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Aspen Institute

oddly blank 719 issackson?

API

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useful idiot?

https://www.aspeninstitute.org/blog-posts/driving-climate-action-with-direct-action/

greenwash?

cLIMATE CHANGE

Driving Climate Action with Direct Action

MARCH 18, 2019  • GREG GERSHUNY

On Friday, thousands of students around the world took to the streets, skipping school to demand climate action at more than 2000 events in 123 countries.  Led by 16 year old Swedish student Greta Thunberg and in the US, 13 year old student Alexandria Villasenor, students demonstrated to demand leaders take action on climate change.  Some question the utility of students skipping school and protesting. Will it have any impact? Is this worth the time lost in school?  To gain some perspective, I think we need to turn to past conflicts. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” a popular reading for Aspen Institute leadership seminars, may offer some insight.

In the middle of the Civil Rights Movement, Dr. King was arrested and thrown in the Birmingham city jail.  While imprisoned, he heard about a group of clergymen who criticized his strategy of direct action as “unwise and untimely.” They argued that negotiation is better than direct action.  However, the relevant point that Dr. King makes in response is that direct action, in fact, leads to negotiation. In his reply to the Alabama clergymen, Dr. King wrote:

You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored… So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

In this case, the combination of the announcement and attention (both positive and negative) around the Green New Deal, as well as the non-violent protests of the student strikers, has created a movement on climate action. Ignited, partially, by the recent release of the IPCC special report on global warming of 1.5˚ C, which warns of the need for immediate strengthened actions to avoid imminent perilous effects, many policymakers and leaders are heeding this call.

Since the rise of the climate strike and the Green New Deal, there have been a flurry of announcements on climate action.  Former Secretary of Energy Ernest Moniz and former Assistant Secretary of Energy Andy Karsner released the Green Real Deal, which is focused on the deployment of clean energy technology.Instead of an industrial policy like the Green New Deal, it focuses on market solutionsto deploy new technology like batteries, wind and solar, as well as advanced nuclear and carbon capture technologies. Rep. Buddy Carter(R-GA) 4% LCV, who is a Republican member of the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis said that, “We know that we’ve got to address climate change… Everything is on the table and everything has got to be addressed.” Meanwhile, Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) [LETS LOBBYIST HOLMSTED AND MARTELLA WRITE BILLS] and Joe Manchin (D–WV) stated in a joint op-ed that, “Resource development and environmental stewardship must move in tandem, which is why we are committed to putting forward bipartisan solutions to help address climate change.” Similarly, Republican former governor of Ohio John Kasich said, “We’ve finally reached a tipping point… most of our allies around the world are convinced that climate change is happening and that strong, concerted actions are needed to minimize its effects.”

But perhaps the most important statement in recent days is from António Guterres, the United Nation’s Secretary-General, who has also served as prime minister of Portugal. Guterres specifically called out the importance of the climate strike and asked world leaders to come to the UN Climate Summit in New York in September with plans to reduce to net-zero by 2050.  Not all leaders will do this – it’s nearly certain President Trump will not – but action begets action.  Having world leaders ratchet up their Paris climate commitments will spur more innovation and spending on clean energy technologies. It will spur new financial mechanisms, increased investments from individuals and from governments, and it will speed the deployment of clean technology. Whether we as a planet actually achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 will remain unknown, but this can set a course that can allow us to accomplish this seemingly impossible feat.

Martin Luther King Jr., sitting in a jail cell in 1963, was right. Direct action can help to bring reluctant parties to the negotiation table. Today’s climate leaders like Greta Thunberg, Alexandria Villasenor, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others are walking in Dr. King’s shoes.  Politicians, corporate leaders, and experts are pushing the conversation from a backburner issue to a crisis point that has opened the door to negotiation. Once at the table we will quickly realize that we have all the tools needed to achieve deep decarbonization.

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nY post owned by Murdoch

pro disinfo

https://nypost.com/2021/12/14/hypocrisy-of-media-censors-claim-to-be-against-misinformation/

labelled opinion

no lnx many

inside the hypocrisy of media manipulators, censors who claim to fight misinformation

By Christine Rosen

December 14, 2021   Updated

George Soros, billionaire and founder of Soros Fund Management LLC,

Billionaire George Soros will play a critical role in funneling millions into the Aspen Institute's information suppression project.

MORE ON:

JOURNALISM

Journalists in Ukraine pay the ultimate price for revealing the atrocities of war

Sky News correspondent shot by Russians while covering Ukraine invasion

Russian law poses heavy threat to journalists who report ‘fake’ news: officials]

Letters to the Editor — Feb. 21, 2022

There is a new scourge befouling the media landscape, one that our self-appointed mandarins have declared themselves eager to combat: misinformation.

The Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorderrecently released a report that blamed misinformation for a range of social problems: “Information disorder is a crisis that exacerbates all other crises … Information disorder makes any health crisis more deadly. It slows down our response time on climate change. It undermines democracy. It creates a culture in which racist, ethnic, and gender attacks are seen as solutions, not problems. Today, mis- and disinformation have become a force multiplier for exacerbating our worst problems as a society. Hundreds of millions of people pay the price, every single day, for a world disordered by lies.”

With $65 million in backing from investors such as George Soros and Reid Hoffman, the newly organized Project for Good Information also vows to fight fake news wherever it roams.As Recode reported, the group’s marketing materials claim, “Traditional media is failing. Disinformation is flourishing. It’s time for a new kind of media.” The project is run by Democratic operative Tara Hoffman, whose company ACRONYM created the app that spectacularly bungled the Iowa Democratic caucus vote in 2020.

And as Ben Smith reported in the New York Times, the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University has been hosting a series of meetings with major media executives to “help newsroom leaders fight misinformation and media manipulation.” Even Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for his platform’s role in spreading misinformation.

Big Disinfo

The origin of this new wave of portentous declarations and hand-wringing can be found in the Trump years. In an insightful piece in Harper’s, Joseph Bernstein labels this effort Big Disinfo.

Then President Donald Trump

The liberal elites are storming with every resource at their disposal to combat former President Donald Trump’s war on “fake news.”

It’s “a new field of knowledge production that emerged during the Trump years at the juncture of media, academia, and policy research,” he writes. “A kind of EPA for content, it seeks to expose the spread of various sorts of ‘toxicity’ on social-media platforms, the downstream effects of this spread, and the platforms’ clumsy, dishonest, and half-hearted attempts to halt it.”

As Bernstein argues, “As an environmental cleanup project, it presumes a harm model of content consumption. Just as, say, smoking causes cancer, consuming bad information must cause changes in belief or behavior that are bad, by some standard.”

Big Disinfo has gained in popularity in mainstream media outlets in part because it claims to solve the problem of bad information while placing blame for it on anyone other than mainstream media. In fact, those diagnosing our illness and prescribing the cure are themselves purveyors of the “infodemic” they claim is upon us.

The Aspen Institute’s commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election. 

Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in ­Alabama.”

The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the national anthem. Ginsburg’s criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared.

Rashad Robinson, President, Color of Change

Activist leader Rashad Robinson tried to perpetuate Jussie Smollett’s hate crime hoax.

]

Commissioner Rashad Robinson, head of the activist group Color of Change, also helped spread misinformation by promoting the hate-crime hoax of actor Jussie Smollett even after it was clear Smollett, who last week was convicted on criminal charges related to the staging of the attack, was lying. And then there is commission member Prince Harry, an expat British ex-royal with few qualifications but a lifetime of evidence of his own questionable judgment (such as dressing up as a Nazi and, more recently, whining to Oprah about the family that funds his lavish lifestyle).

Earlier this year, Harry declared the First Amendment “bonkers.”

Lies trump honesty

The Aspen Commission’s report says there is no such thing as an “arbiter of truth,” and yet our media gatekeepers have claimed that mantle for themselves — with decidedly mixed results — for some time.

Katie Couric

Longtime anchor Katie Couric adds elite media connections as co-chair of the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder.

]

Consider the fact that Russiagate, a yearslong effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president. We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.

And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center used the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions.

The lesson that the center’s leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns.” In other words, the suppression of information deemed by “experts” to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation — it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader.” [huh?]

But what is there to resolve about the fact that the Fourth Estate eagerly embraced the role of chief information censor on behalf of a Democratic candidate for president?

Then Deputy National Security Adviser For Strategic Communications Ben Rhodes

Then-Obama administration top aide Ben Rhodes tricked America into falling for Iran’s sham nuclear deal.

]

Misinformation and disinformation are nothing new. Propaganda, political dirty tricks, and deliberate lies have been with us a while — and have often been a point of pride for their practitioners. It was not that long ago that Ben Rhodes, then a top aide to President Barack Obama, boasted about creating an “echo chamber” in the media to spread falsehoods about the details of Obama’s Iran nuclear deal.

It is true that misinformation has taken on greater significance thanks to the scale and speed of the social-media platforms that spread it. But the new sanctimony about misinformation should be leavened with some healthy skepticism about the movement’s ­major actors.

Prince Harry visits One World Observatory on September 23, 2021 in New York City.

Prince Harry will be a commission member while he’s not asking for his daily allowance from the royal family.

]

As Bernstein noted, in some sense “the disinformation project is simply an unofficial partnership between Big Tech, corporate media, elite universities, and cash-rich foundations.” The crusade against misinformation is an approximate mirror image of Donald Trump’s war against “fake news.”

Confirmation bias

Control of information is control of one of the most valuable commodities in the developed world: people’s attention. And people want their confirmation biases affirmed. But scholars and commissioners studying misinformation also suffer from confirmation bias. Contra the proposals made by panels and commissions on misinformation, the most radical thing we could do right now isn’t to give more power to elites or the federal government to control information. 

Their record of late — Russiagate, Hunter Biden, the Covington kids, the Wuhan lab-leak hypothesis, Border Patrol officers with whips, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial — has not been stellar. It would be far better for the health of the “information ecosystem” that these supposed experts are always invoking if reporters focused on shoring up what were once unassailable tenets of journalism — balance, iron-clad sourcing, and critical independence from and skepticism about the powerful. ­Instead, they are power’s ­handmaidens.

From Commentary

FILED UNDER 2020 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION  BARACK OBAMA  BEN RHODES  CENSORSHIP  DEMOCRATS  DONALD TRUMP  DOSSIER  FACEBOOK  FAKE NEWS  GEORGE SOROS  HUNTER BIDEN  IRAN DEAL  JOE BIDEN  JOURNALISM  KATIE COURIC  LIBERALS  SOCIAL MEDIA  12/14/21

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some lnx

...Aspen Institute’s commission, for example, includes several people who have actively engaged in misinformation efforts. As the Washington Free Beacon reported, one of the commission’s advisers, Yoel Roth, was the Twitter executive who blocked his site’s users from sharing the New York Post story about Hunter Biden’s laptop just before the 2020 election.

Adviser Renee DiResta is something of a misinformation wunderkind as well: She was an adviser to American Engagement Technologies, which, the Beacon reports, is a “tech company that created fake online personas to stifle the Republican vote in the 2017 special Senate election in ­Alabama.”

The commission’s co-chair, Katie Couric, is also familiar with manipulating facts to yield favorable outcomes. She admitted in her recently published memoir that she had removed and edited statements made by Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about athletes protesting the playing of the national anthem. Ginsburg’s criticism of the practice might have angered her fellow liberals, Couric feared...

Consider the fact that Russiagate, a yearslong effort to prove that Donald Trump was being blackmailed and controlled, proved untrue yet was given constant media attention, while the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop and its contents, which proved true, was actively suppressed with the explicit purpose of protecting Joe Biden’s chances of becoming president.We live in a surreal information moment when the lie was given ample airtime and featured prominently in print, while the truth was smothered and labeled disinformation.

And yet our self-appointed misinformation warriors have proven unwilling to engage in self-reflection. Harvard’s Shorenstein Center used the New York Post’s story on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer as the basis for one of its case studies during its recent misinformation sessions.

The lesson that the center’s leaders drew, however, was not the one anyone who values the truth should follow. According to the Times, the Shorenstein Center claimed that the Hunter Biden story offered “an instructive case study on the power of social media and news organizations to mitigate media manipulation campaigns.” In other words, the suppression of information deemed by “experts” to be misinformation was precisely the kind of Good Information objective we should be pursuing. The research director of the center, Joan Donovan, told the Times that the Hunter Biden case study was “designed to cause conversation — it’s not supposed to leave you resolved as a reader....

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critic whitleblower

http://www.anand.ly/

cols

https://www.nytimes.com/by/anand-giridharadas

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guk no lnx

anand Giridharadas was surprised this September when Google invited him to their offices, given his outspoken criticism of tech giants. “I applaud whoever it was who invited me or did not read my book,” Giridharadas said to a few tepid laughs.

Afflicting the comfortable is a talent honed by Giridharadas, and his talk about breaking up monopolistic companies like Google and checking the power of its elite executives – while speaking at Google – is only one recent example.

A former McKinsey consultant-turned New York Times columnist, Giridharadas is now a bestselling author. His recent book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, torches the privileged circles he has moved in much of his adult life, and is rooted in insider knowledge.

The book stems from a speech he was asked to give several years ago to the Aspen Institute, a thinktank that organizes exclusive ideas conferences for the wealthy and powerful,as part of a program designed to raise up a “new breed of leaders” and solve “the world’s most intractable problems”. Instead he delivered an electrifying critique, arguing the “change makers” and “thought leaders” in America’s winners-take-all economy – once again, the very people he was speaking to – are less helping the world through their various philanthropic efforts than propping up the broken system that made them.[city arts: 20 ceos zzz, so include a jrnlsit and couple other , he was "indian spicwe; he says they no longer have outsiders]

What billionaires want: the secret influence of America’s 100 richest

Read more

Giridharadas first gained access to the high-flying group he censures in 2011 when he was selected as part of a group of distinguished fellows for the Aspen Institute. Giridharadas was a strange pick, as not only the youngest member at 29, but also the sole journalist in a group composed largely of rising stars in the business world (the 2018 fellows group is composed almost entirely of CEOs).

Still, he made fast friends with his Aspen compatriots, and even officiated one of their weddings. Soon he found himself flying around in their private jets and mingling with them in ostentatious mansions.

Tony Blair at theAspen Ideas Festival. The Aspen Instituteorganizes exclusive ideas conferences for the wealthy and powerful.

Tony Blair at the Aspen Ideas Festival. The Aspen Institute organizes exclusive ideas conferences for the wealthy and powerful. Photograph: Zuma/Rex

The unstated thesis behind their being chosen by Aspen was clear: that the people best-equipped to protect the interests of the poor are the rich and rich adjacent.

Giridharadas was bothered by it, and particularly by how the program seemed to encourage elite participants from tech giants and hedge funds to start philanthropic side-hustles doubling as vanity projects, rather than find ways to do less harm in their day jobs. (At a Goldman Sachs-sponsored lunch put on at a fellowship reunion, for instance, the corporate giant’s role in the 2008 financial crisis went unmentioned as its do-gooding was praised.)

And so, given an opportunity to speak at an Aspen gathering in 2015, Giridharadas behaved like the journalist he is. Instead of presenting what was expected, he called things as he saw them. “I love this community, and I fear for all of us – myself very much included – that we may not be as virtuous as we think we are, that history may not be as kind to us as we hope it will, that in the final analysis our role in the inequities of our age may not be remembered well,” he said, to an aghast audience that included Madeleine Albright, the former US secretary of state, and prominent writers like himself.

The book that grew out of that moment is unsparing in its criticism and sometimes even strident. Giridharadas mercilessly mocks the wealthy who would change everything but the rules that enabled and protect their status, and ridicules their coinage of notions like “win-win”, the idea that there’s no tension between doing well for yourself and doing good for others.

The bad behavior of the richest: what I learned from wealth managers

Read more

Perhaps no one better emulates the failure of the “win-win” ethos than the Sackler family, Giridharadas writes. Their pharmaceutical empire helped make them one of America’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families, with wings of universities and concert halls named after them – including an entire Smithsonian museum. But they’ve also profited off America’s opioid crisis, which the US Department of Justice and others have accused them of fueling through their aggressive and misleading marketing of the widely used drug OxyContin. Their company agreed to pay $635m in fines in 2007, a pittance compared with how lucrative the drug had been. Now, in precisely the kind of the “win-win” model that Giridharadas reviles, the family’s patriarch, Richard Sackler, is working to fight the opioid epidemic – and make money doing it – by patenting a new drug to help wean people off opioids.

Giridharadas also calls special attention to the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton’s recently defunct annual gathering that extracted charitable commitments from corporations and plutocrats in exchange for some good PR and image laundering. “They fly here because they see investment opportunities; they see branding opportunities,” Giridharadas quotes Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation, saying of the conference: “It’s this idea that you can support a health initiative in Nigeria or the Niger Delta to reduce disease or diarrhea or whatever, and you can also make an investment in a company that is a polluter in the Niger Delta.”

And yet Giridharadas wants to do more than just shame people – he wants to have a conversation, and with people whom he considers his peers. “Many of my friends are drunk on dangerous bullshit. However, they’re still my friends,” he says.

The Sackler’s pharmaceutical empire helped make them one of America’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families. They also profited off of America’s opioid crisis.

The Sackler’s pharmaceutical empire helped make them one of America’s wealthiest and most philanthropic families. They also profited off of America’s opioid crisis. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

It’s been called a traitor-to-its-class kind of book, and though it wasn’t written per se for the elites it excoriates, it does appear to have their attention. The 2015 speech was first written up by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who was in attendance and is no stranger to the ideas circuit Giridharadas excoriates. And when the book first came out, renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz took to the pages of the Times to urge philanthropic plutocrats to “read a copy of this book while in the Hamptons this summer”.

It has also found deeper resonance in a country still searching for explanations of the last presidential election. “It’s hard for me to think of anything better designed to burn down this age of business fundamentalism, this age of market worship than the flamboyant failure of the faux billionaire, faux savior Donald Trump,” Giridharadas says.

Why are so few US politicians from the working class?

Read more

Trump’s campaign was boosted by the same logic by which America’s wealthy “saviors” deem themselves fit to lead, he argues: that their familiarity with and even greedy exploitation of America’s financial and political systems somehow makes them uniquely qualified to fix them.

Giridharadas admits he’s long been repelled by the notion that, for instance, the best course of action for young would-be world savers is to get an MBA. And his book rails against what he sees as a central myth that’s taken hold in American culture: that training at Goldman Sachs or a stint at McKinsey is somehow essential, or even particularly relevant, to making good policy or a meaningful understanding of the world.

He chafes at the quick, self-aggrandizing solutions hawked by the people who speak at ideas conferences. And so, perhaps, it follows that when pressed for solutions, he bristles. “This is a book about tearing down dogma,” he says. “It’s trying to convince you that other people’s unfounded dogma have hijacked the discourse,” he adds. “I don’t have a substitute dogma to replace this dogma with.”

In a way his resistance makes sense. He doesn’t want to be the anti-thought leader leading the charge against thought leading, after all. And he’s all for reform, but only once the problem has been fully considered, which, by the way, he thinks it almost never is.

“It’s hard for me to think of anything better designed to burn down this age of business fundamentalism, this age of market worship than the flamboyant failure of the faux billionaire, faux savior Donald Trump,” Giridharadas says.

‘It’s hard for me to think of anything better designed to burn down this age of business fundamentalism, this age of market worship than the flamboyant failure of the faux billionaire, faux savior Donald Trump,’ Giridharadas says. Photograph: Evan Vucci/AP

“It’s the winners who want these solutions,” he says, to mask their desire for premature absolution. “I think the desire for solutions and takeaways itself has an agenda,” he adds. “I think takeaway culture is a big part of why we’re here: because we’re not willing to think any more and understand the complexity of these problems, and sit with them.”

Is America an oligarchy dominated by billionaires?

Read more

He sounds some hopeful notes, provocatively quoting the billionaire Vinod Khosla as saying “capitalism exists by permission of democracy”. It’s a way, perhaps, to suggest that real change requires politics and collective action, something Giridharadas has argued previously in the pages of the Times. “We ended slavery by acting together,” he tells me now. “We defeated fascism together. We electrified rural America together. We got kids out of factories and antifreeze out of medicine acting together.”

In addition he thinks Aspen would do well to spend its time listening to more of society’s losers, and fewer winners. “The powerful are very good at disseminating their own bullshit,” he says. “They don’t need the intellectual reputation laundering of ideas festivals to make their heavily marketed bullshit smell even sweeter.”

“I sincerely believe,” he says, “that had more of the institutions of this country – and particularly those involved in thinking and ideas, not just conferences but all kinds of things – been more skeptical of elite fantasies and more mindful of what was actually going on in other people’s lives in this country, I think it’s very possible we wouldn’t have orange Mussolini in the White House.”

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The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (AIHS) describes itself as an "international non-profit organization dedicated to informed dialogue and inquiry on issues of global concern."

Founded in 1950 by Walter Paepeke, chair of the Container Corporation, AIHS seeks to bring together leading citizens from private and public sectors of the U. S. and abroad to consider interrelated issues of the human mind and spirit in contemporary society. The group believes that immersion in the Humanist tradition can make participants in its program better decision makers. It Institute holds seminars primarily for business executives "for reflection, rediscovery of personal values, and examination of contemporary issues in the company of some of the best minds in the world" and gives cross-cultural training "to go beyond immediate business issues to the underlying questions faced in all cultures."

The Aspen Institute owns the 1100-acre Wye River Conference Center in Maryland, a park-like retreat that has served as host to a number of historically significant events, including Middle East peace negotiations. It also served as a temporary home to 5-year-old Elián Gonzalez in 2000 during the political controversy in the United States during the custody battle between his Cuban father and his Miami relatives. This in turn made AIHS a target for right-wing conspiracy theorists, who labeled it a "training center for a global army of psycho-social change agents."[1]

Aspen Strategy Group

AIHS also sponsors the Aspen Strategy Group, a policy program concentrating on strategic relations and arms control issues. The Aspen Strategy Group is currently co-chaired by Joseph Samuel Nye, Jr. and Brent Scowcroft.

Aspen Strategy Group Members

Source

Henry Crown Fellowship Program

The Henry Crown Fellowship Program was established in 1997. It "seeks to develop our next generation of community-spirited leaders, providing them with the tools necessary to meet the challenges of corporate and civic leadership in the 21st century ... A unique mix of intellectual and personal development seminars designed to broaden the perspectives of the participants and hone their skills in values-based leadership. It honors the memory of Chicago industrialist Henry Crown (1896-1990), whose legendary career was marked by a lifelong commitment to honor, integrity, industry and philanthropy."

The two-year program commences each year with a class of 20 Crown Fellows "chosen from among young executives and professionals nominated for their potential to provide leadership at the highest levels of corporate and civic responsibility. The selected candidates are men and women between the ages of 25 and 45 who have already achieved considerable success in the private or public sector."

Board of Overseers

Aspen Health Stewardship Project

In Fall 2007, Aspen announced its "Health Stewardship Project," to "reframe and broaden the national dialogue on health care reform leading up to the 2008 presidential election and beyond." ^[1]

In January 2008, Aspen announced that former New Jersey governor turned PR executive Christine Todd Whitman; U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention director Julie Gerberding, and GE Healthcare president and CEO Joseph Hogan would co-chair the health project. "They join Mark Ganz, president and CEO of Regence Blue Cross Blue Shield, in leading the new project to help transform health care," stated an Aspen press release. ^[1]

Health Stewardship Project advisory board

From an Aspen Institute press release: ^[1]

Board of Trustees

Nine New Members, April 2003 (See announcement)

Honorary Trustees: See web site for list.

Trustees Emeritus: See web site for list.

Contact information

The Aspen Institute

One Dupont Circle, NW

Suite 700

Washington, DC 20036-1133

Phone: 202.736.5800

Fax: 202.467.0790

URL: http://www.aspeninstitute.org

SourceWatch resources

External links

References

  1. ↑ ^Jump ^up ^to:1.0^ 1.1 ^1.2 Press release, "Christine Todd Whitman, Julie Gerberding and Joseph Hogan Join Mark Ganz to Lead Aspen Institute Health Stewardship Project," Aspen Institute via PR Newswire, January 14, 2008.

Articles

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Aspen Institute / Aspen Strategy Group - SourceWatch

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Aspen_Institute_/_Aspen_Strategy_Group

1.

}:

The Aspen Institute for Humanistic Studies (AIHS) describes itself as an "international non-profit organization dedicated to informed dialogue and inquiry on ...

==

Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI)** is a think tank founded byRobert Strausz-Hupé in 1955. The FPRI's describes itself as "devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests". ^[1] It has at its nexus a strong foundation based at The University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

Contents

  [hide] 

Introduction

The FPRI's membership includes "a former aide to three U.S. secretaries of state, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, a former president of Swarthmore College and a Bancroft Prize-winning historian, and two former staff members of the National Security Council. We count among our trustees a former Secretary of State and a former Secretary of the Navy (and among our former trustees and interns two current Undersecretaries of Defense), not to mention two university presidents emeritus, a foundation president, and several active or retired corporate CEOs," it ststes on its website. ^[2]

The FPRI Publishes a quarterly journal titled Orbis ^[3] currently edited by Mackubin Owens, along with several different bulletins transmitted directly via email to approximately 18,000 key people in 85 countries.

The FPRI's claim of independence should not be mistaken for non-partisan, nor should their deep roots within higher education imply an intent of a simple advisory role. In a speech given at the Heritage Foundation on June 5, 1991, former FPRI member Daniel Pipes stated that the FPRI is an activist organization driven by its own ideology:

"Put most baldly, we have always advocated an activist U.S. foreign policy; we have shared an abiding suspicion of the Soviet Union and other Communist states; and we have always maintained a strong interest in the promotion of democracy, free-enterprise, and the rule of law. Perhaps most controversially, the professional staff is not shy about the use of force; were we members of Congress in January 1991, all of us would not only have voted with President Bush and Operation Desert Storm, we would have led the charge." ^[4]

FPRI's Board Members

As of April 2007 FPRI's Board members were:

Personnel

Program Organization

The FPRI is an ends focused think tank. They are not a just another grouping of theoreticians cogitating what ifs as they contemplate models from their armchairs. The FPRI openly strives to be activist, and sometimes even wrap descriptions of their activist intents with wordage that imples reverence. One of the FPRI's oft repeated mantras is that they are:

"devoted to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the development of policies that advance U.S. national interests.""[1],[2],

The Institue's members also view their roles not first and foremost as researchers, but more along the lines of a practising engineer. They are willing to get their hands duty fulfilling their goals, one of which is to

"shape the national debate on foreign policy through frequent appearances in the national news media."[3]

These are often the same goals other think tanks share, the difference here being the FPRI's organization of proactive programs to facilitate the stated goals of influencing the government. They do not just sit back on their papers at the door to the leislature until called to testify, they engage.

Their organizational programs are divided into two main categories; research and educational.

Research Programs

Since the FPRI is intent on maintaining active role in the shaping of policy, both domestic and international, their research programs' fields of are dynamic. Currently, The main programs are:

The Asia Program
Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security
Center for the Study of America and the West
Ethnic Conflict Program
Middle East Program
Program on National Security
Project on Democratic Transitions

"Launched in 2005 under the direction of Ambassador Adrian Basora, the Project on Democratic Transitions (PDT) examines the dramatic political-economic transformation of post-communist Europe and Eurasia since 1989 through a wide-angle lens." ^[5]

South Asia
Think Tanks and Civil Societies
Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security

Educational Programs

Marvin Wachman Fund for International Education

Provides studies for High School teachers to improve their "international and civic literacy".

History Academy

Takes the Wachman Fund even farther and provides weekend seminars for High School teachers.

Contact Information

Foreign Policy Research Institute

1528 Walnut St, Ste 610

Philadelphia, PA 19102

Phone: 215-732-3774

Fax: 215-732-4401

Email: fpri AT fpri.org

Website: http://www.fpri.org/

References

  1. Jump up↑ "About FPRI", accessed May 2007.
  2. Jump up↑ "About FPRI", accessed May 2007.
  3. Jump up↑ "ORBIS: A Journal of World Affairs", accessed May 2007.
  4. Jump up↑ Daniel Pipes, "From a Distance: Influencing Foreign Policy from Philadelphia", The Heritage Lectures, Heritage Foundation, June 5, 1991.
  5. Jump up↑ Project on Democratic Transitions, Foreign Policy Research Institute, accessed June 13, 2008.

Categories: 

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Funding Analysis - DeSmogBlog

https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.desmogblog.com/files/EEI%20Funding.xlsx

1.

84, Aspen Institute, $10,000, $10,000, $10,000, $7,400, $10,000, $12,000 ... http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Coal_Utilization_Research_Council.

[XLS]

DonorsTrust Funding - DeSmogBlog

https://www.desmogblog.com/sites/beta.../DonorsTrust%20Funding%202017-05_0.xlsx

May 20, 2017 - 16, Institute for Faith Work & Economics, $6,253,000, Lovett and Ruth Peters Foundation ... $250,000, http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Philanthropy_Roundtable ...... 582, Aspen's Strategic Initiative Institute, $10,000 ...

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