of prey sought out by the whales. “Following their prey, the whales traveled farther north than they had before, into areas without protection. It wasn’t that people weren’t willing to protect them in these locations, simply that no one expected the whales to show up there.” While scientists feel that more research and careful monitoring is needed, reporting from NPR’s WCAI radio station and science reporting effort Science Friday found that “more than a half dozen scientists and right whale conservation advocates interviewed for this story said the biggest risk to right whales and other endangered species is the very danger offshore wind is designed to address: climate change.” Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, [5/9/24; Science Friday, 3/29/24]

## Right-wing media used the false whale narrative to praise Trump’s executive order

- On Newsmax’sSavage Nation, guest Tucker Carlson praised the executive order targeting offshore wind power and complained about “the amount of destruction that it’s wrought to the environment,” mentioning whales specifically. He also claimed without evidence that “it’s proven — we know that wind turbines, offshore wind turbines, kill whales,” adding, “I really hope the president, by executive order, will end the destruction of nature in the name of green energy.” Newsmax, *Savage Nation with Michael Savage*, [1/28/25]

- While discussing Trump’s initial executive orders, Fox host Mark Levin compared wind turbines to “old-time tombs and other things that these past ancient people built” and said, “They’re killing birds, they’re killing whales, they make noise, and they do ... not a damn thing.”He praised Trump for promising to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our national landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” [Fox News, Life, Liberty & Levin, 1/27/25]

- Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy and climate denier Marc Morano claimed Trump is “saving the whales.”Campos-Duffy said that Trump debunked “the left’s claim that wind energy is better for the environment.” She told Morano that she “hates windmills,” labeled them as “bird murderers” and “whale murderers,” and declared, “I think Donald Trump is like the whale whisperer. He’s saving the whales.” Morano said that “Donald Trump is turning out to be the greatest environmental hero of the 21st century,” not just because of “endangered species in terms of especially offshore wind and whales,” but also because he is “bringing in more fossil fuels from the western world.” Fox News, *Fox & Friends Weekend*, [1/25/25; DeSmog, accessed 1/30/25]

- Fox anchor Bret Baier and correspondent Bryan Llenas highlighted various attacks on offshore wind turbines, including Trump’s claim that they are “ugly, unreliable, and expensive,” “interfere with military radars,” and “kill whales.” Llenas said: “President Biden gave a billion dollars in government subsidies to the Danish energy company Orsted back in 2023 just to see them pull the plug on two wind projects off the coast of New Jersey, citing the high costs. Now, critics have raised concerns that wind turbines interfere with military radars, conservationists claim they disrupt fish migration and kill whales.” Right-wing media celebrated when Orsted scrapped those projects, even though they would have created 15,000 jobs over their lifetimes. Fox News, *America’s Newsroom*, [1/24/25; Media Matters, 11/14/23]

- On his new One America News show, former Republican lawmaker Matt Gaetz called offshore wind “a whale torturing project.”OAN, *The Matt Gaetz Show*, [1/21/25]

- On Fox Business, National Review writer Carolina Downey claimed that Trump will “drill, baby, drill, as he promised to the American people,” adding that “he's also going to save the whales because he's cutting into those wind projects which we know are affecting the whale population.”Fox Business, *Mornings with Maria*, [1/21/25]

## Fox News has waged a yearslong campaign against offshore wind

- In 2023, Fox News aired 54 segments falsely linking offshore wind to whale deaths.That year alone, at least 15 programs on the network reported on the false link between offshore wind and whale deaths, including the network’s so-called straight news program Special Report With Bret Baier. Media Matters, [1/18/24]

- Fox News has played a key role in the proliferation of offshore wind misinformation by regularly airing false claims about the technology and providing a platform to groups that are bankrolled by the fossil fuel industry.A 2023 report from the Center for American Progress illustrated how the fossil fuel industry is bankrolling offshore wind misinformation, “with money flowing through interest groups, think tanks, and astroturf groups to achieve its ultimate goal of slowing, if not stopping, the expansion of offshore wind in the United States.” Fox has amplified several of these groups, including Protect Our Coast NJ and people associated with the Texas Public Policy Foundation and Environmental Progress. The latter group’s founder and president, Michael Shellenberger, has appeared frequently on Fox News to spread offshore wind misinformation. The Center for American Progress, [12/11/23; Media Matters, 1/18/24,1/12/23,2/3/23 ,8/29/23]

- Fox News began linking offshore wind projects to whale deaths as early as 2022. In August 2022, Meghan Lapp, a fisheries liaison for the fishing company Seafreeze, whose campaign to stop offshore wind development has been bankrolled by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, appeared on Fox News’ Jesse Watters Primetime. Distilled, [1/31/23; Foxnews.com, 8/26/22]

## Fox News ranted about job casualties after the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline, but offshore wind projects were also set to create jobs

- Blocking offshore wind projects would hurt American manufacturing. According to Oceanic Network, “64% of manufacturing and supply-chain investment” supporting the offshore wind industry is in Republican districts. Felicia Sanchez, a partner with the law firm K&L Gates, pointed out to Utility Dive that “it’s hard to say ‘we’re going to end offshore wind’ when you’re also impacting a vast supply chain that has already been going for the last few years that has been implemented — when ports have been developed, and vessels have started to either be under construction or have come out of the yard ready to work in offshore wind.” Canary Media, [1/28/25; Utility Dive, 1/21/25]

- Fox News personalities expressed outrage about job losses for more than a year and a half after then-President Joe Biden decided not to proceed with the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline project. According to AP News, “The Keystone XL pipeline was intended to be an expansion of the existing Keystone pipeline, which runs about 2,687 miles from Alberta to Illinois and Texas, and is operating.” In 2021, in the first nine days after news outlets reported that Biden would be scrapping the project, Fox News made misleading claims about jobs 74 times. The network offered several misleading or decontextualized estimates for how many jobs would be lost, ranging from about 11,000 to 42,000. The numbers were a far cry from the State Department’s actual estimate of just 35 long-term jobs. Meanwhile, Trump’s executive order will impact many wind energy projects, not just one. Media Matters, [6/29/22, 1/28/21; AP News, 3/17/22; PolitiFact, 7/21/22]

## By excluding solar and wind, Trump’s executive order undermines his declaration of a “national energy emergency”

- Trump declared a national energy emergency, which unlocked special authorities to boost the “production and sale of a wide range of energy resources” and “to expedite the completion of all authorized and appropriated infrastructure, energy, environmental, and natural resources projects.” S&P Global, [1/22/25; Whitehouse.gov, 1/20/25]

- Trump’s national energy emergency counterintuitively excludes certain renewable energies, including offshore wind.The executive order does not mention solar or wind in its definition of the “energy resources” Trump wants to expand. Director of the Harvard University environmental economics program Robert N. Satvins told The New York Times, “If there really were an energy emergency, then the right thing to do would be to increase supplies of all forms of energy, and to try to use energy conservation initiatives.” Whitehouse.gov, [1/20/25; The New York Times, 1/21/25]

- Experts are skeptical that Trump’s declared energy emergency will fulfill its purported goal of lowering energy costs for Americans.Trump cannot force energy companies to produce more, and currently, it would not be profitable for them to do so because crude oil is abundant. In October 2024, the World Bank predicted an “oil glut next year with a supply-demand gap that's been this large only twice before” in part because Chinese consumers are pivoting away from gas-powered cars. And despite a predicted increase in power demand from AI, experts also say the technology could ultimately boost supply and hurt oil prices. The New York Times, [1/24/25; Axios, 10/29/24; Whitehouse.gov, 1/20/25; Reuters, 9/3/24]

- Trump cannot reverse the transition to renewable energy. In a recent report, Citigroup analysts wrote that, despite uncertainties, “Clean energy is cheaper, more widely available, and more efficient. … For advocates of clean energy transition, the power of economics will prevail.” In October, BloombergNEF found that even “a total repeal of the IRA’s tax credits” — a scenario BNEF called “unlikely” — “would not entirely stymy the US’s clean power momentum.” Fortune, [1/27/25; BloombergNEF, 10/31/24]

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an 11 23

allies of influential Texas billionaire Tim Dunn are pushing ahead in Austin with efforts to create a private-school voucher system that could weaken public schools across the state. Meanwhile, Dunn’s associates in his hometown of Midland are working to defeat a local school bond proposal that his district says it desperately needs.

Dunn, an evangelical Christian, is best known for a mostly successful two-decade effort to push the Texas GOP ever further to the right. His political action committees have spent millions to elect pro-voucher candidates and derail Republicans who oppose them. Defend Texas Liberty, the influential PAC he funds with other West Texas oil barons, has come under fire after The Texas Tribune revealed that the PAC’s president had hosted infamous white supremacist Nick Fuentes for an October meeting and that the organization has connections to other white nationalists.

*[In West Texas, schools hope skeptical voters will OK debt to upgrade crumbling, overcrowded buildings]

Less known are Dunn’s efforts to shape politics in his hometown of Midland, which will come to a head next week. On Tuesday, residents in the Midland Independent School District will vote on a $1.4 billion bond, the largest in its history, after rejecting a smaller measure four years ago. A dark-money organization whose leaders have ties to Dunn’s Midland oil and gas company, as well as to a prominent conservative public policy organization where Dunn serves as vice chairman, have become among the loudest voices against the bond.

On Sept. 21, less than two months before the Midland bond election, three Midland residents with deep connections to Dunn and his associated public policy organization registered a “social welfare” nonprofit called Move Midland.

The nonprofit is headed by Rachel Walker, a public affairs manager for Dunn’s oil and gas company, CrownQuest Operating LLC, according to public records. A second member, Ernest Angelo, is a former Midland mayor and board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that Dunn has helped lead for more than two decades. The third member of the nonprofit’s board is Elizabeth Moore, a former West Texas development officer for the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Within weeks, the nascent nonprofit had a website, campaign signs and a social media presence as its directors appeared on local radio shows and in community debates to oppose the bond. In the local newspaper, another former mayor urged residents to visit Move Midland’s website for insights about the election. That former mayor, Mike Canon, had run for the Texas Senate in 2018 to unseat Kel Seliger, a prominent Republican who opposed vouchers. Another PAC funded by Dunn, Empower Texans, provided the bulk of his war chest, nearly $350,000, in a losing effort.

Move Midland and its directors have not called attention to their relationship to Dunn and his entities in public appearances. Biographies of the three directors on the nonprofit’s website make no mention of Dunn, CrownQuest or the Texas Public Policy Foundation, where Dunn serves as vice chair of the board.

Walker and other members of the group did not respond to voice messages, emails, Facebook messages or requests made through the Move Midland website.

Dunn likewise did not respond to specific questions regarding the Midland bond and the role of his various entities. Defend Texas Liberty has condemned Fuentes’ “incendiary” views and replaced its president, but has not provided any details about its association with the white nationalist. Dunn has reportedly called the PAC’s meeting with Fuentes a “serious blunder.”

During a debate hosted by the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Walker said that the group is “more than just me. There is a group of informed and involved Midlanders involved in this organization. And we have every right to speak on this issue, because we are taxpaying citizens, just as the rest of the involved and informed community does.”

Walker has said that the group would be open to a scaled-down version of the bond in the future, but that should come when “our taxpayers feel like they have trust in the system, and right now, they just have an overwhelming distrust of how MISD is spending their tax dollars,” she told Marfa Public Radio.

Because Move Midland was formed as a nonprofit and not a political action committee, it is not required to disclose the sources of its funding. Organizations that engage in campaign activity but don’t disclose where their money comes from are typically considered “dark money” entities. A small number of states, including New York and Connecticut, require disclosure of donors who contribute to 501(c)(4) nonprofits that engage in lobbying or make political contributions.

The IRS allows such nonprofits to shield the identities of donors as long as political activity doesn’t constitute the group’s primary activity, though it rarely takes action against nonprofits that violate its rules.

According to its website, Move Midland is “dedicated to making Midland better” and plans to tackle various community issues. The bond election represents the group’s “current area of focus.”

Bond supporters, including a large chunk of the Midland energy sector, say it is crucial to relieving overcrowding and modernizing outdated facilities.

Supporters also have raised questions about the timing of Move Midland’s creation and expressed frustration that its donors are shielded from public view, unlike funders of traditional PACs.

“It seems disingenuous and also unfair and very odd that you would not disclose who’s behind it when as a PAC, they would have to,” said Josh Ham, a volunteer with the pro-bond PAC Energize Midland Schools.

Texas Ethics Commission records show the Energize Midland PAC has received more than $530,000 in contributions, most of it coming from Midland energy companies, which hail the election as an opportunity to cultivate a more robust labor force.

That far outstrips the $10,252 raised by Midlanders for Excellence in Education, a local PAC that opposes the bond. According to campaign finance reports, Midlanders for Excellence in Education has used much of that money to pay for signs and radio advertising.

Walker, the Move Midland leader, reported spending $33,432 to oppose the bond, including payments for direct mailings, text messages and yard signs. Texas law requires nonprofits that engage in independent campaign activity to disclose campaign-related expenditures to the state, but like the federal government, it does not require such groups to disclose the source of their funding. It is unclear if Dunn has given money directly to the group.

Ham said that he does not know who is funding Move Midland, but that its sudden appearance after two years of bond planning makes him question the motivation behind the effort. “To have someone just come along overnight and pop up with just a couple of talking points and with no real support is disappointing,” he said.

Dunn has not been quiet about his concerns over the bond. In an Oct. 15 commentary in the Midland Reporter-Telegram, Dunn accused bond supporters of not being forthcoming with voters about the bond’s tax impact. The district says the bond won’t raise tax rates because the new rates adopted in September were set lower than the previous year’s and included the bond’s impact. Dunn argued that the bond will soak up the $18 million in statewide property tax relief recently approved by the Legislature and that tax rates would be even lower if not for the bond.

While Dunn’s oil companies operate in multiple states, they control mineral properties that, combined, owed more than $1.3 million in estimated property taxes to the school district for 2023.

Dunn called claims that the bond won’t result in a tax rate increase “somewhere between materially misleading and factually false.”

In fact, Dunn noted, the actual ballot language Midlanders will find when they go to the polls will include the clause, “This is a property tax increase.”

Public policy organizations connected with Dunn played a central role in ensuring that the phrase is attached to every single school bond ballot measure in the state, regardless of the bond measure’s actual impact on local taxes.

The phrase, tucked into a 308-page bill in 2019, didn’t make headlines at the time, but those six words have since had an outsize impact on school bond passage rates. According to Dax Gonzalez, director of governmental relations at the Texas Association of School Boards, the phrase is at least partly responsible for the decline in school bond passage rates in subsequent years.

From 2000 to May 2019, about 75% of all school bond proposals passed, according to data from the state’s Bond Review Board. That passage rate has dipped to 64% since November 2019, which bond supporters have attributed to the new ballot language and pandemic-related worries. In elections this past May, that number rebounded to 78%.

“I really do believe that the sole purpose of that language is to decrease the amount of bonds that pass,” said Gonzalez.

Earlier this year, Dunn-backed entities marshaled opposition to attempts favored by public education supporters to give districts more flexibility in the required ballot language in cases where bonds don’t result in tax rate increases. None of the bills made it out of committee.

Dunn has weighed in on local Midland politics before. In 2019, Dunn cast doubts on the Midland school district’s $569 million bond proposal in an op-ed in the local newspaper in which he wondered whether school district officials were “sufficiently committed” to improving the quality of students’ education.

Although officials initially announced the bond had passed on election night, the bond proposal ultimately lost by 26 votes after Midland County election workers discovered a box of unopened ballots weeks after the election.

A few months later, Dunn threw his support behind a sales tax increase for the Midland County Hospital District, explaining in a newspaper column that “high property taxes violate a founding principle of America: private property ownership.”

Sales taxes, Dunn argued, “are the only broad-based, transparent and optional forms of taxation.”

The sales tax increase passed handily in July 2020.

A shift from property taxes to sales taxes at the state level has long been a goal of the various public policy organizations associated with Dunn. According to Texas Comptroller estimates analyzed by the Tribune, sales tax increases cost poor Texans more than wealthier ones, making it a regressive tax.

For some bond supporters, Dunn’s opposition to the current bond proposal is a reflection of his embrace of vouchers for private schools.

“Having a vested interest in a private school, while politically funding an agenda that includes private school vouchers, appears to present a pretty clear conflict of interest for Tim Dunn,” said Reagan Hignojos, a former Midland school board candidate and bond supporter. “These private schools would not be held accountable or be transparent by the same standards of public schools.”

Dunn is the founder of Midland Classical Academy, a private school that offers its approximately 600 K-12 students a “Classical Education from a Biblical Worldview,” according to its website. The school explains that through this lens, “human civilization is rightly understood to have begun in the garden with Adam and Eve.” The school believes in interpreting the Bible in its literal sense, which it takes to mean that marriage can only be between a man and woman and that there are only two genders.

Dunn’s school is currently unaccredited, however, according to data provided by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission. Under legislation proposed by Texas lawmakers, including several state senators who have received campaign funding from Dunn and his associated PACs, private schools would need accreditation to be eligible for taxpayer dollars.

Dunn has not weighed in on whether his school would pursue voucher payments, and in 2014 he explained the lack of accreditation, writing that the requirements “deal mainly with processes and credentials rather than focusing on an excellent academic and student life opportunity.”

The school did not respond to questions about any potential accreditation or voucher plans.

According to its 2021 IRS filing, the most recent available, the school had $10.4 million in total assets and revenue of $6.3 million, a 66% percent increase compared to what it earned in 2020.

Dunn and his family own five million-dollar homes on land adjacent to Midland Classical Academy, where property taxes go to Midland ISD.

*Disclosure: The Texas Association of School Boards and the Texas Public Policy Foundation have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2023/11/02/tim-dunn-move-midland-school-bond/.

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https://www.alternet.org/house-republicans-invoke-greg-abbott/

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twenty-two House Republicans have signed on to a motion filed in federal court requesting to be allowed to join Governor Greg Abbott in defending the Texas Republican against a federal government lawsuit alleging his 1000 feet of razor wire and floating buoys constructed of circular saw blades, designed to prevent migrants from crossing into the United States from Texas, are illegal.

They have invoked the Bible’s Book of Genesis, including Noah’s Ark, to make their case.

“In a motion filed on behalf of U.S. Rep. Jodey Arrington, R-Lubbock, and other GOP members, lawyers for the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundationhave asked to be part of the case and targeted how a key law is interpreted in it,” the Houston Chronicle reports.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is the right-wing organization The New York Times last year profiled as “The Texas Group Waging a National Crusade Against Climate Action.”

RELATED: Supreme Court in Hand, Far Right Wing Prepares to ‘Take the Reins of Government’

The buoys, deployed on the Rio Grande river, may have led to the deaths of two migrants, possibly including a child.

Democratic U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas called the buoys “barbaric,” and in video showed they are constructed of circular saw blades. In that video Congressman Castro also points to Governor Abbott’s razor wire fences.

Sawyer Hackett, a senior advisor to former Obama Cabinet Secretary Julián Castro, referred to the floating fences as “razor wire death trap buoys.”

“A key point to the Arrington group’s defense is whether the 1,900-mile Rio Grande should be defined as a navigable waterway despite being used by thousands of boats every year,” The Chronicle explains. “They point to a court case from 1870 that suggested that the term navigable waterway is intended to mean moving commerce from one state to another or to a different country and not just one where any small boat occasionally uses the river.”

READ MORE: Critics Blast Top US Conservative Think Tank President for Applauding Italy’s Election of ‘Neo-Fascist’ Prime Minister

That’s where the Bible and Noah’s Ark come in.

“Indeed, if one takes the Book of Genesis literally, then the entire world was once navigable by boats large enough to carry significant amounts of livestock,” the proposed amicus brief reads. “Under the federal government’s theory, these anecdotes would render any structure built anywhere in Texas an obstruction to navigationsubject to federal regulation.”

Governor Abbott has had a long partnership with theTexas Public Policy Foundation.

In 2016, as NCRM reported, Abbott while at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, unveiled a major policy plan toalter the U.S. Constitution, adding nine amendments,the result of which could have lead to same-sex marriage bans and anend of LGBTQ protections.

According to Congressman Arrington, the list of signatories to his amicus brief include: Rep. Jodey Arrington, Dr. Michael Burgess, Rep. August Pfluger, Rep. Brian Babin, Rep. Andy Biggs, Rep. Roger Williams, Rep. Lance Gooden, Rep. Beth Van Duyne, Rep. Jake Ellzey, Rep. Vern Buchanan, Rep.Chip Roy, Rep. Nathaniel Moran, Rep. David Rouzer, Rep. Pete Sessions,Rep. Ronny Jackson, Rep. Sam Graves,Rep. Clay Higgins, Rep. Michael Cloud,Rep. Keith Self, Rep. John Carter, Rep. Jeff Duncan, Rep. Kat Cammack.

:{:{}:

https://arrington.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=1063

Watch the video above or at this link.

'Very scary': Former RNC staffer dishes on the more terrifying members of GOP's right-wing

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Ex-GOP congressman blasts Republicans for embracing 'being a bully, being a jerk' ›

Greg Abbott implicates 'the government' in Saturday’s mass shooting ›

Author of 'clearly fake' story shared by Greg Abbott calls TX gov 'one of the dumbest people in the country' ›

Key Facts

China’s role in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement is less obvious than the spy balloons in our airspace, but equally perilous.

Destroying fossil fuels would destroy capitalism and subject the future of humanity to abject poverty, because affordable and reliable energy is the key to human flourishing.

orig on fox, issac

america under threat from ESG, investment firms that aid China’s power push

The Chinese spy balloons are an obvious infiltration into America. Less obvious, but equally perilous, is China’s role in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement. But over the past few weeks, it has become more apparent that the ESG agenda is the China-ESG agenda.

A few weeks ago, I was in Indiana testifying in support of a House bill calling for fiduciary responsibility to take precedence over political ideology in pension fund management. At the hearing, the bankers’ association showed up and touted research done by the Wharton School of Business. The research claimed that costs “could” increase significantly if the bill was passed.

The Houston Chronicle used the same research, claiming that the University of Pennsylvania and the Federal Reserve System say “Texas cities incurred an additional $300 million to $500 million in interest on $31.8 billion in bonds” after Texas passed a law prohibiting the use of ESG in taxpayer-funded investments.

But it wasn’t just the University of Pennsylvania that conducted the study. The claim comes from a “new analysis” that was “conducted by Econsult Solutions on behalf of The Sunrise Project — a nonprofit focused on climate change.” The Sunrise Project’s opening statement on their website gives their allegiance to the “climate crisis” and claims that “an energy revolution is moving the world beyond fossil fuels. How, and how fast that revolution happens will determine the future of humanity.” It’s hardly a politically neutral source.

The Sunrise Project “commissioned” Econsult to “use the econometric analysis of Texas and its findings to provide estimates of the potential financial impacts on taxpayers,” in other words, to rig the results by making a biased corporation create a biased study.

It’s not “analysis.” It’s an outburst by aligned organizations realizing that states that won’t do business with BlackRock, Vanguard, etc. will inhibit their mission to destroy fossil fuels. Doing so, no matter its pace, would also destroy capitalism. It would subject the future of humanity to abject poverty, because affordable and reliable energy is the key to human flourishing.

They know this perfectly well. The Sunrise Project’s consultants gave an editorial comment that the Houston Chronicle buried at the end of the article: “encroachments into the marketplace by political actors…will have adverse effects on long-term public investments, including public program and state pensions.”

But the best interest of American families isn’t the goal of the ESG movement. If you peel back the layers of the onion, it’s clear Wall Street isn’t only pushing the leftist agenda, it’s fighting for China’s agenda. The People’s Republic of China has given about $30 million to the University of Pennsylvania — just a few months before this new study was released by the University’s Wharton School of Business, the same school hosts The ESG Initiative.

BlackRock has shown clear favoritism by giving Chinese companies better ESG scores than American companies, even though American companies are the most environmentally responsible in the world. BlackRock is a part of Climate Action 100+, whose primary investor networks include the Asia Investor Group on Climate Change and includes several Chinese groups, as reported by Heritage Action executive director Jessica Anderson.

And BlackRock owns shares of PetroChina, a fossil fuel-based Chinese company, despite publicly railing against fossil fuels and preaching about the climate “crisis.”

Boycotting financial institutions thatplace ESG principles on a pedestal over fiduciary dutyis the only way to remove political actors from the marketplace. ESG is a political tool to subvert the democratic process and force the political ideology of the globalist elites on the rest of us.

Expensive energy hurts every American, especially the poor and marginalized communities that ESG activists claim to fight for. The results of letting woke companies rule the market would be nothing short of dystopian. And we cannot allow ourselves to think that China is only testing us by hovering spy balloons over our land. China and global elitists are doing even more through Wall Street, and it’s time to stop their ESG agenda.

EVs Aren't the Answer to Climate Worries

July 11, 2023

aa woman

Fear is being used as a weapon by climate activists.

Currently, there is a very loud narrative that climate change is a crisis that can only be solved with renewables and decarbonization, but like most things, it’s more complicated than that.

As in too many assumed crises, the government has put its hand on the scales just as it did leading up to the 2008 housing crisis and after. Of course, it is no surprise that corporations and executives will profit at others’ expense.

And at whose expense is this narrative being pushed? The poor. It is time to tell the truth for all of humanity and even the planet we inhabit.

Fossil Fuels are incredibly necessary; they are used in clothes, medical supplies, medicines, and construction materials for “clean” energy sources.

Even so called renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar, are not “clean.” And require equipment and materials created from industrial processes reliant on fossil fuels.

On top of that, it is impossible to expect every American family to exchange their traditional fossil fuel products like cars and gas stoves for a more expensive alternative, especially because already 53% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.

This change would force more Americans than ever to rely on government assistance.

The wealthy are not bearing the brunt of the war on fossil fuels, child laborers in Africa and working American families are, and the weight will be crushing.

And the current administration is not just assisting EV buyers; they are propping up the entire EV market by paying buyers to create demand so that suppliers will have the profitability necessary to make the product.

There isn’t a natural widespread demand for EVs, so policymakers are using the popularized “ESG” narrative to ban the alternatives (fossil fuels).

So, what happens when the government meddles with supply and demand? We got a glimpse of this in the housing bubble, where the government tipped the scales.

Eventually the bubble burst, and the very people who were claimed to be the beneficiaries of a government-led solution lost their homes and the dream they had been peddled.

Let’s call this “reverse market engineering.” Here’s how it’s affecting you.

Reverse market engineering creates financial market conditions that artificially enhance liquidity, making the product more financially viable at an earlier point in time than normal market demand will permit.

Subsidies ultimately add an additional tax on the middle class to lower the risk for the latest favored institutions and companies.

On the flip side, if you let markets thrive and run their course, products and ideas can compete, grow, and shift.

If you force a market to operate in reverse, the winner has already been chosen. Now those bearing the brunt deserve the truth about the costs they will pay.

If you’d like to learn more about this topic, head tolifepowered.org/shininglight.

Jamila Piracciis a senior fellow for Life:Powered, researching the impacts of ESG and other anti-energy policies that result in energy poverty.

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April 13, 2023

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https://podtail.com/en/podcast/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga/

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The Anti-ESG Campaign Gets a Boost from RAGA - Transcripts

June 13, 2023

Ever since the Securities and Exchange Commission announced its intention to make Environmental Social and Governance metrics actually mean something to investors, polluting industries have suddenly turned on ESG. Now that fight has a legal strategy, being carried out by the Republican Attorneys General Association.

Transcript: https://www.steno.ai/drilled/the-anti-esg-campaign-gets-a-boost-from-raga

Hello and welcome back to Drilled, I'm Amy Westervelt. We've talked before on this show about the growing backlash against taking environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, factors into consideration when it comes to investing. The watchdog group Documented first revealed last year that state treasurers were getting in on the action, kicking woke investment firms likeBlackRock out of their states. Back then I wondered when the attorneys general would show up to join the fray, and now sure enough, they are here. The Republican Attorneys General Association, RAGA, our old favorite, has come to play in the anti-ESG space. But first, a quick reminder, why all this upset about ESG all of a sudden in the first place? Good question. For a really long time, oil companies actually kind of loved ESG. It was all very loose and self-reported, and it gave them a way to unlock so-called green capital. But in 2021, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC, looked around and went, huh, there are all these different SEG ratings, and some of them seem a little scammy, and no one knows what these disclosures even really mean. These are the kinds of things it's our job to clean up. So we are going to provide formal guidance on climate risk disclosure.

And that is when you start to see corporate interests, fossil fuel companies, and right-wing politicians lose their minds over ESG. Because all of a sudden, they couldn't just write whatever they wanted to in a report, they might have to actually disclose what their real climate risks are.

Speaker 5 00:02:16

Here is Jesse Coleman withDocumented. I think that a lot of this, both the legislative side, this legal strategy, the strategy of using state treasurers to pressure asset managers into attack climate disclosure, all of this is really mostly aimed at SEC scope three emissions disclosure requirements coming, you know, supposedly coming soon

Speaker 4 00:02:43

in the next couple of months, even. Wait, sorry, I'm gonna pause to define scope three. That means how your product's actually being used, not how you're making it, which is a big deal for especially heavy polluting industries

Speaker 5 00:02:58

like oil and gas companies, for example. Yeah, yeah, it's a really big deal. Whereas ESG, having a non-standardized ESG disclosure is no big deal to a major company. The SEC coming and saying, how much carbon emissions are you really responsible for? Not just, you know, what you're claiming you're responsible for, but if you're an oil company, for example, how much carbon are you actually putting in the atmosphere from everything that you've gotten from underground? What is your real impact? And that is a really big deal. It's probably one of the biggest climate policy issues in play right now. So, you know, in my opinion, a lot of this anti-ESG stuff, which doesn't make a lot of sense on its face, you know, these state bills that have passed in some states and been introduced in a ton of states, the actual thing that those bills are gonna do, they're not gonna have a really big impact. And sort of this antitrust stuff is very similar in the sense that, you know, the claims are kind of weak and it's hard to say exactly what the impact is gonna be specifically. But at the same time, it's building up all of this pressure and it's building up all of this political inertia that is all aimed at opposing, disclosing climate emissions. And that's what this SEC rule would do when it comes out, is that it would require publicly traded companies to disclose those emissions.

So, you know, in my opinion,

that's the real goal, is to keep that from happening. You may have heard Jesse mention there the words antitrust. That is where the Republican Attorney's General Association comes into the picture. Back in June, 2021, a guy named Jason Isaac, who spearheads the Texas Public Policy Foundation's work on energy, went to a meeting of theAmerican Legislative Exchange Council, ALEC, with an idea for a legal strategy that he thought could take ESG down.

Speaker 7 00:05:04

Documented shared audio from that meeting with us.:

Yes, so earlier, a couple months ago,our state affairs committee voted nine to nothing. So, broad bipartisan support, every single member voted in support to give the committee subpoena authority.

So, they have sent out a couple months ago,

our state some paper documents to find out where this collusion is happening. We anticipate truckloads of documents being delivered. And so, we look forward to the Texas Public Policy Foundation to going through those meticulously, because we believe that there is, and we actually partner withC. Boyden Gray, Boyden Gray Associates law firm out of Washington, D.C.

Corporate collusion, liability risk for the ESG agenda to charge higher fees and rig the market. We believe that there's antitrust violations. This is really kind of geared towards our attorneys generalto lay the foundation for antitrust violations on this corporate collusion. Find out the connections with the Glasgow Financial Alliance for net zero, which has over, I think, $100 trillion under managed assets in there. And there are the connections with the glad zero, this Paris Accord, which is net zero. So, I hope our committee gets a ton of paper bac

from these large financial institutions.

Hope our committee gets in the courts and our attorneys generalaround the country filed antitrust violations.

So, yeah, cartels colluding for decarbonization.What the hell is he talking about here?We're gonna try to answer that question right after this quick break. And we're back. So, after COP26 in Glasgow, insurers and asset managers, both formed groups focused on ESG. In both cases, these firms were saying, look, all sorts of environmental and social factors can impact our bottom line, and we would like to know what those risks might be so we can factor that into our decision-making around what to ensure and what to invest in. But according to Isaac, these firms talking to each other, issuing joint statements about what kind of information they'd like to see from companies, that's colluding to rig the market. In the wake of that 2021 ALEC meeting you heard Isaac talking at before, not only did Texas continue with the investigation Isaac mentioned, but Arizona Attorney General, Mark Bernovich, opened an investigation into ESG investing. And Raga coordinated a letter to various asset managers and politicians with more than a dozen attorneys general signed on, stating their concern that ESG investing might actually be an antitrust violation.

Speaker 5 00:08:13

Here's Jesse Coleman again. We started to see some of the bright lights of the Republican Attorneys General Association file various kinds of legal attacks on ESG issues, whether that's going directly after asset managers and asking them questions about their net zero commitments, or that's going directly after ratings agencies

Speaker 4 00:08:38

and saying that you're boycotting fossil fuels. And they seem to have coalesced around this idea of painting ESG as some sort of corporate collusion, you know, building an antitrust case. Can you explain what the thinking is there,

what they're trying to prove?

The allegation is that a lot of large asset managers get together in a shadowy cabal and they plan to collude to reduce carbon emissions. The reason these groups are alleging antitrust violations is that antitrust violations are very scary to companies. If a jury finds you guilty of an antitrust violation, it's very expensive. And it's a pretty hard bar to meet. And most experts are saying that the antitrust allegations that are coming from these people that are opposing climate policy, they probably don't have a leg to stand on, but a lot like slap suits and other kinds of legal tools that are used to silence people, just defending against the antitrust allegation is very, very expensive. So, you know, you see companies really backing away from participation in these kind of global groups that are trying to address climate emissions and trying to address investment

10:08

in the fossil fuel industry by large asset managers. In 2022, Alec once again held a meeting with a session on how to handle ESG at the state level. And again, the antitrust strategy was front and center. This time, Isaac was in the room cheering on new proponents of the strategy, including Will Hild with Consumers Research, which is funded by former Federalist Society President Leonard Leo, Paul Watkins, who used to work in the Arizona Attorney General's office and now runs an outfit called Fusion Law, advising on these sorts of strategies. Andy Puzder, former CEO of the Food Conglomerate that is home to Wendy's and Hardee's, and Catherine Gonzalez with the Heritage Foundation. Puzder kicked things off by comparing ESG investors

11:03

to, not kidding here, the Nazis. I wanna tell you, ESG investing is socialism in sheep's clothing. I mean, this is the challenge of your generation. My father's generation's challenge was the Nazis, who, by the way, were, of course, very proud socialists. The challenge of my generation was the communists, who were, of course, very committed socialists. The challenge of your generation is ESG investing, and it's more insidious than communism or the Nazis. It's the thing they're doing it. So ESG, Environmental Social and Governance. Like, how bad could that be, right? It sounds so innocuous, but it's a ruse. It's a ruse to conceal the fact that it's a direct threat to our founding principles.

11:53

It's a threat to our democracy. How bad could that be, right?

Speaker 4 00:11:55

It's a threat to our democracy.

Speaker 6 00:12:02

Hild and Watkins kept it focused on the litigation strategy. They get in rooms and they talk about they're gonna set a policy across the market. Now, it's been a while since I was in law school,

but when I was there, that was antitrust 101. And that's why you see U.S. senators saying this is potentially criminal antitrust liability.

Speaker 4 00:12:22

You see AG saying that they're going to investigate. And again,I have yet to speak with a single legal expert who thinks that this strategy could actually win in court. But like we said before, that is not necessarily the point. It's already having a chilling effect on investment firms and insurance companies in these net zero groups. And now that Republicans have control of the House, it's the focus of a series of oversight committee hearings too. The first one happened back in May and featured the attorneys general of Utah and Alabama as witnesses.

Speaker 1 00:13:00

Here'sSean Reyes, attorney general of Utah. But ever since the signing of the Paris Agreement, there's been anopen conspiracy to bypass Congress using the power of horizontal agreements by key players in our financial system. Some of these groups are Climate Action 100, the Glasgow Alliance for Net Zero, which include the largest asset managers, banks and insurance companies globally. These horizontal organizations seek to use their collective market power over tens of trillions in assets

to force burdensome changes on American companies.

amy: The Democrats witnessed during this hearing, Illinois State Treasurer Michael Frerichs gave a great and completely non-climate related example

of where ESG can safeguard profits. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities that could have a material financial impact on investment performance. For example, if you're investing in apharmaceutical company, it's thinking about whether that company has exposure to massive lawsuits because of its role in the opioid epidemic. Our approach is to integrate material ESG factors into investment decisions along with many other considerations. We are not ignoring traditional financial factors like profitability and credit worthiness. We are integrating more data into our decisions

to give us a better idea of risk and growth prospects. Frerichs also pointed out that limiting the information investors can get about the companies they're investing in

is the exact opposite of a free market idea. This pushback is anti-free market and anti-investor. It is misleading and it is harmful. It harms retirement savers, pensioners, working people, businesses, and it harms America. This coordinated campaign is focused on ESG investing. Most people don't know what ESG is. ESG is data. ESG is simply additional information that investment professionals use to assess risk and return prospects. It is about value, not about values. In order to maximize returns, an investor must be able to manage and mitigate risk. The more data we as investors have, the better informed our decisions are when selecting investments over the long term. ESG is about looking at a wider range of risks and value opportunities.

It could have a material financial impact

on investment performance. Last week, the House Oversight Committee held its second hearing on this subject,

calling on none other than Jason Isaac himself to testify. I'm Jason Isaac. I'm the director of LifePowered, a national initiative of the Texas Public Policy Foundation to raise America's energy IQ. And I live a high carbon lifestyle. And I think the rest of the world should too. That's why I refer to the ESG agenda as the China ESG agenda. It does very little to help Americans. It does everything to help the Chinese Communist Party. And again, making energy expensive, scarce and government controlled. This body, the United States Congress has not ratified the Paris Treaty. It is not the law of the land here in the United States, butto force an American entrepreneur to admit that his company will comply with that

is just mind blowing to me.

Whether the committee will hold a third hearing remains to be seen. I'm not sure the anti-ESG bench of experts rolls that deep. Plus, while these ideas might get folks at an ALEC meeting riled up, they're remarkably unpopular with American voters, including the majority of Republican voters. New Mexico rep Melanie Stansberry

made that point at last week's hearing. What I find particularly strange about this conversation is that over 63% of American voters actually oppose, directly oppose, any kind of government interference in investing strategies. And the vast majority of Republicans oppose it as well. And when you look at the bigger picture, when you look at what the American people are actually asking Congress to do, asking businesses in the private sector to do, almost 70% of Americans are in support of actions to address climate change,

to transition to a clean energy economy. Whether the SEC will be swayed by the antitrust argument remains to be seen.

That's it for this week. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Drilled is an original critical frequency production. Our producer is Sarah Ventre. Sound design, mixing, and mastering are by Peter Duff, who also wrote our original score. Our first amendment attorney is James Wheatman at the First Amendment Project. And the show is reported, written, and hosted by me, Amy Westervelt.

https://newrepublic.com/article/172636/esg-house-oversight-conspiracy

may 11 no lnx

QANON REBOOT

Republicans Are Truly Losing Their Minds Over ESG

Right-wingers at a House Oversight Committee hearing Tuesday insisted this boring investment strategy is some kind of global conspiracy.

Steve Marshall speaks at a podium in front of the Supreme Court building.

Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall, who testified at Tuesday’s hearing on ESG, speaks to members of the press in October 2022.

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee convened a hearing on environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, investing criteria. For over a year now, Republicans have been trying to turn this obscure three-letter acronym into a full-fledged culture war.So far, the right has expressed its complaints about ESG via a word salad whose components don’t share much of a relationship either to reality or one another. This pattern persisted on Tuesday, when the word “cabal” was used at least three times in reference to allegedly “woke” investors.

ESG criteria, in reality, refer to the broad set of data that investors look at to determine a company’s impact on the world and the impact the world might have on it. In other words, it’s not just about whether a company is “good” according to some abstract set of values. It represents another way of factoring risk exposure into investment—something financiers have been doing for centuries.

“Elites from around the globe have formed alliances to coordinate together to implement woke climate policy.”

:{:{}:

The two witnesses Republicans summoned to this week’s committee hearing weren’t economists or investment professionals, who might be familiar with these criteria or risk assessment in general, but attorneys general from Utah and Alabama, respectively: Sean Reyes and Steve Marshall. Whatever ESG actually means, to them and other anti-ESG crusaders, is mostly irrelevant. For those trying to understand their crusade, the hearing showed that it’s best to think of ESG as a canvas onto which the right projects its own plans and anxieties.

If you’ve heard of Marshall, it may well be because he’s spent considerable time since 2020 trying to overturn the results of that year’s presidential election, and shield other Republicans from accountability for spreading lies about it. Both he and Marshall joined fellow red states attorneys general in filing a brief with the Supreme Court supporting Trump’s claims about election fraud. Marshall, for his part, was serving as head of the Rule of Law Defense Fund that year, which sent out robocalls encouraging Trump supporters to flock to the Capitol on January 6.RLDF—whose donors include the Edison Electric Institution and the Judicial Crisis Network—is also a sister organization of the Republican Attorneys General Association, or RAGA, which Marshall was appointed chair of after continuing to deny, in 2022, that Joe Biden won the 2020 election.

:{:{}:

Generous RAGA donors have included Koch Industries, Chevron, Exxon, Fox, andTikTok. ProPublica recently reported that companies that initially withdrew funds from RAGA over its role in the January 6 attack are back, including Amazon, Walmart, and JPMorgan Chase’s PAC. Overall, RAGA revenues jumped 68 percent in 2022.

In his testimony, Marshall—who chairs a secretive organization pushing a clandestine political agenda through undemocratic means—accused a “cabal of global elites” of being “clearly connected through various alliances” to try to force an ESG agenda onto an unwilling public. Reyes similarly accused “woke investors” like Blackrock of being part of an “organized syndicate of pressure” that is engaged in an “open conspiracy to bypass Congress.” Answering big policy questions like decarbonization, he argued, “is the role of the people’s elected representatives in a democracy—including each of you in Congress, state elected officials, and local leaders—not unelected bureaucrats or foreign governments.”

In other words, someone who’s spent the last several years attempting to overturn the results of a democratic election took to the Capitol on Tuesday to accuse an ill-defined set of actors of trying to sidestep democracy by asking companies if climate-fueled droughts, floods, and fires (for instance) might have some impact on their operations.And while claiming only to want investors to adhere to fiduciary duty, Republicans failed to mention that much of Wall Street’s wariness around investing in new fossil fuel production has nothing to do with a “woke” agenda: Before the pandemic, energy companies on the S&P 500 were underperforming every other sector on that index, and had spent a decade lagging behind as they binged cash on rapid drilling through the shale boom. Its fortunes have changed in recent years, but investors and oil and gas industry managers themselves are urging modesty on exploration and production precisely so that they can make more money.

“People don’t like men. People don’t like people with a European background, that sort of thing.”

“Elites from around the globe have formed alliances to coordinate together to implement woke climate policy,” Marshall said in his opening statement. “These schemes undermine our system of government because unelected elites are making policy decisions outside of democratic processes.” The footnote on that sentence in his pre-written testimony references Consumers Research, which is funded by millions of dollars in undisclosed donations and advised by right-wing legal guru Leonard Leo.

Republicans on the committee responded enthusiastically to this opening salvo. Wisconsin Republican Glenn Grothman asked Marshall whether “ESG” might influence decisions over who companies hire or put on corporate boards. “Right now there’s certain disfavored groups in our society,” Grothman mused. “People don’t like men. People don’t like people with a European background, that sort of thing. Could this be something where you’re encouraging businesses not to hire or promote people from certain unfavored groups.” In a moment dripping with irony, Texas Representative Pete Sessions decried “activist government making decisions on behalf of free people” in service of his larger point, supporting efforts to limit financial institutions’ decision-making power—and even what kind of data can be made available to them—in order to curb the spread of ESG.

It would be a fool’s errand to try to find much coherence in the right’s screeds against supposedly woke investors—who don’t really seem to exist. But today’s Oversight hearing might have accidentally illustrateda good rule of thumb: Whatever Republicans accuse the “ESG movement” of doing is something they’re probably already doing themselves.

Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff

Kate Aronoff is a staff writer at The New Republic.

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no lnx many

https://newrepublic.com/article/167550/desantis-anti-esg-movement

Kate Aronoff

August 29, 2022

CRT —> ESG?

The Deranged Demands of the “Anti-ESG” Movement

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is the latest Republican to claim woke capitalists are discriminating against fossil fuels.

Making good on a long-promised threat, Texas State Comptroller Glenn Hegar last week announced a list of 10 financial institutions and more than 300 funds his office deems to be “boycotting energy companies,” a.k.a. fossil fuels. Accordingly, state entities—including pension funds for teachers and government workers—will be required to divest from these financial institutions as the state moves to implement Senate Bill 13, which Governor Greg Abbott signed into law last year. Under the same bill, Texas has since September required any financial company entering into new contracts or renewing contracts with state entities to affirm they do not and will not “boycott energy companies.”

Since the Texas “energy discrimination elimination” law passed last year, similar efforts to fight what’s known as “environmental, social, and governance,” or ESG, criteria in investing have cropped up in at least 15 other state legislatures and passed in four. Republicans have begun to embrace the fight as an election issue, as well, turning “ESG” into a base-rallying bogeyman much like CRT, or “critical race theory.” The conservative argument in each case, as I’ve previously reported, is that any decrease in investment in oil, gas, and coal is a form of discrimination.

“You’ve seen a rise of something called ESG—environment, social, governance—where they will grade different companies based on how they’re performing on those metrics,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis says over ominous music in a recent video, warning that “masters of the universe” are using their “economic power to impose policies on the country that they could not … at the ballot box.” The State Board of Administration that DeSantis serves on moved this week to ban that body from considering “social, political, or ideological interests” in decision-making about Florida pensions. As the anti-ESG movement racks up state-level wins, its biggest payoff may come at the national level: kneecapping U.S. financial regulators’ ability to respond to the climate crisis.

Officials from several of the same Republican-controlled states where anti-ESG efforts have taken root are rallying to stop a proposed Securities and Exchange Commission rule that would require publicly listed companies to disclose their greenhouse gas emissions. The comment period for the rule has just ended, but not before Republican attorneys general from 21 states filed their opposition, claiming the rule oversteps the SEC’s authority and runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in West Virginia v. EPA.

The attorneys general claim specifically that requiring publicly listed companies to disclose emissions would violate the “major questions doctrine,” the novel legal concept that the court’s right-wing majority, in its West Virginia v. EPA opinion, more or less invited litigants to use in challenging the administrative state. This doctrine holds that the court should review the executive branch’s interpretation of congressional statutes when such interpretations constitute questions of serious political or economic significance.

Unsurprisingly, then, the attorneys general’s rhetoric about the proposed rule has been noticeably hyperbolic, suggesting a rule merely requiring companies to disclose information to the SEC, as they do regularly, is nothing less than all-out war on American identity. “The woke left is going full throttle in their mission to change every facet of American life,” West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey said, “and erode our democratic institutions to suit their liberal agenda. The Biden administration wants to radically transform the SEC and other agencies run by unelected bureaucrats and make them champions of climate change.”

The comment sets the stage for a legal battle that could thwart the SEC’s and potentially other agencies’ ability to reckon with physical reality as temperatures rise. “The door may close on that before anyone realizes what’s going on,” says Sarah Haan, a law professor at Washington & Lee University. In addition to the major questions doctrine, the new rule is also likely challenged on First Amendment grounds. Republican attorneys general raised the possibility in their comment as well. If so, Haan says, it could open a “Pandora’s box” of constitutional challenges to securities regulation in general.

There are a number of ways to insulate climate-related financial regulations from legal challenges. “The SEC should be really clear about the purpose of the rule,” Haan argues, and—per its mandate—articulate emissions disclosures as protecting the interests of both investors and the public. “The climate risk rule is a continuation of long-standing securities regulation,” she adds. “It’s not radical or new, it’s just a continuation of the kinds of security regulation that we’ve always had,” including corporate disclosures that cover the many other sorts of risks investors might face. Madison Condon, a professor at Boston University School of Law, adds that using the protections around systemic risk established by Dodd-Frank—in some ways a more natural fit for evaluating climate change’s impact on the financial system—could provide additional protections for prospective new rules at the Treasury and Federal Reserve.

Time may be running out to get those up and running, though. Should Republicans take Congress and the White House come 2024, they could both tear up regulations enacted at the end of the Biden administration and prevent the federal government from issuing rules that are “substantially similar” in the future. The Trump administration did exactly that. Within his first year in office, Republicans used the Clinton-era statute to target 130 executive orders, Cabinet-level agency decisions, Congressional Review Acts, and even bills that would impact older laws. Seventy of those nixed rules related to the environment.

Fossil fuel companies and dark-money groups have funded the recent attacks on ESG, as well as those on other efforts to regulate polluters.The Republican Attorneys General Association has accepted millions of dollars from fossil fuel interests, including a $100,000 donation last year from the American Petroleum Institute. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has taken plenty of fossil fuel cash, too, and has heartily backed theS.B. 13 pushwhile working to export it as a model for other states. Funders for the lesser-known State Financial Officers Foundation—a network of state treasurers that’s been pushing anti-ESG measures around the country and opposed former Deputy Treasury Secretary Sarah Bloom Raskin’s nomination to the Federal Reserve—include a hodgepodge of financial institutions, including some targeted by the Texas bill and whose websites extoll their commitment to ESG principles.

Enterprising grifters are also cashing in on the trend. “Anti-woke” money manager Strive ($DRLL), which launched this year with backing from Peter Thiel, recently announced it has $250 million in assets under management, building on a $20 million seed funding round in May.As Alex Kotch pointed out for the Center for Media and Democracy, which first reported anti-ESG efforts late last year, Hegar introduced Strive founder Vivek Ramaswamey at the American Legislative Exchange Council’s annual conference in July, where he talked about his book Woke Inc: Inside Corporate America’s Social Justice Scam.

The battle over ESG is on some level one between different arms of capital with different political leanings; the fossil fuel companies helping back anti-ESG efforts inordinately lean right and have an obvious interest in wanting to keep as much investor cash as possible parked in their industry. Banks and asset managers tend to vote blue and take a longer-term view of fiduciary responsibility, looking to insulate returns on their broad portfolios from the considerable financial risks posed by climate change.

Condon also sees it as bigger than that. Asset managers’ prominence, she explained, is a relatively recent development. After the financial crisis, low interest rates sent institutional investors searching for the kinds of steady yields they were used to getting from U.S. Treasury securities. Asset managers—with affordable passive investment funds—were ready and eager to provide. Blackrocknow controls a whopping $10 trillion of assets, up from just $1 trillion in 2009. Altogether, the Big Three asset managers (Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street) own roughly 20 percent of the average company listed on the S&P 500. Those shares give a small handful of companies considerable sway over a broad swath of corporate America—and can in practice allow them to override the decisions of the executives who manage firms. “This has really become a fight, also, between the CEO class and the asset manager class,” Condon said. It’s the CEOs, Haan notes, who control where corporations spend their lobbying efforts. “They stand in a position to say to candidates and party officials, ‘It’s really important for us to kill ESG.’ We’re starting to see politicians stepping up on a multipronged assault on ESG from all angles,” she said.

The purpose of laws like S.B.13 and their copycats is to prevent companies like Blackrock from using their sizable share positions to enforce a “woke” green agenda, mainly through their votes on shareholder resolutions. That’s why Texas officials have accused Blackrock of “boycotting energy companies,” despite the $108 billion the company has invested in Texan energy companies, which would seem to disqualify it.

Jason Isaac, director of the Texas Public Policy Project’s Life:Powered Initiative, who’s led the group’santi-ESG work, says Blackrockis “using that investment muscle to make that board adopt resolutions that are contrary to the best interest of their business” and “is more concerned about stakeholders than shareholders, and that’s not capitalism.” While they tend to behave similarly, Blackrock’s main competitors—Vanguard and State Street—were not included on the comptroller’s list. Asked why, a representative from Hegar’s office said the companies “must have responded” to their questionnaire, “and they must have succeeded in asserting an ordinary business purpose,” as opposed to an ideological one.

Blackrock has criticized the list, calling it “anti-competitive.” In an emailed statement, a Blackrock representative said that “elected and appointed public officials have a duty to act in the best interests of the people they serve. Politicizing state pension funds, restricting access to investments, and impacting the financial returns of retirees is not consistent with that duty.”

Ironically, the Texas comptroller’s office did not evaluate how firms actually voted in shareholder meetings when compiling its list, due “to the amount of voting data required to be reviewed.” If it had, it might have found that Blackrock backed fewer than half of environmental and social shareholder resolutions last year and plans to support “proportionately fewer” this year, according to a recent commentary the company published on its investment stewardship approach, “as we do not consider them to be consistent with our clients’ long-term financial interests.”

Anti-ESG efforts have also taken aim at a number of investor-led climate initiatives, including Climate 100 and the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, comprising the Net Zero Banking Alliance and Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative. In Arizona, Attorney General Mark Brnovich has launched an investigation into whether Climate 100 violates antitrust rules. “Wall Street banks and money managers are bragging about their coordinated efforts to choke off investment in energy,” he wrote this March in The Wall Street Journal.

For climate advocates critical of the often vague label of ESG, all of this is profoundly ironic: Banks and asset managers continue to pour prodigious amounts of money into fossil fuel companies. One-third of the climate-themed funds analyzed by the U.K. think-tank Common Wealth in 2020 held oil- and gas-producing companies. As European regulators are in the midst of trying to crack down on what financial products can use the ESG label, nearly a quarter may not qualify, according to the research firm Morningstar. The German headquarters of Deutsche Bank and that of its asset management arm were recently raided by authorities for misleading investors about how “green” various investment products they offer really are.

Anti-ESG measures stateside may well come back to bite the states passing them. Texas’s law barring public contracts with blacklisted companies is already estimated to have cost the state between $303 and $532 million, according to a recent study by Daniel Garrett and Ivan Ivanov, of the University of Pennsylvania and the Federal Reserve Board, respectively. That figure, they explain, accounts for just one way in which the contracting bill has cost taxpayers: big municipal bond underwriters fleeing the state. Because no state entity can enter into new contracts with firms that don’t sign a fossil fuel loyalty pledge, cities and school districts looking to raise funds on the municipal bond markets—for things like new schools or upgrading water systems—have had to seek out new partners and underwriters, generally smaller firms that can’t offer rates that are competitive and may be struggling to take on new business from the companies that walked away from Texas as a result of the bill. On average, Ivanov and Garrett find that the law saddles state entities with paying interest rates some 15 basis points higher than they would otherwise. As of the start of this year, Blackrock managed $10 billion worth of bonds issued by the state of Texas and its various municipalities, which won’t be impacted by S.B. 13 since those contracts already exist. (Hegar’s office declined to comment on the study.)

Other impacts could be far greater, leaving pensioners exposed to the many ways climate change will hit the economy—and potentially their own retirement savings—in years to come. “I think it’s already having a chilling effect,” Condon says of financial institutions’ willingness to address climate issues. Among the criteria Hegar’s office considered in compiling its blacklist was the “extent of engagement of the board of directors on perceived climate risk.” Firms that even consider the effect devastating droughts, wildfires, and storms might have on their portfolio, that is, could stand to lose business just for looking into it. “This is definitely one of the many disincentives for Blackrock or more actively managed funds to take climate change seriously,” Condon says. “You cannot look at our economy and think we’re prepared for climate change.”

Kate Aronoff @KateAronoff

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badash AN 9 22

Heritage Foundation is ranked as the third most influential think tank – left or right – in the U.S. A right-wing D.C. organization, it’s where Donald Trump went to deliver a speech in April when he was trying to reposition himself as someone who was getting ready to run for president again, this time with “policies.”

Policies are what once made the Heritage Foundation the jewel of the conservative movement. It provided Ronald Reagan with the backbone of his body of work that transformed the American right into what it was until Trump took it over. It’s now home to at least four former top Trump administration officials, including former Vice President Mike Pence.

Critics on both sides of the aisle overnight were stunned and outraged when the new head of the Heritage Foundation, Dr. Kevin Roberts, applauded Italy’s election this weekend of a fascist, Giorgia Meloni, to be its new prime minister.

“Italy’s far-right coalition led by Meloni wins election, exit polls say,” is the headline at European news agency France 24, calling her a “neo-fascist.

Here in the U.S., ABC News’ headline reads: “How a party of neo-fascist roots won big in Italy.”

“A century after Benito Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, which brought the fascist dictator to power, Meloni is poised to lead Italy’s first far-right-led government since World War II and Italy’s first woman premier,” the article, from the Associated Press makes clear.

It also makes clear Meloni’s fascist focus: “Yes to the natural family. No to the LGBT lobby. Yes to sexual identity. No to gender ideology,” the AP says she “thundered” at a rally.

The Heritage Foundation has assets of around $400 million. Its latest annual report, 2021, is titled, “Always on Offense.” The cover boasts a flattering quote praising the organization from former Trump Secretary of State and possible 2024 presidential hopeful Mike Pompeo.

Dr. Kevin Roberts leads Heritage. He’s the former CEO of the far-right wing Texas Public Policy Foundation, based in Austin, Texas.

TPPF has received funding from Koch Industries, is a big supporter of school vouchers, and an even bigger supporter of climate change denialism.

Its Fueling Freedom Project, it says, is working to “Explain the forgotten moral case for fossil fuels.”

Back in 2016 Texas GOP Gov. Greg Abbott proposed nine major changes to the U.S. Constitution. He chose to make his announcement at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Those proposals could have led to the elimination of many federal LGBTQ protections, including same-sex marriage.

Dr. Roberts is a former president of Wyoming Catholic College. In 2015 he decided to opt out of accepting federal financial aid, citing the school’s religious beliefs against LGBTQ people as part of the reason.

“Roberts said that his university loves all people and has charity towards all, but they would have problems with the admissions and employment of transgender individuals or people with a same-sex sexual orientation,” Fox News reported at the time.

So perhaps it’s unsurprising that Roberts celebrated Italy’s election of a fascist leader with a strong anti-LGBTQ agenda Sunday evening – urging conservatives to fuel more elections of people like Meloni.

“If exit polls are right, then conservatives will come to power in Italy, just weeks after conservatives in Sweden won,” he tweeted, glossing over the fascistic aspects of their conservatism.

“This can be a trend,” he urged, “conservatives everywhere need to define the choice as what it is—US vs THEM, everyday people vs globalist elites, who’ve shown they hate us.” xxx

[twt]

roberts was highly criticized, even by fellow conservatives.

Tom Nichols, a staff writer at The Atlantic who is the popular and now retired U.S. Naval War College professor and an expert on Russia, nuclear weapons, and national security, blasted Roberts.

“The president of a DC think tank explains how he’s just a regular guy helping the little people against the globalists, and not all aligned with a political movement that trades in hateful rhetoric,” tweeted Nichols, a Never Trump conservative.

Former Bloomberg Opinion columnist Noah Smith who writes about economics at Substack mocked Roberts.

“‘Globalist elites’? Man, you have a PhD and you’re the president of a think tank that fights for free trade. Who do you think you’re kidding??” he tweeted.

Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the right wing Manhattan Institute, slammed Roberts’ remarks.

“I’d just like a party that stands for free markets, less government, originalist judges, strong defense, and against woke excess. Count me out with this Pat Buchanan-style tinfoil hat populism,” he tweeted, referring to the far-right anti-immigration former Nixon-Ford-Reagan advisor.

A former editor for the right wing Cato Institute also criticized Roberts.

“When the president of your think tank is cheering on the electoral victories of actual fascism, that’s probably a sign it’s time to resign from the organization if you’re an employee, or pull your dollars if you’re a donor. American conservatism mustn’t continue down this path,” warned Aaron Ross Powell.

“Recovering libertarian” writer and editor Jay Stooksberry also mocked Roberts.

“Careful, Kev. If I saw somebody with the title ‘Ph.D. and CEO of one of the largest, most influential think tanks in D.C.’, I’d assume they were one of the ‘global elite’. Us-versus-them populism is some raunchy, anti-intellectual, and dangerous thinking, my dude.”

Conservatives weren’t the only ones criticizing the Heritage Foundation head, with some seeing his “globalist elites” remarks as antisemitic.

“American fascists, crawling out of their holes,” wrote Jay Bookman, author and award-winning journalist.

“We see you and your cutesy code words. You want to embrace fascism? We will stop you and your ilk. Our democracy will destroy your fascism,” David Sugarman, an Oregon attorney, wrote.

Writer and director David Avallone did not mince words in response to Roberts’ remarks.

“L’Shanah Tovah, you absolute fucking Nazi scumbag,” he tweeted. “Stop being a pants shitting coward. Just say ‘Jews’ when you mean Jews.”

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Fani Willis:

On Tuesday,subpoenas were served to seven Trump World confederates:Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), who also phoned Raffensperger on behalf of the brooding soon-to-be-ex-commander in chief; Trump's television attorney Rudy Giuliani and his associate Jenna Ellis; coup architectJohn Eastman (who was behind the coordinated campaign to send fraudulent slates of electors to Washington from multiple swing states that Trump lost); as well as three lesser-known lawyers – Jacki Pick Deason, Kenneth Chesebro, and Cleta Mitchell – the latter of whom was present for Trump's clandestine chat with Raffensperger.

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off bs tppf

jacki brings expertise to the Life: Powered initiative at the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Currently the host of The Jacki Daily Show, she has had an impressive career in energy, law, and politics.

Most recently, Deason served as Chief Operating Officer for a free market think tank specializing in health care policy, entitlement reform, and energy policy. Previously, she served many years as legal counsel on Capitol Hill to the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Constitution and the former Ranking Member of the Commercial and Administrative Law Subcommittee, advising on the oversight of federal agencies. Prior to her career in Washington, she worked as a litigator and as an Assistant Vice President for a national bank.

Prior to her legal career, Jacki served as the Public Relations Director for a statewide political organization.

Jacki studied Economics, Spanish, and World History at Marshall University (Society of Yeager Scholars), Oxford University in the United Kingdom,and the University of Zaragoza in Spain. She is an alumna of the Vanderbilt University Law School, where she served as the President of the law school’s Federalist Society chapter.

Jacki is from the Ohio River Valley, where the shale runs deep. She descends from a long line of energy workers, including roughnecks, railroaders, coal miners, and nuclear energy specialists.

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this is not even part of planning the coup so much as aa PR ploy to counter original story that got a good bit of coverage (not sure how broad)

how is TPPF so central?

omg yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-2655520362/

no lnx

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'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021

The right-wing Claremont Institute published a report in mid-October 2020 that gamed out a scenario where Donald Trump would remain in office through an alliance between law enforcement and militant extremists.

The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.

"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."

Most of the predictions in the report, titled "79 Days to Inauguration," did not come to fruition, such as the authors' belief that some states' voting results would be fatally tainted by cyber attacks and suspicious fires, and left-wing mobs did not converge on Washington, D.C., to incite violence, and police did not execute antifa/Black Lives Matter leaders as part of a federal operation.

"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."

The report was produced in response to the bipartisan Transition Integrity Project's (TIP) exercise on "Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition," which considered the prospect of Trump refusing to concede an election loss and made recommendations for avoiding a crisis -- which seems to be the opposite intent of the Claremont Institute's exercise.

"To the extent that the Claremont-TPPF report offers recommendations, they are mostly focused on how to emerge victorious from the chaos, including preparation 'for destructive urban unrest [with] potential targets includ[ing] ballot counting facilities, government buildings, especially state capitols and city halls, as well as television and radio studios,'" Vanderbrouk writes. "The Claremont task force seems either resigned to—or perhaps energized by—the view that 'prudent steps are likely to be spun as preparations for a military takeover or coup and may result in negative consequences either way.'"

"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear:do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."

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https://www.the**bulwark**.com/notes-on-an-authoritarian-conspiracy-inside-the-claremont-institutes-79-days-to-inauguration-report/

...Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants includeKevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

The distinguished wargamers.....

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https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/03/28/revealed-the-biggest-voter-suppressor-youve-never-heard-of/

no lnx many

da Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, a major funder of rightwing groups promoting the Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election, is also pushing voter suppression policies in states across the country,the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) has learned.

Based in Maryland, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation (“the Foundation”) is led by its namesake, the daughter of Shelby Cullom Davis, who made a fortune on investments and insurance and once chaired the right-leaning Heritage Foundation. The Foundation disclosed net assets totaling $1.5 billion on its 2020 IRS filing obtained by CMD.

In analyzing the Foundation’s latest IRS filings between 2018 and 2020, CMD found that it gave $3.7 million to 13 voter suppression groups. Many of the grants are designated for “election integrity”—rightwing code words for restricting voting rights.

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In addition, the Foundation’s IRS filings for those three years detail $24 million in contributions to DonorsTrust, the preferred donor conduit of the Koch political network. DonorsTrust pumped over $137 million into rightwing groups in 2020 alone—including millions to the same voter suppression groups funded by the Foundation—according to a CMD analysis of its last IRS filing.

Here are the voter suppression groups the Foundation supported between 2018 and 2020, presented in descending order of funding granted:

Lawyers Democracy Fund — $625,000

Over the three-year period (2018–20), the Lawyers Democracy Fund (LDF) received a total of $625,000 in Foundation grants for its “election integrity project.” LDF’s IRS filings show that the Foundation’s $200,000 grants in both 2018 and 2019 accounted for its entire revenue those years.

The Foundation’s 2019 IRS filing states that the $200,000 is for “educational initiatives, policy research activities and public interest litigation efforts with respect to the vital issues of electoral system integrity throughout the United States.” Its 2020 grant of $225,000 is similarly worded.

LDF President Harvey Tettlebaum was the former president of the Republican National Lawyers Association (2003–06) and LDF Secretary Elliot Berke currently serves as Georgia’s special assistant attorney general and on the Board of Advisors of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

LDF advocates for strict voter ID laws and opposes all mail-in ballots and mandatory voter registration—policies that make it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote.

Much of LDF’s public-facing work is in the courts. In January it helped overturn Pennsylvania’s no-excuse absentee voting law in Commonwealth Court and filed an amicus brief with Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill.) in the Supreme Court case Berger v. North Carolina State Conference of the NAACP, arguing in favor of giving the state legislature the power to intervene to defend the constitutionality of North Carolina’s voter ID law.

LDF and two other grant recipients, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and the Honest Elections Project, also filed briefs in the case, which was argued on March 21. The groups are trying to get the Supreme Court to embrace the “independent state legislature doctrine,” a fringe theory that resurfaced during attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, by arguing that only state legislatures can control federal elections—without any limitations from state courts or constitutions.

As the ranking member on the U.S. House Administration Committee, Davis leads Republicans in their Faith in Elections Project to combat efforts by Democrats to safeguard elections and expand access to the ballot box.

American Civil Rights Union — $550,000

The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU), rebranded as the American Constitutional Rights Union in 2019, received $550,000 in grants from the Foundation for its voter suppression efforts. ACRU had $810,000 in revenue as of its last IRS filing and is led by Lori Roman, ALEC’s former executive director.

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ACRU received grants of $125,000 in 2018 and $150,000 in 2019 for “election integrity” and $300,000 in 2020 for a project to “protect elderly and military votes” and “voter educational initiatives.” The longtime voter suppression group launched its Protect Elderly Votes Project in April 2020 “to protect seniors from those who may wish to defraud them of their vote.”

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ACRU’s Project “applauded” the Racine Sheriff in Wisconsin for identifying what he claimed were eight cases of voter fraud at a nursing home in the area. The sheriff recommended criminal charges against five election commissioners, but prosecutors have not acted due to a lack of evidence.

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Two national leaders of misinformation about widespread voter fraud serve on ACRU’s policy board: Ken Blackwell, chairman of the MAGA Voter Suppression Center, and Hans von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative.

Judicial Education Project / The 85 Fund — $450,000

The Foundation granted the Judicial Education Project—now rebranded as The 85 Fund—$450,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives in various states.” The large grant likely went to the fund’s Honest Elections Project (HEP).

HEP is a dark money voter suppression group formed in February 2020 by Leonard Leo‘s network. Known as Trump’s “judge whisperer,” Leo worked behind the scenes during the Trump administration to organize a rightwing takeover of the U.S. Supreme Court.

In addition to pushing misinformation about voter fraud, HEP has placed ads opposing mail-in balloting and advocated for purging voter rolls. It is also developing model voter suppression policies for ALEC, and organized at least two multi-day voter suppression summits for ALEC members preceding its Annual Meeting, along with last year’s States and Nation Policy Summit.

CMD obtained memos that HEP distributed to ALEC members at the summit, loaded with rightwing spin on Congress’s Freedom to Vote Act, state election laws, and polling from HEP Action claiming that West Virginia voters oppose the Freedom to Vote Act and ending the Senate filibuster.

Blackwell and HEP’s Executive Director Jason Snead, a former senior policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation (where he developed the Heritage Election Fraud Database with Spakovsky), were among the speakers at the first voter suppression summit.

American Legislative Exchange Council — $440,000

The Foundation granted ALEC a total of $550,000 in 2020, with $440,000 of that designated exclusively for “accurate and verifiable voter rolls: an American public awareness campaign.” ALEC’s revenue for 2020 was just under $8 million.

In the past year, CMD has repeatedly blown the whistle on ALEC for falsely claiming that it does not work on voting issues. In September 2021, CMD obtained and published a video of CEO Lisa Nelson enumerating the states where ALEC was working on voting issues and stating that it would outsource actual model policy development.

“We don’t have model policy,” Nelson told the Council of National Policy audience. “We will be developing that at the Honest Elections Project [seminar]—through them.” ALEC held voter suppression summits with HEP at both of its national conferences in 2021.

In April 2021, The New York Times published details of a $24-million Heritage Action for America voter suppression plan (obtained by Documented) that described its efforts to work closely with ALEC to move legislation in “crucial states.”

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) also said at the time that he had spoken with state legislators through ALEC about passing state bills that restrict voting rights and impose greater legislative control over how elections are run. CMD research found that more than 100 Republican politicians connected to ALEC in just six battleground states were lead sponsors or co-sponsors of those bills.

When a broad coalition of more than 300 civil rights and democracy reform groups called for ALEC’s corporate members to leave the organization in June 2021 because of its voter suppression efforts, ALEC’s response was swift and righteous.

“ALEC doesn’t have ‘template legislation’ on voting because ALEC doesn’t work on voting issues,” its CEO Lisa Nelson wrote in a Real Clear Politics opinion piece. “The allegation is a literal fabrication.”

And, in a letter obtained and published by CMD, Nelson told ALEC members that “the assertions included in the coalition letter are categorically false…. ALEC does not create or promote policy models on election reform/security.”

The Foundation grant to ALEC—specifically earmarked for voting work—provides the latest evidence that ALEC is lying to both the public and its corporate members.

Public Interest Legal Foundation — $300,000

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF) received a total of $300,000 in 2019 and 2020 for “public interest litigation activities in connection with preserving the constitutional framework of the American elections project” and “election integrity.”

PILF is led by J. Christian Adams, who has moved the group to focus on the threat of “voter fraud,” despite lack of evidence that this is a widespread problem. PILF has filed numerous lawsuits across the country with the goal of purging state voter rolls, and saw its revenue climb to $3.8 million in 2020.

Its Board Chair Cleta Mitchell is a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute, where she chairs its Election Integrity Network. She participated in the infamous call in which Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn Biden’s victory in the state.

Blackwell, Spakovsky, and insurrectionist John Eastman are also PILF board members.

Texas Public Policy Foundation — $300,000

In 2019 and 2020, the Foundation distributed grants totaling $300,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) for “election integrity.”

With revenues of $17.7 million in 2020, TPPF launched an Election Integrity Project in March 2020 that spread the myth of widespread voter fraud and helped Texas Republicans put the right spin on the voter suppression bills passed there in 2021.

TPPF also spread misinformation about the For the People Act, the federal voter protection legislation that has stalled out in Congress.

Thomas More Society — $250,000

The Thomas More Society (TMS) received $250,000 in 2020 for its “election integrity initiatives.” The rightwing litigation outfit’s 2019 and 2020 IRS filings show its revenues almost doubled in that one year—from $9.6 million to $17.4 million.

TMS’s Amistad Project has played a key role in challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election alongside rightwing allies in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

TMS is a proponent of the election subversion strategy of giving state legislatures (such as in Michigan) the ability to certify electors.

Earlier this month TMS also released a report on its review of the 2020 election in Wisconsin, where it claimed it found evidence of voter fraud. The organization shared an office with former Wisconsin Supreme Court Judge Michael Gableman, who was hired by State Assembly Speaker Robin Vos (R) to conduct an election review.

Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund — $200,000

The Foundation distributed $200,000 in 2020 to the Eagle Forum Educational and Legal Defense Fund (EFELDF) for an “election integrity project.” EFELDF’s 2020 IRS filing is not publicly available but it brought in $1.3 million in funds in 2019.

EFELDF’s activities around elections and voting appear to center on filing amicus briefs such as the one in support of U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly in Kelly v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, which asked the U.S. Supreme Court to forbid Pennsylvania from certifying its 2020 election results because the legislature allowed for no-excuse absentee voting.

Virginia Institute for Public Policy — $160,000

The Virginia Institute for Public Policy (VIPP) received $60,000 in 2019 for “election integrity programs” and $100,000 in 2020 for “the Tuesday Morning Group coalition impact and election integrity program.”

The organization’s latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) details the smallest total revenue—$141,501—among all of the Foundation’s grant recipients.

On its website, Virginia Institute claims its Tuesday Morning Group“has over 1,000 participants representing more than 260 organizations.” It’s unclear whether the Virginia Institute-led Virginia Fair Elections Coalition is an offshoot of this group or the same one but with a different name.

Virginia Institute published The Virginia Model on “election integrity” earlier this month, detailing an approach that Lynn Taylor, president of VIPP and chair of Virginia Fair Elections, credits with helping the GOP realize massive gains in the 2021 elections.

In listing the “experts” it consulted with, the Virginia Fair Elections Coalition cites J. Christian Adams from PILF, Cleta Mitchell from Conservative Partnership Institute, Hans von Spakovsky from the Heritage Foundation, Ken Cuccinelli from Election Transparency Initiative, and Chris Marston, general counsel for the Republican Party of Virginia. The Thomas More Society’s Amistad Project is also listed as a “partner.”

As a guest on Mitchell’s Who’s Counting podcast,Taylor and her host recently touted the efficacy of the Virginia model in achieving voter suppression goals.

Abby Spencer Moffat, the Foundation’s CEO, sits on VIPP’s board of directors.

Judicial Watch — $150,000

The Foundation gave Judicial Watch $150,000 in 2020 for “election integrity initiatives.” Tom Fitton leads the group, which reported $110 million (2020) in revenue and, like PILF, has focused its voter suppression efforts on purging voter rolls in the states.

The same year it received the grant, Judicial Watch published a “study” making dubious claims “that 353 U.S. counties had 1.8 million more registered voters than eligible voting-age citizens.”

While not directly addressing the study, the Brennan Center calls large-scale purges “risky because of the sheer numbers of records involved,” and cautions against using “third-party information” to remove voters because it does “not come directly from a voter” and “will inevitably include errors.”

Judicial Watch has also litigated to purge state voter rolls and filed amicus briefs supporting voting rights restrictions.

Americans of Faith — $100,000

The Foundation gave Americans of Faith (AOF) $100,000 in 2020 for an “election integrity project.” AOF has no web presence beyond a Facebook page that hasn’t been active since May 2020.

Its latest publicly available IRS filing (2019) shows that it brought in $1.1 million for the mission of “voter education.”

AOF is led by Ralph Reed, founder and president of the dark money group Faith & Freedom Coalition and a GOP operative. Faith & Freedom is a Christian right electioneering outfit that works to turn out Republican voters.

FreedomWorks Foundation — $100,000

FreedomWorks Foundation received $100,000 in 2020 “to be allocated exclusively toward the election integrity program.” Despite bringing in $8.3 million in revenue that year, FreedomWorks Foundation does not have a web presence.

Its larger sister organization, FreedomWorks, is a major rightwing group that launched the National Election Protection Initiative in March 2021. Led by Mitchell, it has focused on opposing federal voting rights bills, backing voter suppression legislation, and building state “election integrity” infrastructure in the swing states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

In 2020, the year its Foundation received the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation grant, FreedomWorks held “Election Protection” trainings for activists to counter “mail-in ballot fraud.”

Ballotpedia — $50,000

The Foundation granted Ballotpedia $50,000 in 2019 for “general support and the Election Integrity Content Project.” Officially registered with the IRS as the Lucy Burns Institute, Ballotpedia brings in over $8 million in revenue, and is run by rightwing operative Leslie Graves.

The group publishes pages on “election integrity” and “voter suppression” that may be part of the Foundation-funded content project.

About David Armiak

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COVIDenial Executive Summary

COVID-19 Denial

COVID-19 & Climate Comparisons

Give Me Freedom or Give Me COVID

Climate Deniers & the ‘China Virus’

Climate Deniers & Coronavirus ‘Cures’

COVID-19 & Plastic Promoters

COVID Deniers & Attacks on Renewables

COVID-19 Denier Attacks on WHO

COVID Denier Conspiracy Theories

Alex Epstein

“Power Hour: 4 Ideas About COVID-19 You Won’t Hear Anywhere Else,” via Alex Epstein on SoundCloud, March 18

Alex Epstein: [00:02:05] Our biggest ally in the fight against Coronavirus is the fossil fuel industry.

Life:Powered/ Texas Public Policy Foundation

April 2, 2020 (Via TPPF/Life: Powered Newsletter, on file at DeSmog: “Facts: Powered — Surviving Coronavirus? Thank Fossil Fuels)

If you’re surviving the coronavirus, you have fossil fuels to thank. After the coronavirus subsides, our politicians’ priorities when it comes to energy must change....

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desmog

Life:Powered

Background

Life:Powered (LifePowered.org) is a project of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) designed to “ensure that Americans continue to benefit from abundant, reliable, safe, and clean energy” and to “reframe the discussion about energy sources” including fossil fuels. [1]

In February 2018, TPPF brought onBernard McNamee to lead the Life:Powered project and also to head TPPF’s Center for Tenth Amendment Action. According to its 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was originally TPPF’s “Fueling Freedom” project, which launched in 2015 “to combat the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.” [2], [3]

McNamee most recently worked as deputy general counsel for energy policy under Secretary Rick Perry at the Department of Energy and has also advised Texas senator Ted Cruz. [2]

“In 2018, we’ll be taking the project to a new level, expanding it to cover every aspect of the policies that promote abundant, reliable, and affordable energy to power modern life,” the report’s message from the President and the Chair noted. [3]

TPPF’sKathleen Hartnett-White was director of the Fueling Freedom project and co-authored the same-titled book with Heritage Foundationeconomist Stephen Moore. White is a senior fellow of the Life:Powered project. [4]

Stance on Climate Change

May 4, 2018

Life:Powered promotes articles critical of a carbon tax as a solution to climate change, generally linking to research done by TPPF. One example is an article by Vance Ginn that links to research byJohn Cristyto suggest “there’s little conclusive evidence to prove that carbon dioxide emissions cause environmental harm.” [5]

The Life:Powered article concludes: [5]

“Finally, perhaps most importantly, there is little to no evidence that there is a need to reduce carbon emissions in this country. For all of these reasons, and many more, the proposed carbon tax should be whole-heartedly rejected.”

2018

“Human flourishing depends on energy use, often in invisible and unnoticed ways. A reliable energy supply can feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and ensure a prosperous economic future for society. It promotes freedom and independence around the world and right here at home,” the Life:Powered websitereads. [6]

The Texas Public Policy Foundation features a“Life:Powered”playlist in its YouTube channel that promotes “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels” by Alex Epstein, as well as a panel presentation by the CO2 Coalition promoting the supposed benefits of boosting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. View the playlist below:..[vid] docs]

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The following funding values are for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the parent organization of Life:Powered.

View the attached spreadsheet for more details on the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s funding by year (.xlsx). [7]

Donor and Year Total

Pew Charitable Trusts $5,488,454

Donors Capital Fund $3,530,848

DonorsTrust $1,369,616

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation $1,137,624

Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation $980,000

Searle Freedom Trust $645,000

Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation $548,500

Jaquelin Hume Foundation $490,001

State Policy Network $378,900

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $315,000

The Roe Foundation $287,000

The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation $275,000

Armstrong Foundation $160,000

Castle RockFoundation $125,000

William H. Donner Foundation $110,000

JM Foundation $105,000

Cato Institute $100,000

Exxon Mobil $100,000

Heartland Institute $100,000

Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice $62,000

Charles Koch Institute $47,623

The Robertson-Finley Foundation $42,500

PhRMA $35,000

National Christian Charitable Foundation $27,500

Walton FamilyFoundation $25,000

Americans for Tax Reform Foundation $25,000

The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation $11,000

Atlas Economic Research Foundation $9,500

Grand Total $16,531,066

990 Forms]

key People

Michael Nasi — Reportedly heading the Life-Powered effort, as of August 2018.[8]

Michael Nasiis General Counsel of Balanced Energy for Texas, a “coalition of energy consumers, producers, and providers” that includes major coal and energy companies, related advocacy groups, and groups supplying the energy industry such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), American Electric Power, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, andUnion Pacific Railroad. [9]

When President Donald Trump issued an executive order to revise or rescind the Clean Power Plan, Nasi described itas “a crucial win for Texas and the nation.” He is also a partner of the law firm Jackson Walker LLP where he founded the firm’s “Climate Change and Carbon Management group.” [10], [11]

Jason Isaac — Senior Manager and Distinguished Fellow of Life:Powered as of April 2019

Former State Representative for Hays and Blanco counties in the Texas Hill Country. According to SourceWatch, Isaac received $2,000 fromKochPACto his Jason Isaac Campaign in 2018.[20]

Bernard McNamee — Initially listed as project lead until moving to a position at DOE. [2]

Bernard L. McNamee was initially listed as project lead for the Life:Powered project in February 2018, however according to his LinkedIn he left that position in May 2018 to become Executive Director at the Office of Policy for the Department of Energy (DOE). McNamee worked for the DOE as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Policy since May 2017, and as Senior Counsel to the law firm McGuireWoods LLP before that. [12]

Kathleen Hartnett-White —Senior Fellow,**Life:Powered

Kathleen Hartnett-White is the distinguished senior fellow-in-residence and director of the Armstrong Center for Energy & the Environment at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). Hartnett White previously worked as Chairman and Commissioner of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Prior to 2001, she served as then-Governor George W. Bush’s appointee to the Texas Water Development Board, where she sat until appointed to TCEQ. [13]

Hartnett-White was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and also served on Trump’s “economic advisory team” in 2016. White’s nomination was withdrawn after it was sent back to the White House at the end of 2017. [14], [15], [16]

Jacki Pick — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered

:{Jacki Pickformerly served as the executive vice president and CEO of the:{National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a corporate-funded group that has promoted supposed uncertainties around climate science. She also hosts The Jacki Daily Show at TheBlaze.com.[:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:17 ]}:

Mandy Gunasekara — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered [28]

Gunasekara is a Republican “climate and energy strategist” and the founder of the “pro-Trump nonprofit” Energy 45 Fund. As of February 2020, Gunasekara was reportedly set to return as the EPA‘s chief of staff accordig to The Washington Post. [24], [25]

She is a a memberof the CO2 Coalition, a group directed by climate change denier William Happer that portrays carbon dioxide as “a nutrient vital for life” and advocates for more of it in the atmosphere. Her CO2 Coalition profile describes Gunasekara as “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan” while working for Trump at the EPA as principal deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. [26], [27]

Other People

As of August 2018, TPPF was actively hiring for positions including “Project Coordinator” and “Policy Analyst” for the Life:Powered project. [18]

Actions

April 6, 2020

Life:Powered, represented by Jason Isaac, was signatory to an American Energy Alliance letter to President Donald Trump supporting the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles Rule which would scrap federal fuel economy mandates under the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) program. [31]

Describing CAFE, the letter contends: “Those families and individuals who prefer or need trucks, SUVs, and crossovers pay more to subsidize those who buy smaller vehicles or electric vehicles under the existing mandate. This significant, needless, and unjust cost is a very real regressive tax on American families that has made our country worse off.” [31]

March 23, 2020

As reported at DeSmog, Life:Powered sent a letter to Congresscritical of the COVID-19 stimulus package for including “tax incentives and spending for unreliable ‘green’ energy

programs.” [29], [30]

The letter concludes:

“This is no time for political games. Climate change is not an immediate threat to humanity. Climate-related deaths have declined 98.9% in the last century, and humanity is growing more and more resilient thanks to the availability of affordable, reliable energy. On behalf of all Americans, we urge you to oppose any stimulus proposals that carve out special treatment for or bail out any energy companies and focus instead on stopping COVID-19.” [30]

Signatories included: [30]

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Name Title Organization STINKTANKS

Jason Isaac Senior Manager & Distinguished Fellow Life:Powered/Texas Public Policy Foundation

Myron Ebell Director, Center for Energy and Environment Competitive Enterprise Institute

Bette Grande CEO Roughrider Policy Center

Ellen Weaver President & CEO Palmetto Promise Institute

Isaac Orr Policy Fellow Center of the American Experiment

Bethany Marcum Executive Director Alaska Policy Forum

David T. Stevenson Director, Center for Energy and Environment Caesar Rodney Institute

Donald van der Vaart Senior Fellow John Locke Foundation

Jason Hayes Director of Environmental Policy Mackinac Center for Public Policy

John Droz, Jr. Founder Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions

George K. Rasley, Jr. Managing Editor ConservativeHQ.com

Becky Norton Dunlop Former Secretary of Natural Resources Commonwealth of Virginia

James L. Martin Founder/Chairman 60 Plus Association

Saulius “Saul” Anuzis President 60 Plus Association

Ken Blackwell Senior Fellow Family Research Council

Eunie Smith President Eagle Forum

Jenny Beth Martin Honorary Chairman Tea Party Patriots Action

Jon Caldara President Independence Institute

L. Brent Bozell, III Founder and President Media Research Center

Jason Pye Vice President of Legislative Affairs FreedomWorks

Jameson Taylor Vice President for Policy Mississippi Center for Public Policy

Carol Platt Liebau President Yankee Institute

Mike Stenhouse CEO Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity

Daniel Erspamer CEO Pelican Institute for Public Policy

Christian N. Braunlich President Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy

Todd Myers Environmental Director Washington Policy Center

june 14, 2019

Speaking to the American-Statesman, senior manager Jason Isaac said that the mission of Life:Powered was to “raise America’s energy IQ,” adding: [22]

“We’re making the connection between prosperity we enjoy here in the United States and access to energy in all forms, all abundant, affordable reliable, all forms and all of the above.” [22]

:{:{A 2018 TPPF video }:promoting the continued operation of a coal-fired power plant on the Arizona Navajo reservation has been rebranded with the Life:Powered name. The video showed images of smokestacks with a voiceover by a young Navajo girl saying, “Papa says it’s the heart of the land. I can hear it beating.”:{ [22:(style="background-color:#ff9966ff"):}:]}:

The video’s closing text reads:

“Extreme environmentalist politics will eliminate jobs, destroy families, and spike electric bills in the Navajo Nation and across America. The Navajo don’t need to be told what to do. They’ve been protecting the environment for centuries.” [22 [vid]

Local environmental groups responded with claims that the plant’s consumption of billions of gallons of groundwater has led to contamination and depletion of the reservation’s water supply. The executive director of a Navajo non-profit organization told the Statesman: [22]

“The pro-coal supporters have made it all about jobs. There’s more to it than that. What’s happening on Black Mesashows that jobs and revenues is not all that it’s made out to be. When you lose your own potable water source, that’s life or death right there.” [22]

Peabody Energy, a TPPF donor, operates the Navajo Generating Station, which will be shuttered at the end of 2019. [22]

Another TPPF on the topic of “Energy Poverty” featured Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Foundation promoting wider adoption of fossil fuel-generated electricity in the developing world. [22]

Life:Powered plans to target future messaging in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and Alaska in opposition to renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives. [22]

February 8, 2019

Life:Powered posted a critique of the Green New Dealon its website, written by The:{Honorable Jason Isaac, describing it as a “massive new tax” and claiming the threats to the planet of continued fossil fuel use have “no scientific evidence to back it up.” [21]}:

“… if U.S. emissions were completely eliminated by 2020, global temperatures would only be 0.077°C lower in 2050. That doesn’t exactly do much to prevent the End of Days in the next 12 years,” the article claims. “Here is something a little closer to scientific certainty: we are not going to figure out how to generate all the power we need and use in America from wind and solar in the next decade. We’re not even going to get close.” [21]

In conclusion: “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez predicts catastrophe in 12 years if we do nothing to fight climate change. The real catastrophe would be enacting her plan to do that.” [21]

August 7, 2018

S&P Global reportedthat Life:Powered screened two videos at the American Coal Council’s Coal Market Strategies conference in New Mexico that would be part of an upcoming campaign. [8]

Michael Nasi, who is reportedly leading the effort, said the videos “aim to educate an ‘extremely under-informed’ public on fossil fuels.” [8]

“We have failed as both a coal industry, a power industry and obviously other fossil industries and the nuclear industry because we have failed to get together to message together,” said Nasi. [8]

Also speaking at the conference, Luke Popovich, former spokesman for the National Mining Association, discussed industry tactics with regards to climate change: [8]

“It’s too late for denial when your customers, the ratepayers, the banks, and regulators already believe climate change is real,” Popovich said. “Accepting that climate change is real merely opens the discussion with the public.”

Rather, a message on how fossil fuels could be a “humanitarian tool”— so-called “energy poverty” has long been a talking point of industry — would be a primary focus of the Life:Powered videos. [8]

“Over 1 billion people do not have any electricity,” retired Penn State University Professor Frank Clemente said in one of the videos. “That’s only the tip of the iceberg. About 2.5 billion people only have limited access to electric power. You’re closing on almost half of the population of the world are living in energy poverty and that’s why I say it is the leading problem facing mankind today.” [8] Clemente has regularly consulted for the energy industry, and has said he has “written, spoken and testified quite a bit on coal’s importance to the quality of life around the world.”

Related Organizations

Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — Life:Powered describes itself as a project of TPPF. [1]
Fueling Freedom — According to TPPF’s 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was formerly the Fueling Freedom project. [3]

Contact & Address

The Life:Powered project shares the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s address. As per the project’s Privacy Policy Page: [19]

https://www.texaspolicy.com/

901 Congress Avenue

Austin, Texas 78701

United States

comms@texaspolicy.com

512) 472-2700

Social Media

TPPF promotes Life Powered by the #lifepowered hash tag on Twitter.
Life Powered links to TPPF’s Facebook page @TexasPolicy.

Resources

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oops 2x see below

https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/meet-foxs-newest-favorite-climate-misinformer-mandy-gunasekara

2019

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As President Donald Trump’s communication strategy begins to take shape for the 2020 election, his favorite network has been repeatedly booking a former Environmental Protection Agency official to gaslight for the president’s destructive anti-climate and anti-science agenda.

Since February, Mandy Gunasekara has appeared at least 17 times on both Fox News and Fox Business to talk about her past work with the Trump administration, promote his energy agenda, and criticize the Democratic presidential candidates. She has made numerous appearances on other right-wing outlets as well, including The Daily Caller and Bill Mitchell’s radio program. Gunasekara’s history of working with climate change deniers makes her the perfect right-wing pundit for Trump’s so-called “energy dominance” agenda.

Gunasekara worked at Scott Pruitt’s EPA after cutting her teeth working for infamous climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

From March 2017 through February of this year, Gunasekara was a top climate and air quality adviser at the EPA, where she played a key role in helping the Trump administration undo major environmental regulations. Her organization, Energy45, lists her as “chief architect of the withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accord” and an orchestrator of the Clean Power Plan repeal. At a 2017 conference, she reportedly told coal company representatives that she was in a position at the EPA to “make a big difference and do things to help out and tear back the problems that stemmed from decisions of the last administration.”

Before joining the EPA, Gunasekara worked on Capitol Hill, where she served as counsel for Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), “the grandfather of climate denial,” handing him the snowball during his infamous climate denial speech in 2015.

Gunasekara currently runs a pro-Trump energy PAC

Gunasekara resigned from the EPA in February to start Energy45, also known as the Energy 45 Fund, a dark money PAC that is “dedicated to informing the public about the environmental and economic gains made under the Trump Administration.” The organization’s issues include “Defending the Trump Energy Agenda,” promoting “America First Environmentalism,” and “Exposing Liberal Energy Fantasies.” The description of the last of those issues calls policies to combat climate change “nothing but a proxy for draconian government control” that “would make Stalin blush.”

In addition to her role with the Energy 45 Fund, Gunasekara is also a senior fellow with Life:Powered, a project of the Koch-backed Texas Public Policy Foundation, which generally rejects climate science and has close connections to the Trump administration.

In a June interview with The Washington Post, Gunasekara explained her new role in promoting Trump’s energy agenda:

“I think what Republicans are starting to understand is, we need to be better about communicating the good work that we're doing,” Gunasekara, the former deputy assistant administrator of the EPA's air office, said in an interview Tuesday.

“I always say, we're right on the policy, we're right on the facts,” she added. “But what we're not great at is conveying that.”

Apparently for Gunasekara, that means lying about energy and climate issues.

Gunasekara has appeared at least two dozen times in right-wing outlets since February

Since starting the Energy45 PAC, Gunasekara has appeared nine times on Fox News and eight times on Fox Business, splitting her time on Fox News between Trump’s favorite show, Fox & Friends, and America’s Newsroom, while all of her Fox Business appearances have come on Varney & Co.

She also penned an op-ed for FoxNews.com on February 20 which bashed the Green New Deal as “Karl Marx’s Christmas list” and chastised Democrats for moving “so far to the extreme that eating meat is murder, but killing a baby moments after birth is a choice.” Most recently, she appeared on Fox Nation’s Deep Dive on August 14 to discuss the Green New Deal and Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda.

Gunasekara has also[:](https://youtu.be/VWlvZQ0_CDI): on, a right-wing outlet that has received plaudits from Trump; twice on The Daily Caller platform, on its and in a video criticizing the Green New Deal; and twice on the radio show of Bill Mitchell, an extreme pro-Trump pundit and ridiculous climate denier who has amplified the QAnon conspiracy theory. She’s also appeared on a conservative Minnesota radio show and has written for Y’all Politics, a conservative news outlet focused on Mississippi politics.

In contrast, she has appeared sparingly in mainstream outlets, including and. In June, she penned an op-ed for USA Today criticizing Joe Biden’s climate plan. That op-ed was then amplified by the official Twitter account of Trump’s election campaign.

Gunasekara has also appeared on Real News Insights, a streaming Facebook show produced by the Trump reelection campaign and hosted by the president’s campaign adviser and daughter-in-law Lara Trump.

She regularly spouts climate denial

Gunasekara has repeatedly questioned the scientific consensus on climate change. In her July 10 appearance on Fox & Friends First, she stated falsely that “there is serious lack of consensus on the issue” and claimed that “climate change is not a crisis”[vid]

that same day on America’s Newsroom, Gunasekara accused Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) of using climate change to “manufacture crises” and “divert the American people’s attention away from all the successes of the President Trump administration.” She also stated that climate change is “not a national emergency, it’s not an existential threat -- it’s something that’s always been occurring.”

Appearing in a Real News Insights video posted to Facebook on July 9, she said that Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez “are trying to scare the American people by citing frivolous science in terms of climate change” in order “to make their socialist agenda seem reasonable.”

In her March 29 appearance on The Daily Caller podcast, Gunasekara that the climate is changing but that the important question is “what role are humans actually having.” (Hint: Humans are having an outsized role and are by far the dominant cause of climate change.) In this same interview, she also accused “activist scientists” of writing the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report’s Summary for Policymakers and referred to United Nations climate conferences as “somewhat of a religion or somewhat cultish."

In a July interview with Bloomberg Environment, she offered a more nuanced opinion on climate:

“I embrace the consensus that the climate is changing and support continuing to enhance our understanding of humans’ role,” she said. “What I reject are intrusive policies that masquerade as some ‘solution’ to our changing climate where they will have little meaningful impact on the environment, but massive costs to the economy.”

Her views on climate line up well with those of others in the Trump administration, which is rife with climate denial and staffed by fossil fuel industry insiders and shills. It’s no surprise that right-wing media book her to parrot these views to Trump’s supporters.

She repeatedly makes false claims about Trump’s environmental progress

Gunasekara often uses her appearances on the president’s favorite network to boast about the environmental progress made under the Trump administration. Examples include:

-: In her first appearance on America’s Newsroom, Gunasekara attacked the Green New Deal proposal and said the Trump administration had worked instead on “practical solutions to improve the environment.” The same day on Varney & Co., she praised the “extensive environmental progress” of the Trump administration.

February 20: In a FoxNews.com op-ed, she stated that the “U.S. is already the leader on environmental issues in spite of oft-criticized actions like withdrawing from the Paris Climate Accord.”

-: She referenced “significant environmental gains” made in the U.S. on an America's Newsroom appearance.

-: Appearing on Fox & Friends First, Gunasekara stated that the “president is setting us up for perpetual success thanks to his economic agenda and environmental dominance that goes alongside a very healthy future when it comes to environmental progress.”

-: Appearing on Varney & Co., she stated that “we are making the economy and the planet much better and it's under president Trump's balanced policies.”

This is extreme gaslighting -- Trump’s environmental record is shameful. His administration has rolled back 83 federal regulations aimed at protecting the environment, which will cause great harm to the general public and may put “thousands of lives” at risk. The replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, is estimated to cause up to an additional 1,400 annual premature deaths by 2030, and it may cause polluting coal plants to stay open longer while not doing anything to reverse fortunes for the declining coal industry. Ditto for the administration's vehicle emissions rollback plan, which will likely increase traffic fatalities and lead to more auto pollution.

She makes false claims about clean air records under Trump

Gunasekara also likes to state that the U.S. has the cleanest air on record. Examples include:

-: Appearing on Varney & Co., she stated, “Under President Trump we've not only continued to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions more than any other country, but we have the cleanest air on record.” Later in the interview, she referenced the EPA’s success in reducing criteria pollutants since the 1970s, doubling down on her claim that “we undoubtedly have the cleanest air on record.”

-: In another Varney & Co. appearance, she said, “We are already leading the world in terms of clean air, clean water, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

August 2: Appearing on America’s Newsroom, Gunasekara claimed that Trump “has put in place balanced regulations that continue the trajectory of having the cleanest air on record.”

We currently do not have the cleanest air on record; in fact, air quality has worsened since 2016. There has been a 15% increase in the number of high air pollution days since President Barack Obama’s second term. At least one report shows that the U.S. ranks 123rd out of 195 nations for ozone pollution levels. Additionally, at least three toxic “criteria” pollutants are more prevalent in the air now than in 2016, and the number of unhealthy air days in the U.S. has been increasing since Trump took office.

She’s made numerous other inaccurate remarks about environmental issues

In a July 2 Daily Caller video, Gunsekara stated that “some could say we are leading the world in fighting climate change.” This is blatantly false -- the U.S. is actually disproportionately causing climate change, as it is one of the largest carbon emitters in the world on a per capita basis. The emissions reductions that Gunasekara often hypes were largely just a continuation of Obama-era policies. In fact, the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle environmental regulations mean that we may never see very deep cuts in emissions again. Additionally, U.S. emissions shot up in 2018, and the U.S. is nowhere close to being on track to prevent the worst effects of climate change by 2050.

In an America’s Newsroom appearance on March 18, Gunasekara her support for pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord, and accused France of “not even achieving environmental progress.” This accusation is completely baseless, as French emissions actually declined in 2018, unlike in the U.S. France also has a much cleaner energy sector than the U.S.

In her February 20 FoxNews.com op-ed, Gunasekara said the Green New Deal “reads like Karl Marx’s Christmas list,” and she’s attacked the proposal a number of other times as well. On February 8, the day after the Green New Deal was released, she claimed on Varney & Co. that it could cost anywhere from $5 trillion to $7 trillion. These numbers are some of many that have been floating around for the Green New Deal, and they are bogus; in reality, no one knows how much it would cost. After the Senate vote on the Green New Deal in March, she on Fox & Friends First that “it’s a total embarrassment” that Democrats voted “present” rather than no. What she didn’t mention was that entire vote was really a political stunt orchestrated by Republicans. On this same episode, she said that the Green New Deal is “trying to propose issues that are not popular and wouldn’t work.” The Green New Deal is actually quite popular, and it gets support from environmentalists, labor unions, and even coal miners.

Speaking with Lara Trump on July 2, Gunasekara said Trump ended the Clean Power Plan and the “war on coal,” which she claimed “was a war on communities.” Speaking about former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign one month later on America’s Newsroom, she declared that “the Obama-Biden legacy was the war on coal.” Republicans have long pushed a mythical war on coal, but in reality, the cheap cost of renewable energy sources and the explosive growth of natural gas production are the causes of the reduced market for coal. Gunasekara also failed to mention the number of coal plant closures under Trump, or the fact that more coal plants were shut down in Trump’s first two years in office than in all of Obama’s first term.

Her proposed climate solutions bash renewables and promote more fossil fuel usage

Gunasekara has often claimed that the U.S is doing a great job in reducing emissions in its fossil energy use, but she changes her tune when it comes to things that will further reduce emissions and make a meaningful impact in the fight against climate change. One example came in a February 18 Varney & Co. segment about local opposition to a solar project in rural Virginia, in which Gunasekara downplayed the environmental benefits of solar power and criticized the project as a case of “political preferences overtaking and ignoring the needs of the community”[ ivid]

In reality, the only polling on the project shows overwhelming local support, and research from the Energy & Policy Institute showed that this specific solar project had been infiltrated by climate skeptics and fossil fuel interests who played a role in influencing much of the opposition to the project. Gunasekara also left out the fact that solar power is clearly more environmentally friendly than fossil fuels.

On the March 11 edition of Varney & Co., Gunasekara praised Trump’s decision to cut the budget of the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) by 70%, calling its programs “inefficient” and stating that “a lot of this money goes to propping up investment from left-wing donors" [vid]

the Trump administration’s massive proposed cuts to this office were too much even for congressional Republicans. And contrary to Gunasekara’s claims, the office’s programs are not inefficient; one assessment showed that “an EERE taxpayer investment of $12 billion already has yielded an estimated net economic benefit of more than $230 billion.”

In an America’s Newsroom segment on July 10, Gunasekara praised the EPA’s deregulatory agenda under Trump and propped up the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) rule as an example of the EPA helping to curb greenhouse gas emissions[vid]

the ACE rule is really just a lifeline to the coal companies that EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler used to support directly as a lobbyist. The rule will also lead to more CO2 emissions, which directly contradicts Gunasekara’s statement.

Gunasekara is nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for Trump

Trump knows he has an abysmal record on environmental issues. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found that only 29% of Americans approve of Trump’s position on climate change, while 62% disapprove. Additionally, Trump’s own internal polling says that his awful record on environmental issues is a huge obstacle to his reelection.

Who better to gaslight for him than Gunasekara, who’s spent much of her career supporting climate deniers and boosting the fossil fuel industry? In her resignation letter from the EPA, she was clear that she would fight to tell the public about his environmental successes. And she doesn’t plan to stick to just right-wing media; in her recent interview with Bloomberg Environment, she said she plans to “branch out and try connecting with Democratic voters on outlets like MSNBC.” Media outlets must take her claims with a grain of salt and push back vigorously against her attempts to whitewash the Trump administration’s environmental record.

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BAK

tppf122

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see TPPF 2 new 11/17

SEE life powered TPPF 3

capt 1 22

html goverment sic

sorta forgot about this; mackinac biggest state level stinktank?

huge swamp thing trump admin:

Doug Domenech Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary, Insular Affairs Texas Public Policy Foundation The Kochs and Exxon Mobil have funded the TPPF. Wrote, "Speaking truth to power, these experts had a common message in response to the age-old questions: Is climate change real? Yes, it has happened in the past and will happen in the future. Is man making an impact on the climate? Perhaps but in very small ways. But the overarching consensus remains the climate change we are experiencing is by no means catastrophic." Koch; Exxon; oil and gas; fossil fuel

Susan Combs Department of the Interior Assistant Secretary of Interior Nominee Former Texas State Comptroller; Texas Public Policy Foundation The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a Koch-funded organization; it is also funded by Exxon Reported to be an active opponent of the Endangered Species Act; reportedly used 'used her budget to finance studes on species that some academics criticized as politically skewed' Koch; oil and gas; Exxon; fossil fuel; nominee

Kathleen Hartnett White White House Council on Environmental Quality Nominee for Chair TheTexas Public Policy Foundation; Former Chairwoman of Texas Commission on Environmental Quality The Texas Public Policy Foundation is funded by ExxonMobil, the Heartland Institute, and the Koch brothers. Hartnett White has denounced climate science and stated that fossil fuels caused the end of slavery. She owns oil leases. nominee; fossil fuel; oil and gas; Koch; Exxon; climate denier

https://www.texasobserver.org/revealed-the-corporations-and-billionaires-that-fund-the-texas-public-policy-foundation/

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/inside-total-catastrophe-ensued-after-elected-libertarian-mayor-promised-freest

... In 2006, fearing annexation by rapidly encroaching San Antonio, some in Von Ormy proposed incorporating as a town. But in government-averse rural Texas, incorporation can be a hard sell. Unincorporated areas are governed mainly by counties, which have few rules about what you can do on private property and tend to only lightly tax. There’s no going back from what municipal government brings: taxes, ordinances, elections and tedious city council meetings. Still, the fear of being absorbed by San Antonio — with its big-city taxes and regulations — was too much for most Von Ormians.

Enter Art Martinez de Vara. At the time, Martinez de Vara was an ambitious third-year law student at St. Mary’s University in San Antonio, a local boy with a penchant for Texas history and right-wing politics.

Martinez de Vara suggested a compromise of sorts. Von Ormy could become a “liberty city” — a stripped-down, low-tax, low-government version of municipal government that’s currently en vogue among the tea party in Texas.

Initially, the city would impose property and sales taxes, but the property tax would ratchet down to zero over time. The business-friendly environment would draw new economic activity to Von Ormy, and eventually the town would cruise along on sales taxes alone.

There would be no charge for building permits, which Martinez de Vara said would be hand-delivered by city staff. The nanny state would be kept at bay, too. Want to shoot off fireworks? Blast away. Want to smoke in a bar? Light up. Teens wandering around at night? No curfew, no problem.

Martinez de Vara and his mother, Sally Martinez, along with other prominent residents, started the Commission to Incorporate Von Ormy. He gave Von Ormy a motto: “The Freest Little City in Texas.”

Folks in Von Ormy liked what they heard and in May 2008 voted to incorporate. Martinez de Vara was elected mayor that November.

In a 2015 presentation he gave at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, Martinez de Vara said that a group of people with no political experience took it upon themselves to do everything a large city like San Antonio does but at a lower cost. He touted Von Ormy’s ability to provide animal control services, a 20-officer police department — a mix of paid officers and volunteers — and an online city hall.

“We were blessed with this unique opportunity to experiment with democracy,” he said.

Today, there is no city animal control program and stray dogs roam the streets. The Bexar County Sheriff’s Office patrols the town instead of city police, and City Hall resides in a mobile home with one full-time staffer — though that’s a step up from the dive bar where City Council met until the owner bounced them out. If you go to the city’s website, you’ll be informed that it’s still under construction....

swamp things inside the wire

Texas Public Policy Foundation

Doug Domenech

Backstory: The Austin, Texas-based conservative think tank was founded in 1989 by James Leininger, a physician and investor. Leininger is a devout Christian conservative with close ties to Energy secretary nominee Rick Perry, according to The Texas Tribune.

Key staff: Doug Domenech, who led the Trump administration's transition team for the Interior Department and is now a political aide at that agency, hails from TPPF. He was director of the think tank's Fueling Freedom Project before joining the Trump team. He was also secretary of natural resources in Virginia under then-Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) and an Interior official during the Bush administration.

Kathleen Hartnett White of TPPF's Armstrong Center for Energy and the Environment, who was rumored to be in the mix for Trump's EPA administrator and is considered a possible pick to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality. White, a former Texas regulator, was a Trump adviser on the campaign trail. She has argued that treating carbon dioxide like a pollutant is damaging to the U.S. energy sector (Greenwire, Nov. 28, 2016).

Energy/environmental platform: The group advocates for a pivot toward state autonomy and "less burdensome" regulations. Views pushed by TPPF's personalities — like support for fossil fuels, questions about climate change and calls for regulatory changes — have spurred attacks from critics including environmental and consumer groups (Energywire, Dec. 6, 2016).

omg

http://www.exposedbycmd.org/2017/03/23/kochs-bankroll-movement-rewrite-constitution/

By Alex Kotch, CMD contributor

A constitutional convention, something thought impossible not long ago, is looking increasingly likely. Under Article V of the U.S. Constitution, if 34 state legislatures “issue a call” for a constitutional convention, Congress must convene one. By some counts, the right-wing only needs six more states. Once called, delegates can propose and vote on changes and new amendments to the U.S. Constitution, which, if approved, are currently required to be ratified by 38 states.

There are two major legislative pushes for a convention at the state level. One would attempt to engineer a convention for a balanced budget amendment only, and the other tries to secure an open convention for the purpose of limiting the power and jurisdiction of the federal government. But once a convention is underway, all bets are off. The convention can write its own rules, resulting in a wide-open or “runaway” convention that can make major changes to the constitution and even change the number of states required to ratify those changes.

If America gets saddled with a runaway convention, the Koch coterie of funders will be to blame. Most of the groups pushing the convention idea are being underwritten by one or more institutions tied to billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch.

ATTEMPTS TO LIMIT TOPIC OF THE CONVENTION LIKELY TO FAIL

On Feb. 24, Wyoming became the 29th state to pass a resolution requesting a convention specifically to add a single balanced budget amendment to the Constitution. Many of these legislative resolutions also attempt to set the rules for the convention and limit who can attend it to a select list of largely GOP state leaders.

Austerity advocates claim that they need only to convince five of seven targeted states—Arizona, Kentucky, Minnesota, Montana, South Carolina, Virginia, and Wisconsin—to get on board, and they will have enough states to convene a convention. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, three linked measures were just introduced in Wisconsin and were placed on a fast track to approval.

Another faction representing a broader “Convention of States” initiative is advocating an open constitutional convention to limit “the power and jurisdiction of the federal government.” Because this open convention format would be called on a particular subject rather than a particular amendment, representatives would likely vote on any number of measures.

Legislatures in nine states—Arizona, Georgia, Alaska, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Louisiana—have signed on to the Convention of States resolution,. Texas appears likely to join in, as the state Senate approved a Convention of States bill in February. Republican Gov. Greg Abbott is fiercely campaigning for a convention and has deemed it an “emergency issue.” In 2016, he published a 70-page plan that includes nine proposed amendments aimed at severely limiting federal authority, even allowing a two-thirds majority of the states to override a Supreme Court ruling or a federal law.

Groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, Common Cause, and the Center for Media and Democracy have raised the alarm about these efforts. No convention has been called since 1787 in Philadelphia where George Washington presided.

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities explains why any convention call, no matter how narrowly written, is likely to result in a “runaway” convention. A convention is empowered to write its own rules, including how delegates are chosen, how many delegates attend and whether a supermajority is required to approve amendments.

Nothing in the Constitution prevents a convention, once convened, from setting its own agenda, influenced by powerful special interests like the Koch groups. A convention could even choose an entirely new ratification process. “The 1787 convention ignored the ratification process under which it was established and created a new one, reducing the number of states needed to approve the new Constitution and removing Congress from the approval process,” writes CBPP.

Legal uncertainly surrounds the entire effort, which is sure to be litigated if successful. For instance, are states bound by resolutions passed many years ago? Will states withdraw their approval? Some states, like Delaware and New Mexico, have already moved to do so.

THE KOCH CONNECTION TO THE PUSH FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION

Libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch have long opposed federal power and federal spending. Koch Industries is one of the nation’s biggestpolluters and has been sanctioned and fined over and over again by both federal and state authorities. In response, the Kochs have launched a host of “limited government” advocacy organizations and have created a massive $400 million campaign finance network, fueled by their fortunes and those of their wealthy, right-wing allies, that rivals the two major political parties.

The Kochs’ Americans for Prosperity says it favors a balanced budget convention. Such an austerity amendment would drastically cut the size of the federal government, threatening critical programs like Social Security and Medicare and eviscerating the government’s ability to respond to economic downturns, major disasters and the climate crisis.

AFP has opposed an open convention, calling it “problematic.” But whatever qualms the Kochs might have, they continue to be a bedrock funder of the entire convention “movement.”

Running the “Convention of States initiative” is an Austin, Texas-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit called Citizens for Self-Governance (CSG). CSG reported revenue of $5.7 million in 2015, more than double its haul from two years earlier, when it launched its Convention of States Project, according to Dallas News. It now boasts 115,000 “volunteers,” although that figure may represent the number of addresses on its email list.

The group is not required to disclose its donors, but research into other organizations’ tax records by the Center for Media and Democracy, Conservative Transparency and this author show a web of Koch-linked groups having provided nearly $5.4 million to CSG from the group’s founding in 2011 through 2015:

Donors Trust, a preferred secret money conduit for individuals and foundations in the Koch network of funders, has given CSG at least $790,000 since 2011.

The Greater Houston Community Foundation, which is funded by Donors Capital Fund (linked to Donors Trust) and the Kochs’ Knowledge and Progress Fund, has donated over $2 million since 2011.

The Vanguard Charitable Endowment Program, which has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Donors Capital Fund, gave $2.5 million from 2012-2013.

Citizens for Self-Governance also has two Koch-connected board members. Eric O’Keefe is a director of the Wisconsin Club for Growth, a group which has taken in considerable funding from Koch-linked groups like the Center to Protect Patient Rights, and was at the center of the long-running “John Doe” criminal investigation of Scott Walker’s campaign coordination with dark money groups.

O’Keefe was the national field coordinator for the Libertarian Party when David Koch ran for Vice President in 1979 on the Libertarian Party ticket. The party’s platform called for the end of campaign finance law, the minimum wage, “oppressive Social Security,” Medicaid, Medicare and federal deficit spending.

The Koch agenda has not changed much since.

Another board member is Tim Dunn, an oilman from Midland, Texas who is vice chairman of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), a right-wing think tank that’s raked in over $1 million from Koch family foundations, $160,000 from Koch Industries in 2012 alone and at least $1.8 million from Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund.

Dunn runs another political group, Empower Texans, which supports Republican candidates and has taken in funds from Donors Trust and “Americans for Job Security,” a Koch-tied dark money group that was slapped with a severe fine by the FEC for its involvement in a dark money shell game intended to disguise the origin of its funds.

Both TPPF and Empower Texans back the constitutional convention idea.

What’s more, a 501(c)4 nonprofit connected to CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance (which does business as Convention of States Action), received $270,000 in 2012 from Americans for Limited Government, which has received funding not only by Donors Capital Fund but by two Koch-funded political groups, the Center to Protect Patient Rights and Americans for Job Security.

Those two groups exchanged millions of dollars in 2010 and 2012, illegally hiding the source of funding for political expenditures, lying to the Internal Revenue Service and making unlawful contributions to pass-through groups, prompting investigations and historic fines by the both the State of California and the Federal Elections Commission. Eric O’Keefe’s Wisconsin Club for Growth also funneled $450,000 to Alliance for Self-Governance in 2012, at a time when WCFG was battling the Walker recall.

Any time any organization is named “self-governance” or “limited government” you can be sure that Wisconsin’s Eric O’Keefe is either a founder or on the board, and indeed O’Keefe is tied to all three organizations: CSG, the Alliance for Self-Governance and Americans for Limited Government.

If the Kochs and their friends don’t want an open constitutional convention, they’ve sure done a lot to aid the effort.

OMFG

Ebell looks to be in good company in the Republican nominee’s camp.

In August, Trump’s team announced Kathleen Hartnett-White as one of several new additions to its “economic advisory team.”

Hartnett-White is another who doubts the well-established link between fossil fuel burning and climate change.

In a column last year, Hartnett-White lauded the “environmental benefits” of fossil fuel burning, while claiming the evidence for climate change was waning.

Hartnett-White is director of an energy and environment project at the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — another group that has taken money from the Koch brothers.

In July, the TPPF released a “research booklet” written by contrarian Dr. Roy Spencer that attempted to undermine findings related to sea level rise, extreme temperatures, and other impacts from burning fossil fuels.

Hartnett-White is also an adviser to the CO2 Coalition — a group that includes extreme climate science denier Patrick Moore, who rejects any evidence for human-caused climate change.

omg

http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/

AUSTIN, Texas – A team of prominent scientists gathered in Texas today at a climate summit to declare that fears of man-made global warming were “irrational” and “based on nonsense” that “had nothing to do with science.” They warned that “we are being led down a false path” by the upcoming UN climate summit in Paris.

The scientists appeared at a climate summit sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The summit in Austin was titled: “At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit.”

Climate Scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen, an emeritus Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT, derided what he termed climate “catastrophism.”

“Demonization of CO2 is irrational at best and even modest warming is mostly beneficial,” Lindzen said.

Lindzen cautioned: “The most important thing to keep in mind is – when you ask ‘is it warming, is it cooling’, etc. — is that we are talking about something tiny (temperature changes) and that is the crucial point.”

Lindzen also challenged the oft-repeated UN IPCC claim that most of warming over past 50 years was due to mankind.

“People get excited over this. Is this statement alarming? No,” Lindzen stated.

“We are speaking of small changes 0.25 Celsius would be about 51% of the recent warming and that strongly suggests a low and inconsequential climate sensitivity – meaning no problem at all,” Lindzen explained.

“I urge you when looking at a graph, check the scales! The uncertainty here is tenths of a degree,” he noted.

“When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record. What are they talking about? It’s just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period. And they are arguing over hundredths of a degree when it is uncertain in tenths of a degree,” Lindzen said.

“And the proof that the uncertainty is tenths of a degree are the adjustments that are being made. If you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasn’t certain to 2/10ths of a degree,” he said. (Also See: Scientists balk at ‘hottest year’ claims: Ignores Satellites showing 18 Year ‘Pause’ – ‘We are arguing over the significance of hundredths of a degree’ – The ‘Pause’ continues)

“The UN IPCC wisely avoided making the claim that 51% of a small change in temperature constitutes a problem. They left this to the politicians and anyone who took the bait,” he said.

Lindzen noted that National Academy of Sciences president Dr. Ralph Cicerone has even admitted that there is no evidence for catastrophic claims of man-made global warming. See: Backing away from climate alarm? NAS Pres. Ralph Cicerone says ‘we don’t have that kind of evidence’ to claim we are ‘going to fry’ from AGW

Lindzen also featured 2006 quotes from Scientist Dr. Miike Hulme, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia, and Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, admitting that claims of a climate catastrophe were not the “language of science.”

“The discourse of catastrophe is a campaigning device,” Hulme wrote to the BBC in 2006. “The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. To state that climate change will be ‘catastrophic’ hides a cascade of value-laden assumptions which do not emerge from empirical or theoretical science,” Hulme wrote.

“Is any amount of climate change catastrophic? Catastrophic for whom, for where, and by when? What index is being used to measure the catastrophe?” Hulme continued.

Lindzen singled out Secretary of State John Kerry for his ‘ignorance’ on science.

“John Kerry stands alone,” Lindzen said. “Kerry expresses his ignorance of what science is,” he added.

Lindzen also criticized EPA Chief Gina McCarthy’s education: “I don’t want to be snobbish, but U Mass Boston is not a very good school,” he said to laughter.

Lindzen concluded his talk by saying: “Learn how to identify claims that have no alarming implications and free to say ‘So what?’”

Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer, who has authored over 200 peer-reviewed papers, called policies to reduce CO2 “based on nonsense.”

“Policies to slow CO2 emissions are really based on nonsense. They are all based on computer models that do not work. We are being led down a false path.

“Our breath is not that different from a power plant,” he continued.

“To call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually?” he asked.

“Coal, formed from ancient CO2, is a benefit to the world. Coal is CO2 from ancient atmospheres. We are simply returning CO2 to the atmosphere from which it came when you burn coal. And it’s a good thing since it is at very low levels in the atmosphere. We are in a CO2 famine. It is very, very low,” Happer explained.

Happer continued: “CO2 will be beneficial and crop yields will increase.” “More CO2 will be a very significant benefit to agriculture,” he added.

Happer then showed a picture of polluted air in China with the caption: “Real pollution in Shanghai.”

"If f you can see it, it’s not CO2,” Happer said.

“If plants could vote, they would vote for coal,” Happer declared.

Happer also rebutted the alleged 97% consensus.

“97% of scientists have often been wrong on many things,” he said.

Ecologist and Greenpeace founding member Dr. Patrick Moore discussed the benefits of rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

“Let’s celebrate CO2!” Moore declared.

Embedded image permalink

“We know for absolute certain that carbon dioxide is the stuff of life, the foundation for life on earth,” Moore said.

“We are dealing with pure political propaganda that has nothing to do with science,” he continued.

“The deserts are greening from rising CO2,” he added.

“Co2 has provided the basis of life for at least 3.5 billion years,” Moore said.

Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/#ixzz3sut0a1jA

Read more: http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/11/19/scientists-declare-un-climate-summit-goals-irrational-based-on-nonsense-leading-us-down-a-false-path/#ixzz3susqeII0

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http://ecowatch.com/2015/11/21/ted-cruz-obama-climate-change/

...

His taped remarks were delivered Thursday at the Texas Public Policy Foundation‘s second annual At the Crossroads: Energy & Climate Policy Summit. The two-day event in Austin, Texas included speakers such as Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), Congressman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, Stephen Moore of the Heritage Foundation, Marc Morano of Climate Depot and James Taylor of the Heartland Institute.

“The president’s radical attempt to destabilize the nation’s energy system is flatly illegal,” Cruz said. “And unless it is invalidated by Congress, struck down by the courts or, hopefully, rescinded by the next administration, it will cause Americans’ electricity costs to skyrocket at a time when those who are struggling can least afford it. What the Obama administration is doing to harm the American economy is the sort of power grab that our founders would have recognized as tyranny.”

His comments came just a day after he and 51 other senators approved two resolutionsrejecting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s carbon rules for power plants, the Clean Power Plan. President Obama has vowed to veto the measures.

Republicans are also taking aim at Obama’s Green Climate Fund. The $3 billion fund was set aside by the Obama administration last year as something the president hopes to be able to bring to the negotiating table at the COP21 Paris climate talks.

“We pledge that Congress will not allow U.S. taxpayer dollars to go to the Green Climate Fund until the forthcoming international climate agreement is submitted to the Senate for its constitutional advice and consent,” 37 Republican senators wrote in a letter to Obama Thursday....

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Wendy and the Pious Hospital Bed Maker

With so many fingers in so many pies, it’s often difficult to keep up with Dr. Wendy Gramm. In addition to Mercatus Center, she serves as the chairman of the board of another conservative organization “whose positions on issues can make the difference between life and death for major legislation.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) “501(c) non-profit, non-partisan research institute” is run by a man Texas Monthly called “the most influential Republican in Texas” and probably a person most people have never heard of.

Austin Democratic political consultant George Shipley once called the shy and unassuming Dr. James Leninger, “ the sugar daddy and godfather of the Republican right wing in Texas.”

Besides the many groups with a local political interest, Leininger has funded national social conservative organizations, including the American Family Association (considered a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center) , Christian Pro-Life Foundation, Family Research Council, and Focus on the Family.

Molly Ivins reports:

Leninger tends to give his PACs and foundations innocuous names — Texans for Justice, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Texas Justice Foundation, Children’s Economic Opportunity Foundation, Texans for Governmental Integrity, the A PAC for Parental School Choice, etc. According to the Current (a weekly alternative paper), Leininger is also a major donor to, or plays a leading role in, at least a dozen major right-wing groups. Politically, he has given not only to Christian-right school board candidates and right-wing legislative candidates but also to Sens. Kay Bailey Hutchison and Phil Gramm, and he was Rick Perry’s largest campaign contributor ($500,000) in Perry’s race for lieutenant governor.

The mission of TPPF, founded by Leninger in 1989, is to “promote and defend liberty, personal responsibility, and free enterprise in Texas and the nation by educating and affecting policymakers and the Texas public policy debate with academically sound research and outreach.”

A conservative and devoutly religious Republican businessman, Leininger made his personal fortune through Kinetic Concepts, based in San Antonio, which makes and rents therapeutic beds for patients who are paralyzed or suffer from serious illnesses. As humble as that might sound, take note, KCI Revenue for 2008 was $1.88 billion, increasing to $1.99 billion in 2009 and in 2010 increased to $2.02 billion.

Incidentally, Rick Perry, before he ran for lieutenant governor developed a lucrative relationship with Leininger. According to a Houston Chronicle piece dated September 21, 1997:

On Jan. 13, 1995, Perry bought $38,875 worth of stock in Kinetic Concepts, a company owned by Jim Leininger, a San Antonio physician, conservative activist and major Perry campaign donor. Perry invested an additional $35,167 in the company on Jan. 24, 1996 — the same day he spoke at a luncheon that Leininger attended. Later that day, an investment firm bought 2.2 million shares of Kinetic Concepts stock, driving up its price. Perry sold his Kinetic Concepts holdings a month later for a $38,382 profit. Leininger and Perry acknowledged they spoke at the luncheon but denied discussing the stock.

Just a terribly fortunate coincidence? Back in 1997, Wendy Gramm also (coincidentally) had ties to Leininger’s company. Gramm earned a miniscule $25,000 a year as a member of the Kinetic Concepts board of directors. She also held stock options in the company when Kinetic Concepts Inc. agreed to sell most of the company to two San Francisco investor firms in a deal worth $850 million to $875 million.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rick Perry owes a lot to Leninger. There is the new report issued by Texans for Public Justice, a money-and-politics watchdog group.

Perry might never have been governor — nor now be a presidential candidate — but for James Leininger. In a game-changing 1998 race then-Texas Agriculture Commissioner Perry was elected Lieutenant Governor. That victory secured Perry’s automatic promotion to governor two years later when President-Elect Bush abandoned the Governor’s Mansion. Perry narrowly won his fateful 1998 race against Democrat John Sharp, capturing just 50.04 percent of the vote. This squeaker victory was secured by an eleventh-hour media blitz that Perry paid for with a last-minute, $1.1 million loan. Leininger and two other Texas tycoons guaranteed the loan, which supplied more than 10 percent of the $10.3 million that Perry raised for that election. Leininger’s family and company PAC contributed $62,500 to that Perry campaign. Leininger also was the No. 1 contributor at the time to the Texas Republican Party (then chaired by former Leininger employee Susan Weddington), which sank $82,760 into that Perry campaign. “I congratulate Leininger,” Perry opponent John Sharp said at the time. “He wanted to buy the reins of state government. And by God, he got them.”

Through the TPPF, Leininger has used his wealth to promote his own conservative-religious agenda in a variety of ways. Karen Olsson writes in Texas Monthly, Leininger was the driving force back in 2002 to influence the Texas Board of Education to re-write school textbooks.

... TPPF aimed to influence policy by publishing research reports on state issues; its early preoccupations mirrored several of Leininger's own: tort reform, vouchers, and reduced government. Working in tandem with the new SBOE [State Board of Education] members, the TPPF began objecting to textbook material deemed liberally slanted or morally suspect. The Legislature retaliated in 1995, forbidding the SBOE to question any aspect of textbook content other than "factual errors." Despite the restriction, the TPPF continued to analyze proposed books, hiring researchers to ferret out errors both of fact and of insufficient patriotism. Last winter the group helped bat down an environmental-science textbook (in large part because of a poorly written sentence linking democracy to pollution); this summer it criticized proposed social science and history textbooks for failing to disavow socialism.

While the TPPF’s involvement in Texas textbooks may seem like a very narrow agenda, its policy interests, in fact, are wide-ranging, covering many conservative causes. Teddy Wilson, progressive political activist and blogger notes:

The TPPF supports the predictable conservative line on a whole host of issues. The TPPF disputes the scientific evidence of climate changes and claims that the “scientific consensus has never been as broad as proclaimed,” and the compromised emails of climate scientists showed “data manipulation and fundamental errors now discredit a once broadly accepted body of science.” The “private sector can bring innovation and competition to the criminal justice system” is how the TPPF frames its advocacy of the private prison industry, despite that there has been no evidence to support that the privatization of the prison industry has provided any public savings. The TPPF even has an entire center dedicate to “Tenth Amendment Studies,” which is a favorite Constitutional Amendment among the Tea Party faithful.

If any of this sounds depressingly familiar, then there’s a good good reason. Two long time supporters of TPPF are foundations associated with Koch Industries (Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation) which contributed contributing $383,125 in 2005-2009 and nearly a half million dollars between 1997 and 2009.

Rick Perry’s Wrong Approach

In Perry’s campaign book, Fed Up! the governor says that he knows of no other organization that is better positioned than Texas Public Policy Foundation to help “foster a national conversation” about “the proper role of government in our lives."

However, last May, TPPF might have pushed its agenda a bit too hard. Its attempts to influence educational policy created quite a controversy. Seven breakthrough solutions to problems with the Texas’ high educational system were drafted by TPPF in its think-tank capacity, and promoted by Governor Perry.

It did not go over as well as expected. In response, five A&M faculty members from various disciplines drafted a letter to Richard Box, the chairman of the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents, laying out their concern regarding the lack of transparency in the board's apparent intention to implement seven proposed "breakthrough solutions" promoted by the TPPF. The seven recommendations advocated “a business-style, market-driven approach under which colleges and universities would treat students as customers, de-emphasize research that isn't immediately lucrative, and evaluate individual faculty by the tuition revenue they generate.”

Within a few days of the letter being posted online, more than 530 faculty members had added their names. The A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney eventually resigned.

All this is rather ironic of course since Wendy Gramm served on the board of Regents from 2001 to 2007, (as mentioned in Part 1) and serves as chairman in TPPF. Coincidence can quickly be discounted.

A concise assessment of TPPF’s market-oriented recommendations makes a fine case for rejection.

Put simply, this is the wrong approach... the classroom is not a marketplace. The proposals reviewed here will not promote effective learning or the responsible use of resources inside a laboratory, library or seminar room. The University of Texas at Austin's bottom line is to provide a first-class education while spending our resources responsibly and efficiently. Separating those two goals is like separating research from teaching: it serves the wrong bottom line. Similarly, treating students as customers, offering them a "product" designed to win positive reviews and then rewarding the most popular instructors will neither challenge students in meaningful ways nor foster the deep learning and skills they will need throughout life.

Many feel the Perry’s close association with TPPF has damaged the university. This is turn has damaged the governor’s image. He would have Wendy Gramm, its chairman, to thank for that.

As the editors of The Eagle Bryan-College Station remark:

Texas A&M University has the support of its former students that is the envy of many universities. Aggies love their alma mater and it shows in many ways. One Aggie, however, should love his school less and, in fact, should stay out of its business. Gov. Rick Perry's obsession and interference in A&M has caused great harm, damage some observers feel could take a generation to undo. From his appointment of regents with greater fealty to him than to the university system they are supposed to represent to his constant meddling in the day-to-day operations of the flagship university to his infatuation with the Texas Public Policy Foundation -- an ultraconservative think tank that seeks to insinuate itself into every corner of state government -- Perry has proven not to be a friend of A&M, but rather a hindrance.Never before has a governor of Texas had such deadly influence on a major state university, and Perry's meddling blocks the way of A&M's oft-stated efforts to achieve greatness.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation seems harmless on the surface, with its stated goals of limited government, individual liberties, free markets, personal responsibility and private property rights. Most Texans probably would subscribe to those goals. Dig below the surface, however, and you see just how radical its efforts are.

Founded by arch-conservative physician James Leininger, the foundation board is chaired by Wendy Gramm, former Texas A&M regent and wife of former Sen. Phil Gramm. Current Regent Phil Adams of Bryan is a board member, a clear conflict of interest to his responsibilities to A&M.The foundations website says, "The public is demanding a different direction for their government, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation is providing the ideas that enable policymakers to chart that new course."

Unfortunately, thanks to Perry's influence, those ideas become mandates, without discussion and input from the people of this great state....Perry has been in thrall to the Texas Public Policy Foundation and its backers since he began accepting generous contributions from them in his first statewide race. Texas cannot, however, be run by contribution and those most able to spend big bucks to help buy elections, no matter which side of the political spectrum they are on.

A&M is well on its way to achieving greatness. It would be a shame to let Rick Perry and his cohorts derail that with their interference.Rick Perry can love Texas A&M more by meddling less -- preferably not at all. Beyond appointing the best regents he can find -- no matter who they contributed to in the last gubernatorial election -- and attending football games at Kyle Field, Perry should leave A&M alone.

Rick Perry Phil Gramm Nexus

A graph of the relationships mentioned in the posts.[dl 7/31/15]

Epilogue

In researching and writing this post, I was astonished at how much harm two people can do to the country. One would think that our system would be stronger than that. That our long established system of checks and balances would prevent people like the Gramms from ever inflicting too great a harm to the nation. But then the underlying purpose of all the de-regulation that the Republicans have called for (and have achieved) is really just a means to an end, a method of abolishing the safety checks that had, for the most part, protected our institutions. Once those have been removed, anything is possible.

Even this list of all of the misdeeds of Mr. and Mrs. Gramm, as comprehensive as it might seem, is partial. Still I should think this is enough information about Perry and the friends of Rick for most intelligent voters to help them decide who the governor of Texas owes his allegiance to.

I began this investigation with a quote from the first president of the United States and I shall end it with two quotes by its fourth, James Madison.

“All men having power ought to be distrusted to a certain degree”

And this is especially true when those that wield the power are partially hidden behind masks and puppets. When it comes to peoples like the Gramms- whose working relationship with a presidential candidate is not only acknowledged but applauded- it is simply not possible to be as vigilant as necessary. Since justice has apparently failed- not once but repeatedly in this case, the only option is to make sure than any candidate connected with such people is not elected to high office. We literally cannot afford it. Now is the time to make sure that Perry doesn't come any closer to the White House than he is at this minute.

When reflecting on the various attempts by Phil and Wendy Gramm to by-pass, ignore or remove the regulatory powers of our government to protect its citizens, it is helpful to recall this other quote by Madison:

“If men were angels no government would be necessary”

And when you are dealing with a pair like the Gramms (along with so many other less-than- angelic types), it's all the more reason that we need more regulations in place, not less. Ironically, despite having waved the flags of deregulation at every opportunity, Mr. and Mrs. Gramm themselves provide the best proof of the necessity, the vital importance of having tight regulations and the power to punish those that violate them.

---

http://politicalgates.blogspot.com/2011/11/friends-of-rick-perry-mr-and-mrs-gramm_14.html

links:

...With so many fingers in so many pies, it’s often difficult to keep up with Dr. Wendy Gramm. In addition to Mercatus Center, she serves as the chairman of the board of another conservative organization “whose positions on issues can make the difference between life and death for major legislation.”

Austin Democratic political consultant George Shipley once called the shy and unassuming Dr. James Leninger, “ the sugar daddy and godfather of the Republican right wing in Texas.”

Molly Ivins reports:

Incidentally, Rick Perry, before he ran for lieutenant governor developed a lucrative relationship with Leininger. According to a Houston Chronicle piece dated September 21, 1997:

It is no exaggeration to say that Rick Perry owes a lot to Leninger. There is the new report issued byTexans for Public Justice, a money-and-politics watchdog group.

The TPPF supports the predictable conservative line on a whole host of issues. The TPPFdisputes the scientific evidence of climate changes and claims that the “scientific consensus has never been as broad as proclaimed,” and the compromised emails of climate scientists showed “data manipulation and fundamental errors now discredit a once broadly accepted body of science.” The “private sector can bring innovation and competition to the criminal justice system” is how the TPPF frames its advocacy of the private prison industry, despite that there has been no evidence to support that the privatization of the prison industry has provided any public savings. The TPPF even has an entire center dedicate to “Tenth Amendment Studies,” which is a favorite Constitutional Amendment among the Tea Party faithful.

Rick Perry’s Wrong Approach

Within a few days of the letter being posted online, more than 530 faculty members had added their names. The A&M Chancellor Mike McKinney eventually resigned.

All this is rather ironic of course since Wendy Gramm served on the board of Regents from 2001 to 2007, (as mentioned in Part 1) and serves as chairman in TPPF. Coincidence can quickly be discounted.

A concise assessment of TPPF’s market-oriented recommendations makes a fine case for rejection.

---

GP 2013 Texas Public Policy Foundation $2,492,008

wamo background:

Until recently, Texas’s influence was balanced to some degree by the more-liberal pull of California, the nation’s largest textbook market. But its economy is in such shambles that California has put off buying new books until at least 2014. This means that McLeroy and his ultraconservative crew have unparalleled power to shape the textbooks that children around the country read for years to come.

Up until the 1950s, textbooks painted American history as a steady string of triumphs, but the upheavals of the 1960s shook up old hierarchies, and beginning in the latter part of the decade, textbook publishers scrambled to rewrite their books to make more space for women and minorities. They also began delving more deeply into thorny issues, like slavery and American interventionism. As they did, a new image of America began to take shape that was not only more varied, but also far gloomier than the old one. Author Frances FitzGerald has called this chain of events “the most dramatic rewriting of history ever to take place.”

This shift spurred a fierce backlash from social conservatives, and some began hunting for ways to fight back. In the 1960s, Norma and Mel Gabler, a homemaker and an oil-company clerk, discovered that Texas had a little-known citizen-review process that allowed the public to weigh in on textbook content. From their kitchen table in the tiny town of Hawkins, the couple launched a crusade to purge textbooks of what they saw as a liberal, secular, pro-evolution bias. When textbook adoptions rolled around, the Gablers would descend on school board meetings with long lists of proposed changes—at one point their aggregate “scroll of shame” was fifty-four feet long. They also began stirring up other social conservatives, and eventually came to wield breathtaking influence. By the 1980s, the board was demanding that publishers make hundreds of the Gablers’ changes each cycle. These ranged from rewriting entire passages to simple fixes, such as pulling the New Deal from a timeline of significant historical events (the Gablers thought it smacked of socialism) and describing the Reagan administration’s 1983 military intervention in Grenada as a “rescue” rather than an “invasion.”

To avoid tangling with the Gablers and other citizen activists, many publishers started self-censoring or allowing the couple to weigh in on textbooks in advance. In 1984, the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way analyzed new biology textbooks presented for adoption in Texas and found that, even before the school board weighed in, three made no mention of evolution. At least two of them were later adopted in other states. This was not unusual: while publishers occasionally produced Texas editions, in most cases changes made to accommodate the state appeared in textbooks around the country—a fact that remains true to this day.

The Texas legislature finally intervened in 1995, after a particularly heated skirmish over health textbooks—among other things, the board demanded that publishers pull illustrations of techniques for breast self-examination and swap a photo of a briefcase-toting woman for one of a mother baking a cake. The adoption process was overhauled so that instead of being able to rewrite books willy-nilly, the school board worked with the Texas Education Agency, the state’s department of education, to develop a set of standards. Any book that conformed and got the facts right had to be accepted, which diluted the influence of citizen activists.

Around this time, social conservatives decided to target seats on the school board itself. In 1994 the Texas Republican Party, which had just been taken over by the religious right, enlisted Robert Offutt, a conservative board member who was instrumental in overhauling the health textbooks, to recruit like-minded candidates to run against the board’s moderate incumbents. At the same time, conservative donors began pouring tens of thousands of dollars into local school board races. Among them were Wal-Mart heir John Walton and James Leininger, a hospital-bed tycoon whose largess has been instrumental in allowing religious conservatives to take charge of the machinery of Texas politics. Conservative groups, like the Christian Coalition and the Eagle Forum, also jumped into the fray and began mobilizing voters.

Part of the newcomers’ strategy was bringing bare-knuckle politics into what had been low-key local races. In the run-up to the 1994 election, Leininger’s political action committee, Texans for Governmental Integrity, sent out glossy flyers suggesting that one Democratic incumbent—a retired Methodist schoolteacher and grandmother of five—was a pawn of the “radical homosexual lobby” who wanted to push steroids and alcohol on children and advocated in-class demonstrations on “how to masturbate and how to get an abortion!” The histrionics worked, and the group quickly picked off a handful of Democrats. The emboldened bloc then set its sights on Republicans who refused to vote in lockstep. “Either you’d hippity-hop, or they would throw whatever they could at you,” says Cynthia A. Thornton, a conservative Republican and former board member, who refers to the bloc as “the radicals.”

It took more than a decade of fits and starts, but the strategy eventually paid off. After the 2006 election, Republicans claimed ten of fifteen board seats. Seven were held by the ultra-conservatives, and one by a close ally, giving them an effective majority. Among the new cadre were some fiery ideologues; in her self-published book, Cynthia Dunbar of Richmond rails against public education, which she dubs “tyrannical” and a “tool of perversion,” and says sending kids to public school is like “throwing them into the enemy’s flames.” (More recently, she has accused Barack Obama of being a terrorist sympathizer and suggested he wants America to be attacked so he can declare martial law.) Then in 2007 Governor Rick Perry appointed Don McLeroy, a suburban dentist and longstanding bloc member, as board chairman. This passing of the gavel gave the faction unprecedented power just as the board was gearing up for the once-in-a-decade process of rewriting standards for every subject.

McLeroy has flexed his muscle particularly brazenly in the struggle over social studies standards. When the process began last January, the Texas Education Agency assembled a team to tackle each grade. In the case of eleventh-grade U.S. history, the group was made up of classroom teachers and history professors—that is, until McLeroy added a man named Bill Ames. Ames—a volunteer with the ultra- conservative Eagle Forum and Minuteman militia member who occasionally publishes angry screeds accusing “illegal immigrant aliens” of infesting America with diseases or blasting the “environmentalist agenda to destroy America”—pushed to infuse the standards with his right-wing views and even managed to add a line requiring books to give space to conservative icons, “such as Newt Gingrich, Phyllis Schlafly and the Moral Majority,” without any liberal counterweight. But for the most part, the teachers on the team refused to go along. So Ames put in a call to McLeroy, who demanded to see draft standards for every grade and then handed them over to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank founded by his benefactor, James Leininger. The group combed through the papers and compiled a list of seemingly damning omissions. Among other things, its analysts claimed that the writing teams had stripped out key historical figures like George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Pat Hardy, a Republican board member who has sat in on some of the writing-team meetings, insists this isn’t true. “No one was trying to remove George Washington!” she says. “That group took very preliminary, unfinished documents and drew all kinds of wrongheaded conclusions.”

Nevertheless, the allegations drummed up public outrage, and in April the board voted to stop the writing teams’ work and bring in a panel of experts to guide the process going forward—“expert,” in this case, meaning any person on whom two board members could agree. In keeping with the makeup of the board, three of the six people appointed were right-wing ideologues, among them Peter Marshall, a Massachusetts-based preacher who has argued that California wildfires and Hurricane Katrina were God’s punishment for tolerating gays, and David Barton, former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party. Both men are self-styled historians with no relevant academic training—Barton’s only credential is a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University—who argue that the wall of separation between church and state is a myth.

When the duo testified before the board in September, Barton, a lanky man with a silver pompadour, brought along several glass display cases stuffed with rare documents that illustrate America’s Christian heritage, among them a battered leather Bible that was printed by the Congress of the Confederation in 1782, a scrap of yellowing paper with a biblical poem scrawled by John Quincy Adams, and a stack of rusty printing plates for McGuffey Readers, popular late-1800s school books with a strong Christian bent. When he took to the podium that afternoon, Barton flashed a PowerPoint slide showing thick metal chains. “I really like the analogy of a chain—that we have all these chains that run through American history,” he explained in his rapid-fire twang. But, he added, in the draft social studies standards, the governmental history chain was riddled with gaps. “We don’t mention 1638, the first written constitution in America … the predecessor to the U.S. Constitution,” he noted as a hot pink “1638” popped up on the screen. By this he meant the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, which called for a government based on the “Rule of the Word of God.” Barton proceeded to rattle off roughly a dozen other documents that pointed up the theocratic leaning of early American society, as the years appeared in orange or pink along the length of the chain.

Barton’s goal is to pack textbooks with early American documents that blend government and religion, and paint them as building blocks of our Constitution. In so doing, he aims to blur the fact that the Constitution itself cements a wall of separation between church and state. But his agenda does not stop there. He and the other conservative experts also want to scrub U.S. history of its inconvenient blemishes—if they get their way, textbooks will paint slavery as a relic of British colonialism that America struggled to cast off from day one and refer to our economic system as “ethical capitalism.” They also aim to redeem Communist hunter Joseph McCarthy, a project McLeroy endorses. As he put it in a memo to one of the writing teams, “Read the latest on McCarthy—He was basically vindicated.”

On the global front, Barton and company want textbooks to play up clashes with Islamic cultures, particularly where Muslims were the aggressors, and to paint them as part of an ongoing battle between the West and Muslim extremists. Barton argues, for instance, that the Barbary wars, a string of skirmishes over piracy that pitted America against Ottoman vassal states in the 1800s, were the “original war against Islamic Terrorism.” What’s more, the group aims to give history a pro-Republican slant—the most obvious example being their push to swap the term “democratic” for “republican” when describing our system of government. Barton, who was hired by the GOP to do outreach to black churches in the run-up to the 2004 election, has argued elsewhere that African Americans owe their civil rights almost entirely to Republicans and that, given the “atrocious” treatment blacks have gotten at the hands of Democrats, “it might be much more appropriate that … demands for reparations were made to the Democrat Party rather than to the federal government.” He is trying to shoehorn this view into textbooks, partly by shifting the focus of black history away from the civil rights era to the post-Reconstruction period, when blacks were friendlier with Republicans.

Barton and Peter Marshall initially tried to purge the standards of key figures of the civil rights era, such as César Chávez and Thurgood Marshall, though they were forced to back down amid a deafening public uproar. They have since resorted to a more subtle tack; while they concede that people like Martin Luther King Jr. deserve a place in history, they argue that they shouldn’t be given credit for advancing the rights of minorities. As Barton put it, “Only majorities can expand political rights in America’s constitutional society.” Ergo, any rights people of color have were handed to them by whites—in his view, mostly white Republican men.

While the writing teams have so far made only modest concessions to the ideologue experts, the board has final say over the documents’ contents, and the ultraconservative bloc has made it clear that it wants its experts’ views to get prominent play—a situation the real experts find deeply unsettling. While in Texas, I paid a visit to James Kracht, a soft-spoken professor with a halo of fine white hair, who is a dean at Texas A&M University’s school of education. Kracht oversaw the writing of Texas’s social studies standards in the 1990s and is among the experts tapped by the board’s moderates this time around. I asked him how he thought the process was going. “I have to be careful what I say,” he replied, looking vaguely sheepish. “But when the door is closed and I’m by myself, I yell and scream and pound on the wall.”

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2010/1001.blake.html

texas school textbook censoring

cse and eagle forum

http://www.tfn.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5629

timeline:

2001 - The Texas Public Policy Foundation and other pressure groups successfully lobby to ban an environmental science textbook they called “anti-free enterprise” and “anti- Christian.” Among the criticisms are those regarding textbook information on global warming and the U.S. role in creating pollution. The textbook had been used at the college level for several years. Publishers make changes to other books that significantly curtail the talk of endangered species and discussions of Native American cultures.

http://www.tfn.org/site/PageServer?pagename=issues_public_schools_censorship_timeline

Before Texas Senator Ted Cruz did things like faux-filibustering the

funding of the federal government in order to halt the Affordable Care Act,

or “Obamacare,” he was a fellow at an influential state political group

called the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF). In 2010, he co-authored

a report for TPPF that described Obamacare as an “unconstitutional

federal overreach and violation of 10th Amendment rights.”i

The paper

detailed what would later become an American Legislative Exchange

Council (ALEC) “model” bill to overturn Obamacare – the “Health Care

Compact”ii

– as noted recently by the Current.

iii

TPPF is one of 63 state-based groups that have recently been identified as

members of the State Policy Network (SPN), a web of right-wing “think

tanks” in every state across the country. Although many of SPN’s member organizations claim to be

nonpartisan and independent, our in-depth investigation reveals that SPN and its member think

tanks are major drivers of the right-wing, ALEC-backed agenda in state houses nationwide, with

deep ties to the Koch brothers and the national right-wing network of funders, all while reporting

little or no lobbying activities. Acknowledging the groups’ political power and that their activities

make them into something different than think tanks, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin

called one SPN member a “do” tank.iv

cmd

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The SPN revolving door spins both ways. Brooke Rollins, president and CEO of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), previously served [45] as Republican Gov. Rick Perry's deputy general counsel and the head of Perry's policy division, overseeing the administration's work on everything from health care and education to criminal justice. Jeff Judson, who led the TPPF before Rollins, did stints [46] in the offices of Sen. John Tower and Rep. Tom DeLay, as well as in the George H.W. Bush administration's Department of Energy spn

---

lee fang right leans in:

State Policy Network was founded on March 24, 1992, in South Carolina by Thomas Roe, a wealthy businessman, Reagan adviser and leader of the South Carolina Policy Council, a state think tank modeled after the Heritage Foundation. Now headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, SPN began as an effort to mobilize more than twenty state think tanks. Political Research Associates, a left-leaning investigative team, reported that the group quickly became a “government-in-waiting” for the wave of Republican governors elected in 1994. As SPN affiliates proposed broad tax cuts and privatization schemes, the Republican governors frequently hired policy professionals from the think tanks to help enact those ideas.

Though backed by some of the largest Republican donors in the country, including the Coors family and Richard Mellon Scaife, SPN also thrived in the 1990s by assisting the tobacco industry in packaging its resistance to tobacco taxes and health regulations as part of a “freedom agenda” for conservatives.

Sharp herself gained experience working at this nexus of influence. Records stored with the University of California, San Francisco, reveal that Philip Morris not only gave generous financial donations to SPN affiliates, but was heavily involved in drafting and disseminating content for the think tanks. Before assuming her current position, Sharp served as executive director of the Cascade Institute, a State Policy Network affiliate in Oregon. The UCSF archive shows that during her tenure, the Cascade Institute corresponded with Philip Morris’s state lobbyist in Salem on promoting opposition to tobacco taxes, including one instance where Cascade published an opinion piece by a doctor. The doctor’s column, which was faxed to the Philip Morris representative, warned that high cigarette taxes could lead to “drive-by shootings and mob-style assassinations—turf wars—over the control of black market cigarette sales.”

At a 2001 meeting for SPN, Sharp invited Joshua Slavitt, Philip Morris’s director of external affairs, to give a talk. “I know that many of you have worked with Philip Morris,” Slavitt said, according to a prepared text, adding: “It won’t surprise you that we believe it is in our enlightened self-interest to be part of the policy discussions that ultimately shape the environment in which we do business.” He ended his speech with specific recommendations for SPN leaders in requesting corporate contributions.

A look at the donors to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the SPN affiliate in Austin, provides a rare window illustrating how these think tanks operate today. The evidence shows that the Big Tobacco–era strategy has been embraced by other large corporations.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation, whose leaders recently stirred up controversy for surreptitiously lobbying on behalf of the government of Malaysia, received the bulk of its money from more than seventy-five business interests, including firms like ConocoPhillips, Boeing, TXU Energy, ExxonMobil, AEP Texas and Devon Energy. The largest company on the donor list, Koch Industries, gave $159,834 through its Austin lobbyist, J. William Oswald, in addition to a $69,788 donation from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, a Koch family foundation run in part by Richard Fink, another executive with Koch’s lobbying operation. As The Texas Observer noted, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has focused much of its advocacy on issues pertaining to its corporate benefactors, including energy deregulation and opposition to Environmental Protection Agency rules to curb mercury, smog and carbon pollution.

The Texas donor list also reveals that Sharp has played a larger role in directly financing the expansion of her affiliates than was previously known. Public disclosures indicate that SPN distributed only $19,500 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2010. That modest amount, which is similar in size to grants given to other state think tanks, suggests that many of the groups do not rely on a central source of cash. But the leaked document shows Sharp as the contact for a donation of $300,000 from the “State Think Tank Fund,” as well as $195,000 from the “Government Transparency Fund” and $49,306 from SPN itself—a discrepancy of $524,806 compared with the disclosed grant. Neither the State Think Tank Fund nor the Government Transparency Fund appears on Guidestar.com or the Foundation Center, repositories for nonprofit and foundation disclosures.

* * *

Like many SPN affiliates, the Texas Public Policy Foundation has seen its budget steadily rise. In 2011, the group brought in $5.5 million in contributions, $2.4 million more than it raised in 2008. How the other state think tanks in SPN’s orbit are funded largely remains a mystery, since they, like many overtly political nonprofits, do not disclose their donors. A recent investigation by the Center for Public Integrity shows that Donors Trust, a donor-advised fund that caters to wealthy individuals, has provided much of the funding for the recent expansion in state think tanks backed by the Franklin Center and SPN.

Under Sharp’s leadership, State Policy Network has grown, opening new think tanks (now numbering fifty-nine) and forging close relations with ALEC, which brings together conservative state lawmakers and corporate lobbyists to draft “model legislation.” In 2009, ALEC gave Sharp an award to thank her for “getting SPN members more involved” with the organization. “This special acknowledgement belongs to those who have put in dedicated time and energy through ALEC, said Sharp, who accepted the award onstage with lobbyists from Verizon and Altria.

While progressive donors have also sought to fund targeted think tank and state media outlets in certain states namely Colorado and, reportedly, Texas—there is no comparison in terms of size and scope, or in the underhanded tactics embraced by their ideological opponents.

Brian Rothenberg, head of ProgressOhio, notes that while family foundations exist on the right and the left, corporate money has flowed almost exclusively to conservative think tanks. “Especially after Citizens United,” he says, the right is inherently better funded than the left.” In 2011, during the effort to repeal Governor John Kasich’s collective bargaining law, unions still provided less than 20 percent of ProgressOhio’s budget.

As far as local labor activists like Brett Banditelli (who also produces the Rick Smith radio show in Harrisburg) are concerned, their side is already overwhelmed. The Franklin Center’s Pennsylvania Independent “doesn’t have much readership, but does an incredible job of setting the tone on attacks on unions before the attacks come,” says Banditelli, who notes the Legislature might first go after union pensions before changing any membership or collective bargaining rules. Banditelli says labor has been slow to adapt to the changing media environment, and teachers and workers now stand defenseless.

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Also, Republicans who were newly elected in 2012 seem intent on consolidating power. Missouri’s GOP state legislators have contemplated using their supermajority to enact right-to-work legislation. The Advance Arkansas Institute, the SPN affiliate in Little Rock, produced content pushing for the strict voter ID laws recently passed by the legislature—which became Republican this year for the first time since Reconstruction.

Similarly, the Americans for Prosperity chapter in Kansas has pushed an effort to undercut paycheck dues to public sector unions this year, while the John W. Pope Civitas Institute, a North Carolina think tank, has rolled out attacks against Democratic efforts to reform the state’s infamously gerrymandered congressional lines.

Tim Phillips, the national head of Americans for Prosperity and a close adviser to David Koch, has been clear about his intention to make the most out of the Republicans’ state-level gains. Speaking at a recent press conference in Indianapolis, he declared: “We see a debate going on at the state level that is really going to define the nation.”

Meanwhile, at another Heritage Foundation gathering, Sharp and her colleagues said that their new strategy had been inspired in part by a Malcolm Gladwell article in The New Yorker called “How David Beats Goliath.” The piece, which details the ways that underdogs can win playing by their own rules, offers anecdotes on how insurgents have defeated well-equipped armies by harassing and weakening their opponents. It also describes how a computer scientist won a naval warfare simulation by spending his fictional trillion-dollar budget almost entirely on PT boats.

Referring to the Gladwell article, Sharp said PT boats are “an apt metaphor” for her network of groups because “they’re fast and maneuverable. A team of PT boats working strategically can defeat much larger and less maneuverable vessels—such as huge chunks of unions.”

---

Tracie Sharp , president of the State Policy Network (SPN) since January 2000, had previously served on its board of directors for 14 years. She was the executive director and one of the founders of Cascade Policy Institute, Oregon's market-oriented think tank, from 1991 to 1999. She worked in the areas of education and social security privatization.[5]

In 2012, a list of 2010 funders of an SPN member think tank in Texas, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), that was disclosed to the IRS was inadvertently made public. The list of funders revealed is an important case study in how SPN's member think tanks are funded, and by whom. Koch Industries, for example, gave $159,834 directly to TPPF, in addition to $69,788.61 from the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, which is a Koch Family Foundation. SPN itself gave TPPF $49,306.90, but what's more, Tracie Sharp, SPN's executive director, was the contact person for an additional $495,000. These two grants, for $300,000 and $195,000, were listed as being received from the "State Think Tank Fund" and the "Government Transparency Fund," respectively -- two funds about which virtually nothing is known.[24][25]

Sharp represents SPN as a member of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). She is a member of ALEC's Education Task Force[26] and Health and Human Services Task Force.[27] She was the recipient of ALEC's 2009 Private Sector Member of the Year Award.[28]

Sharp is also a trustee to the Roe Foundation and to the Special Hope Foundation, a "family foundation supporting innovative projects to assist the causes of the physically, emotionally, and developmentally disabled," a biographical note states. In 1993, Sharp founded HOPE-Oregon, a Portland, Oregon-based "private volunteer effort to provide health care education services to low-income families."[5]

"Previously, Ms. Sharp worked with Washington State radio commentator and Republican Party leader John Carlson as director of programs at the Washington Institute for Policy Studies in Seattle."[5] Please see Tracie Sharp for more.

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Texas Public Policy Foundation

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) is a conservative think tank founded in 1989 by James R. Leininger. The TPPF is based in Austin, Texas.

According to the TPPF's website, their mission is to "improve Texas government by generating academically sound research and data on state issues, and by recommending the findings to opinion leaders, policy makers, the media and general public. The work of the Foundation is conducted by academics across Texas and is funded by hundreds of individuals, foundations and corporations." [1]

Contents

[hide]

1 Funding

2 Board of Directors

3 Senior Fellows

4 Staff

5 Contact Details

6 External links

Funding

The TPPF's 2005 annual report states that the groups budget was $1,759,602 million, an almost 30% increase on its 2004 budget. Individual contributors accounted for just over half the contributions, unspecified corporations $259,000 or 15% with the remainder from unspecified foundations. [2] (Pdf)

Media Transparency lists TPPF as having received 26 grants totalling $491,749 (unadjusted for inflation) between 1998 and 2004 from a range of foundations including [3]:

Armstrong Foundation

Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation

Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation

Jaquelin Hume Foundation

JM Foundation

Roe Foundation

Ruth and Lovett Peters Foundation

TPPF has received $15,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998, $5,000 in 2001 [4] and $10,000 in 2004. [5]

Board of Directors

Brooke L. Rollins (President)

William A. McMinn (Chairman)

Wendy Gramm, Chairman Emeritus; Distinguisheed Scholar, Mercatus Center, George Mason University

James R. Leininger, Founder, Former CEO and Chair, Kinetic Concepts,

Tim Dunn, Vice Chairman; CEO CrownQuest Operating

Ernest Angelo, Treasurer; Managing Partner, Discovery Exploration

Phil D. Adams, Owner Phil Adams Company

Ramiro Galindo, Founder & CEO, R.A. Galindo

Bill Jones, Vinson & Elkins

Dale Laine, Laine Strategy Group

Tim Lyles

Vance C. Miller, Chairman, President & CEO Henry. S. Miller Companies

John L. Nau, III, Silver Eagle Distributors

Brenda Pejovich, Founder and Former CEO Pejovich & Assoc

Jeff Sandefer, Sandefer Capital Partners

Fritz Steiger, Founder and Former President TPPF

Michael Stevens, Chairmen and CEO, Michael Stevens Interests

Senior Fellows

John Barrett

Michael Bond

Patrick Brockett

H. Sterling Burnett

Wendell Cox

Robert W. Crandall

Jerry Ellig

Timothy J. Gronberg, Ph.D.

Christopher Hammons

Eric Hanushek

David A. Hartman

Devon M. Herrick

Milton Holloway

Ronald A. Kaiser

Matthew Ladner

Maurice P. McTigue

Haavi Morreim

Grover Norquist

Randal O'Toole

John Pisciotta

Nat Shapo

James C. Smith

Ronald Trowbridge

David G. Tuerck

Richard Vedder, Ph.D.

Bob Williams

Patrick Wolf

Staff

Brooke Rollins President

Michael Quinn Sullivan Vice President

Chris Patterson Director of Research

Byron Schlomach Chief Economist

Mary Katherine Stout Health Care Policy Analyst

Bill Peacock Economic Freedom Policy Analyst

Marc Levin Director, Center for Effective Justice

Shari Hanrahan Director of Development

Talmadge Helfin

Nancy Druart Events, Publications & Marketing Manager

Nathan Thompson Director of Operations

Arlene Wohlgemuth

Contact Details

Texas Public Policy Foundation

900 Congress Ave., Ste. 400

Austin, TX 78701

Phone 512.472.2700

Fax 512.472.2728

Email: info AT TexasPolicy.com

Web: http://www.texaspolicy.com

External links

"Perry, staff took Bahamas trip paid for by donors", Associated Press, 24 February 2004

Category: Think tanks

---

Scott Walker's Texas Rangers

Submitted by Mary Bottari on January 13, 2012 - 8:42am

It has been a tough holiday season for Scott Walker. The state lost 14,600 jobs in November and a new government report indicates that Wisconsin leads the nation in killing public sector jobs. A November poll has support for the recall of the governor at 58 percent, up from 47 percent in the spring, and next week Wisconsin residents are preparing to file over 500,000 recall petitions to trigger a gubernatorial recall. Is it any wonder that Wisconsin's governor decided to fly to Texas to find a friendlier crowd?

Walker Addresses Koch-funded Policy Group

Walker was scheduled to address the Texas Public Policy Foundation(TPPF), a right-wing policy shop, funded by the Koch Brothers and central to promoting the agenda of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in the state.

Progress Texas executive director Matt Glazer says the group is the cornerstone of ALEC in Texas, helping to shape "model legislation" in areas such as higher education, healthcare, civil and criminal justice.

"The foundation develops legislation that then goes through the ALEC process," Glazer said during a January 11 news conference to draw attention to Walker's appearance in Texas. He also said that the TPPF helps staff some ALEC task forces and helps to develop and distribute their "model legislation." Separate investigative reports have pointed out how parts of the legislative agendas of both Walker and Texas Governor Rick Perry closely resemble that of ALEC.

Walker's visit did not go unnoticed by working people in the state. Texas AFL-CIO President Becky Moeller and Occupy Austin organized a noon protest outside the conference. Folks in ten gallon hats held "Recall Walker" signs and chanted to be heard inside the conference. "People need to see the pattern. The assault on working families is a coordinated right-wing attack that requires a coordinated defense at every point where the issue of dignity in the workplace is engaged," said Moeller.

Raising a Fortune from Outside the State of Wisconsin

Many in Wisconsin suspect that the real reason for Walker's visit to the Lone Star State was to raise unlimited campaign funds prior to an anticipated spring recall election.

Wisconsin's campaign finance laws limited individual donations to gubernatorial candidates to $10,000 until November 4, 2011, when a loophole in the recall law kicked in and enabled Walker to raise unlimited funds from individuals from that date until the end of the election. From July 1 to December 15, 2011, Walker raised $5.1 million, the most ever for a single reporting period in Wisconsin. Forty-nine percent of the money came from outside the state, an astonishing number for a candidate who traditionally raised the vast majority of his money from inside the state.

The most recent campaign finance report showed that 27 people gave Walker more than $10,000. Seventeen of the 27 are from outside Wisconsin. Five of these 27 hail from the state of Texas.

Walker's Big Texas Donors

Here are some of Walker's deep-pocket supporters in Texas.

Bob Perry of Houston, Texas, gave Walker $250,000 on December 4, 2011. Perry's wealth comes from the homebuilding company Perry Homes, but he is most famous for bankrolling the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which funded the steamrolling of fellow veteran John Kerry during the 2004 presidential race. Perry's $250,000 is the largest donation to a political candidate in Wisconsin history. He is a big donor to Rick Perry, and he gave an eye-popping $7 million Karl Rove's American Crossroads group, one of the largest single campaign contributions ever.

H.R. Perot, Jr. of Plano, Texas, gave $20,000. He is Ross Perot's son, and has been called the wealthiest Texan of all time. Forbes has reported his net worth as $1.5 billion. He is also a big backer of Perry and the Texas Republican establishment.

John Nau, head of Silver Eagle Distributors, gave $40,000. Silver Eagle Distributors, headquartered in Houston, Texas, is the nation's largest distributor of Anheuser-Busch products. He is a big backer of Perry and alcohol-related PACs in Texas.

Ross Perot, Jr

Margaret Crow, a Dallas "homemaker," is the widow of Trammell Crow of Trammel Crow Co. and Crow Holdings. The Trammel Crow company is a giant real estate and investment firm in 14 U.S. cities and Canada. Mrs. Crow gave $25,000 to Walker and is one of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's biggest donors. Among other controversies, Trammel Crow was sued in 2010 by the New York Attorney General for not constructing buildings accessible to the disabled.

As Wisconsin prepares for a likely recall election, Wisconsin Democracy Campaign Executive Director Mike McCabe fears that we haven't seen anything yet. The latest reports include only five weeks of unlimited fundraising and do not include anonymous independent expenditures.

"We are seeing things we've never seen before in Wisconsin. There is nothing to compare it to," McCabe said.

---

crooks and liars:

Here's what I do know. Part of that agreement was to hold harmless all parties affected. The list of affected parties is in the image above, and includes the following people: Francisco Gonzalez, Greg Walker, Colin Sharky and Maureen Wagner as members of the board, former and past. Consultants, donors and fundraisers to Project Veritas include Kate Doner, Eric O'Keefe, and Denis Calabrese. Who are these people who consulted, donated or fundraised for James O'Keefe?

Kate Doner:

Sourcewatch:

Doner Fundraising established by Kate Doner in 2003 in Austin Texas, is a fundraising and event services company "that partners with issue based non-profits, coalitions, corporations, and professional associations" and Republican candidates.

Although listed on the site of the State Policy Network and its current newsletter as its event planning consultant, there is no website corresponding to the domain. Her colleague, Elizabeth James, who lists her phone number as the same as Doner Fundraising, has an email address affiliated with Quorum Public Affairs, another Austin strategic public affairs company helping businesses to influence goverment and regulatory policies.

[...]

A biographical note states that "Doner received her Bachelor’s of Arts from Hillsdale College in Michigan with a double degree in Political Science and History. She is a native of Michigan, has lived in Texas since 1993."

She served as Director of Finance for the Texas Public Policy Foundation in 2003.

[...]

She managed the Austin fundraising for Texas Representative Joe Nixon in his race for the Texas Senate in 2005. Nixon of Houston chaired the Texas House Civil Practices Committee and was described by Texans for Lawsuit Reform in 2003, in The Advocate as "our one true friend" there and a courageous lawyer." In a news release, Nixon described Doner as "known throughout the state as an Austin fundraising powerhouse....Her client list reads like the who's who of Texas' best known Republican and conservative causes."

Doner's comments on tort reform appeared in the Winter 2006 issue of James Madison Institute.

Her former husband, John Doner operates John Doner & Associates. His Austin-based firm provides marketing services and consulting for political campaigns, political action committees, grassroots initiatives, and associations since 1989.

---

TWO

TPPF 2 texasEdit

11/17 maybe premature, big swamp things

poster, not sure for what 10'18 on brooke rollins (harnet white fail thx god]

html $249,999

---

this is not even part of planning the coup so much as aa PR ploy to counter original story that got a good bit of coverage (not sure how broad)

how is TPPF so central?

omg yikes

https://www.alternet.org/2021/11/trump-2655520362/

no lnx

'Barely concealed bloodlust': Claremont Institute laid out detailed plan for using cops to overturn Trump’s election loss

Travis Gettys and Raw Story November 08, 2021

The report was prepared by attorney John Eastman, who authored a memo laying out another strategy for keeping Trump in office, and former Trump deputy national security advisor K.T. McFarland, as well as Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, alt-right figure Jeff Giesea and right-wing blogger Charles Haywood, reported The Bulwark.

"Despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor — 'for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism' — the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right," writes columnist Christian Vanderbrouk. "Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government — aided by citizen 'posses' of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers — could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office."

"A barely concealed bloodlust runs through the report," Vanderbrouk writes. "This isn't a serious wargame or a policy study so much as a bowdlerized retelling of The Turner Diaries."

"Either way. It's as if they're steering into the violence instead of trying to avoid it," he adds. "The message is clear: do whatever it takes to crush your opponents and all will be forgiven in the second Trump term."

---

https://www.thebulwark.com/notes-on-an-authoritarian-conspiracy-inside-the-claremont-institutes-79-days-to-inauguration-report/

...Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman—lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden’s win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors—and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, “a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes,” and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American “Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions.”

The distinguished wargamers.....

---

desmog

Life:Powered

Background

In February 2018, TPPF brought on Bernard McNamee to lead the Life:Powered project and also to head TPPF’s Center for Tenth Amendment Action. According to its 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was originally TPPF’s “Fueling Freedom” project, which launched in 2015 “to combat the Obama-era Clean Power Plan.” [2], [3]

McNamee most recently worked as deputy general counsel for energy policy under Secretary Rick Perry at the Department of Energy and has also advised Texas senator Ted Cruz. [2]

TPPF’s Kathleen Hartnett-White was director of the Fueling Freedom project and co-authored the same-titled book with Heritage Foundation economist Stephen Moore. White is a senior fellow of the Life:Powered project. [4]

Stance on Climate Change

May 4, 2018

Life:Powered promotes articles critical of a carbon tax as a solution to climate change, generally linking to research done by TPPF. One example is an article by Vance Ginn that links to research by John Cristy to suggest “there’s little conclusive evidence to prove that carbon dioxide emissions cause environmental harm.” [5]

The Life:Powered article concludes: [5]

“Finally, perhaps most importantly, there is little to no evidence that there is a need to reduce carbon emissions in this country. For all of these reasons, and many more, the proposed carbon tax should be whole-heartedly rejected.”

2018

The Texas Public Policy Foundation features a “Life:Powered” playlist in its YouTube channel that promotes “The Moral Case For Fossil Fuels” by Alex Epstein, as well as a panel presentation by the CO2 Coalition promoting the supposed benefits of boosting atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. View the playlist below:..[vid] docs]

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no lnx

The following funding values are for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the parent organization of Life:Powered.

View the attached spreadsheet for more details on the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s funding by year (.xlsx). [7]

Donor and Year Total

Pew Charitable Trusts $5,488,454

Donors Capital Fund $3,530,848

DonorsTrust $1,369,616

Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation $1,137,624

Albert and Ethel Herzstein Charitable Foundation $980,000

Searle Freedom Trust $645,000

Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation $548,500

Jaquelin Hume Foundation $490,001

State Policy Network $378,900

The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation $315,000

The Roe Foundation $287,000

The Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation $275,000

Armstrong Foundation $160,000

Castle Rock Foundation $125,000

William H. Donner Foundation $110,000

JM Foundation $105,000

Cato Institute $100,000

Exxon Mobil $100,000

Heartland Institute $100,000

Friedman Foundation For Educational Choice $62,000

Charles Koch Institute $47,623

The Robertson-Finley Foundation $42,500

PhRMA $35,000

National Christian Charitable Foundation $27,500

Walton Family Foundation $25,000

Americans for Tax Reform Foundation $25,000

The Vernon K. Krieble Foundation $11,000

Atlas Economic Research Foundation $9,500

Grand Total $16,531,066

990 Forms]

key People

Michael Nasi — Reportedly heading the Life-Powered effort, as of August 2018. [8]

Michael Nasi is General Counsel of Balanced Energy for Texas, a “coalition of energy consumers, producers, and providers” that includes major coal and energy companies, related advocacy groups, and groups supplying the energy industry such as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), American Electric Power, Arch Coal, Peabody Energy, and Union Pacific Railroad. [9]

When President Donald Trump issued an executive order to revise or rescind the Clean Power Plan, Nasi described it as “a crucial win for Texas and the nation.” He is also a partner of the law firm Jackson Walker LLP where he founded the firm’s “Climate Change and Carbon Management group.” [10], [11]

Jason Isaac — Senior Manager and Distinguished Fellow of Life:Powered as of April 2019

Former State Representative for Hays and Blanco counties in the Texas Hill Country. According to SourceWatch, Isaac received $2,000 from KochPAC to his Jason Isaac Campaign in 2018. [20]

Bernard McNamee — Initially listed as project lead until moving to a position at DOE. [2]

Bernard L. McNamee was initially listed as project lead for the Life:Powered project in February 2018, however according to his LinkedIn he left that position in May 2018 to become Executive Director at the Office of Policy for the Department of Energy (DOE). McNamee worked for the DOE as Deputy General Counsel for Energy Policy since May 2017, and as Senior Counsel to the law firm McGuireWoods LLP before that. [12]

Kathleen Hartnett-White — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered

Hartnett-White was nominated by President Donald Trump in 2017 to lead the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), and also served on Trump’s “economic advisory team” in 2016. White’s nomination was withdrawn after it was sent back to the White House at the end of 2017. [14], [15], [16]

Jacki Pick — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered

Jacki Pick formerly served as the executive vice president and CEO of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), a corporate-funded group that has promoted supposed uncertainties around climate science. She also hosts The Jacki Daily Show at TheBlaze.com. [17]

Mandy Gunasekara — Senior Fellow, Life:Powered [28]

She is a a member of the CO2 Coalition, a group directed by climate change denier William Happer that portrays carbon dioxide as “a nutrient vital for life” and advocates for more of it in the atmosphere. Her CO2 Coalition profile describes Gunasekara as “the chief architect of the Paris Accord withdrawal and the repeal of the Clean Power Plan” while working for Trump at the EPA as principal deputy assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. [26], [27]

Other People

As of August 2018, TPPF was actively hiring for positions including “Project Coordinator” and “Policy Analyst” for the Life:Powered project. [18]

Actions

April 6, 2020

March 23, 2020

As reported at DeSmog, Life:Powered sent a letter to Congress critical of the COVID-19 stimulus package for including “tax incentives and spending for unreliable ‘green’ energy

programs.” [29], [30]

The letter concludes:

“This is no time for political games. Climate change is not an immediate threat to humanity. Climate-related deaths have declined 98.9% in the last century, and humanity is growing more and more resilient thanks to the availability of affordable, reliable energy. On behalf of all Americans, we urge you to oppose any stimulus proposals that carve out special treatment for or bail out any energy companies and focus instead on stopping COVID-19.” [30]

Signatories included: [30]

no lnx

Name Title Organization STINKTANKS

Jason Isaac Senior Manager & Distinguished Fellow Life:Powered/Texas Public Policy Foundation

Myron Ebell Director, Center for Energy and Environment Competitive Enterprise Institute

Bette Grande CEO Roughrider Policy Center

Ellen Weaver President & CEO Palmetto Promise Institute

Isaac Orr Policy Fellow Center of the American Experiment

Bethany Marcum Executive Director Alaska Policy Forum

David T. Stevenson Director, Center for Energy and Environment Caesar Rodney Institute

Donald van der Vaart Senior Fellow John Locke Foundation

Jason Hayes Director of Environmental Policy Mackinac Center for Public Policy

John Droz, Jr. Founder Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions

George K. Rasley, Jr. Managing Editor ConservativeHQ.com

Becky Norton Dunlop Former Secretary of Natural Resources Commonwealth of Virginia

James L. Martin Founder/Chairman 60 Plus Association

Saulius “Saul” Anuzis President 60 Plus Association

Ken Blackwell Senior Fellow Family Research Council

Eunie Smith President Eagle Forum

Jenny Beth Martin Honorary Chairman Tea Party Patriots Action

Jon Caldara President Independence Institute

L. Brent Bozell, III Founder and President Media Research Center

Jason Pye Vice President of Legislative Affairs FreedomWorks

Jameson Taylor Vice President for Policy Mississippi Center for Public Policy

Carol Platt Liebau President Yankee Institute

Mike Stenhouse CEO Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity

Daniel Erspamer CEO Pelican Institute for Public Policy

Christian N. Braunlich President Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy

Todd Myers Environmental Director Washington Policy Center

june 14, 2019

Speaking to the American-Statesman, senior manager Jason Isaac said that the mission of Life:Powered was to “raise America’s energy IQ,” adding: [22]

“We’re making the connection between prosperity we enjoy here in the United States and access to energy in all forms, all abundant, affordable reliable, all forms and all of the above.” [22]

A 2018 TPPF video promoting the continued operation of a coal-fired power plant on the Arizona Navajo reservation has been rebranded with the Life:Powered name. The video showed images of smokestacks with a voiceover by a young Navajo girl saying, “Papa says it’s the heart of the land. I can hear it beating.” [22]

The video’s closing text reads:

“Extreme environmentalist politics will eliminate jobs, destroy families, and spike electric bills in the Navajo Nation and across America. The Navajo don’t need to be told what to do. They’ve been protecting the environment for centuries.” [22 [vid]

Local environmental groups responded with claims that the plant’s consumption of billions of gallons of groundwater has led to contamination and depletion of the reservation’s water supply. The executive director of a Navajo non-profit organization told the Statesman: [22]

“The pro-coal supporters have made it all about jobs. There’s more to it than that. What’s happening on Black Mesa shows that jobs and revenues is not all that it’s made out to be. When you lose your own potable water source, that’s life or death right there.” [22]

Peabody Energy, a TPPF donor, operates the Navajo Generating Station, which will be shuttered at the end of 2019. [22]

Another TPPF Life:Powered-branded video on the topic of “Energy Poverty” featured Caleb Rossiter of the CO2 Foundation promoting wider adoption of fossil fuel-generated electricity in the developing world. [22]

Life:Powered plans to target future messaging in New Mexico, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, and Alaska in opposition to renewable energy and carbon reduction initiatives. [22]

February 8, 2019

Life:Powered posted a critique of the Green New Deal on its website, written by The Honorable Jason Isaac, describing it as a “massive new tax” and claiming the threats to the planet of continued fossil fuel use have “no scientific evidence to back it up.” [21]

In conclusion: “Rep. Ocasio-Cortez predicts catastrophe in 12 years if we do nothing to fight climate change. The real catastrophe would be enacting her plan to do that.” [21]

August 7, 2018

S&P Global reported that Life:Powered screened two videos at the American Coal Council’s Coal Market Strategies conference in New Mexico that would be part of an upcoming campaign. [8]

Michael Nasi, who is reportedly leading the effort, said the videos “aim to educate an ‘extremely under-informed’ public on fossil fuels.” [8]

Also speaking at the conference, Luke Popovich, former spokesman for the National Mining Association, discussed industry tactics with regards to climate change: [8]

“It’s too late for denial when your customers, the ratepayers, the banks, and regulators already believe climate change is real,” Popovich said. “Accepting that climate change is real merely opens the discussion with the public.”

Rather, a message on how fossil fuels could be a “humanitarian tool”— so-called “energy poverty” has long been a talking point of industry — would be a primary focus of the Life:Powered videos. [8]

Related Organizations

Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — Life:Powered describes itself as a project of TPPF. [1]

Fueling Freedom — According to TPPF’s 2017 annual report, Life:Powered was formerly the Fueling Freedom project. [3]

Contact & Address

The Life:Powered project shares the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s address. As per the project’s Privacy Policy Page: [19]

https://www.texaspolicy.com/

901 Congress Avenue

Austin, Texas 78701

United States

comms@texaspolicy.com

512) 472-2700

Social Media

TPPF promotes Life Powered by the #lifepowered hash tag on Twitter.

Life Powered links to TPPF’s Facebook page @TexasPolicy.

Resources

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12 2016

UK’s biggest energy company, Centrica, has donated tens of thousands of dollars to a Texas-based climate denial think tank strongly linked to Donald Trump’s new energy secretary Rick Perry, Unearthed can reveal.

Centrica, which owns British Gas and is a major investor in UK fracking, has made a number of donations to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) over the last five years and says it has no plans to stop.

When contacted by Unearthed, Centrica refused to disclose the total sum that it had donated to the group. But a leaked 2010 donor list reveals that its US subsidiary, Direct Energy, was among the TPPF’s largest donors that year with a payment of $20,000.

Other donors in 2010 included ExxonMobil, Chevron, the Koch brothers, Devon Energy and a host of other energy companies and climate sceptic funding bodies.

The Austin-based think tank has played a central role in the US climate denial movement, which is now poised to take control of energy and environmental policy under Donald Trump.

Centrica has previously sought to position itself as corporate leader on climate action.

In its last annual report the firm boasted: “We are also making an important contribution to address big issues in society related to energy: from energy pricing and vulnerability to energy security and climate change.”

Responding to the news, Caroline Lucas MP told Unearthed: “For a company that has claimed to be at the forefront of action on climate change, it is simply astounding that Centrica is donating money to climate deniers.”

“Now that these links have come to light, we need a clear commitment from Centrica to end all further donations. It is shameful that one of our largest energy companies is linked to this reckless and irresponsible organisation, and I hope an apology will be issued shortly.”

Ties to Trump

The TPPF holds strong relationships with leading Republican politicians, including former presidential candidate Ted Cruz, who was a senior fellow at the organisation, and new energy secretary Rick Perry.

Leading Republicans Rick Perry and Ted Cruz have strong links to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which aims to stop CO2 being regulated as a pollutant. Photo]

Perry published his 2010 book, Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington, with the TPPF, using his author’s note to praise the think tank for its role in fighting the “perils of environmental policy based on the hysteria of global warming.”

The think tank’s ties to the new Trump administration also include Doug Domenech, who is leading Donald Trump’s department of interior transition team.

Domenech, a former department of interior staffer under George W. Bush, leads the TPPF’s “Fueling Freedom” project, which aims to “end the regulation of CO2 as a pollutant” and collaborates with the Heritage Foundation to organise an annual climate sceptic energy summit in Washington D.C.

This year’s event was attended by prominent sceptics, including Senator Jim Inhofe, Willie Soon and Professor Will Happer, who was caught in an Unearthed undercover sting last year agreeing to hide the fact a fossil fuel company would be funding his research on the benefits of CO2.

Centrica’s donations

Centrica has refused to disclose how much it has donated to the TPPF but admitted that it continues to do so and has no plans to stop the payments.

According to the Guardian guk, the company’s most recent donation was of a similar size to the $20,000 payment in 2010.

A Centrica spokesperson told Unearthed: “Centrica has a clear position on climate change and we believe in the need to take material action to reduce the effect of fossil fuels on climate change.”

“The TPPF is a non-profit research organization and cannot by law lobby the Texas government or any governmental institution. [guffaw] We share some of their views on the benefits of a well-structured retail electricity market to help consumers get the best possible price and product, fair tax policy for families and businesses, strong schools, quality health care and safe neighborhoods for our customers and employees.”

When asked if Centrica felt it had been a mistake to donate core funding to a think tank so at odds with its views on climate change, the spokesperson said: “We do not make contributions to any organization to advocate specifically for a position on the environment. We believe the science on climate change is absolutely clear.”

Nick Surgey, Director of Research at the Center for Media and Democracy in the US, told Unearthed:

“For decades, the U.S. climate change denial movement has been backed by millions of dollars in secret funding from the fossil fuel industry. Over the past eight years climate denial had been fading in the mainstream, increasingly pushed into the shadows of US politics. But fossil fuel funding for groups like TPPF had continued, mostly in secret, and they are now moving into a position of power and influence.”

“With the election of Trump, the deniers are finding themselves with greater access to the incoming administration than they have had for years, possibly more than they have ever had. TPPF presents itself as an independent quasi-academic think tank. It is actually one of the more extreme climate change denial groups in the United States, promoting disinformation about the threat of climate change to the benefit of its corporate funders.”

The Texas Public Policy Foundation failed to respond to a request for comment.

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/01/26/state-policy-network-oil-transportation-climate-initiative-northeast

no lnx many

Last month New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu announced the state would not be participating in the Transportation and Climate Initiative (TCI), a regional cap-and-trade program aimed at reducing carbon emissions from vehicles. The program is still in early stages of development, but groups tied to petroleum interests and conservative networks funded by the Koch empire are already fighting it with opposition campaigns.

These campaigns are active in multiple states throughout the Northeast, featuring public events to sway legislators, public letters co-signed by various free market groups, and at least one study produced by a Koch- and oil-industry funded think tank based in Texas.

Public Health and Sustainability Benefits

Supporters of the program describe TCI as an important step towards cleaning up the transportation sector and say it will improve public health and community sustainability. A draft Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was released in December, along with initial projections of potential economic and public health benefits.

According to the TCI website, “Preliminary modeling estimates that by 2032, the proposed program could yield monetized annual public health benefits of as much as $10 billion, including over 1,000 fewer premature deaths, and over 1,300 fewer asthma symptoms annually region-wide, among other safety and health benefits.”

In his comments announcing New Hampshire’s withdrawal from the 12-state coalition, Governor Sununu cited an estimate for fuel price increase. “New Hampshire is already taking substantial steps to curb our carbon emissions, and this initiative, if enacted, would institute a new gas tax by up to 17 cents per gallon while only achieving minimal results,” Sununu said.

Around the same time as Sununu's announcement, a coalition of 18 conservative think tanks released an open letter in opposition to TCI. The groups claim the initiative is “a carbon dioxide tax being implemented through a gas tax.” According to the letter, “Citizens in TCI states can expect to be hit with higher personal costs, higher costs for goods and services, and higher taxes.” The language in the letter appears similar to Sununu’s description of TCI as a “gas tax” and a “financial boondoggle.”

The Republican governor of New Hampshire is the brother of James Sununu, board chairman of the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy — one of the groups behind that open letter.

The Bartlett Center is a member of the State Policy Network, a Koch-funded network of think tanks based in states across the country that advocate against climate and clean energy policies and other initiatives deemed in opposition to “economic freedom.” This New Hampshire think tank also lists former Governor John H. Sununu — Chris Sununu’s father — as an emeritus board member. The organization has led the opposition to TCI in the Granite State.

With New Hampshire now backing out, pressure is mounting in other states to follow suit, as conservative think tanks continue to raise alarm at the proposal to rein in transportation-sector emissions.

'Biased' Surveys and Oil-Funded Studies Deployed in Connecticut and Virginia

When asked about the TCI in a recent radio interview, Connecticut Governor Ned Lamont did not give a definitive position, but he did say that a “gas tax” is “probably not the way to go.” Several newspapers picked up on this remark, including the conservative Boston Herald in Massachusetts and the Middletown Press in Connecticut.

The Yankee Institute for Public Policy, one of the think tanks that signed the opposition letter to TCI, posted a link to the Middletown Press article on its Facebook page with the caption, “good.” The Yankee Institute is Connecticut’s prominent conservative, free market think tank and another member of the State Policy Network. In December last year, the group posted on its blog in response to the TCI’s draft MOU release. The blog post labels the TCI as a “regional gasoline tax” and quotes from the oppositional open letter that the Yankee Institute signed.

More recently, the Yankee Institute attacked TCI in a blog post by claiming that modeling shows the program would have no effect on climate change.

“But the overall effect on the climate is too small to be measurable, according to climate modeling conducted by Brent Bennett, PhD, of Life: Powered — the energy policy division of the Texas Public Policy Foundation,” the blog post states. That climate modeling is meant to measure the impact of policy changes on global temperature, and is often used by conservative groups opposed to climate action — like the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) — to claim that a single policy will do nothing to alleviate global warming on a global scale.

“This modeling is flawed in that it’s an effort of focus on local costs and then change the scope of impact to global impacts. Demanding that any specific reductions making a difference on total pollution levels has been a polluter mantra for decades,” David Littell, senior advisor at the Regulatory Assistance Project, told DeSmog. “If we require any specific reduction in greenhouse gases to reduce global warming noticeably we will never do anything. No single reduction will move the dial, we need to transform our energy and transportation systems as a whole to address global warming and climate change.”

In Virginia, the Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy is ramping up criticism of TCI though an opposition campaign that includes questionable polling and research. The Jefferson Institute is another conservative think tank, a member of the State Policy Network, and signatory of the TCI opposition letter.

The Jefferson Institute is promoting a new report, conducted by one of its own staff members, filled with misleading information about the expected impacts of TCI.

For example, the report claims that TCI will have no health benefits, will prevent no deaths, and will have no environmental benefits, citing dubious sources including the Koch-funded Texas Public Policy Foundation and notorious climate science denier Steve Milloy. The report points to the same TPPF climate modeling cited by the Yankee Institute, examining the impact that TCI would have on global temperature.

Jefferson Institute for Public Policy's report on the Transportation and Climate Initiative

Jefferson Institute for Public Policy's report on the Transportation and Climate Initiative posted on its website.

The author of the report, titled “The Transportation and Climate Initiative — All Pain and No Gain,” is David Schnare, an attorney who was embroiled in a legal dispute over finances with his business partner and who has sued universities to obtain climate scientists’ emails. Schnare is now the director of the Jefferson Institute’s Center for Environmental Stewardship.

The Jefferson Institute is also touting results of a poll indicating a majority of Virginians would oppose TCI if it meant a tax increase of at least 18 cents per gallon of gas. The same poll found that 61 percent would support TCI given benefits like reducing carbon emissions and developing the clean energy economy. The two questions yielding these results were added at the request of the Jefferson Institute to a more general poll on political and legislative topics.

According to one expert in polling and strategic communication, the way in which the two questions were posed was intended to generate these results.

“The approach used in this survey strikes me as biased in a more subtle way,” Ed Maibach, of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, told DeSmog. “The first question specifies the benefits only — which are benefits that most people value — and then assesses support for the [TCI] proposal. The second question states the costs only, and then assesses support for the proposal, but participants in the survey may or may not remember the benefits stated in the prior question,” Maibach explained. “A better (i.e., fairer) way to assess support for the proposal would be to present the benefits and costs — in a fair and balanced manner — in the same question.”

TCI Opponents Gather in Boston

The Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, a free market conservative think tank, is leading the opposition to TCI in the Bay State. The group is lobbying the state legislature and pushing for a bill that would prohibit participation in TCI without legislative approval.

Last week the alliance and other conservative think tanks convened a press conference in Boston voicing their opposition to TCI.

Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance spokesman Paul Craney told reporters that multiple governors have expressed concerns about the initiative and that momentum to squash it was on their side. “Things are going in our direction for the taxpayers and consumers,” Craney said.

“What we once saw as maybe a regional approach seems to be falling apart,” added Chris Carlozzi, state director of the National Federation of Independent Business for Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Groups represented at the press conference, according to MassLive, included Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, the Vermont chapter of Americans for Prosperity, Maine Heritage Policy Center, Rhode Island Center for Freedom & Prosperity, and Connecticut’s Yankee Institute for Public Policy. Most of these groups are members of the Koch-funded State Policy Network.

TCI Moves Forward

Mass. Gov. Charlie Baker

Governor Charlie Baker, Lt. Governor Karyn Polito, MassDOT Secretary and CEO Stephanie Pollack and Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Kathleen Theoharides at the Massachusetts Transportation and Climate Initiative Business Summit in December 2019. Credit: Gov. Charlie Baker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Despite the criticisms and opposition campaigns, the initiative to introduce a regional cap on transportation sector emissions is moving ahead. The program is accepting public comments on the draft MOU through the end of February. A final MOU is expected later this spring, and the program could become operational by 2022.

Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker let TCI critics down when defending the program in his State of the Commonwealth address this week.

“Greenhouse gas emissions from transportation have been on the rise for decades and now represent 40 percent of this state’s total emissions. Unless we take on transportation, we won’t meet our objectives,” Baker said. “RGGI, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative that our proposal is based on, has worked for 10 years. Power plants have adopted clean energy solutions and funded energy efficiency programs, investing 3.3 billion dollars across the region. Greenhouse gas emissions in the power sector have dropped by nearly 50 percent. Applied to the transportation sector, the same market mechanisms can encourage automakers and fuel suppliers to find efficiencies and deploy cleaner fuels. In addition, the Transportation Climate Initiative will deliver millions of dollars in needed investments in our transportation infrastructure. It’s a critical part in expanding public transportation, transforming our highways and reducing congestion.”

off bs tppf

FERC

2/08/2018 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 02/08/2018 11:23

TPPF Brings On Bernard McNamee, Former Dept. Of Energy Official, To Lead Tenth Amendment Center, Life:Powered

AUSTIN - Today, the Texas Public Policy Foundation announced the hire of Bernard McNamee to lead the Center for Tenth Amendment Action and to serve as director of the Foundation's Life:Powered project. Most recently, McNamee served as deputy general counsel for energy policy under Secretary Rick Perry at the Department of Energy. Previous positions include partner at McGuireWoods, chief of staff to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and as senior advisor to Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

As the head of the Center for Tenth Amendment Action, McNamee will focus on applying the Texas Model of individual liberty, fiscal responsibility and free-market reforms to federal policy, in the areas of health care, taxes, and spending. He will also lead the Life:Powered project, a continuation of TPPF's work on energy policy, to ensure Americans continue to benefit from abundant, reliable, safe and clean energy.

'We are thrilled to have someone with Bernie's experience in the Executive Branch, in Congress, at the state level, and in private practice lead these critical initiatives,' said executive vice president Kevin Roberts. 'His deep knowledge of energy policy, in particular, comes at an important time for Texas and the country as America becomes a leader in energy innovation and development. Bernie will spearhead our effort to maintain energy reliability and a commitment to a clean environment while ensuring our state and national economies continue to grow.'

About Life:Powered:

Life:Powered begins with the principle that human flourishing depends on energy use, often in invisible and unnoticed ways. A reliable energy supply can feed the hungry, take care of the sick, and ensure a prosperous economic future for society. It promotes freedom and independence around the world and right here at home.

The United States, and Texas in particular, has the means to lead the world in energy production. Through American ingenuity and innovation, responsible production of reliable energy will make the world safer, our environment cleaner, and each and every citizen more prosperous.

For more information, please contact Alicia Pierce at apierce@texaspolicy.com or 512-472-2700.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation is a non-profit free-market research institute based in Austin that aims to foster human flourishing by protecting and promoting liberty, opportunity and personal responsibility.

Primary website: www.TexasPolicy.com

Facebook page: www.Facebook.com/TexasPublicPolicyFoundation

Twitter feed: www.Twitter.com/TPPF

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https://www.alternet.org/environment/trump-enviro-pick-displays-outrageous-level-climate-denial-senate-confirmation-hearing

athleen Hartnett White, President Trump’s pick to chair the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), testified at her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday and, like many Trump nominees to date, showed herself to be an unqualified, polluter-friendly ideologue who rejects mainstream climate science.

“Your positions are so far out of the mainstream, they are not just outliers, they are outrageous,” Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey exclaimed at one point in clear exasperation. “You have a fringe voice that denies science, economics and reality.”

What Markey failed to note, however, is that White has personally experienced climate change-related extreme weather events in her home state of Texas, and scientists say they are only going to get worse.

Unqualified from the Start

White, who Trump previously considered for Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, is a cattle rancher and dog breeder who chaired the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ)—the Lone Star State’s version of the EPA—from 2001 to 2007 and was a member of the Environmental Flows Study Commission, the Texas Water Development Board and the Texas Wildlife Association board.

Her qualifications for those positions? None.

White earned her bachelor’s and master’s degree in Humanities and Religion at Stanford, attended Princeton’s comparative religion doctoral program, and completed a year of law school at Texas Tech. It’s not quite the background one would expect for someone serving on environmentally related boards, let alone running the TCEQ. But in Texas, as in Florida and Wisconsin, ideology trumps science credentials, and White holds a politically correct pro-fossil fuels viewpoint.

That bias serves her well in her current job with the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a libertarian think tank funded by what Texans for Public Justice characterized as a “Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies.” Among TPPF’s benefactors are Chevron, Devon Energy and ExxonMobil; Koch Industries and its family foundations; and Luminant, the largest electric utility in Texas. White, who joined TPPF in January 2008, runs the nonprofit’s energy and environment program and co-heads its Fueling Freedom Project, whose mission is to “push back against the EPA’s onerous regulatory agenda that threatens America’s economy, prosperity and well-being.”

Climate Paranoia Strikes Deep

Recent media coverage of White’s nomination for the CEQ post has shined a light on her lack of scientific understanding — and her paranoia about the rationale for addressing climate change. She falsely claims that climate science is “highly uncertain,” characterizes it as the “dark side of a kind of paganism, the secular elite’s religion,” and argues that the “climate crusade,” if unchecked, would essentially destroy democracy. That’s right. White believes the United Nations and climate scientists are bent on establishing a “one-world state ruled by planetary managers.” Further, she routinely trumpets the benefits of carbon emissions, insisting that carbon dioxide “has none of the characteristics of a pollutant that could harm human health.” Carbon is a good thing, she says, because “the increased atmospheric concentration of man-made CO2 has enhanced plant growth and thus the world’s food supply.” Never mind that farmers and ranchers in her own state have been whipsawed in recent years by devastating heat waves, drought and floods, all linked to climate change.

At her confirmation hearing on Wednesday, White cited reducing ground-level ozone in Houston and Galveston when she chaired the TCEQ as her greatest accomplishment. But according to a recent editorial in the Dallas Morning News, she pushed for weaker ozone standards while she was at the helm of the agency.

“Her record is abominable,” the October 17 editorial stated. “White consistently sided with business interests at the expense of public health as chair of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. She lobbied for lax ozone standards and, at a time when all but the most ardent fossil fuel apologists understood that coal isn’t the nation’s future, White signed a permit for a lignite-fired power plant, ignoring evidence that emissions from the lignite plant could thwart North Texas’ efforts to meet air quality standards.”

Predictably, White also disparages renewable energy. “In spite of the billions of dollars in subsidies, retail prices for renewables are still far higher than prices for fossil fuels,” she wrote in her 2014 tract, Fossil Fuels: The Moral Case. “At any cost, renewable energy from wind, solar, and biomass remains diffuse, unreliable, and parasitic….” In fact, fossil fuels have received significantly more in federal tax breaks and subsidies for a much longer time than renewables; new wind power is now cheaper than coal, nuclear and natural gas; and the Department of Energy projects that renewable technologies available today have the potential to meet 80 percent of U.S. electricity demand by 2050.

Most of Trump’s nominees for other key science-based positions—notably EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt—agree with White’s twisted take on climate science and renewables. What sets her apart, besides her penchant for calling advocates for combating climate change “pagans,” “Marxists” and “communists,” is her up-close-and-personal experience with climate change-related extreme weather events.Ignoring the Evidence

White and her husband, Beau Brite White, live in Bastrop County, an outlying Austin bedroom community, and own a vast cattle ranch of 118,567 acres—more than 185 square miles—in Presidio County, which sits on the state’s southwest border with Mexico.

Bastrop and Presidio counties are both struggling with drought due to low precipitation and high temperatures and, like the rest of Texas, suffered from an especially extreme drought in 2011. Part of a prolonged period of drought stretching from 2010 to 2015, the one in 2011 was the hottest and driest on record, and climate change likely played a significant role. A 2012 study published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society found that the high temperatures that contribute to droughts such the one that struck Texas in 2011 are 20 times more probable now than they were 40 to 50 years ago due to human-caused climate change.

The Fourth National Climate Assessment report, released on November 3, agreed. “The absence of moisture during the 2011 Texas/Oklahoma drought and heat wave was found to be an event whose likelihood was enhanced by the La Niña state of the ocean,” the report, authored by scientists at 13 federal agencies, concluded, “but the human interference in the climate system still doubled the chances of reaching such high temperatures [emphasis added].”

The 2011 heat wave was particularly intense in Presidio County. According to Texas State Climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon, a meteorology professor at Texas A&M University, the county “achieved the triple-triple: at least 100 days reaching at least 100 degrees.”

Bastrop County, meanwhile, has become a tinderbox. Wildfires are happening there with greater frequency and intensity for a variety of reasons, including rising temperatures and worsening drought as well as population growth and development. In 2011, the county experienced the worst wildfire in Texas history, which destroyed more than 1,600 homes and caused $325 million in damage. Two years ago, in October 2015, the Hidden Pines Fire torched 7 square miles in the county and burned down 64 buildings.

White’s Neighbors Know Better

White may refuse to acknowledge what is happening in her own backyard, but most of her neighbors realize that human-caused climate change is indeed a problem, according to polling data released last March by the Yale Program on Climate Communication. The survey, conducted in 2016 in every county nationwide, found that a majority of residents in Bastrop and Presidio counties—67 percent and 78 percent respectively—understand that global warming is happening, while more than half of the respondents in both counties (52 percent in Bastrop and 62 percent in Presidio) know it is mainly caused by human activity.

Majorities in both counties also want something done about it. More than 70 percent want carbon dioxide regulated as a pollutant and at least 65 percent in both counties want states to require utilities to produce 20 percent of their electricity from renewables.

Given their responses, White’s neighbors in Bastrop and Presidio counties make it clear that if they were polled on whether she should become the next chair of a little-known but powerful White House office that oversees federal environmental and energy policies, a majority would likely say no—and with good reason: Unlike White, for them, seeing is believing.

https://www.texasobserver.org/revealed-the-corporations-and-billionaires-that-fund-the-texas-public-policy-foundation/

2012

Texas Public Policy Foundation—an influential right-wing think tank based in Austin with ties to Rick Perry, Ted Cruz and many other powerful politicians—bills itself as a “non-partisan research institute” and brags that it “does not accept government funds or contributions to influence the outcomes of its research.”

It’s easy for the organization to make that claim; as a 501(c)(3) non-profit TPPF doesn’t have to disclose its funding sources. But a list of TPPF’s donors was inadvertently posted on Guidestar.org.

According to the tax filings, TPPF gets a majority of its funding from a relatively small group of major corporations, conservative foundations and wealthy individuals with a financial interest in the type of policies that TPPF promotes. Altogether, the list of donors includes 129 individuals, corporations and foundations and totals $4.7 million in donations.

“Most think tanks work for their funders and TPPF’s donors are a Who’s Who of Texas polluters, giant utilities and big insurance companies,” said Craig McDonald, director of Texans for Public Justice. “TPPF is thinking the way its donors want it to think.”

That was the charge leveled by a former TPPF executive that Abby Rapoport and I spoke with for a story last year.

Melinda Hasting—who served as the foundation’s vice president from 1996 to 1998 but has since broken with the conservative movement—says one fundraising tactic involved approaching corporations, wealthy businessmen, and corporate-funded foundations with a pitch. Hasting (formerly Melinda Wheatley) describes it: “We think this is beneficial to your industry and would you consider providing us with a non-profit contribution. … Here’s the timeline for the completion of the research; the parameters of the research are this; we expect it will result in some savings or outsourcing.”

TPPF’s response at the time was that the organization no longer, if it ever, operated that way. (The foundation didn’t respond to a request for comment by press time. I will update the post if and when I hear back.) Regardless, there is remarkable confluence between its donors and the positions it stakes out.

Take Energy Future Holdings, for example.

When it became apparent this summer that Texas’ power grid could go dark because of a lack of investment in new power generation, regulators found few tools at their disposal to deal with the problem. Texas, after all, has one of the most deregulated power markets in the world. Big utilities urged the Public Utility Commission to raise the cap on wholesale prices, a measure that would pad their bottom lines but almost certainly cost consumers. In June, the PUC voted 2-0 to raise the cap from $3,000 per megawatt-hour to $4,500. The decision was as much about laissez-faire ideology as practical management of the grid.

Over the last decade of Texas’ electricity deregulation experiment, no organization has proved a bigger apologist for dereg’s failures as TPPF. In a July op-ed in the Houston Chronicle, the organization’s Bill Peacock went so far as to call for the complete elimination of the cap. This was par for the course. In 2007, when TXU (now the nearly-bankrupt Energy Future Holdings) was accused of market abuse and electricity prices were skyrocketing, Peacock rallied to the company’s defense, arguing that “prices are not too high because of problems with the market or TXU.” He’s still on this kick, blasting the PUC for “spurious claims of market power abuse” and calling for the agency to be handcuffed in its ability to punish wrongdoers.

TPPF has also rallied to the defense of coal, in particular Luminant’s fleet of coal- and lignite-fired power plants, which are struggling due to competition from natural gas and stricter EPA limits on mercury, smog and carbon pollution. (Luminant is a unit of Energy Future Holdings.) Luminant and TPPF singled out the EPA’s Cross-State Air Pollution Rule for sustained legal and rhetorical attack. But TPPF was the most strident, saying it would “eliminate jobs, threaten the reliability of our electricity grid, drive up the cost of electricity, and lower economic growth.” Kathleen Hartnett White, a TPPF energy analyst and former chairwoman of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, has gone so far as to claim that “There is no environmental crisis. In fact there’s almost no major environmental problems.” Luminant couldn’t get better support if it was paying for it. And maybe it was.

According to the donor list, Luminant and its two sister companies—TXU Energy and Oncor—donated $110,000 to TPPF in 2010. The American Coalition for Clean Coal chipped in $10,000. Other big utility interests were generous too: the Associated Electric Companies of Texas kicked in $43,000; NRG Energy offered $10,000; AEP Texas and AEP SWEPCO contributed $10,000 each; and Direct Energy ponied up $20,000.

***

Close observers of how powerful interests control policy in Texas will perhaps not be surprised by the TPPF’s funding sources.

The foundation’s major corporate donors include:

The Koch Brothers: Koch Industries Inc. ($159,834) & the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation ($69,788.61)

Verizon ($47,450)

State Farm Insurance ($25,000)

Texans for Lawsuit Reform ($30,000)

ExxonMobil ($10,000)

Altria ($20,000)

GEO Group, a private prison company ($15,000)

TimeWarner Cable ($10,000)

RJ Reynolds Tobacco ($5,000)

Texas Association of Manufacturers ($5,000)

ConocoPhillips ($5,000)

Farmers Insurance Group ($5,000)

Chevron ($5,000)

Boeing ($5,000)

Blue Cross Blue Shield of Texas ($5,000)

Devon Energy ($5,000)

AND MANY MORE!

Notably, most of the brand-name corporations donating to TPPF aren’t particularly “political” or ideological. But they do have something in common: They are all subject to oversight by state government and mostly benefit from the pro-deregulation, pro-privatization, “free market” policies favored by TPPF.

“We support TPPF’s mission to promote free enterprise, as this is the best way to expand customer choices and improve customer service,” said Patti Kelly, a spokeswoman for State Farm.

Another major funding source: wealthy businessmen (and they are mostly men). Oil and gas interests, especially independent producers based out of Midland, have an outsized presence:

Jim Leininger, the founder of TPPF and the so-called Daddy Warbucks of the conservative movement in Texas ($50,000)

Don Sparks, Discovery Operating Inc., Midland ($48,500)

Tim Dunn, Crownquest Oil & Gas Inc., major funder also of Empower Texans ($43,000)

Chaz Neely, San Antonio Steel Co. ($25,000)

Beaman Floyd, lobbyist for insurance interests and director of Texas Coalition for Affordable Insurance Solutions ($15,000)

Robert McNair, owner of the Houston Texans ($10,000)

Red McCombs ($5,000)

Jim Hornfischer, publisher of Fed Up!, Rick Perry’s anti-government book, the proceeds of which went to TPPF ($94,000)

George Seay, finance chair for Perry’s disastrous presidential run who ran into campaign-finance trouble ($15,000)

Harold Simmons, Dallas billionaire and one of the nation’s biggest donors to conservative superPACs ($11,000)

AND MANY MORE!

Perry-appointed regents for Texas A&M and the University of Texas, a highly-desirable appointment often encouraged with the ample application of dollars into campaign coffers, also are big boosters of TPPF. The regents for both schools have worked closely with TPPF on unpopular schemes to impose market discipline on the systems’ flagship schools:

Wallace Hall, UT regent ($31,692)

Phil Adams, insurance company owner, Texas A&M regent ($15,000)

Brenda Pejovich, UT regent and TPPF board member ($10,487)

Jeff Sandefer, UT regent and TPPF board member who’s been instrumental in pushing controversial reforms at UT and A&M ($200,495)

Foundations constituted a large share of TPPF’s funding in 2010:

Entities associated with the State Policy Network, which Mother Jones described as “a little-known umbrella group with deep ties to the national conservative movement.” ($544,306.90)

The ED Foundation, the family charity of controversial UT System regent & TPPF board member Jeff Sandefer ($200,495)

The Fickling Family Foundation ($100,000)

Jacquelin Hume Foundation ($40,000)

DonorsTrust ($65,300)

The Amon G. Carter Foundation, a Ft. Worth-based charity that mostly funds the arts ($20,000)

AND MANY MORE!

Notably, TPPF’s top donors are middle-of-the road foundations. However, the following foundations all earmarked their money specifically for the organization’s criminal justice reform project, which has made common cause with progressives:

Pew Charitable Trusts ($354,420)

Chicago Community Foundation ($203,760)

Public Welfare Foundation ($175,000)

TPPF explicitly advertises access to its board members and executive director on its donation page. Those who give $5,000 to $24,999 receive “priority communications with the President and the Chairman of the Board.” So-called “Liberty Leaders”—those who give $100,000 to $249,999— are invited to “join President or Executive Director at personal one-on-one meeting to discuss Foundation’s focus and strategy”; meanwhile Freedom Stewards ($250,000 or more) are allowed to attend board meetings to “give feedback” and “make suggestions.”

TPPF 3 life powered

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

INTRODUCTION

A WHO’S WHO OF RENEWABLE ENERGY OPPONENTS

Fossil Fuel Industry Funders:

Alliance Resource Partners:

Years of falsehoods from Fox News helped solidify offshore wind as a prime target for Trump

Key Facts

China’s role in the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) movement is less obvious than the spy balloons in our airspace, but equally perilous.

Destroying fossil fuels would destroy capitalism and subject the future of humanity to abject poverty, because affordable and reliable energy is the key to human flourishing.

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Gunasekara worked at Scott Pruitt’s EPA after cutting her teeth working for infamous climate denier Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK)

Gunasekara currently runs a pro-Trump energy PAC

Gunasekara has appeared at least two dozen times in right-wing outlets since February

She regularly spouts climate denial

She repeatedly makes false claims about Trump’s environmental progress

She makes false claims about clean air records under Trump

She’s made numerous other inaccurate remarks about environmental issues

Her proposed climate solutions bash renewables and promote more fossil fuel usage

Gunasekara is nothing more than a propaganda mouthpiece for Trump