GMU 2
see main and tag
see scalia law school
1/17
see LEC, butler, manne
reverse inside the wire, Yale partnership? why not shut down?
see shukla, butler, barre seid
FAIL voodoo econ, stephen moore advisor: KANSAS BROWNBACK
:{Indeed, Moore does not have the typical qualifications of a Fed appointee, the vast majority of whom have a PhD in economics:{. Moore has a Master of Arts degree from the famously right-wing George Mason Universitya}:nd served as a fellow at the also famously right-wing Heritage Foundation.
He has advised several GOP campaigns, including Trump’s, and co-wrote a book with conservative economist Art Laffer titled “Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy.”}:
Moore is a proponent of supply-side economics,the theory that tax breaks for billionaires and corporations will increase investment and production to the point that prices fall for everyone else — which has broadly failed but nonetheless forms the backbone of the Republican Party’s economic agenda.As a pundit, he has made some spectacularly wrong predictions, like that the U.S. was risking hyperinflation during the Obama years and that ACA was increasing the deficit. His errors have had human consequences: he helped craft formerKansas Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax cut plan,which essentially wrecked the state.
Notorious “dark money” conduit Wellspring Committeegave $14.8 million to the primary spender on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation and paid $919,900 to the mysterious LLC that made a $1 million donation to President Donald Trump’s inaugural committee, according to a new tax return obtained Nov. 27 by the Center for Responsive Politics.
Wellspring has acted as a conduit for large contributions from secretive donors since it was set up, effectively laundering multi-million dollar donations with no substantive disclosure or accountability.
Despite operating behind the scenes with a name unknown to most of the American public, Wellspring is at the crux of Ann and Neil Corkery’s network of politically active dark money groups, funneling millions from anonymous financiers to political causes they don’t want their names attached to — and doing ostensibly little else.
Wellspring has continued to be the chief financier of the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), with a $14,814,998 contribution last year.
JCN is another nondisclosing politically active nonprofit linked to the Corkerys’ network of conservative dark money groups. It has become the predominant dark money spender in Supreme Court confirmation fights as a vehicle for deep-pocketed donors to funnel millions of dollars behind or against judicial nominees.
Since 2010, Wellspring has funneled more than $54.2 million to JCN, according to tax returns obtained by CRP.
The bulk of Wellspring’s funds that came from three multi-million dollar secret donors in 2017, a shift from prior years in which the biggest amount the group received from a single mystery donor increased with each passing year. The largest donor accounted for $8.9 million, another gave $5.5 million and a third secret donor provided $2 million — but all of their identities remain hidden from the public.
The biggest anonymous contribution to Wellspring in 2016 was nearly $28.5 million, a jump from $8.5 million in 2015 and $6.96 million in 2014. That one secret donor accounted for around 90 percent of Wellspring’s funding in 2016, a year it gave $23 million to JCN.
As a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, JCN is not required to report its donors to the IRS — and chooses not to disclose its funders’ identities to the public — so its only discoverable donors are other entities like Wellspring that act as conduits for the anonymous money directed at JCN.
JCN was back in the limelight this year as the biggest spender in support of Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh. Following its tried and true playbook, JCN launched its first ad about Kavanaugh before Trump even finished announcing his nomination and soon after announced plans to spend $10 million on his confirmation. JCN pledged $10 million to support the successful confirmation of Trump’s first Supreme Court nominee, Neil Gorsuch, the prior year and reported spending $7 million to block the confirmation of Merrick Garland before President Barack Obama left office.
JCN has also spent substantial sums on lobbyists, including Jon Kyl, who lobbied to help JCN marshall in Gorsuch’s nomination before becoming the official White House “sherpa” guiding Kavanaugh through that same process. He was later appointed to fill the late Sen. John McCain’s seat — ultimately enabling him to vote for the confirmation he was once tasked with helping Kavanaugh secure.
JCN spent $483,246 in total on Facebook ads and just $1,900 on Google platforms around the fight to confirm Kavanaugh with an estimated reach of potentially millions of Facebook users.
TV advertising made up the bulk of JCN’s reported spending on Kavanaugh with around $3.9 million going TV ads, according to Kantar Media/CMAG estimates — leaving millions of dollars JCN had pledged to spend unaccounted for.
The puzzle of Trump’s mysterious inaugural gift
The only contractor paid by Wellspring last year was BH Group, the mysterious LLC created four months to the day before it made a $1 million donation to the Trump inaugural committee on Dec. 22, 2016.
The newly discovered payment for “public relations” follows a $750,000 payment to the newly minted BH Group the prior year as well as $947,000 from JCN to the BH Group around when the LLC made its inaugural donation.
While it initially appeared that BH Group was merely a shell company created solely for the purpose of laundering money into the Trump inaugural committee, more information about the LLC has only added to its mystery.
New tax returns reviewed by CRP reveal that Judicial Education Project, JCN’s sister 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, also paid an additional $1.3 million to BH Group LLC last year. Judicial Education Fund keeps its donors anonymous but CRP tracked the bulk of the group’s recent funding to DonorsTrust, which accounted for more than 99 percent of its money last year. Like JCN, Judicial Education Fund has also been funded by Wellspring in prior years.
One name that CRP has tied to the mysterious LLC is Leonard Leo, the executive vice president at the Federalist Society, an influential conservative and libertarian legal organization, who listed “BH Group” as his employer in a campaign finance filing reported to the Federal Election Commission.
Leo’s more widely known affiliation with the Federalist Society has gained attention after reports that it played a substantial role guiding the hand of Trump’s White House in its judicial nomination process, including in the selection of Supreme Court justices.
Ann Corkery, the Wellspring Committee’s former president and wife of current president Neil Corkery, has reportedly worked closely with him in this process and Leo has been “directly involved” in raising much of the anonymous money the Wellspring Committee brings in every year.
A public records request revealed that Leo and another Federalist Society vice president have also been involved in a nonprofit called the BH Fund,which was set up to enforce a donor agreement between an anonymous $20 million donor and theAntonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University, whose president came under fire for allowing donors to dictate conditions in return for financial gifts.
Incorporation records list BH Group’s address as avirtual office in Arlington, Va. and the only identified point of contact is Donna Smith, whose name matches that of a longtime paralegal at Holtzman Vogel Josefiak Torchinsky, the law firm that shared a Warrenton, Va. office with the address the Trump inaugural committee on its tax return.:{
}:
Continuing the money churn
Staying the course from prior years, Wellspring also gave $400,000 to the Catholic Association, $48,000 to the Annual Fund and $350,000 to the Foundation for Government Accountability’s 501(c)(4) arm, FGA Action.
Another appendage of the Corkerys’ dark money web is theFoundation for Accountability and Civic Trust (FACT), a nonprofit run by acting Attorney General Matthew Whitaker before he became Jeff Sessions’ chief of staff, as CRP first reported in 2016. Like Wellspring, JCN and the Judicial Education Project, Neil Corkery is also the treasurer of FACT. Nearly 100 percent of FACT’s funding came from a single anonymous donor each year since the group was created in 2014, which CRP discovered came entirely from a donor-advised fund called DonorsTrust.
In addition to longstanding dark money stalwarts that have realigned their priorities for the Trump era, new groups spending heavily in support of Trump’s agenda also weighed in on Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation battle but are not entirely isolated from the Washington swamp Trump pledged to drain.
Wellspring was one of the early donors of 45Committee, another 501(c)(4) social welfare nonprofit that primarily exists to support Trump’s agenda which spent on ads supporting Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation this year.:{
}:
Another spender was America First Policies, the 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization staffed by former Trump campaign and White House personnel that has become the main dark money group supporting Trump’s agenda.
Although America First Policies itself does not reveal donors’ identities, CRP traced over a quarter of its funding to major corporate players, including Reynolds American and Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), a trade group representing the drug company industry’s lobbying interests.
New tax documents filed by another pro-Trump nonprofit, Great America Alliance, show it raised and spent around $3.4 million during that period. Unlike America First Policies, which reported millions more in previously undisclosed political spending it its new tax return, Great America Alliance claimed that it “educated voters through direct and indirect political advocacy messaging nationwide within the scope of applicable laws and regulations.”
This highlights one of the many legal grey areas emerging in the wake of Trump’s unprecedented move to register as a candidate for the 2020 presidential election on his first day in office — leaving the vast majority of financiers behind the growing network of dark money groups spending on his agenda a mystery.
https://usrtk.org/food-for-thought/trevor-butterworth-spins-science-for-industry/
STATS GLP entine split?
Koch Industries / George Mason University Foundation
Charles Koch, CEO of the petrochemical conglomerate Koch Industries, gave over $100 million to 361 college campuses from 2005 to 2014, according to a Greenpeace analysis of IRS filings. The George Mason University Foundation, which received $45.5 million, was by far the largest beneficiary of this largesse.
Students at GMU raised concerns about Koch funding in a 2014 letter to the GMU president, noting that the university has been “criticized as being a subsidiary of Koch Industries.” In response to a public records request for information about Koch funding, the students “were told that all financial donations are funneled through the GMU Foundation, which does not have to respond to our FOIA request as a distinct private entity.”
The GMU Foundation funded STATS sister organization CMPA $220,990 in 2012, and $75,670 in 2013, according to tax records. In those years CMPA also helped finance STATS. In 2012, STATS reported a $203,611 loan from CMPA that “due to inadequate funding” has “not been reimbursed.” In 2013, STATS reported a loan from CMPA for $163,914.
Tax records for 2014 show no loans between the groups or donations from GMU Foundation. CMPA’s 2014 tax filingshows compensation of $97,512 for Butterworth and $173,100 for Jon Entine, a longtime public relations operative with deep ties to the chemical industry, who runs the Genetic Literacy Project, an agrichemical industry front group.
Wholly Independent?
https://medium.com/@acaalim/new-evidence-suggests-chicago-billionaire-closely-allied-with-the-koch-brothers-and-implicated-2abc9bcbd102
Over 810 pages of documents produced by George Mason University in October 2019 suggest that Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire who has been called an “Angel of the Right” and is “closely allied” with the Koch brothers, is the “anonymous donor” who pledged $20 million over five years to rename George Mason’s publicly-supported Law School after the late Justice Antonin Scalia. (The documents referenced by page number below can be viewed and downloaded here.)
Mr. Seid has previously been implicated as the $16.8 million funder of the “swing state” distribution of the incendiary Islamophobic film “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” in an effort to block the 2008 election of Barack Hussein Obama. Mr. Seid has also been implicated as the anonymous donor behind the funding of climate change denial projects by the “Heartland Institute.” That funding totaled over $6 million (not counting donations after 2012), including a billboard comparing a belief in global warming with the “Unabomber’s” manifesto. In both instances, Mr. Seid’s anonymous role was only uncovered through investigative reporting by ProPublica, Salon magazine, DeSmogBlog, and the Daily Kos. “Mystery of who funded right-wing “radical Islam” campaign deepens”; https://www.desmogblog.com/barre-seid; “The Case for Barre Seid as the Heartland Institute’s Anonymous Donor”.
The documents that prove that Mr. Seid is the Scalia Law donor were produced in response to requests under the Virginia Freedom of Information Act for “communications or documents containing the name of the anonymous donor under the March 31, 2016 Grant Agreement, or the name of the lawyer and agent for the anonymous donor.” After review of those documents repeatedly led to connections with Mr. Seid, a follow-up request was made for all communications with “Barre Seid.” Initially, the University tried to ward off production of the anonymous donor documents by demanding payment of nearly $10,000 for search and production costs and asserting that only the Dean of the Law School could conduct the search because only he knew the identity of the “anonymous donor.” At the direction of the Virginia FOIA Advisory Council, the University’s Interim President required the Dean of the Law School to provide the name of the donor to the University’s FOIA officer to conduct the search. The FOIA officer used the donor’s name to conduct the search and redacted the name only after all the documents were collected. When the follow up request was made for all communications with “Barre Seid,” Mr. Seid’s name unredacted in some of the same communications (see pp. 400–1 and 743; 680 and 812). Other emails where the donor’s name had been redacted were revealed to be related to communications with Mr. Seid about meetings with the Law School’s current and former Deans (pp. 481 and 784–89; pp. 483 and 706; pp. 377–78 and 809).
[doc]
barre Seid’s History of Grants to GMU Before 2016
While a George Mason University press release in 2016 and a response to “media attention” suggested that the funding to rename the Law School “came to George Mason” through an “unexpected” donor “who approached Leonard A. Leo,” the Executive Vice President of the Federalist Society, the FOIA documents show long-standing ties between the donor and the Law School’s current Dean, Henry Butler, and its former Dean, Dan Polsby, both of whom describe the donor as a “friend” (p. 482, 814). Rather than an “unexpected” approach to Leonard Leo, the documents show that Dean Butler transmitted a “five-year plan” to the donor only five days after Justice Scalia’s death (p. 330). From 1998 to 2006, Mr. Seid already had funded $3.1 million in projects at the Law School and the University’s Mercatus Center through contributions from his “Barre Seid Foundation.”https://www.desmogblog.com/george-mason-university. After 2006, Mr. Seid used two donor-advised funds as mechanisms to make the source of an additional $6.9 million anonymous. Altogether, Mr. Seid’s contributions to the Law School before the 2016 Grant Agreement totaled over $8.3 million. His contributions supported controversial training of judges by the Law & Economics Center (LEC) and individual faculty hires and salary supplements.
The documents produced under FOIA show:
● After a pledge of $300,000 in January 2000 for “two new institutions for federal judges,” Dean Polsby informed the President of the University’s Foundation at the start of February 2005 that the same donor was pledging $650,000 “per year” for the Law & Economics Center, and that “[m]ost of this money would pass through to donees external to GMU” (pp. 562 and 456, 560–67). Within days, two checks were received, one for $550,000 and one for $100,000 (p. 559). TheBarre Seid Foundation Form 990 shows a contribution of $575,000 to the University Foundation on February 9, 2005. At the end of December, the same donor pledged an additional $975,000, including $325,000 “for the LEC’s judges program” (p. 634). In 2007, the Judicial Conference of the U.S. Courts placedlimits on such privately-funded judicial education programs, which resulted in the Barre Seid Foundation being listed as a “Funder” for the LEC’s judges program.
● After a period of experimenting with donor-advised funds, Barre Seid started using Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund to make the source of his donations less transparent.“The Case for Barre Seid as the Heartland Institute’s Anonymous Donor”. A 2008 email from Dean Polsby states “we now have an additional five hundred thousand simoleons [sic] for each of the next three years, which will give us flexibility to pursue our faculty options”; two months later Dean Polsby sent the donor an “update on the four additional faculty” (pp. 528, 530).
● In 2010, Mr. Seid set up theChicago Freedom Trust (CFT) with the principal officers of Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund along with Leonard Leo of the Federalist Society serving as trustees. Then-LEC Director Henry Butler met in person with Mr. Seid in March 2011 and transmitted a funding solicitation for “Training” in September 2011 (pp. 502–4, 743). Four days later, an email from the donor to Butler says “$400,000 coming from DT [Donors’ Trust] for econ/law and law/econ professor training. Hope to continue yearly” (p. 502).
● In response to a March 2013 email on the “appointment” of a particular professor, the donor tells Dean Polsby “I intend to make 5 yearly contributions of $250,000 each to the Law School [amended five days later to $375,000 per year]” through “Donors Trust” “to fund the compensation and fringe benefits” of the professor. The donor’s email stated that “if [name redacted] leaves GMU, the contributions will cease” (pp. 361–63, 371). Six days later, the Law School announced the appointment of Senior Judge Douglas Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia as a full-time professor (as a Senior Judge, Judge Ginsburg continues to actively hear and decide cases).
● After commiserating with Dean Polsby on “the ugly apparatus of modern government” and “the administrative welfare state” (p. 806), the donor agrees in February 2014 to “$100K” for a project to address what he describes as “extreme deference” to government agencies under administrative law (pp. 342, 815). On July 14, 2014, then-LEC Director Butler informs Leonard Leo that the conference “for which our friend provided special funding” on “Administration Unbound?” will be held on September 11–12, 2014 (p. 814).
● On June 19, 2015, Mr. Seid met in Chicago at 1:00 pm with incoming Dean Butler, Dean Polsby, LEC Deputy Director Paige Butler (Dean Butler’s spouse), and new LEC Director Todd Zywicki (pp. 684, 698–700, 784–89). At 4:02 pm the same day, the Donor sent a message to Dean Polsby: “Confirming our discussion of today, we are forwarding from Donors Capital Fund $150,000 as the first installment of a three-year commitment to assist you in hiring [a professor whose name has been redacted]” (p. 481).
The Anonymous 2016 Grant to Rename the Law School and Redefine Its “Mission”
In March 2016, the donor, now believed to be Barre Seid, entered into the $20 million Grant Agreement ($4 million per year for five years) with another $10 million coming from the Charles Koch Foundation that renamed George Mason’s Law School after Justice Scalia. The Grant Agreement required twelve faculty to be hired to carry out the School’s “Mission,” defined in the Agreement as “[r]etain[ing] focus on the study of Law & Economics” and developing “areas of concentration” on “intellectual property, legal history, constitutional studies, administrative law, and the relationship between law and liberty.” The March 31, 2016 Grant Agreement deems Dean Butler a “critical part of advancing the School’s Mission” and requires that the Donor be notified if the Dean is replaced. The Agreement also requires support for the School’s Center that is dedicated to “dismantling the Administrative State” and a new “Center for Liberty & Law.” The Grant Agreement installed the Federalist Society’s Leonard Leo in an oversight role over the Law School through a newly-created entity called the “BH Fund” (as mentioned, Mr. Leo was already associated with Mr. Seid through his Chicago Freedom Trust). The $4 million annual pledges under the Grant Agreement are conditioned on “annual written proposals” by the University Foundation that the donor must “approve” in his “sole and absolute discretion” before each contribution is due. In an uncanny parallel, Mr. Seid anonymously funded an unsuccessful takeover in 2010 of Shimer College, a small “Great Books” college in Chicago. As with the 2016 Law School Grant Agreement, that takeover included a redefinition of the “Mission” of the college and placement of supporters in trustee positions. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2010/11/18/921508/-. One of those supporters was George Mason Law ProfessorF.H. (Frank) Buckley, who was from 1999 to 2010 the Director of the Law & Economics Center that Mr. Seid was funding.
Barre Seid’s Meetings and Communications with the Law School’s Deans and Faculty
The FOIA documents show that before and after the 2016 Grant Agreement, the Law School’s former Dean Polsby and its current Dean, Henry Butler, regularly communicated with Mr. Seid in-person, by telephone, and by electronic communications. There were eight in-person meetings in Chicago (pp. 377–78, 483, 549, 698–700, 706, 727–30, 743, 750–51, 775–76, 800, 809). Another group of emails in 2016 shows a representative of the donor asking how much it would cost the Center for the Study of the Administrative State to have a program on “overreach” in “patent jurisprudence” and whether such a program could be covered by the contributions for the renaming of the Law School (pp. 568–69) (Mr. Seid’s Chicago companies hold over a dozen patents and have been sued for patent infringement). The requested program took place inNovember 2017. Other documents show the donor on short notice anteing up $10,000 to provide security for a September 2017 on-campus Federalist Society event with Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos (pp. 68–69, 570). The donor was informed of potential faculty hires (pp. 361–63, 481, 818–20) and was promptly notified when the Law School hired Justice Kavanaugh in March 2019 (p. 233).
There are also communications between Deans Butler and Polsby and Mr. Seid where he connects them with other conservative organizations and individuals at the time he is making grants, using introductions like “You guys are working on a lot of the same things. Maybe you should get together” (pp. 677–80, 766–67, 777–78, 811–12). The communications show both Deans as solicitous of Mr. Seid’s views. Dean Butler refers to demands to reveal contributions to Donors Trust as “the essence of a witch hunt,” and Dean Polsby one-ups him by saying, “If they have never given a dime to Donors Trust then f — k ‘em” (p. 681). Dean Butler also caters to Mr. Seid’s views against climate change science (pp. 766–69, and 752–55, 770–74, 777–80).
The FOIA documents show that despite Dean Butler’s assertion that only he knew who the anonymous donor was, the donor’s identity has actually been known to many other faculty and University officials, including former Dean Polsby, President Angel Cabrera, Professors Joshua Wright, Frank Buckley, and Michael Greve (pp. 205, 279, 551, 631–32). Mr. Seid had previous associations with Professors Buckley and Greve from his funding of the Illinois-based “Heartland Institute” and the takeover of Shimer College, which both involved Professor Buckley, and his funding of the Center for Individual Rights which Mr. Greve co-founded, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute where Mr. Greve worked for a decade. A 2013 email also shows Professor Michael Krauss, a product liability law expert, transmitting an email to Dean Polsby whose subject line and message has been redacted because they relate to the identity of the donor. Dean Polsby forwards that email to Associate Dean Craig Lerner with the message “We shd discuss in person” (p. 485). Professor Todd Zywicki, the Executive Director of the Law & Economics Center from 2015 to 2017, and Paige Butler, the Deputy Executive Director of the LEC, also traveled to Chicago to meet with Mr. Seid (pp. 698–700, 787).
Mr. Seid’s financial support and lines of communication within George Mason University extend beyond the Law School to the Economics Department. The*Daily Kos* reported that before 2004, Mr. Seid gave over $2.1 million to George Mason’s Mercatus Center, which is associated with the Economics Department. A 2011 email to Donald Boudreaux, a former Chair of the Economics Department who wrote a2009 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Learning to Love Insider Trading” said, “there will be an anonymous donation in your name given to your department. I don’t know how you can put out so many interesting comments — keep it up” (p. 628)
che
ecember 18, 2019; Chronicle of Higher Education
Maybe money can’t buy you love, but on university campuses at least, it may buy you access and influence. When the power of that money combines with donor anonymity, it creates a toxic brew that can poison an organization’s values and culture.
The pressure on colleges and universities to raise funds places donors in a position of privilege that is strengthened as their wealth and ability to make larger gifts grows. For donors with a mission, whether it’s to reclaim a stained reputation or to advance a political philosophy, that leverage becomes a tool to be used.
In 2016, George Mason University announced with great fanfare and immediate controversy that it had raised $30 million from two donors and would, as a result, be renaming its law school in honor of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. At the time, Ruth McCambridge reported on the strong negative reaction that the renaming drew and pointed to concerns not just with having Scalia’s values tied to George Mason, but also with the two donors:
One donor is anonymous, but approached the school through the conservative Federalist Society with a $20 million gift; the other donor is the Charles Koch Foundation for $10 million. The strong donor politics leave many worried, both about the potential for an abrogation of academic freedom and the probability that the combination of donor and honoree will give the perception that the school is essentially a conservative legal stronghold.
This week, we may have learned who the anonymous donor might have been and about the ongoing ability of that donor to influence the university’s operations. Based on documents obtained from the university, Allison Pienta, a lawyer working for the nonprofit UnKoch My Campus, identified the $20 million donor as Barre Seid, a Chicago billionaire industrialist with strong conservative beliefs.
George Mason’s interim president, Anne Holton, could neither confirm nor deny the identity of the anonymous contributor, according to the :{Chronicle of Higher Education:(style="box-sizing:border-box;margin:0px;padding:0px;border:0px;font-style:inherit;font-variant:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-stretch:inherit;vertical-align:baseline"):}:. But if Pienta’s conclusions are correct, then, based on the treasure trove of communications now available, he has been actively using the access his donor status provides to quietly push the university to agree with his political agenda.
As the Chronicle observed, once it reviewed the information about Seid and George Mason, “People who are concerned about undue donor influence often envision clear-cut quid pro quos or prescriptive gift agreements that grant wealthy people too much control over the academic enterprise. These documents imply a subtler form of influence, one in which a donor elevates concerns about a professor or a regulatory body just by passing information along to university decision makers.” Subtle, yes, but influence nonetheless.
The documents contain evidence Seid was willing to use large and regular gifts to help him influence the university’s law school. Seid committed $1,875,000 over five years to support the hiring of a specific law professor.The gift, to be made anonymously through “Donors Trust,” would be terminated if the professor Seid favored left the school. He was also, through the select forwarding of blog posts, able to have an audit triggered on the program of Jagadish Shukla, a climate scientist at George Mason.
NPQ’s coverage of the pernicious effect of big money and secrecy had us worried about the future of colleges, universities, and the nonprofit sector overall: “Anonymity and secrecy may make fundraising easier, but they don’t build trust.” With each new case, our worry grows.—Martin Levine
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https://theconversation.com/why-some-public-universities-get-to-keep-their-donors-secret-129309
April 2018, the public learned that George Mason University had let the Charles Koch Foundation have a say in the hiring and review of faculty. The revelation confirmed long-held suspicions that Virginia’s largest public university was susceptible to pressure from wealthy people who make big donations to a foundation that solely exists to support the school.
The news also raised more questions. For example, how was the school able to conceal the strings-attached gift agreements for years? Do other public universities have similar arrangements, in which donations flow not to them, but to affiliated foundations?
Most importantly, do these foundations give donors a legal right to shape a public institution of higher education without public oversight if they so choose?
As a journalist-turned-professor who researches the tension between privatization and the public’s right to know, I can tell you the vast majority of public colleges and universities have separate foundations that exist to receive and manage their private donations. And unless state lawmakers do more to address the transparency status of these foundations, I’m concerned there are few ways to detect the kind of influence allowed at George Mason.
[graf]
The George Mason case
Transparent GMU, a student advocacy group formed in 2013, had tried for years to access the Koch agreements under Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act (VFOIA). The group suspected that, like Florida State University, George Mason might be trading academic influence for Koch dollars.
The group’s VFOIA requests were denied on the basis that the George Mason University Foundation possessed the agreement records and, as a private entity, did not have to share them.
Transparent GMU sued the foundation in 2017. The group argued that because the nonprofit accepts, disburses and administers funds for the sole benefit of a public university, it should be subject to VFOIA requests just like the university.
More than a year later, while the case was still pending, the university released the agreements and acknowledged that allowing donors to influence faculty decisions “falls short of the standard of academic independence we should expect in every gift.”
In the wake of the scandal, in May 2019 the university revised its gift acceptance policy. The university now accepts conditions attached to a private donation in writing, which makes them part of the public record. The Charles Koch Foundation also announced that it will now make public all multi-year agreements with colleges and universities.
But Transparent GMU ultimately lost its court challenge. In a unanimous decision that leaves no path for appeal, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled Dec. 12 that as a privately held corporation with its own bylaws, the George Mason University Foundation is not a public body. Therefore, it’s not obligated to disclose records.
State by state
Unless it’s related to the federal government, public information access is regulated state by state under individual Freedom of Information laws. Each state defines in its own way what constitutes a public body, public records and public meetings.
Only Nevada explicitly defines university foundations as governmental entities under its public records act. A handful of other states, including Colorado, Georgia and Minnesota, have laws dictating that foundations disclose certain financial records while still remaining private. In most cases, even in Nevada, donor identities remain confidential.
Virginia’s Freedom of Information Act applies to public agencies, bodies supported wholly or principally by public funds, and entities “of the public body created to perform delegated functions of the public body.”
The state Supreme Court cited the Webster’s dictionary definition of the word “of” in deciding the George Mason foundation wasn’t a product “of” the university, even though it exists to support that school, pays the majority of the president’s salary, operates on campus, is part of the GMU website and staff directory, and is considered a “component unit” in university accounting.
“Had the General Assembly intended the unreserved inclusion of nonprofit foundations, that exist for the primary purpose of supporting public institutions of higher education, as public bodies under VFOIA, it could have so provided, but it has not,” Justice Cleo Powell wrote. “Policy determinations of this nature are peculiarly within the province of the General Assembly, not the judiciary.”
California case
Courts in other states have followed the same logic. In 2001 a California appellate court found that the California State University, Fresno Association, a nonprofit that operates the university’s commercial enterprises, wasn’t a public agency under the state’s Public Records Act (CPRA).
The court looked at the language of the law, weighed it against the spirit of transparency, and saw a puzzling gap.
“We are fully cognizant of the fact that our conclusion seems to be in direct conflict with the express purposes of the CPRA ‘to safeguard the accountability of government to the public,’” Justice Rebecca Wiseman wrote. “The Legislature’s decision to narrowly define the applicability of the CPRA, balanced against its sweeping goal to safeguard the public, leaves us scratching our judicial heads and asking, ‘What was the Legislature thinking?’”
But courts don’t act as super-legislatures to determine the wisdom or propriety of statutes, she continued. “The rewriting of a statute is a legislative, rather than a judicial function, a practice in which we will not engage.”
Ten years later, California passed a law that makes university foundations’ financial records, contracts and correspondence subject to public disclosure.
Under the Richard McKee Transparency Act of 2011, donors can remain anonymous unless they receive something in exchange that’s worth more than $2,500 or a no-bid contract within five years of the donation, or if they attempt to influence university curriculum or operations....
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yikes OMFG note models not good at tip pt
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/top-scientists-warn-of-an-amazon-tipping-point/2019/12/20
dec. 20, 2019 at 12:14 p.m. PST
Deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.
“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances.“Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”
Combined with recent news that the thawing Arctic permafrost may be beginning to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gases, and that Greenland’s ice sheet is melting at an accelerating pace, it’s the latest hint that important parts of the climate system may be moving toward irreversible changes at a pace that defies earlier predictions.
The speed of the transformation in some key systems, such as Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, the head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”
In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of rising temperatures, crippling wildfiresand ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.
How we know that global warming is real]
The Amazon is 17 percent deforested, but for the large portion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but also give off mist that aids agriculture and sustains innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.At that point, much of the rainforest could decline into a drier savanna ecosystem. Rainfall patterns would change across much of South America. Several hundred billion tons of carbon dioxide could wind up in the atmosphere, worsening climate change. And such a feedback loop would be tough to reverse.
That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.
The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.
This month, nearly 100 scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’slosses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion tons lost per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.
“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events, but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up, too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at the University of Leeds in Britain who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual."
Separately, a report this month from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration laid out evidence suggesting that the global Arctic already has become a net emitter of carbon dioxide because of the thawing permafrost. That would be a profound shift for a region that includes vast stretches of Alaska, Canada, Siberia and Greenland, and which haslong stored massive amounts of carbonin its frozen soil.
At the same time, a global die-off of coral reefs in 2016 and 2017, which included the loss of nearly half of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, shocked scientists.
“Compared to coral bleaching in 1998 and 2002, the 2016 event was much more extreme — hotter, far more extensive, and deadlier,” said Terry Hughes, an expert on the reef and the director of the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University in Australia. “The reef has changed forever."
While the speed of the changes involving the Amazon, permafrost and ice sheets has surprised experts, models that scientists created decades ago regarding the average global temperature have largely held true.
The world has experienced about 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming since the late 19th century, largely because of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity.
But much of the Arctic has already warmed by 2 degrees Celsius and some regions even more.
The Amazon also is warming at an accelerated rate. An analysis by The Washington Post of global temperature changes found that almost the entirety of Brazil has warmed by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, since the late 1800s.
Higher temperatures and deforestation are drying out parts of the Amazon and posing a fundamental threat to the rainforest.
In the southern Amazon dry season in particular, temperatures are already 3 degrees Celsius higher than in the 1980s, and the dry season is getting longer, exceeding four months in some regions, Nobre said.
Particularly worrying, he said, is a recent study showing how trees are faring in more than 100 locations across the Amazon.Led by Adriane Esquivel Muelbert of the University of Leeds, researchers found forest transition has begun — trees accustomed to dry conditions are more likely to grow now while trees that require more moisture are disproportionately dying in places where climate changes are the greatest.
Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist and professor at the University of California at Irvine who has long studied the Amazon, said it is tricky to try to determine the tipping point.
"The definition of ‘tipping point’ can be quite broad,” Brando said, so it is difficult to say whether the Amazon has reached what scientists would call a point of irreversible change. But this much is clear, he added: “We’re not moving away from that tipping point. We’re probably driving very fast toward that direction.”
The impact of changes to the Amazon reach far beyond South America. The rainforest stores an immense amount of carbon in its enormous trees, and if they die, that carbon is released.
In a radically different part of the world, scientists last week described something eerily similar.
Ted Schuur, an expert on northern permafrost at Northern Arizona University, wrote in NOAA’s 2019 Arctic Report Card that recent studies suggest that the thawing of the permafrost — a repository for millennia of dead plant and animal remains — is likely to be contributing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as those once-frozen materials begin to decompos.
For the “science community at large,” Schuur said in an email, “this is a ‘surprising’ confirmation that the data show the Arctic currently acting as a carbon source.”
Schurr’s reasoning is based heavily on a groundbreaking study led by Susan Natali of the Woods Hole Research Center, research that is in many ways parallel to the new Amazon study. It pools the results from large numbers of scientists across the Arctic to show that in winter, permafrost soils are already emitting a lot of carbon. And those releases are probably enough to offset what happens in the growing season, when Arctic plant growth absorbs carbon.
The models that scientists have used to try to determine how the Arctic region is processing carbon were too conservative when it came to losses in winter in particular, Natali said. As a result, the potential for a transition of the Arctic from a “sink” that takes up carbon to a “source” that emits it may have been underestimated.
"The models, they project that to be happening quite a ways out in the future, but I would say it’s happening now,” Natali said.
Occasional extreme heat events in the Arctic can cause abrupt hillside collapses or “thaw slumps,” which rapidly expose very old and deep permafrost to the open air. Meanwhile, worsening Arctic fires can quickly remove insulating soil and vegetation layers from large stretches of permafrost, suddenly exposing it to the sun.
“It’s like you’re opening the top of a cooler,” Natali said.
In combination, the Amazon and Arctic news underscores that even as humans are largely failing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the Earth may increase such emissions yet further.
Still, it is possible to slow the transformation of the Amazon through reforestation, researchers said.
“A tipping point is a way to talk about a moment of system shift or system change,” Lovejoy said. “In this case, it’s not going to be instantaneous, and that’s good news. It allows you to do something about it.”
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horner sues team blue hit scam
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In the AGs’ case, there was no relevant extant or reasonably anticipated joint or common legal proceeding. Nor has there been one since. The purpose of their pact, specifically its paragraph 6, requiring consultation among AGs about responding to public record requests, was to shield from public scrutiny the otherwise public record of their efforts to defend President Obama’s global warming policy agenda and their own investigations of political opponents for alleged racketeering or financial fraud deriving from their opposition to the climate policy agenda. After an extended delay brought on by litigation, which was itself forced by stonewalling, courts have held that this arrangement offers the AGs no such shield.32 Numerous other AGs have effectively agreed with this finding, choosing not to fight that battle but instead to realease the correspondence that was purportedly shielded and in many cases withheld by their partners.
Those state-level open records productions, which revealed close orchestration with plaintiffs’ lawyers and environmental activists, proved costly to that coalition and scared off participants while discrediting said investigations. This approach, in turn, likely prompted Schneiderman and company to consider how to pursue such a political coalition while keeping the public records from the public. Critically—and as one email from NYU’s Elizabeth Klein to the Illinois OAG discussed later suggests— Bloomberg’s program aims not only to provide the activist AGs a home to get the band back together, but also to supply another bite at claiming attorney–client and “work product” privileges to shield their work going forward.
The 2016“informal coalition”in practice sought to extract three things from its targets: (a) a vow of silence, (b) a vow not to financially support other opponents of the agenda (like the subpoenaed CEI),33 and (c) a settlement fund in the hundreds of billions of dollars modeled on the tobacco master settlement agreement (MSA).
As in the tobacco MSA, this settlement, in large part, would fund more activist government and would be distributed among political constituencies.34 The same is true of any settlement obtained in the staggered series of lawsuits filed against major energy producers by coastal municipalities such as Marin County, Oakland, and San Francisco in the summer and fall of 2017; New York City in January 2018; inland liberal enclaves such as Boulder, Colorado, in April 2018; and the state of Rhode Island—home of Schneiderman coalition partner Peter Kilmartin and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a major proponent of using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against political opponents—in July 2018.
The first record production on the 2016 campaign, from the Vermont OAG, included responses to a questionnaire sent to the state AGs by Schneiderman’s office. U.S. Virgin Islands AG Claude Walker reveals his interest, having“just finished litigation against Hess Oil … [obtaining an] $800 million settlement.” Walker goes on to express interest in “identifying other potential litigation targets” and in seeking ways to“increase our leverage.”35
After the first production of these damning public records, the Vermont OAG sealed up tight, and other OAGs facing record requests followed suit. Speaking at least in part regarding the ongoing campaign of stonewalling state FOI requests (after reciting some highlights of what was known at the time about this collaboration with plaintiffs’ lawyers and activists), one federal court noted that these AGs ought to drop the fight and release the requested public records in the name of dispelling speculation on what these revelations indicated was going on:
[New York] Attorney General Schneiderman and [Massachusetts] Attorney General Healey, despite these media appearances by both, are not willing to share the information related to the events at the March 29, 2016, meeting at the AGs United for Clean Power press conference.Should not the attorneys general want to share all information related to the AGs United for Clean Power press conference to ensure the public that the events surrounding the press conference lacked political motivation and were in fact about the pursuit of justice? The attorneys general should want to remove any suspicion of the event being politically charged since it was attended by (1) former Vice President Al Gore, a known climate change policy advocate in the political arena; (2) Mr. Peter Frumhoff, a well-known climate change activist; and (3) Mr. Matthew Pawa, a prominent global warming litigation attorney who attended a meeting two months prior to thepress conference at the Rockefeller Family Fund to discuss an “Exxon campaign” seeking to delegitimize Exxon as a political actor. Any request for information about the events surrounding the AGs United for Clean Power press conference should be welcomed by the attorneys general.36
The judge noted that efforts to keep public records from the public, as was suggested in their “common interest agreement,” “causes the Court to further question if the attorneys general are trying to hide something.”
The settlement fund sought by this campaign is enormous. The figure publicly bandied about is $200 billion—perhaps because that was the approximate value of the 1998 tobacco MSA providing the plaintiffs’ lawyers’ and consultants’ settlement template.37 Hydrocarbon energy, however, is a much bigger industry than tobacco.
At least one prominent academic, Edward Maibach, director of the Center for Climate Change CommunicationatGeorge Mason University (GMU), has admitted to an expected payout from this campaign for his type of work. Maibach’s background is in public relations, in which business he served as worldwide director of social marketing for the PR firm Porter Novelli and where he worked on distribution of the tobacco master settlement funds. He told Grist magazine in an interview about his new work promoting the climate campaign, which we learned also entailed recruiting academics to call for RICO investigation of that campaign’s opponents:
If the White House took up Sen. [Sheldon] Whitehouse’s suggestion to wage a full investigation into the fossil fuel industry for all of their collusion and stonewalling to confuse the public about the harm of fossil fuels, and if a RICO suit were successful, and if there was a
settlement between the government and the fossil fuel industry—there is no question in my mind that a good portion of that money should be spent on a national campaign to educate people on the risks of climate change, and [to] build their resolve to work towards solutions. If this were treated as a public health problem, that is exactly what would be done.38
CEI and this author filed a Virginia FOIA suit, Horner et al. v. George Mason University,39 after some GMU faculty members led by Maibach worked with Sen. Whitehouse in calling on then-U.S. AG Loretta Lynch to go after their agenda’s opponents under an antiracketeering law. In a deposition in the matter in which this author participated, Maibach testified thus in response to my question:
Q. As director of the Center for Climate Change Communication, what do you do?
A: … As director, I suppose my chief job is raising the money we need to do the research, actually overseeing the research so that it is done of sufficient quality, mentoring my post docs, my students, my faculty, keeping the ship moving forward.
He was then asked if he recalled that Grist interview. He did, and soon he modified his previous answer about priorities:
Q. You testified that your earlier job in that position is raising funds?
A. Part of.
Q. You said your chief job was the quote. We can go back. Your chief job is raising money to keep it going. Is that still accurate?
A. That is probably a little too glib.... 41.
When Maibach asked Peter Frumhoff of the Union of Concerned Scientists to enlist UCS in publicly calling for RICO investigations of their opponents, Frumhoff let on to the brewing state AGs’ campaign, months before it became public. In a July 31, 2015, email, Frumhoff first dismissed Maibach’s call for a federal RICO investigation:
As you know, deception/disinformation isn’t itself a basis for criminal prosecution under RICO. We don’t think that Sen. Whitehouse’s call gives enough of a basis for scientists to sign on to this as a solid approach at this point.42
Then, Frumhoff assured Maibach,“[W]e’re also in the process of exploring other state-based approaches to holding fossil fuel companies legally accountable … [via] state (e.g., AG) action.”43
So far, two courts in Texas have issued scathing rulings noting these revelations: one the aforementioned federal district court for the Northern District of Texas44 and more recently a state court in Tarrant County.45 The federal district courtfocusedonanemailinwhich Schneiderman’s office asks activist lawyer Matt Pawa to mislead a reporter about his role in briefing the AGs and Al Gore in the back room just before the March 29, 2016, Manhattan press conference announcing a whatever-means-necessary campaign against opponents.46
This email references Pawa and Frumhoff, who both participated in the January Rockefeller/“delegitimize” meeting and the 2012 La Jolla conference; they had been invited to
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no lnx chart
The world is in desperate need for a revolution in economics education
https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-world-is-in-desperate-need-for-a-revolution-in-economics-education/
written by The Conversation April 17, 2019
Economic thinking governs much of our world. But the discipline’s teaching is stuck in the past. Centred around antiquated 19th-century models built on Newtonian physics, economics treats humans as atomic particles, rather than as social beings.
While academic research often manages to transcend this simplicity, undergraduate education does not – and the influence of these simplified ideas is carried by graduates as they go on to work in politics, media, business and the civil service.
Economists such as myself tend to speak in tightly coded jargon and mathematical models. We speak of “economic laws”, tacitly positioning these as analogous to the laws of physics. We wrap a thick layer of technical jargon around our study material and ban all moral or ethical discussions from the classroom. We attempt to take cover under the protective white lab coat of “real science”, a phenomenon described by Nobel Prize winner Friedrich Hayek as scientism.
In short, economics has become a rather quaint and highly guarded discipline. We urgently need to update economics education to change this – because economics, as taught in universities, does not reflect or speak to many of the issues of the real world, be they political, environmental or social.
The political economy
Take the tricky entanglement between politics and economics, which economists tend to try to avoid. Such an attempt is futile. Sidelining politics, history and broader ideas while teaching economics, as most professors do, is like studying the “natural” flows of water in the Netherlands without taking into account that there are people living there who are steering it, building dikes, reclaiming land and channelling the water – and ignoring that they have been doing this for thousands of years already. You can’t study thesystem while ignoring the people who make it.
Politics and economics are inextricably intertwined, as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx knew all too well. Somehow this has been forgotten. This does not mean economists need to get political or choose sides. But it does mean that we ignore politics at our own peril – by blindsiding ourselves or dismissing it as “external stuff”,we hamper our understanding of the very system we study.
Economists speak in numbers only, clinging to statistical data and quantitative models. We do so in the hope of looking objective. But this is counter-productive – “data” cannot tell us everything. Other social sciences such as sociology and anthropology use a broader range of methods, and consequently have a broader perspective on society. If we take our societal role of adviser on economic matters seriously, we will need to open up and adopt the insights that these other disciplines bring us about how the economy works.
It is true that academic economists are aware of the shortcomings of their discipline. But unfortunately, this awareness of the complexity of the economic system does not necessarily extend to those who leave university after their degree. And this is what the vast majority of economics graduates do. These are the people who go on to work in big business, governments and central banks, who shape policy and create our “economic common sense”.
Educational blinders
So what sort of ideas do these undergraduate economics students take out of university and into some of the most important careers in our societies?
Concerned student groups everywhere have started to systematically map this out. Student members of the University of Manchester Post-Crash Economics Association wrote a book surveying 174 economics modules at seven leading UK universities. They found that fewer than 10% covered anything other than mainstream economics. In the Netherlands, students found that real-world problems, from climate change to inequality, were seriously treated in only 6% of all modules and that only 2% of methods courses were not focused on statistical work.
A series of subsequent curriculum review projects, including one covering 13 countries from Argentina to Israel, found similar conditions in economics programs everywhere.
Undergraduate economists all over the world learn theories from textbooks that have barely changed since the 1950s. Those theories are based on individual agents, competing in markets to maximise narrowly defined “economic utility” (for people) or profit (for firms). The principles are taught with the same certainty as Newtonian physics, and are as devoid of value judgements.
This is absurd. Clearly, there are values; mainstream economics values efficiency, markets and growth – and puts individuals over collectives. Yet undergraduates are not taught to recognise, let alone question, these values – and the consequences are serious.
Read more:
Shut down business schools? Two professors debate]
The models taught in our education ignore inequality, while our societies are being torn apart by it. In our classes, relentless economic growth is an unquestioned dogma, yet this same economic growth is rapidly ripping apart the ecological foundations of our world. And while we all may individually donate to charities, separate our trash and feel guilty about flying too much, we are collectively handicapped in reforming the very system that drives these problems.
Hope for change
There is hope for change, however. In the UK, a number of economics programmes are gradually becoming more pluralist in terms of theory and methods in response to the movement. Goldsmiths College in London, for instance, has renewed its PPE programme to include the same, and add other disciplines. And the Schumacher College in Devon now offers an Economics for Transition MSc which explicitly ties together economic and ecological systems. Meanwhile, an international accreditation system for pluralist Masters programmes is being set up.
But we need renewal on a much broader front: a new approach to economics education, one which does not hide behind the self-imposed limits of 19th century physics-style modelling, but instead considers the societal role of economists seriously. We need an economics which focuses on the entire economic system and which acknowledges all relevant sources of knowledge, rather than apprehensively clinging to statistical data. And one which addresses the issues that are most pressing for society, not those that comfortably fit within its mainstream method.
Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait for the present generation of economists to retire before this can happen. By that time, it might be too late.The Conversation
Joris Tieleman, PhD Candidate, Erasmus University Rotterdam
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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A record number of Americans now say that global warming is "personally important" to them, according to the latest *Climate Change and the American Mind* survey released Tuesday by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) and the **:{George Mason University Center for Climate Change:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{ Communication:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}:**. That number has jumped to 72 percent, up nine percentage points since the survey was last conducted in March of 2018.
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larry elder:
How does Ebony justify excluding economist and writer Walter Williams, former chairman of the economics department of George Mason University, where he still teaches? Raised by a single mother, he lived in Philadelphia's Richard Allen housing projects. He served as a private in the Army before earning a bachelor's degree at a state university, followed by a master's and a Ph.D. in economics at UCLA. Williams has written a dozen books on economics and race, including the inspirational "Up From the Projects: An Autobiography," and was recently the subject of a documentary about his life.
The exclusion of people like Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams explains why there's no serious discussion in the black community about government dependency; school choice; the damage done by high taxes, excessive regulation and laws like minimum wage; and why blacks should rethink their allegiance to the Democratic Party
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The Law & Economics Center is comprised of five divisions:
The Mason Judicial Education Program is the nation’s preeminent provider of high-quality, balanced judicial education seminars and conferences that focus on economics, finance, accounting, statistics, and the scientific method.
To date, over 5,000 federal and state judges from all 50 states and the District of Columbia, including three current U.S. Supreme Court Justices, have participated in at least one of the LEC’s judicial education program
The Henry G. Manne Program in Law & Economics Studies promotes law and economics scholarship by funding faculty research and hosting policy-relevant research roundtables and academic conferences.
...Since its founding, the Manne Program’s workshops and research roundtables have included more than 2,000 participants from 429 academic institutions. In addition to its core constituency of academics, Manne Program events also attract attendance from the policy community, including economists and lawyers from federal agencies, Capitol Hill, state government offices, and the non-profit and for-profit research sectors.
:{The Mason Attorneys General Education Program:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: offers courses that provide broad-based understanding of economic and public policy issues to state attorneys general and their staff lawyers.
:{The Congressional Civil Justice Academy:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}: provides balanced educational programs on a range of civil litigation issues for the benefit of Members of the U.S. Congress, their staff, and their constituents.
The Program on Economics and Privacy produces timely and original economic analyses of the privacy, data security, competition, and consumer protection issues intrinsic to the modern, digital economy, and introduces this analysis into public policy discussions by generating education programs and hosting forums in which scholars, thought leaders, and policymakers can share research and insights.
The Congressional Civil Justice Academy provides rigorous, empirically-based, and balanced panel discussions on a range of civil litigation issues for the benefit of Members of the U.S. Congress, their staffs, and their constituents
.... Program on Economics & Privacy, with the support of the Federalist Society’s:{Regulatory Transparency Project:(style="box-sizing:inherit"):}:,will hold its 6th Annual Public Policy Symposium on the Law & Economics of Privacy and Data Security, on Friday, June 1, 2018 at George Mason University Antonin Scalia Law School in Arlington, VA.
In the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica affair and recent high-profile data breaches, we are at an inflection point. There are increasing calls to rethink regulation of the digital economy, Congress is considering several bills to overhaul the laws governing the collection and use of consumer data, and the impact of the GDPR will be felt in the US in less than a month. What’s more, a new slate of FTC Commissioners has just started work.
Join us on June 1 for the 6th Annual Symposium on the Law & Economics of Privacy and Data Security where we tackle these issues with thought leaders from government, academia, think tanks, and industry.
This year’s symposium will include remarks from the new Director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, Andrew Smith.
The symposium will also feature panels on A New Regulatory Regime for Digital Platforms?, Algorithmic “Fairness”, What Does the GDPR Mean for the US?, and Researching Bug Bounty Programs.
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dem in chains:
ch 11 Democracy defeats the doctrine --
GMU courted JB hard; when he came, big corp $ which boosts rank of school; Richie Fink macher; grads can't get teaching jobs, but lots of policy gigs [CTT? gov't?] 173
Kemp-Roth bill req tearing up social contract ; Stockman realize he could not win b/c of popularity of SS etc, by 82 knew r revo not possible; seen as turncoat, gop left fact-based universe 177by 1989 nat debt 53% of GNP ; libtard say RR did not fail so much a forfeit [rt turned on Ike for accept SS]; so indirect brabattack; step 1 make SS look less attractive; step 2 divide and conquer; progressive will fall for make rich pay more/means test, but will kill it . libtard kill soc sec 3x win 181
pvtize once fringe theory
stephen moore
Manne program dead? sdo hot on mkt, got GMU law school head; pro corp vs green and consumerism
oct 86 Nobel JB; also libtard helped by lost of trust in gov't LBJ VN, ategate
IHS works with fedsoc
ch 12 The kind of force that propelled Columbus --
contract w. Am bal budget. mostly by Dick Armey, who staffed from Cato; gop sweep house and senate; armey studies house rules to manipulate; 2 shutdowns on debt limits fail; BC triangulates, takes on gop stated goals but avoid extreme measures works; 193
libtard had to present their bills as opposite of what actually were; so reform will kill; manne retires; 2/5 of all fed judge summer inst; greens biggest threat to corps, "quest for control over industry" 195
gov't health and welfare rules hobble labor mkt; flat rate tax more fair to rich; feminism "heavily socialistic for no apparent reason" 196 socialism is gov't $ for anything other than mil or police.
national voter reg act 1993 motor voter "enfranchising the illiterate" 197 JB
GMU bd of vis Kristol etc etc fink , armey, feulner...
Wendy Gramm may 98 blatant partisan fundraiser ltr v501c3 so prolly illegal; JB PO's, verges on fraud"
PO's at Koch takeover, fink at CSE shady , claiming orgs all allies no consent eg boy scouts 210
Tyler Cowen 202; buch ctr splits off, JB retreats to cabin?
COS weekend retreats, scalia keynote? no academics left in pgm?
Authors:STRIPLING, JACKSource:Chronicle of Higher Education. 5/27/2016, Vol. 62 Issue 37, pA27-A29. 3p.
How George Mason Became Koch’s Academic Darling
IN THE ANNALS of George Mason University's history, few outsiders have claim to a role so prominent as Charles G. Koch's.
Indeed, one can scarcely separate the story of George Mason from that of Mr. Koch, a libertarian billionaire who, along with his brother, David H. Koch, has used his fortune to try to swing elections and to emancipate markets from regulation.
The Koch brothers' war of ideas expands far across academe, where programs aligned with their political interests curry philanthropic favor, but no institution has benefited as consistently from their largess as George Mason. And, arguably, no university has suffered as much criticism as a result.
The Charles Koch Foundation pumped nearly $50 million into George Mason from 2011 to 2014, according to an analysis of tax forms conducted by the Associated Press. Much of that money was steered toward the Mercatus Center, a libertarian-style economic think tank that Charles Koch helped to establish.
While there is little question that George Mason owes a great deal to Mr. Koch's generosity, there is considerable disagreement over whether his donations lend him undue influence over the direction of the university or merely serve to enhance a few academic programs that have long attracted scholars with a free-market orientation.
The dispute reached a tipping point this spring, when George Mason announced that it would name its law school for Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice, in recognition of a $10-million gift from the Charles Koch Foundation and a $20-million donation from an anonymous benefactor.
In naming the school for Justice Scalia, a hero to conservatives and a villain to many progressives, George Mason saw its uneasy relationship with one of the nation's most influential political families come under closer review. It has also pitted professors against one another in an ethically charged dialogue about donor influence on teaching and research.
THE SEEDS of Mr. Koch's relationship with George Mason were planted in 1980, when the Mercatus Center set up shop on the campus. The center, which bills itself as "the world's premier university source for market-oriented ideas," helped George Mason lure some of the biggest names in economics. They include James M. Buchanan Jr. and Vernon L. Smith, both of whom have won Nobel Prizes.
Mercatus was founded by Richard Fink, a professor who would help forge formal links between the university and Mr. Koch's vast financial and political enterprises. As Mr. Fink ascended in Koch Industries Inc., becoming an executive vice president and member of the company's Board of Directors, his influence grew at George Mason, where he served for eight years as a member of the Board of Visitors.
An economist, Mr. Fink remains a member of the Mercatus Center's board, along with Charles Koch and Brian Hooks, executive director of the Koch foundation.
George Mason's emergence as a hot spot for free-market thinking soon extended to the university's Law & Economics Center, a unit of the law school, which attracted legal minds of an often libertarian persuasion. Regardless of whether Charles Koch shaped George Mason's trajectory or simply supported it, few other institutions have become so strongly identified with a particular school of economic thought across multiple disciplines.
Walter E. Williams, George Mason's John M. Olin distinguished professor of economics, had a ringside seat for the university's evolution. On a recent morning at his office, Mr. Williams, who joined the faculty in 1980, sounded unsurprised by the latest controversy concerning Mr. Koch, whom he considers a personal friend.
Most of George Mason's faculty members, the professor says, "have utter contempt for the Constitution."
"So a constitutional person like Scalia would be very offensive to them."
That is the sort of red meat Mr. Williams offers up to listeners of Rush Limbaugh's radio broadcasts, where the professor occasionally fills in as guest host. Over the course of an hourlong interview, he lambasted "nasty liberals" at the University of Massachusetts, compared most forms of taxation to slavery, and watched a video of Mr. Koch toasting the professor at a dinner several years ago. During the toast, Mr. Kochseemed to relish an anecdote about Mr. Williams, who is black, once claiming that if any Black Panther Party members messed with him, he could "kick their butts."
At 6 feet 4 inches, perhaps that is true.
Mr. Williams's politics are no secret. On his bookshelves rest a bust of Adam Smith, patron saint of unimpeded capitalism, and a copy of The Libertarian Reader. But he is careful not to bring his opinions, hardened as they are, into the classroom, he says. He scoffs at any suggestion that George Mason's economics department indoctrinates students with antiregulatory, free-market messages. He does, however, hope that his students will come to see the world just as he does.
"I would like students to share my subjective opinions," Mr. Williams says. "If they become hard-minded thinkers, they will adopt many of my opinions."
FEW PEOPLE seem to dispute that George Mason, at least in the disciplines of law and economics, is a more conservative campus than are many other public institutions. The harder question is whether Kochmoney perpetuates that reality, and in so doing ensures that the university's scholarship and teaching will serve the Koch foundation's political interests.
To answer that question, skeptics naturally look toward Mercatus. The center is a private, nonprofit research organization that operates independently of the university and without state or federal money, but it has considerable cross-pollination with George Mason's economics department, some of whose professors rely upon the center to supplement their incomes. This year, about two dozen George Mason faculty members received a total of $432,000 from the center, Mercatus officials said. It has also provided financial support to 64 graduate students, nearly all of them in economics.
Mercatus has come under increased scrutiny over the past year, and much of that attention is due to Jane Mayer's book Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (Doubleday, 2016). The book recounts the political maneuverings of Charles and David Koch as characterized in a confidential study written by Clayton A. Coppin, a management consultant at Koch Industries who taught history at George Mason.
In the study, Mr. Coppin described Mercatus as "a lobbying group disguised as a disinterested academic program." By donating money to the center, he wrote, Charles Koch received a tax deduction for financing what amounted to an advocacy arm for his "corporate interest."
Establishing centers and institutes, Mr. Coppin said, was preferable to giving money to universities outright because it gave Mr. Koch more leverage.
"It would be necessary to use ambiguous and misleading names, obscure the true agenda, and conceal the means of control," Mr. Coppin wrote. "This is the method that Charles Koch would soon practice in his charitable giving, and later in his political actions."
Tyler Cowen, general director of Mercatus, declined an interview request and referred all questions to Bob Ewing, the center's director of media relations. Mr. Ewing said he had not read Dark Money and could not comment on Mr. Coppin's characterization of the center. He emphasized that the Koch foundation is just one of more than 3,000 foundations, individuals, and corporations that provide Mercatus with financial support.
John C. Hardin, director of university relations at the Charles Koch Foundation, said it is "interested in pursuing questions about the relationship between freedom and prosperity."
"That's what Charles is excited about supporting," Mr. Hardin said. "It's unfortunate that some folks have used political tactics to silence or attack scholars they don't agree with instead of dealing with the ideas themselves."
The Mercatus Center's conflict-of-interest statement speaks directly to concerns of donor meddling, labeling any such interference as unacceptable. "Mercatus financial supporters have absolutely no influence or control over the research design, methodology, analysis, or findings of Mercatus research projects, nor do they have influence or control over the content of educational programs," the statement reads. "Offers of financial support predicated on such expectations are not accepted."
The center's strong language involves overt and egregious forms of donor influence, which academics of all political stripes would presumably find inappropriate. Subtler donor influences on the culture of GeorgeMason University, however, are more difficult to detect and harder to quantify.
Carrie A. Meyer, an associate professor of economics, first joined the faculty in 1988, after finishing her Ph.D. at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. A former Peace Corps volunteer, she describes herself as a political moderate who leans left of her colleagues. Looking back on her career, she said, she has held back in her scholarship at George Mason, gravitating toward vanilla topics, such as a book based on the diaries of her family's farm. She did not want to rock the boat.
"I carefully chose my research so it wouldn't be objectionable to them," she said.
Ms. Meyer described her colleagues as smart economists but said they collectively provide graduate students with a narrow view of the discipline. "I would tell people that it's better to go to a place where they would get a broader education," she said.
Other George Mason professors push back against that critique. Peter J. Boettke, a professor of economics and philosophy, said the university values rigorous intellectual debate, not the parroting of some political orthodoxy.
"We have a variety of people with different views here," said Mr. Boettke, director of a Mercatus program and an authority on the Austrian school of economics, which looks askance at government spending as an economic stimulus. "Let's say we have a graduate student who wanted to write a thesis on the Affordable Care Act. Would they be discouraged from doing it because of Mercatus? I would hope not. I hope they would see this is an environment of open discourse, and the best arguments win out."
Whatever questions Mercatus has prompted, administrators have consistently concluded that the center helps bring superstars into the university. Peter N. Stearns, a former provost, said that the center'sassociation with politically motivated donors raised "yellow flags, but not red ones."
"We didn't know as much about the Kochs then as we do now," said Mr. Stearns, who served as provost from 2000 to 2015. "I was aware of it and not entirely comfortable with it. But the program was providing us with objectively high-quality faculty. The reputation was high, even if they were aligned with a libertarian or a free-market stance."
WHAT ONCE passed for mild suspicion of the Kochs' perceived influence has boiled over into outright disdain among some professors at George Mason. The Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, another Koch-funded nonprofit center on the university's property, have been seen by critics as troubling satellite operations on the fringe of the institution proper. But the gift to the law school brings those concerns closer to the core, and the Scalia naming tracks as a middle finger to liberal-minded students and professors.
Justice Scalia's record on gay rights and racial preferences in college admissions are particularly troubling to some faculty members, who see his opinions as counter to the inclusive mission of the university. During oral arguments over affirmative action last year, Mr. Scalia raised the specter of "mismatch theory," questioning whether black students might do better at a "slower-track school."
"I don't know how we can call ourselves a public university and associate ourselves with someone who doesn't believe that African-Americans belong at a school like Mason," said Craig Willse, an assistant professor of cultural studies.
Henry N. Butler, dean of the law school, said the idea of naming the school for Justice Scalia came from the anonymous donor, who has pledged $20 million to go along with the Koch Foundation's $10-million contribution. The naming, Mr. Butler said, was by no means an endorsement of the totality of Justice Scalia's views. Indeed, the dean said, he would just as happily have named the law school for Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a reliably liberal justice on the court, had that been the donor's wish.
"I would have that thirty-million-dollar smile on my face," he said.
George Mason's Faculty Senate passed a resolution this month calling on the university to put the renaming on hold until the gift agreements could be further reviewed. The discussion before the vote revealed an intensifying rift between law professors, who say the gift will advance the school's national profile, and faculty members in other disciplines, who say the contribution will give the Koch Foundation undue leverage over university affairs.
Lloyd R. Cohen, a law professor, stood before a packed room of his colleagues and described the resolution as "hate-filled."
"Consider the barely concealed contempt for the law-school faculty and administration, that we would voluntarily sell out our right to faculty governance and academic freedom for a donor," Mr. Cohen said.
The anonymous donor's gift agreement, which provides for scholarship money that will in turn generate tuition revenue to help pay for 12 new professorships, gives the donor broad discretion to terminate the deal if the school "is no longer principally focused" on its "mission." It also stipulates that Mr. Butler, specifically, "is a critical part of advancing the school's mission," and that the donors should be notified "immediately" if he is removed or resigns.
None of those stipulations, Mr. Butler said, infringe on the president's or provost's authority to fire the dean, or the law school's authority to appoint the professors it sees fit. To suggest that the school would agree to anything less, Mr. Butler said, is offensive.
"They challenge our academic integrity, and they act like a bunch of purists," he said of his critics. "It's all political. I don't throw hand grenades at other people in the university, and they are taking cheap shots."
What Mr. Butler cannot deny, however, is that George Mason is taking a gamble. The business plan, such as it is, relies on the premise that the law school, which has seen steep drops in enrollment and a corresponding decline in rankings, will rebound with help of the donors' largess. The school expects to exhaust the $30 million in about 10 years, the dean said, after which it will count on sustained enrollment increases to continue to pay for the dozen new professors.
Count David L. Kuebrich as a skeptic. An associate professor of English, he has spent years researching donor influence at George Mason, often finding that the university foundation's agreements are confidential and not subject to public-records laws. The new agreements, which were made public because they required the president's signature for the Scalia naming, ensure that the university will be indefinitely on the hook to pay for new faculty positions, regardless of whether the plan works or the donors deliver, Mr. Kuebrich said.
"The Kochs always cut hard deals," he said. "They get a lot for their money, and it's coming ultimately from Virginia taxpayers."
LIKE the economics department, George Mason's law school has a solid reputation as a bedrock of libertarian thought. Its blending of law and economics draws upon the traditions of the University of Chicago, a number of whose leading scholars have a history of praising the power of unfettered markets.
The Scalia naming has rekindled concerns about the Law & Economics Center's Mason Judicial Education Program. The program, which receives money from the Charles Koch Foundation and other right-leaning groups, provides seminars that aim to give judges an "understanding of critical economic disciplines" to inform their decision making, according to its website.
Critics on George Mason's faculty have questioned whether the seminars are designed to ideologically influence judges.
"There is no brainwashing going on here," D. Bruce Johnsen, the program's director, told professors at the Faculty Senate meeting. "To suggest that anyone could get a bunch of judges together and brainwash them is just nonsense. These people, as their profession, listen to smart advocates constantly and sift through what they say, and they make up their own mind. So, again, I think this is just a thinly veiled attempt to tell a lie and repeat it over and over again."
The law school's reputation as a libertarian stronghold, however, may give some job candidates pause. When David N. Schleicher interviewed for a faculty position, in 2008, he asked Daniel D. Polsby, who was then dean, whether it was a problem that Mr. Schleicher leaned left politically.
"He said, 'Of course not. Are you crazy?'" recalls Mr. Schleicher, who earned tenure at George Mason and is now an associate professor at Yale Law School.
To the extent that George Mason's law school has hired conservative scholars, he said, it is at least in part because those professors are not thought to be as highly sought after by the more-liberal programs that dominate academe.
"The school has developed a bit of an ideology around hiring, the belief that you can hire better people because of biases elsewhere," Mr. Schleicher said. "But it is certainly not exclusive in their hiring, as evidenced by them hiring me."
Thrust into the center of this debate is Angel Cabrera, who took over as George Mason's president nearly four years ago. Mr. Cabrera, a native of Spain, previously served as president of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a financially struggling institution that, in 2014, was taken over by Arizona State University.
Before he assumed his duties at George Mason, Mr. Cabrera was briefed on all of the university's key donors and prospects, including Charles Koch. He later met with Mr. Koch at an Arlington, Va., hotel, where Mr. Cabrera was disabused of some of the legends about Mr. Koch as a dark and mysterious ideologue, he said. The two did not talk politics but rather business-management theory, a shared passion.
"I've been around enough to know that everybody is a lot more nuanced and complicated and interesting than they are portrayed to be," Mr. Cabrera said. "It is human nature to simplify people's characters and positions."
To Mr. Cabrera, Mr. Koch is no different than a passionate climate-change activist who invests in a university well known for its research on global warming. The president said he was not concerned about the Koch foundation's establishing a "beachhead" of political action at the university, as some critics have suggested, because George Mason applies the same standards of tenure, promotion, and peer review throughout the university.
"Call it a beachhead. I don't know. Call it anything you want," Mr. Cabrera said. "All I see as a university president is a generous philanthropist who believes in one of the many things we do and he's willing to invest there. And I say thank you, keep it coming."
[The law school's dean says he would have named it for Ruth Bader Ginsburg had that been the donor's wish. Few people dispute that George Mason is a more conservative campus than are many other public institutions.]
https://www.propublica.org/article/these-professors-make-more-than-thousand-bucks-hour-peddling-mega-mergers
If THE GOVERNMENT ENDS UP approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger,
credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors.
A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every major deal.Again and again, the company has relied on economists from America’s top universities to make its case before the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission. Moonlighting for a consulting firm named Compass Lexecon, they represented AT&T when it bought Centennial, DirecTV, and Leap Wireless; and when it tried unsuccessfully to absorb T-Mobile. And now AT&T and Time Warner have hired three top Compass Lexecon economists to counter criticism that the giant deal would harm consumers and concentrate too much media power in one company.
Today, “in front of the government, in many cases the most important advocate is the economist and lawyers come second,” said James Denvir, an antitrust lawyer at Boies, Schiller.
Economists who specialize in antitrust — affiliated with Chicago, Harvard, Princeton, the University of California, Berkeley, and other prestigious universities — reshaped their field through scholarly work showing that mergers create efficiencies of scale that benefit consumers.But they reap their most lucrative paydays by lending their academic authority to mergers their corporate clients propose.Corporate lawyers hire them from Compass Lexecon and half a dozen other firms to sway the government by documenting that a merger won’t be “anti-competitive”: in other words, that it won’t raise retail prices, stifle innovation, or restrict product offerings. Their optimistic forecasts, though, often turn out to be wrong, and the mergers they champion may be hurting the economy.
American industry is more highly concentrated than at any time since the gilded age. Need a pharmacy? Americans have two main choices. A plane ticket? Four major airlines. They have four choices to buy cell phone service. Soon one company will sell more than a quarter of the quaffs of beer around the world.Some of the professors earn more than top partners at major law firms. Dennis Carlton, a self-effacing economist at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business and one of Compass Lexecon’s experts on the AT&T-Time Warner merger, charges at least $1,350 an hour. In his career, he has made about $100 million, including equity stakes and non-compete payments, ProPublica estimates. Carlton has written reports or testified in favor of dozens of mergers, including those between AT&T-SBC Communications and Comcast-Time Warner, and three airline deals: United-Continental, Southwest-Airtran, and American-US Airways.
Mergers peaked last year at $2 trillion in the U.S. The top 50 companies in a majority of American industries gained share between 1997 and 2012, and “competition may be decreasing in many economic sectors,” President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers warned in April.
While the impact of this wave of mergers is much debated, prominent economists such as Lawrence Summers and Joseph Stiglitz suggest that it is one important reason why, even as corporate profits hit records, economic growth is slow, wages are stagnant, business formation is halting, and productivity is lagging. “Only the monopoly-power story can convincingly account” for high business profits and low corporate investment, Summers wrote earlier this year.
In addition, politicians such as U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren have criticized big mergers for giving a handful of companies too much clout. President-elect Trump said in October that his administration would not approve the AT&T-Time Warner merger “because it’s too much concentration of power in the hands of too few.”
During the campaign, Trump didn’t signal what his broader approach to mergers would be.But the early signs are that his administration will weaken antitrust enforcement and strengthen the hand of economists. He selected Joshua Wright, an economist and professor atGeorge Mason’s Antonin Scalia Law School, to lead his transition on antitrust matters. Wright, himself a former consultant for Boston-based Charles River Associates, regularly celebrates mergers in speeches and articles and has supported increasing the influence of economists in assessing monopoly power. “Mergers between competitors do not often lead to market power but do often generate significant benefits for consumers,” he wrote in The New York Times this week.
...
==
==
vol conspir bs
The coverage of George Mason University Law School was fascinating in part because I knew little of the school's unusual history. Teles explains that the new George Mason University in Virginia had started a law school (in 1979) by picking up a low-ranked local law school in DC. In an effort to create a stronger law school, the University later hired law and economics scholar Henry Manne to be the new Dean of the school and gave him unusual powers to create the law school he wanted. As Teles tells it, the law school became Henry Manne's project to build a law school entirely around a libertarian vision based heavily on law and economics:
Henry Manne's project of building George Mason University law School (GMUSL) represented a very different approach to influencing the legal academy — building an alternative institution from the bottom up rather than influencing the legal academy from the top down. While the Olin programs [of law and economics at elite schools] represented a "Fabian" strategy of slowly burrowing into mainstream institutions, GMUSL followed a "Gramscian" approach of creating a parallel institution where more libertarian professors could hone their ideas without the compromises associated with elite institutions. [p.207]
Teles contends that this experiment is moderately successful so far, although to some extent the jury is still out. On one hand, the law school has stayed largely true to its original vision, and it has made "impressive achievements" with its faculty and the U.S. News Rankings. On the the other hand, Teles contends that it's too early to say if Mason will establish itself fully as a counter to liberal institutions (and especially, more elite ones). I gather three of my co-bloggers will have some thoughts on that.
==
econ jrnl watch
EJW Advisory Council
- Terry Anderson, PERC, Hoover Inst.
- Charles W. Baird, Cal. St. Univ., Hayward
- Peter J. Boettke, George Mason Univ.
- Thomas Borcherding, Claremont Grad. Sch.
- Donald J. Boudreaux, George Mason Univ.
- Matthew Brown, Academy on Capitalism and Limited Government Foundation
- David Colander, Middlebury College
- Tyler Cowen, George Mason Univ.
- Thomas DiLorenzo, Loyola Coll.
- Richard Ebeling, Am. Inst. for Economic Res.
- Bruno S. Frey, Univ. Zurich, Ch.
- Mason Gaffney, U. California, Riverside
- Pierre Garello, Aix-Marseille Univ., Fr.
- Peter Gordon, Univ. So. California
- James D. Gwartney, Florida St. Univ.
- David Haddock, Northwestern Univ.
- Steve H. Hanke, Johns Hopkins Univ.
- David R. Henderson, Mont. Nav. Postgr. Sch.
- Robert Higgs, The Independent Review
- Hal Hochman, Lafayette Coll.
- Randall G. Holcombe, Florida St. Univ.
- Kevin Hoover, Duke University
- Israel Kirzner, New York Univ.
- Timur Kuran, Duke University
- Deepak Lal, U. California, Los Angeles
- Dwight Lee, Univ. Georgia
- Harry Markowitz, U. California, San Diego
- Fred McChesney, Northwestern Univ.
- Deirdre N. McCloskey, Univ. Illinois, Chicago
- Roger Meiners, Univ. Texas, Arlington
- Philip Mirowski, Univ. Notre Dame
- Adrian Moore, Reason Pub. Policy Inst.
- Robert Mundell, Columbia University
- Charles E. Murray, Am. Inst. for Economic Res.
- Robert H. Nelson, Univ. Maryland
- Douglass North, Washington Univ.
- Sam Peltzman, Univ. Chicago
- Martin Ricketts, Univ. Buckingham, UK
- Mario Rizzo, New York Univ.
- Colin Robinson, Univ. Surrey, UK
- Mauricio Rojas, EPIC, Madrid, Es.
- Paul H. Rubin, Emory Univ.
- Thomas Saving, Texas A&M Univ.
- Thomas Schelling, Univ. Maryland
- William Shughart, Univ. Mississippi
- Vernon Smith, George Mason Univ.
- Richard L. Stroup, Montana St. Univ.
- Alex Tabarrok, George Mason Univ.
- Nicolaus Tideman, Virginia Tech
- Richard H. Timberlake, Univ. Georgia
- Karen Vaughn, George Mason Univ.
- Richard Vedder, Ohio Univ.
- Richard E. Wagner, George Mason Univ.
- Walter Williams, George Mason Univ.
- Oliver Williamson, U. California, Berkeley
- Bruce Yandle, Clemson Univ.
- Leland Yeager, Auburn Univ.
- Stephen Ziliak, Roosevelt Univ.
Advisory Council
In Memoriam
- James Buchanan, George Mason Univ.
- Ronald Coase, Univ. Chicago
- Thomas Mayer, Univ. Calif., Davis
- Gordon Tullock, George Mason Univ
==
hhmn, fun
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/George_Mason_University
George Mason University is a distinguished (and sometimes merely distinguishable) public university in Virginia known for its various public outreach and research programs. One of their most well-known programs is their Center for History and New Media, which provides resources for history teachers and hosts the History News Network, a forum for commentary by historians from a number of universities on historical scholarship and current events.
Unfortunately, it's also a hotbed of crankery and prime supplier of experts for hire. Most of its crank hires are employed in global warming denial, libertarian wingnuttery, and the occasional creationism. Some of its notable, questionable professors and programs include:
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- :{1:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Global warming denial:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{2:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Intelligent design:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{3:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Libertarianism:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{4:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{Funding:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{5:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{External links:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
- :{6:(style="display:table-cell;padding-left:0px;padding-right:0.5em"):}::{References:(style="display:table-cell"):}:
Global warming denial
- Patrick Michaels, "distinguished senior fellow in public policy," also bankrolled by the Cato Institute.
- S. Fred Singer, physicist, left GMU in 2000. Another occasional Cato hack.
- Edward Wegman, statistician and author of the discredited and plagiarized Wegman Report, cleared after a foot-dragging "investigation" by GMU that violated the university's own policies on timeliness of such inquiries.
Intelligent design
- Caroline Crocker, fired from GMU in 2005 for teaching intelligent design and featured in the film Expelled.
- Sal Cordova, another IDiot. Holds the honor of being Entry #81 on the Encyclopedia of American Loons.
Libertarianism
Their public policy and economics departments employ a number of professors well-known for libertarian views, ranging from 'meh' to full-on crazy (again, with some climate denial mixed in for good measure). They're all part of the Mercatus Center, which is funded by Koch Industries. Persons associated with GMU, past and present include:
- James M. Buchanan, Nobel-winning economist known for developing public choice theory.
- Vernon Smith, Nobel-winning economist and libertarian known for developing experimental economics.
- Wendy Gramm, chair of Mercatus, wife of former Senator Phil Gramm; known for her role in the Enron scandal.
- Peter Boettke, prominent Austrian school economist.
- Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, economists who run the Marginal Revolution blog. By comparison, a moderate duo who try to eschew denialism and anti-science crankery.
- Arnold Kling and Bryan "Keynes = militant unions" Caplan, the proprietors of EconLog along with David Henderson (a notable climate denier, though not employed by GMU).
- Walter E. Williams, African-American economist infamously known for filling in for the scat-muncher on his radio show and promoting the Southern Lost Cause.[1][2]
Funding
Why so many hacks and quacks? GMU gets boatloads of funding from ultra-rich libertarian and conservative donors, including the Koch brothers, Richard Mellon Scaife, and ExxonMobil. Charles Koch also sits on the boards of the Mercatus Center and the "Institute for Humane Studies."[3][4][5] We need to stress the comedy one more time — this is from a campus that is also desperately trying (like almost every single university in the country) to increase its taxpayer-funded endowment.[6]
External links
- GMU homepage
- Sourcewatch entry
- How to "Buy" a University, Robert D. Feinman
- George Mason: Climate Denial U?, Daily Kos
- George Mason University's Endless Inquiry, Deep Climate
References
- :{Jump up:(style="background-color:initial;user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}::{↑:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}: DiLorenzo, Thomas (2003). "Foreword". The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War. Foreword by Walter Williams. New York, New York: Three Rivers Press. p. xii-xiii. ISBN 0-7615-2646-3. https://books.google.com/books?id=5B9qs5dAnuwC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Retrieved December 7, 2014.
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ {{#invoke:citation/CS1|citation |CitationClass=web }}
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Koch and George Mason University, DeSmog Blog
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ Mercatus Center Board of Directors
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ George Mason University, ExxonSecrets
- :{Jump up:(style="user-select:none;top:-99999px;clip:rect(1px 1px 1px 1px);overflow:hidden;position:absolute !important;padding:0px !important;border:0px !important;height:1px !important;width:1px !important"):}:↑ George Mason president delivers new vision, The Washington Post
- Crank schools
- Creationism
- Denialist organizations
- Economics
- Global warming denialists
- Libertarianism
- Libertarian wingnuttery
==
this is tag copy:
overflow 9/14
http://chrc.gmu.edu/scholars.html
Gary Kreps, PhD, Chair
- Gary L. Kreps (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is a University Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at George Mason University. He is also the Director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication at George Mason University. His research focuses on health communication and promotion, information dissemination, cancer prevention and control, organizational communication, information technologies, multicultural relations, and risk/crisis management. His published work includes more thant 300 books, articles, and monographs concerning the applications of communication knowledge in society. Before his appointment at George Mason in 2004, he served as the founding Chief of the Health Communication and Informatics Research Branch at the National Cancer Institute, the founding Dean of the School of Communication at Hofstra University, Executive Director of the Greenspun School of Communication at UNLV, and in faculty and administrative roles at Northern Illinois, Rutgers, Indiana, and Purdue Universities. He has received numerous awards and honors for his active program of research, teaching, and scholarship.
Founding CHRC Faculty Scholars
Bedore
Joani Bedore, PhD
Assistant Professor of Communication
Joani's research focuses on interpersonal, gender, workplace, and public communication
Boileau
Don Boileau, PhD
Professor of Communication
Don's research focuses on intercultural & public communication, communication education, and rhetoric & society
Botan
Carl Botan, PhD
Professor of Communication
Carl's research focuses on strategic, risk, and health communication, public relations, and research methods
Cai
Xiaomei Cai, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication
Xiaomei's research focuses on media & society, family communication, new media, and research methods
Decker
Warren Decker, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication
Warren's research focuses on public communication, argumentation, communication theory, and social movements
Dickerson
Michael Dickerson, M.A.
Outreach Coordinator and Instructor of Communication
Mike's research focuses on public relations, risk communication, and media systems
Jon Entine
Jon Entine
Senior Research Fellow
Jon, director of the Genetic Literacy Project (www.geneticliteracyproject.org) at STATS/GMU, visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and columnist for Forbes.com and Ethical Corporation, focuses his research and writing on science and public policy, environmental sustainability, corporate responsibility, NGO advocacy and media framing. See: www.jonentine.com.
missing the picture
Andy Finn, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication
Andy's research focuses on public & political communication, media systems, new media, and methods
Carla Fisher
Carla Fisher, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communication
Carla's research examines the information needs of cancer survivors and caregivers, with a focus on intergenerational and family communication.
Gibson
Tim Gibson, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Communication
Tim's research focuses on health & urban communication and media advocacy
Hopson
Mark Hopson, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Communication
Mark's research focuses communication & culture, rhetoric & society, and communication & violence
Paula Kim
Paula Kim
Senior Research Fellow
Paula is an expert on health advocacy and consumer empowerment. She helped to found the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCan), and is working to establish an Advocacy Leadership Academy at George Mason University.
Klein
Steve Klein, M.A.
Journalism Coordinator and Instructor of Communication
Steve's research focuses on electronic journalism, media & society, and public policy
lichter
Bob Lichter, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication
Bob's research focuses on political, health, & scientific communication, media ethics, and methods
Lont
Cindy Lont, Ph.D.
Professor of Communication
Cindy's research media & society, gender, visual com, media production & theory
Maibach
Ed Maibach, Ph.D.
University Professor
Ed's research focuses on social marketing, health & environmental communication, campaigns, and social influence
missing the picture
Jim McAuley, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus
Jim's research focuses on health & aging, health services, communication & culture, and research methods
missing the picture
Star Muir, Ph.D
Associate Professor of Communication
Star's research focuses on new media, environmental comunication, communication education, and public communication
Nicotera
Anne Nicotera, PhD
Associate Professor of Communication
Anne's research focuses on interpersonal, organizational, health communication, and communication & conflict
Pober
Peter Pober, PhD
Professor of Communication and Director of Forensics
Peter's research focuses on public communication, communication & culture, and rhetoric & social movements
Rowan
Kathy Rowan, PhD
Professor of Communication
Kathy's research focuses on scientific, risk & crisis, written communication, and public relations
Villagran
Melinda Villagran, PhD
Associate Professor of Communication
Melinda's research focuses on interpersonal, org, & health communication, communication & culture, and methods
Wright
Catherine Wright, PhD
Assistant Professor of Communication
Catherine's research focuses on new media, communication education, and communication & society
Zhao
Xiaoquan Zhao, PhD
Assistant Professor of Communication
Xiaoquan's research focuses on health communication, communication campaigns, media & social influence, and methods
==
Charles Koch gave $90 million to influence higher ed in the South
Last month, the provost of Western Carolina University in North Carolina asked the public school's chancellor to approve an academic center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a private nonprofit run by the billionaire chairman, CEO, and co-owner of the Koch Industries oil and chemical corporation. The foundation funds academic programs, professorships, scholarships, conferences, lecture series and economics centers, all for the purpose of promoting the free-market agenda embraced by Koch and his brother David.
The chancellor has come out in support, and on Dec. 4 the school's trustees will vote on the fate of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, which would launch with $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over five years and $1.4 million from the university.
The proposed agreement has come under fire from the school's faculty senate, which voted 21-3 to oppose the center's creation. The group raised concerns about academic freedom, cost, reputation, and the lack of peer review.
"The Charles Koch Foundation has previously set forth explicit expectations in line with their political views in exchange for monetary gifts to universities," the faculty senate said in a statement, "thereby constraining academic freedom by influencing and interfering with the development of new knowledge."
The proposed center at WCU is part of a long campaign by Koch to influence higher education. The Charles Koch Foundation along with three other groups led by Koch gave nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, finds an Institute for Southern Studies investigation, building on research by Greenpeace. The other groups are the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. (For more about these groups, see "The Koch-led charities funding higher education" at the end of this story.)
Eighty-five percent of the donations — or $91 million — went to 147 Southern colleges and universities.
The bulk of the money given by the four nonprofits — $77.7 million — went to George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Virginia. Much of that went to the school's Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies, nonprofits housed at the university that focus on teaching and promoting free-market economics. But even when the GMU donations are excluded from the total giving, Southern schools received 45 percent of the remaining contributions.
Besides GMU, the other schools that received the most money from the Koch foundations are all in the South: Florida State University at $2.3 million, West Virginia University at $1.3 million, Clemson University of South Carolina at $1.3 million, and Troy University of Alabama at $1.1 million.
...
http://www.southernstudies.org/2015/12/charles-koch-gave-90-million-to-influence-higher-e.html
==
anomaly:
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/welcome
Director
Edward Maibach
Edward Maibach
Director
Professor
Department of Communication
George Mason University
Bio:
Ed joined the George Mason University faculty in 2007 to create the Center for Climate Change Communication. Trained in public health and communication, he has extensive experience as an academic researcher and as a communication and social marketing practitioner in government, business, and the non-profit sector. His research focuses on the broad question of how public engagement in climate change can be expanded and enhanced.
Ed is currently a Principal Investigator on several climate change education grants funded by the National Science Foundation, NASA, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, and Town Creek Foundation. He also currently serves on the National Climate Assessment Development and Advisory Committee and advises a wide range of organizations on how to improve their climate change communication, education and outreach.
Previously, Ed served as associate director of the National Cancer Institute, worldwide director of social marketing for Porter Novelli, co-chairman of the board for Kidsave International, and as a faculty member at Emory and George Washington universities. He has published over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. His edited book Designing Health Messages earned a distinguished book award from the National Communication Association.
In 2010, Ed was awarded George Mason University’s highest honor: distinguished University Professor.
Education:
BA (’80), Social Psychology, University of California, San Diego
MPH (’83), Health Promotion, San Diego State University
PhD (’90), Communication Research, Stanford University
Selected Publications:
Leiserowitz, A., Maibach, E., Roser-Renouf, C., Smith, N., & Dawson, E. (2012). Climategate, public opinion, and the loss of trust. American Behavioral Scientist. , DOI: 10.1177/0002764212458272. Retrievethe article here.
Mason Faculty Researchers
Katherine Rowan
Robert Lichter
Susan Crate
Timothy Gibson
Xiaoquan Zhao
Andrew Light
Chris Clarke
Chris Kennedy
Connie Roser-Renouf
Emily Vraga
Enrico Wensing
Karen Akerlof
Mona Sarfaty
Teresa Myers
Affiliate Researchers
Do Kyun Kim
Erik C. Nisbet
Jagadish Thaker
Lauren Feldman
Matthew Nisbet
Melinda Weathers
Sol Hart
Stephen J. Farnsworth
Anthony Leiserowitz
Ashley Anderson
Ding Ding
Hilary Schaffer Boudet
Post-Doctoral Researchers
Bob Drost
Brittany Bloodhart
Mason Doctoral Students
Justin Rolfe-Redding
Jenell Walsh-Thomas
John Kotcher
Neil Stenhouse
Raphael Mazzone
Advisory Board
Doug McKenzie-Mohr
Robert Cialdini
Stuart Oskamp
Ronald Abramson
William Novelli
http://www.climatechangecommunication.org/our-team/karen-akerlof
4C's research and other activities are funded through grants from government agencies and foundations, and through donations by individuals, foundations and corporations.
Our sincere thanks to the following sponsors for providing major funding:
NASA
National Science Foundation
National Park Service
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment
Town Creek Foundation
Energy Foundation
Rockefeller Family Fund
Linden Trust for Conservation
George Mason University
Linden Trust for Conservation
National Association of County & City Health Officials
Brodeur Partners
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
The Brownstein Family Foundation
The HELTS Foundation
George Mason University
Prism Public Affairs
The Bergstrom Family (South Carolina)
The Censer Family (Virginia)
Ellen Freudenheim and Daniel P. Wiener (New York)
The Kreps Family (Maryland)
The Maibach Family (Maryland)
Roselyne C. Swig (California)
The Weiss Family (Louisiana & Virginia)
The Hussey Family (Louisiana)
NexGen Energy Partners
The Badt Family (Louisiana)
If you have any questions, you can contact George Mason's Development Office at 703.993.8850.
GMU Yale
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000226/full#eft231-bib-0015
Climate scientists need to set the record straight: There is a scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening
Edward Maibach1,*, Teresa Myers1 and Anthony Leiserowitz2
Article first published online: 7 MAY 2014
DOI: 10.1002/2013EF000226
Human-caused climate change is happening and is accelerating; dangerous impacts are becoming evident around the world, and are projected to get worse in the decades to come, possibly much worse (IPCC, 2013). Nearly all climate scientists are convinced of these basic facts, but more than half of Americans do not currently understand that this scientific consensus has been reached (Leiserowitz et al.,2013).
Americans are not alone in this regard, although relatively less is known about the views of people in other nations. While 57% of Britons aged 15 and older agreed with the statement “most scientists agree that humans are causing climate change” (Poortinga et al., 2011), a separate 16-nation World Public Opinion Poll (Public attitudes toward climate change: Findings from a multi-country poll, 2009, http://worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/btenvironmentra/649.php?lb=brglm&pnt=649&nid=&id=) found that only a minority of citizens in seven nations said “most scientists think the problem is urgent and enough is known to take action”; these were the United States (38%), Russia (23%), Indonesia (33%), Japan (43%), Brazil (44%), India (48%), and Mexico (48%). Across all 16 nations, 51% selected this response option, while 16% said “most (scientists) think the problem is not urgent, and not enough is known yet to take action,” and 24% said “views are pretty evenly divided,” another 10% indicated “don't know.” This public misperception about the state of scientific consensus regarding the reality and causes of climate change matters, a lot.
Different methods have been used to estimate the degree of scientific consensus about human-caused climate change—including surveys of experts (e.g., Doran and Zimmerman, 2009; Cook et al., 2013) and reviews of the peer-reviewed literature (e.g., Oreskes, 2004;Anderegg et al., 2010; Cook et al., 2013). Both methods converge on the following conclusion: 97% or more of climate scientists are convinced that human-caused climate change is happening.
Yet widespread misunderstanding of this scientific consensus persists among the American public. In 2013, only 42% of American adults said that “most scientists think global warming is happening,” 33% said “there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening,” 20% said they “don't know enough to say,” and 6% said “most scientists think global warming is not happening” (Leiserowitz et al., 2014). When asked to estimate the proportion of climate scientists who are convinced that human-caused climate change is happening (in quintiles), only 22% of American adults correctly selected 81%–100% (Leiserowitz et al., 2014).
This misperception among Americans is not only pervasive but also highly consequential (Ding et al., 2011; McCright et al., 2013). Those who do not understand the scientific consensus about human-caused climate change are, in turn, less likely to believe that climate change is happening, human-caused, will have serious consequences, and is solvable (i.e., can be mitigated through concerted action). In addition, not understanding this scientific consensus undermines Americans' support for a broad societal response to the threat. As a result, knowledge of the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change can be considered a “gateway” cognition; as members of the general public come to understand the consensus, they more likely come to the conclusion that human-caused climate change is happening and harmful.
The pervasiveness of this misperception is not an accident. Rather, it is the result of a disinformation campaign by individuals and organizations in the United States—and increasingly in other nations around the world (Norgaard, 2006; Dunlap and McCright, 2011)—who oppose government action to reduce carbon emissions (e.g., Oreskes and Conway, 2010). The claim that climate scientists are still arguing over the reality of human-caused climate change was designed to resonate with the sensibilities of political conservatives who are inherently suspicious of government intervention in markets and societies. This targeted disinformation campaign has been highly effective in the United States: far more political conservatives (49%) than liberals (18%) currently believe that there is “a lot of disagreement among the experts about global warming” (Leiserowitz et al., 2013). While originally launched in the United States, this disinformation campaign is now being pursued in Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand as well (Dunlap and McCright, 2011).
This disinformation campaign has impeded the implementation of strategies to reduce the risks of climate change (McCright and Dunlap,2003; Pooley, 2010). Moreover, as an intentional effort to obscure and dispute the conclusions of climate science, the campaign should be seen as an attack on climate science itself.
Fortunately, an effective, nonpolitical response is available to scientists and their professional societies. A recently published Australian study (Lewandowsky et al., 2013)—and a series of studies conducted at research centers in the United States (Maibach et al., 2013;Kotcher et al., 2014)—demonstrates that clear messages that simply state the extent of the scientific consensus can help correct this widespread misperception. In controlled experiments, a single exposure to a message describing the extent of scientific consensus on human-caused climate change (i.e., 97%) significantly increased participants' subsequent estimates of the consensus—by as much as 10 to 20 percentage points. Importantly, these simple messages were most effective with the very people who are currently the least likely to understand the scientific consensus: political conservatives.
The potential benefits of setting the record straight are considerable. By working to overcome this barrier to public understanding of climate change, scientists can help a broader cross section of American society—and perhaps people in other nations as well—to better understand the realities and risks of climate change, as well as the range of potential solutions. Furthermore, an effort to communicate the scientific consensus can also help bridge the (manufactured) divide between conservatives and liberals about the reality of human-caused climate change and help Americans begin the real debate about climate change—how the nation should best respond. Ideally, a debate about climate solutions should harness the best ideas of people across the political spectrum. Now is the time for citizens, together with government and industry leaders, to engage in a serious conversation about how to manage the risks of climate change.
In the end, scientists cannot insist that the public accept the realities of climate change, but they can and should inform the public that based on the evidence, the vast majority of climate experts are convinced that human-caused climate change is happening. Because public understanding of climate change has been intentionally distorted by vested interests, the scientific community has an obligation to set the record straight.
Methods of effective scientific communication are well known in some parts of the scientific community (National Research Council, 1989;Maibach and Parrott, 1995; Hornik, 2002; Wakefield et al., 2010; Lundgren and McMakin, 2013). The public health and medical communities, for example, have mounted highly effective campaigns to reduce sudden infant death syndrome (Markestad et al., 1995), human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (McCombie et al., 2002; Wellings, 2002), stroke (Roccella, 2002), tobacco use among adults and teens (Pierce et al., 2002a, 2002b; Worden and Flynn, 2002), and to promote seat belt use (Williams et al.,2002). While each of these successful campaigns had unique circumstances, they all conformed to a relatively simple formula: simple clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted voices.
We urge scientific organizations to patiently, yet assertively inform the public that, based on the evidence, more than 97% of climate experts are convinced that human-caused climate change is happening. Some scientific organizations may argue that they have already done this through official statements. We applaud them for their efforts to date, yet survey data clearly demonstrate that the message has not yet reached or engaged most Americans. Occasional statements and press releases about the reality of human-caused climate change are unfortunately not enough to cut through the fog—it will take a concerted, ongoing effort to inform Americans about the scientific consensus regarding the realities of climate change.
Fischhoff (2007) suggests that climate change communication campaigns are best approached as a team effort between climate scientists (who best understand the nature of the risks and potential responses), social and decision scientists (who best understand how to structure information in a manner that is most helpful to members of the intended target audience), and communication professionals (who best understand how to get the information conveyed with sufficient reach and frequency that it will be noticed and considered by members of the target audience). This is a model that any scientific organization can implement by engaging their members, relevant social science colleagues, and in-house or consulting communication professionals.
Individual climate scientists can and should also play a role in setting the record straight. In media interviews, public presentations, and even neighborhood and family gatherings, climate scientists should remember that many people do not currently understand that there is an overwhelming scientific consensus about human-caused climate change. Tell them, and give them the numbers. Contextualize the numbers with your own experience, e.g., “I personally know hundreds of climate scientists who are convinced that human-caused climate change is happening, and not a single one who isn't.”
This is not a call for scientists to become policy advocates, but rather a request that scientists take the initiative to inform the public about the empirically determined conclusions of their field—consistent with several recent prominent calls by climate scientists asking their peers to get more involved in public dialogue (Ellis and Trachtenberg, 2013; Schmidt, 2013; Mann, 2014). There is a critical need to educate the public about one of the most fundamental and important facts to have emerged from climate science, that virtually the entire climate science community is now convinced, based upon the evidence, that human-caused climate change is happening. This may seem self-evident to many scientists; however, it is not yet understood by a majority of the American public.
Such an effort to set the record straight—through simple clear messages, repeated often, by a variety of trusted voices in the climate science community—will improve public understanding of, and engagement in, the issue of climate change. A large majority of Americans—across political lines—are willing to listen.
==
3/15
by now, it's common knowledge that the Koch Brothers more or less own the Republican Party – having spent twice as much in election 2012 as the top ten unions combined.
But a lesser-known aspect of Koch influence is their spending on ideological warfare. The Kochs not only spend big in our elections, but they also finance a network of think tanks, advocacy campaigns, and even educational curricula in order to spread their message.
One example is George Mason University (GMU). Last year, a group of students protested the fact that the Charles Koch Foundation, which is the university's single largest donor, has given at least $23 million to the school since 2005.
This week, a GMU professor gave a speech on a topic that could've come right out of the Kochs' ideology – why we need “less democracy.”
Dr. Garett Jones, professor of Economics and BB&T Professor for the Study of Capitalism at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, gave a lecture on the aforementioned topic, taking aim at some of the core values this country is founded upon. Here's a summary from Fourth Estate, a GMU student paper:
Jones says that less democracy and more epistocracy could lead to better governance. Democracy leaves power to the majority while epistocracy allocates power to the knowledgeable. Jones did not imply that democracy should be eliminated, but lessened by 10% for the sake of long term economic growth.
According to Jones, less democracy would lead to better governance because politicians would be inclined to work on long term growth rather than spending to impress constituents during election season. Politicians try to please the public at the expense of neglecting long- term policies because they are elected through a democratic process.
For example, Jones said senators act like voters have short term memories. They make decisions to get reelected rather than spending their whole term focused on long-term growth.
Jones's remarks are fairly consistent with Koch political activity, which includesadvocating for voter ID laws that are designed to drive down voter participation. On his GMU site, the university notes that Jones is not only an academic researcher, but that he has also served as Economic Policy Adviser to Senator Orrin Hatch and as a staff economist to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress “ – bodies he apparently thinks are too democratic.
Zaid Jilani is an AlterNet contributing writer
wiki
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University_School_of_Law
George Mason University School of Law (Mason Law or GMUSL) is the law school of George Mason University, a state university in Virginia,United States. The law school is located in Arlington, thirteen miles east of the university's main campus in Fairfax.
George Mason University School of Law was authorized by the Virginia General Assembly in March 1979 and was founded on July 1, 1979. The American Bar Association provisionally approved the school in the fall of 1980 and granted full approval in 1986....
e Law School Transparency estimated debt-financed cost of attendance for three years is $188,965 for residents, and $248,292 for non-residents.[9] To combat the high cost of law school, George Mason's Board of Visitors voted in 2013 to freeze tuition through the 2016-2017 academic year.[10]...
GMUSL is somewhat distinctive in offering a wide variety of intensive law tracks, each of which requires that approximately one-third of the credits for graduation be completed in the track, and law concentrations, which are elective specializations and have a less restrictive credit requirement as compared to the track program.[11] The law tracks include Corporate and Securities Law, Intellectual Property Law, Litigation Law and Regulatory Law. The International Business Lawtrack was offered until the fall of 2005.
The law concentrations include Antitrust Law, Communications Law, Corporate and Securities Law, Criminal Law, Homeland & National Security Law, Intellectual Property Law, International Business Law, Legal and Economic Theory, Litigation Law, Personal Law, Regulatory Law, Tax Law, and Technology Law.[12]
MUSL is somewhat distinctive in offering a wide variety of intensive law tracks, each of which requires that approximately one-third of the credits for graduation be completed in the track, and law concentrations, which are elective specializations and have a less restrictive credit requirement as compared to the track program.[11] The law tracks include Corporate and Securities Law, Intellectual Property Law, Litigation Law and Regulatory Law. The International Business Law track was offered until the fall of 2005.
The law concentrations include Antitrust Law, Communications Law, Corporate and Securities Law, Criminal Law, Homeland & National Security Law, Intellectual Property Law, International Business Law, Legal and Economic Theory, Litigation Law, Personal Law, Regulatory Law, Tax Law, and Technology Law.[12]
reg law clinic 404?
informants?
http://www.law.gmu.edu/students/orgs/els
Environmental Law Society
The Environmental Law Society is dedicated to raising environmental awareness at the law school and providing a diverse range of opportunities for students interested in environmental issues. Each year, the Society brings speakers to George Mason to discuss developing areas of environmental law. The organization sponsors an annual career panel discussion and assists students in locating summer jobs and internships. The Environmental Law Society enters a team in a national environmental moot court contest and participates in a national environmental essay contest. It takes an active role in improving the quality of the local environment through activities such as cleaning up streams and lakes in the area and participating in the Adopt-a-Highway program.
Co-Presidents: Brent Maire & Jake Mace
bjlamaire@gmail.com jmace@gmu.edu aciacci@gmu.edu
Treasurer: Adrian Ciacci
irs info
https://www.citizenaudit.org/451602963/
2013 200K$
Litigation, Sewing clients unable to otherwise protect their interests, or broad social interests, providing
law students litigation experience. See Schedule 0 for case specic information
(Grants $115,000) If this amount includes foreign grants, check here
$97,162
Legal Research Publications: Major academic publication was a legal "nutshell" treatise entitled
j'_l_rgtecting Federalism and state Sovereignty. In addition, preparation of a full 3 credit course on federalism
litigation consisting of 14 99_gr_i_inute lectures
(Grants $35,000) If this amount includes foreigrrants, check here F El
335.893
Student trainingand course lecturir_ig,_f_9urteen 90 min. lectures as adjunct professor at George Mason U.
School of Law: _John Locke lecture on Wind energy and the
SPN Energy session Convener 6 hour (full day) session as moderator and presentor (40 participants)
(Grants $0.00)...
David W. Schnare__Law Clinic Director and Board Director 30 $55,000 $0 $0
Steven Gold Board Director 0.2 $0 $0 $0
Michael Thompson Board Director 0.2 $0 $0 $0
Christopher Homer Litigation attorney 20 $60,449 $0 $0
Geor e Mason Environmental Law Clinic aka Free Market Environrrientl Law Clinic 45-1602963
...
Supplement to Question 16:
S 50 Continuing Legal Education
3 611 count ling costs
$1,820 Court reporter costs
$1,164 Law clinic corporate formation ling costs
Legal Research (Lexis)
S 28 Professional meetings
$2,981 Travel (court appearances and speaking engagements)
S 51 Virginia corporatio_r3_a_rinual ling fees
Supplement to question 20
$35,000 Accounts receivable from American Tradition Institute (EIN 26-4239065)
_S_upplment to Question 24
$35,000 Accounts receivable from _American Tradition Institute (EIN 26-4239065)
Supplement to Question 28 - Ongoing litigation
The law clinic serves as the attorneys for the American Tradition Institute. The billable hours in these matters is shared by the FME
clinic and ATI, the division made on a case by case basis.
- ATI v. UVA. This is a that will establish what the Virginia la__Ma_ll_q\_n_Is universitiest_q keep secret from the public. It also
addresses whether a FOI Act unconstitutionally abridges an alleged free speech right to academic freedom. The court acknowledged
the validity of $201,000 costs and fees to FME Law, but has not yet awarded them: The matter is now before the VA Supreme Court.
- Occoquan Watershed Coalition v. EPA. This case raised the question as to whether EPA violated the 10th amendment rights of Virginia and Fairfax county when establishing a water quality criterion that \_ng9_t_ili_l_ require the total Implementation. The matter was settled due to the outcome of other litigation. No costs or fees were awarded.
- ATI v. NASA. A FOIA case seeking ethics records for a NASA employee who had over $2 million in outside income. Because NASA refused to release the records, the Ofce of Government Ethics had to Intervene and order tl1egn__ _t9 release the records, placing the the entire federal govemrne_nt on notice that they must properly le these e_th_i_cs reports and FME Law received $10,887.50 in costs and fees.
For Paperwork Reduction Act Notice, see the Instructions for Form 990 or 990-EZ. Cat No 51056K Schedule 0 (Form 990 or 990-EZ) (2012)
CITIZENAUDIT.ORG PAGE #0011
Schedule 0 (Form 990 or 990EZ) (2012) Page 2
Name of the organization Employer identication number
George Mason Environmental Law Clinic aka Free Market Environment! Law clinic 454602963
- ATI v. Epel. This i_s_a Commerce clause case ch_a_I_|e_r_tgi_ng the constitutionality of the
have sut_:_h_standards and all are unconstitutional. This case is in the discovery process. Cost and fees are being sought.
- ATI v. EPA. This case challenged whether EPA could expo_s__a__I_olunteer subjects to carcinogens and qegglx poisons without telling
them the risks of these exposures The court held EPA cou|d- No costs
Supplement to Question 31 - Other programs: FME Law supplies legal advice and counsel to state attorneys general and state policy
institutes at no cost. FME Law has not tracked the number of such inquiries and is
Schedule 0 (Form 990 or 990-EZ) (2012)
==