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of Ohio. And basically, Teal, Buzzkerk, JD Vance, Tucker Carlson, the

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economist Orin Cass, um, and a number of Rebecca Mercer, who was a big big donor.

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The Mercers were huge Trump donors. They they rented out these bungalows in this nothing town in 100p person town in

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Rockbridge, Ohio. And they wanted to talk about the future of the MAGA movement after Trump. And this is 2019.

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The Nerd Trying to Turn the GOP Populist

in late June, dozens of conservatives gathered on Capitol Hill for a forum on the failings of American capitalism. The event’s aesthetics were stereotypically Republican. There were the buttoned-up, apple-cheeked postgrads who’ve been staffing GOP Senate offices from time immemorial — the kind of young people whose bow ties tell you they have strong feelings about tax policy, birth rates, and Robert Bork. There were gray-haired Republican donors in dark blazers and prim dresses and a wide assortment of predominantly white middle-aged wonks, all mingling beneath the marble columns and chandeliers of the Russell Senate Office Building’s Kennedy Caucus Room.

While the forum’s crowd wouldn’t have looked out of place at a 1980s country club, its speakers’ words would have sounded alien to Republicans of that era. This was not an accident. American Compass, the think tank that had organized the gathering, aims to rip the GOP from Reaganism’s cold, dead hands.

“Capitalism is not working the way that it should,” declared the organization’s founder, Oren Cass, a policy nerd out of central casting, bespectacled and short with salt-and-pepper hair and a slightly nasal voice. “We don’t have the correct alignment between things that generate a lot of profit and things that are good for people,” he continued, explaining that only the government could bring the corporate sector and common good into harmony by channeling investment toward national priorities and income toward the working-class.

Although heterodox, Cass’s sentiments are not novel on the American right. In the years since Donald Trump’s election, skepticism about “free markets” has grown more common in red America. This is partly a product of Trump’s own irreverent attitude toward conservative doctrine in general and outright hostility to free trade in particular. But the former president’s affronts to Milton Friedman were typically more rhetorical than substantive, his appetite for self-promotion outstripping his interest in the nuances of public policy. Trump did not redraw Republican orthodoxy so much as he created space for others to attempt as much.

Various pundits and policy entrepreneurs have exploited that opening. In 2019, Tucker Carlson declared that rising crime and drug overdose rates in rural America were byproducts of the collapse in “male wages” wrought by offshoring, a trend that public policy needed to remedy. Market capitalism “was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings,” Carlson said. “We do not exist to serve markets.”

Meanwhile, “post-liberal” intellectuals like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule — who insisted that only a “liberal” would consider free markets more sacrosanct than “the common good” — gained a wider audience on the right. Other conservative thinkers followed their lead. In 2022, former editor of the Christian-right publication First Things Matthew Schmitz and former New YorkPost op-ed editor Sohrab Ahmari launched Compactmagazine with an anti-woke Marxist. The official aim of their journal is to promote “a strong social-democratic state that defends community — local and national, familial and religious — against a libertine left and a libertarian right.”

What distinguishes Cass from the right’s other dissident intellectuals and polemicists is the realm in which he operates. The bulk of heterodox conservative economic thinking is produced in the airy climes of academia and “ideas” journalism. And it bears the imprint of these origins, evincing a keener interest in litigating philosophical first principles than in sweating the details of policy design. American Compass, by contrast, is a creature of Washington, D.C. It is not prosecuting the case against modernism in an ivory tower or mocking the “laptop class” in a digital publication. Rather, it is translating the populist right’s irritable mental gestures into model legislation for prioritizing workers in corporate bankruptcy and increasing wage subsidies for parents. And it is then pressing those proposals into the hands of Republican senators.

“My critique of the post-liberals is it remains very unclear to me what the actual alternative on offer is,” Cass told me. “Whereas, at Compass, we focus very intensively on having very concrete and actionable policy proposals.”

June’s gathering in the Kennedy Caucus Room was convened to celebrate the release ofRebuilding American Capitalism, a roughly 100-page handbook detailing the think tank’s vision for a new “conservative economics.” On hand were four of the GOP’s most ambitious young senators — Todd Young, Tom Cotton, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance — who touted their sympathies for Cass’s views on industrial policy, vocational training, trade, and organized labor respectively. “Under Oren’s leadership, and with the help of a small group of dedicated policy experts, American Compass has punched far above its weight,” Cotton said, commending Cass and his team for “pioneering new, bright policies that put American workers and families first.”

To Cass’s skeptics, his project is quixotic at best, and cynical at worst, since the concept of “pro-worker conservatism” is a contradiction in terms. The GOP, they say, is structurally committed to the interests of low-road capitalists. “The power base of the Republican Party remains the least imaginative, most hidebound element of the capitalist structure,” said Ahmari, who is supportive of Cass’s work but pessimistic about the near-term prospects of its pro-worker agenda. “It’s the regional tire distributor in the research triangle of North Carolina. And that guy is the most resistant to anything pro-labor.”

In the skeptics’ view, American Compass might succeed in providing bored conservative wonks with a venue in which to LARP as the brain trust of a Christian Democratic Party. It might lend the GOP a patina of intellectual vitality and populism. And it might give political writers fodder for “man bites dog” stories about how conservatives are turning against capitalism. But, in their view, the think tank will accomplish nothing for ordinary Americans. Congressional Republicans are still fighting to defund the IRS, cut the social safety net, and extend regressive tax cuts. The rest is noise.

Yet not everyone is so sure. The Hewlett Foundation and Omidyar Network, a pair of left-leaning philanthropies that aim to seed a “post-neoliberal” economic consensus, have collectively invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in American Compass.

“One of the lessons we take from past shifts in big-picture economic thinking is that paradigms change when they’re adopted as a ‘new common sense’ across the ideological spectrum,” said Brian Kettenring, director of the Hewlett Foundation’s Economy and Society Initiative. Felicia Wong of the progressive Roosevelt Institute also sees promise in Cass’s work, saying that “what Oren is doing could make a real difference in a Republican Party that wasn’t captured by a minority faction.”

Many iconoclastic conservatives, meanwhile, believe that they’re poised for breakthroughs. In Trump’s wake, the GOP has grown so ideologically unmoored that it declined to draft a platform in 2020. Something will need to fill that void. And Cass’s camp believes it has both the popular support and intellectual energy to do so. “The Republican Party is now without question the party of workers,” said Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s former trade representative and an American Compass board member. “The voters in the party are on the side of those of us who want a worker-focused — rather than corporate-focused, or efficiency-focused — trade policy.”

Recently, Trump called for imposing a 10 percent tariffon all foreign imports, which is one of American Compass’ signature policy proposals. And even the Heritage Foundation, long the GOP’s agenda-setter, has begun ceding ground to “common good” capitalism. American Compass doesn’t believe that it will remake the GOP in its image overnight. But in time, Cass thinks he can bend Republicans’ agenda into better alignment with their voters’ interests. “If all goes well,” he told the crowd of young Senate staffers in June, “this is where conservatism is headed.”

If Oren Cass has the politics of a right-populist insurgent, he has the CV of an old-guard Republican. Raised in central Massachusetts and educated at a progressive charter school, Cass wasn’t a self-conscious conservative in adolescence. But he bristled at the hypocritical pieties of his liberal classmates. “Everybody was extremely multicultural,” Cass said. “Unless you suggested that we should therefore tolerate Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women, at which point everyone was extremely not multicultural.”

To the extent that the young Cass betrayed conservative instincts, he skewed libertarian. From his post on the student council, he crusaded to end penalties for not completing one’s homework, arguing that the issue should be a matter of personal responsibility. At Williams College, these impulses coalesced into a worldview. The school’s introduction to microeconomics course awoke Cass to the miracle of free enterprise. The notion that the self-directed activities of autonomous people gave rise to a beneficent order — one that balanced supply against demand and encouraged nations to pursue their comparative advantages — resonated with his reverence for self-government. In a freshman-year paper, Cass declared, “There is no question that free international trade increases a society’s economic surplus.”

After college, he brought this outlook to the management consulting firm Bain & Company. Cass found the job intellectually stimulating. But over time, he grew dissatisfied. “It did frustrate me that the work we did was focused intensively on hitting short-run financial targets rather than actually building stronger businesses,” Cass said.

Cass’s attention turned increasingly to politics. In 2007, he took a six-month leave from Bain to intern on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. Four years later, Cass served as the domestic-policy director to Romney 2012.

Today, Romeny’s second campaign is remembered as the apotheosis of country-club conservatism. The former private-equity mogul centered his candidacy on the grievances of the successful, promising to give tax cuts to job creators and virtually nothing to the “47 percent” of Americans who believed that they were “entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it” — the so-called “taker” class. Yet Cass says it was Romney who opened his eyes to the bankruptcy of market fundamentalism.

Early in his tenure on the campaign, Cass was tasked with preparing a briefing on trade policy. He put together a PowerPoint rehearsing the eternal verities that he had learned in Econ 101, informing the Republican candidate that “opening new markets is crucial to economic growth and job creation.” Romney’s response was terse. “That’s fine,” he told Cass. “But what are we going to do about China?”

The question caught Cass off-guard. “It was not a question one asked in polite company back then, for fear of being revealed as an economic simpleton or, worse, a protectionist,” he later wrote in an essay on his ideological journey. Among the economic thinkers Cass had trusted in 2012, China was not a problem to be solved. Beijing’s communists may have used a combination of industrial subsidies, intellectual property theft, and labor suppression to flood the U.S. market with cheap goods, but if the CCP wanted to give Americans useful products in exchange for a bunch of IOUs, more power to them. Romney, by contrast, felt America’s lopsided trade relationship with China presented economic and national security challenges.

Answering the candidate’s query forced Cass to consult a wider range of economic thinkers. These included two of the Reagan administration’s lonely skeptics of free trade, Clyde Prestowitz and Robert Lighthizer. The two argued that conventional nostrums about the mutual benefits of open exchange did not apply to nonreciprocal trade relationships. The United States had routinely opened its market to nations that shielded their own country’s industries from competition through strategic industrial policies. Typically, these uneven trade relationships were initiated to serve geopolitical ends. “The United States might want Japan to stop manipulating its currency,” Prestowitz wrote in 2015. “But it also might want Japan to vote with it on something in the U.N. Washington has invariably yielded on the economic issue in order to prevail on the geopolitical issue.”

But market-fundamentalist dogmas denied the existence of any tradeoff between domestic and foreign policy goals, portraying the byproducts of realpolitik as economically optimal. In reality, Lighthizer and Prestowitz insisted, America’s tolerance of one-sided trade was corrosive to the productivity of domestic industry and the wages of U.S. workers. And this was especially true of its relationship with China, whose state capitalist system enabled extraordinary subversions of WTO rules.

Once persuaded that Econ 101 did not apply to China, Cass quickly came to question its relevance to contemporary capitalism writ large. He says that the quality of mainstream thinking on China made him “appreciate the extent to which a totally dogmatic orthodoxy that bore no relationship to reality could sustain itself for a very long time. I think it probably gave me a lot of skepticism about the quality of such orthodoxy.”

Rereading the classical economist David Ricardo, Cass found that the dominant theory of free trade’s virtues was premised on nationalistic assumptions: Ricardo had written that free trade was broadly beneficial for nations in part because “most men of property” were patriotic, and therefore preferred “a low rate of profits in their own country” to “more advantageous employment of their wealth in foreign nations.” As a result, countries could open up their markets without fear of investment migrating overseas.

It was clear to Cass that the patriotism of the rich could no longer be presumed. He has since written that capitalism advances the common good only when owners and workers are locked into mutual dependence. If firms cannot boost profits by combing the globe for cheap labor, they will need to do so by investing in productivity-enhancing technology. That technology will in turn make it possible for wages and profits to rise in tandem. But globalization broke the mutual dependence of America’s capitalists and laborers, allowing the former’s fortunes to swell while the latter’s wages stagnated. The inequities of this situation are, in Cass’s analysis, politically unsustainable. “A democratic republic’s vast working and middle classes will rightly reject such an arrangement,” hewrites, “forcing elites to choose between restoring capitalism by constraining capital or entrenching their own economic prerogatives by subordinating the democratic process.”

Since 2012, skepticism of globalization in general — and America’s trade relationship with China in particular — has migrated from the GOP’s fringes to its center. This is partly a consequence of Trump’s election. The nationalist demagogue’s ascent accelerated adecades-long shift in the Republican Party’s class composition, with the GOP bleeding support among college-educated suburbanites and gaining it among white working-class voters in rural areas. As the Republicans’ mass base became increasingly weighted toward blue-collar laborers in deindustrialized regions, conservatives grew less enthused by free trade.

But the GOP’s hawkish turn on China also reflects the CCP’s growing authoritarianism, economic might, and geopolitical assertiveness under Xi Jinping’s leadership. Where the Pentagon once saw free trade as a geopolitical expedient, it now views the interdependence of the U.S. and Chinese economies as anational-security threat. In the Trump era, Robert Lighthizer went from being a gadfly to U.S. trade representative. Tariffs on Chinese imports and prohibitions on the sale of certain technologies to Chinese firms went from being disreputable ideas to bipartisan common-sense.

To an extent, Cass’s wager is that China can serve the same ideological function for his party that it did for himself. Which is to say, that the issue can tear a big enough hole in the GOP’s veil of orthodoxies to open up a broader vision of economic possibility.

In Cass’s account, America’s lopsided trade relationship with China exemplifies the free market’s inadequacies. Left to its own devices, the invisible hand will create jobs in Shenzhen instead of Youngstown. But it will also instruct America’s finest minds to innovate more addictive apps instead of more effective cancer treatments and channel investment toward high-speed trading instead of cutting-edge manufacturing. For Cass, the fundamental problem with market fundamentalism is that the private sector values profitability above all else, whereas true conservatives value strong families, strong communities, and a strong nation above maximizing Wall Street’s returns. And despite the fond imaginings of his party’s libertarians, conserving all that’s best in American life, and shielding markets from government influence, are antithetical endeavors.

Rebuilding American Capitalismhas much to say about U.S.-China policy. It advises Republicans to prohibit American investment firms from holding Chinese assets, to bar Chinese-domiciled firms from accessing U.S. capital markets, and to impose high tariffs on Chinese imports. But the handbook also uses the right’s alarmism about the CCP to illustrate the broader principle that market incentives cannot be trusted to steer economic development, noting, “If satisfying the Chinese Communist Party offers the highest rate of profit, American business leaders have shown they will eagerly do just that.”

:{The think tank proceeds to articulate a comprehensive agenda for restructuring market rule in the realms of trade, industry, education, family formation, and labor relations. Taken together, this program would constitute a radical break from the status quo. In the country that American Compass aims to build, all foreign imports will be subject to a 10 percent tariff, which will automatically increase by 5 percent annually until the trade deficit is closed. All workers in a given industry will collectively bargain with all of their industry’s employers, establishing sector-wide standards for compensation and working conditions, and eliminating the risk that unionization will render an individual firm less competitive than its low-wage rivals.

The National Labor Relations Board will have broader authority to crack down on union busting. Wall Street traders will have to pay a financial-transaction tax on the value of traded equities, bonds, and derivatives. A national development bank will ensure robust public funding for critical industries and infrastructure. In sectors deemed vital to the nation’s industrial base, 50 percent of all inputs will need to be sourced from the United States. Legal immigration will continue at its current level, but its composition will be shifted toward high-skilled workers, thereby insulating America’s most vulnerable laborers from foreign competition. And working families will receive a child allowance of at least $250 a month per child.}:

:{If this agenda scarcely resembles conventional Republican policy, it is also quite distinct from progressivism. Cass’s worldview is not social democratic so much as producerist — an ideology that venerates those who produce tangible wealth over those who live off financial chicanery or nanny-state largesse. American Compass retains the right’s conviction that simply giving money to the jobless poor perpetuates their indolence and withholds its child allowance from parents without earned incomes. Its program evinces little concern for environmentalism, counseling the abolition of the National Environmental Policy Act. The think tank’s preoccupation with increasing male wages specifically suggests a fondness for traditional gender roles.

It is unabashedly nationalistic and hostile toward the undocumented. On China, its handbook is, at times, so belligerent as to lose contact with reality. A policy memo written by former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby asserts that “China supplanting the United States as the world’s most important economy would mean by definition a decline in Americans’ prosperity and economic security.” Yet the notion that Americans will automatically grow less prosperous if a nation of 1.4 billion people is allowed to have a larger economy than the United States is both maniacally jingoistic and patently false: If a nation necessarily grew poorer when another country’s economy “supplanted” its own, then the United Kingdom would be less affluent today than it was in 1916 when U.S. output first outstripped that of the British empire.}:

Nevertheless, Cass has attracted plenty of conservative criticism. The Capital Research Center, a right-wing “investigative think-tank,” has portrayed American Compass as a puppet of progressive philanthropists who aim to undermine conservatism from within. “With bedfellows that fit more comfortably at a Democratic Socialists of America meeting than the Knights of Columbus or Elks Lodge,” CRC’s Michael Watson writes, “for what does American Compass stand?”

As little as free-market conservatives care for Cass’s associations, they’re even less fond of his policy proposals. The Cato Institute argues that American Compass’ 10 percent tariff on all imports would choke off the flow of dollars to the foreign exchange market, thereby driving up the dollar’s value and putting U.S. exporters at a competitive disadvantage. This reality, combined with the retaliatory tariffs that such a policy would surely provoke, would arguably undermine American manufacturing, even as it drove up the cost of living for working-class consumers.

Angela Rachidi, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, argues that virtually all of Cass’s proposals are similarly self-defeating. “This idea that somehow policies that have freed up the market have caused all these problems is wrong,” Rachidi said. “I actually think it’s the reverse: There has been too much government intervention in the market, and it’s driven up costs for families.”

In the widespread conservative pushback against American Compass’ ideas, skeptics may see proof of its project’s hopelessness. But Cass and his sympathizers see the various jeremiads against them as signs that the old guard feels threatened. Rachidi herself says that she’s been surprised by how much traction “anti-market” arguments have gotten on the right in recent years, with Republican policymakers increasingly bringing up American Compass’ proposals in conversation.

The think tank’s influence may be most conspicuous among younger conservatives in D.C. “There’s definitely a generational divide,” said Patrick T. Brown of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think Oren speaks to the sort of younger Hill staffer type who is unsatisfied with where the country’s going.”

There is one thing that AEI and American Compass can agree on: The GOP lacks an affirmative economic vision. The party did not even bother drafting a platform in 2020, and its midterm campaign was almost entirely negative. Republicans ostensibly want to reduce the federal deficit. But as the debt ceiling standoff showed, Trump’s heretical opposition to entitlement cuts has rendered conservatives squeamish about cutting America’s largest social programs. The GOP’s leading 2024 contenders, for their part, have less to say about federal economic policy than aboutdrag queens reading children’s books at public libraries.

To Cass, the party’s rudderlessness presents a historic opportunity. “Trump is like an earthquake. On the one hand, it’s a disaster and obviously causes a lot of problems. But it also exposes what was poorly built or outdated, and creates an opening to build something better.”

But others suspect that the GOP may choose to live among the ruins. A decade ago, Ramesh Ponnuru was waging a crusade similar to American Compass’ present one. Along with a coterie ofother conservative intellectuals, Ponnuru called on the GOP to reorient its agenda toward the needs of its increasingly working-class constituency. The substance of this “reform conservatism” was much less radical than Cass’s. But it pushed in many of the same directions, calling for expanding the child tax credit and wage subsidies for low-income workers. Trump’s populist rhetoric in 2016 affirmed the “reformocon” analysis of where the GOP was heading politically. But his legislative agenda once in office — a failed bid to slash social benefits for working people, followed by a successful corporate tax cut — illustrated the movement’s impotence.

Ponnuru said that he thought he could “make the case that there was a better agenda than the old one that would deliver better results and would also serve the political interests of conservative politicians.” But a lot of Republicans “basically concluded they didn’t need a policy agenda in order to succeed. And the fact of the matter is that they have had decent election showings without running on much of a policy agenda at all.”

The GOP’s growing indifference to governing isn’t the sole obstacle in American Compass’ path. The bulk of the GOP’s big-dollar donors remain hostile to the think tank’s program. And although social conservatives have soured on “woke” capital, they haven’t all necessarily warmed up to Uncle Sam. “Most of the social-conservative world has given up on neoliberalism,” said Julius Krein, founder of American Affairs, a policy journal ideologically aligned with American Compass. “But at the same time, they’re still very wary of any sort of state power, since they think it will only be used against them. There’s an entrenched notion that conservatives can never do anything with the government. Anytime you have a government, it will be liberal, and therefore hostile to them in some way.”

:{Still, there are signs that American Compass is making progress. While Trump apes its trade policy proposals, Ron DeSantis has sought the think tank’s counsel. In addition to the four senators who attended Cass’s June forum, Josh Hawley is also squarely in the “common-good capitalism” camp. J.D. Vance’s senior policy adviser is a former American Compass staffer. And the think tank’s lobbying has yielded a wide array of heterodox legislative proposals.

Vance alone has spearheaded bipartisan bills increasing safety standards for railways, empowering the government to claw back compensation from the CEOs of bailed-out banks, and requiring federally funded inventions to be manufactured in the United States. Tom Cotton has partnered with American Compass on a bill that would tax the endowments of wealthy private universities and use the revenue to provide blue-collar laborers with vocational training. Hawley has advanced Cass’s proposal to end normal trade relations with China and introduced legislation forcing down pharmaceutical prices. Todd Young has backed a bill restricting the use of noncompete clauses in labor contracts.}:

But few of these bills have attracted widespread GOP support. And as American Compass’ policy memos get translated into legislative text, they often get watered down. Cass has endorsed sector-wide collective bargaining agreements and giving workers representation on corporate boards. But American Compass’s partnership with Marco Rubio on labor policy yielded a bill that merely legalizes company-sponsored labor organizations (presently outlawed as a union-busting technique), and empowers such organizations to elect a nonvoting board observer. In other words, rather than requiring large corporations to give their workers full board representation, the bill gives such firms formal permission to let one of their workers watch their board meetings in silence. Cass hailed the bill as “innovative” and an “important step forward” for labor reform.

“I think the problem that American Compass faces structurally is that anytime any kind of conservative is willing to give even an inch on something related to the welfare state or labor, the Democrats immediately are like, ‘Great, let’s do it,’ and then that alienates Republicans,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of the People’s Policy Project, a left-wing think tank. “So to avoid that, they end up proposing stuff that actually just kind of sucks.”

American Compass’ progress in winning over the GOP’s top policy shops has been similarly equivocal. Over the past year, the Heritage Foundation has made a few fledgling gestures in Cass’s direction. Ahead of every presidential election, Heritage drafts a comprehensive policy guide for the next Republican administration. GOP presidents tend to ignore much of these blueprints. But in the Trump era, Heritage nonetheless exerted more influence on administrative staffing and policy than any other think tank. And this year, they let Cass co-author their guide’s labor platform, which endorses federal funding for vocational training and increasing the NLRB’s power to crack down on union-busting, among other things.

Heritage has also evinced sympathy for common-good capitalism as a philosophical project. Multiple conservatives I spoke with, including Cass, pointed to a paper that Heritage published in April as a watershed. In “Free Enterprise and the Common Good,” Heritage’s Alexander Salter pointedly declines to take a side in the fight between AEI and American Compass. This itself is remarkable, given Heritage’s history as a doctrinaire, pro-free-market organization. But Salter goes further, affirming Cass’s basic premise that the economy must be ordered to serve the general welfare and that households “dependent on the vicissitudes of commercial society” may lose faith in America’s political order.

And yet, Salter ultimately bends these high-level philosophical concessions into a case for catering to business owners. Salter agrees with Cass that workers dependent on precarious, low-paid employment will struggle to form stable families and communities. But he then suggests that trying to provide workers with more security through government policy would still leave them perilously dependent on forces larger than themselves. “The vagaries of politics are just as insecure a foundation for national renewal as the vagaries of markets,” Salter writes. In his account, the only stable foundation for social flourishing is personal wealth, as “the independence afforded by property ownership makes households less reliant on impersonal bureaucratic structures, whether of corporate firms or the administrative state.” Therefore, common-good conservatives must “focus on promoting small-business ownership.”

Of course, this is just a reiteration of American conservatism’s perennial valorization of the small-time capitalist. And as a proposal for delivering shared prosperity in a 21st-century economy, it is patently unserious. Every American can’t be a business owner. The vast majority of households in every industrialized economy have lived off wages. Policies that promote small-business ownership are not only irrelevant to the typical worker’s interests but arguably antithetical to them since small enterprises tend to pay worse wages than large firms, which can weather steeper labor bills through higher productivity. Nevertheless, Cass cited Salter’s paper as evidence that Heritage had turned a corner.

American Compass does not appear poised to transform Republican economics any time soon, but the various conservatives I spoke with tended to agree that it is making progress in a few policy areas. They suggest that the next Republican White House is liable to be even more anti-globalization and hostile to China than the first Trump administration. And if the next GOP president boasts control of Congress, there is a decent chance that they will enact American Compass-esque immigration proposals. “I think there’s much more of an interest in imposing requirements on employers who hire illegal workers,” said Henry Olsen, senior fellow with the EPPC. “Three or four years ago, there was complete resistance to mandatory use of E-Verify, and I think that’s fading fast.”

Some conservatives believe the GOP might set slightly less regressive priorities for tax policy. During negotiations over the Trump Tax Cuts in 2017, Marco Rubio and Mike Lee proposed cutting the corporate tax rate to 20.9 percent — instead of all the way down to 20 percent, as Trump had proposed — and using the resulting savings to increase the child tax credit for low-income households. “All of the promising and young people basically voted for the Rubio amendments,” Ponnuru said. “And it was much more of a group that you could legitimately describe as Old Guard Republicans who were on the other side of that. I think that’s a straw in the wind.”

Asked for a model of what a relatively pro-worker GOP fiscal policy might look like in 2025, some conservatives pointed to J.D. Vance’s proposal to scrap Biden’s electric-vehicle tax credit and use the consequent revenue to cuttaxes on married EITC recipients.

Of course, the left-leaning philanthropies patronizing American Compass probably won’t be cheered by the thought that the think tank is successfully advancing immigration restriction, belligerence toward China, and anti-climate tax policies. A conservatism that mostly retains Reaganism’s fiscal priorities, while constricting global trade, severing economic ties between the world’s two great powers, and restricting admissions of low-skill refugees may be “post-neoliberal.” But it’s not obvious that this ideology would be more conducive to human flourishing than the one it displaced.

Further complicating matters, there is a disconcerting overlap between economic heterodoxy and January 6 apologism within the GOP. Two of the Republican senators most sympathetic to American Compass’ program — Vance and Hawley — are also among the party’s most vocal skeptics of the 2020 election’s legitimacy. Hawley voted against certifying that election’s results in Pennsylvania and Arizona, while Vance has claimed that the election was “stolen from Trump” and hailed the Capitol Hill rioters as political prisoners.

The fact that these senators evince sympathy for both Cass’s economics and Trump’s authoritarianism may not be wholly coincidental. In right-wing intellectual circles, antipathy for small government often comes paired with irreverence for liberal democracy. Vermeule and Deneen endorse both state intervention in the economy and heavy-handed regulations of cultural expression and sexual morality. As Vermuele writes, in a “common good” constitutional order, “Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.” (Cass himself rejects the radicalism of his “post-liberal” admirers, arguing that America’s liberal democratic system “is worth preserving and rescuing.”)

For all these reasons, liberals may find it easier to applaud American Compass’ work in the context of divided government. With Washington split between Democrats and Republicans, Cass’s think tank has mostly served to facilitate bipartisan economic reform. When the Senate was debating the CHIPS Act, a bill promoting domestic semiconductor manufacturing, a Wall Street Journalop-edlambasted the legislation. The bill’s Republican co-sponsor, Todd Young, credits American Compass’ rebuttal of the Journalwith stiffening the spines of a critical mass of Senate Republicans, thereby enabling CHIPS to pass. Given how often Democrats need a small number of GOP votes to move legislation, the existence of even a few Republican senators who aren’t allergic to public investment can be consequential.

Nonetheless, common-good conservatives’ most ambitious economic proposals tend to boast more support from Democrats than Republicans. And this reality is not lost on all of the right’s heterodox thinkers.

“I have eyes to see that Democratic labor boards are better,” said Compact’s Ahmari. “Liz Warren has better ideas for taming Wall Street than anyone on the right … The political economy vision is all on the Democratic side. Whether you agree with every element of the CHIPS Act and Inflation Reduction Act, you just have to admit it’s a large vision of reshoring manufacturing.”

Ahmari sees mainstream Republican economic thinking as intellectually bankrupt by comparison. “Silicon Valley Bank fails, and it has to do with this long-term problem of regional banking in the United States,” Ahmari said. “What is the Republican account of what happened to Silicon Valley Bank? That it was too woke, the bank had gone woke. If you look up its board of directors, it’s almost all white guys. What the fuck are you talking about?”

Ahmari hopes that a series of electoral defeats will eventually force the GOP to reform its economic agenda. Until then, he expects his faction’s gains to be limited.

Congressional Republicans are doing their best to affirm that impression. In recent months, the House GOP’s largest caucus has called forgutting Medicaid and anti-poverty spending. The party leadership’s most ambitious economic policy proposal, meanwhile, is a regressive tax cut. As of this writing, there is chatter that House Republicans will force a government shutdown this fall unless Joe Biden agrees to cut food assistance to the poor. Trump’s policy team, meanwhile, is mulling another round of corporate tax cuts.

Cass concedes that Republicans aren’t as far along as Democrats on some issues. “But if we can win the argument on economic thinking,” Cass says, then there is far more hope of “building a consensus platform and ultimately a durable governing majority” within the GOP.

If Cass wins over the rising generations of Republicans, and intellectual bankruptcy starts costing the GOP elections, perhaps conservatism will head in a pro-worker direction. But for now, the American right’s compass points toward a more protectionist, authoritarian, and nativistic variant of Reaganism. Whether this constitutes progress will depend on one’s conception of the common good.

TAGS:

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american Compass is a right-wing nonprofit that, according to the Daily Beast, has been connected to Project 2025 — MAGA Republicans' radical plan to fill the federal government with unquestioning Donald Trump loyalists if he wins the 2024 GOP presidential nomination and defeats Democratic incumbent President Joe Biden in the general election.

The Daily Beast's Roger Sollenberger, in an article published on November 22, reports that a 2022 tax statement reveals who some of American Compass' donors are — and they include groups associated with liberal and progressive causes.

"The page header says, 'Do Not File' and 'Not Open to Public Inspection,' indicating the donors may have been accidentally disclosed," Sollenberger explains. "Of the five groups, two stand out for their prominent histories of supporting liberal causes — the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and the Omidyar Network Foundation."

Sollenberger adds, "According to the tax statement, the Omidyar Network has contributed a total of $400,000 to American Compass since 2020. In reality, Omidyar has donated $500,000, including forthcoming installments. The Hewlett Foundation — a longtime supporter of National Public Radio — has accounted for more than one-third of American Compass' total public support, giving a combined $1,486,000 over the same period, with an extra $475,000 dose this January. That's more than Hewlett gave to NPR or the Planned Parenthood Federation of America in the same timeframe."

The Omidyar and Hewlett donations, Sollenberger emphasizes, are "striking" in light of American Compass' connection to Project 2025.

The reporter notes, "Project 2025 backers include xenophobic Trump advisers Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, as well as Christian nationalist and former Trump budget chief Russ Vought, one of the group's top advisers. According to The Washington Post, Project 2025 has been crafting 'specific plans for using the federal government to punish critics and opponents,' with Trump himself 'naming individuals he wants to investigate or prosecute.' The group is also 'drafting plans to potentially invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office to allow him to deploy the military against civil demonstrations,' the Post reported."

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American Compass is led by a team with years of experience in some of America’s preeminent conservative institutions and across the fields of business, law, and public policy.

Oren Cass

EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

@oren_cass

Chris Griswold

POLICY DIRECTOR

@Chris_Griz

Abigail Salvatore

COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR

@abigailrsal

Emily Davis

CHIEF OF STAFF

Duncan Braid

PROGRAM AND POLICY MANAGER

@duncan_braid

Gabriela Rodriguez

POLICY ADVISOR

@gnrodriguez2

https://theintercept.com/2019/09/06/exxon-mobil-progressive-policy-institute-climate/

kate a

PROGRESSIVE POLICY Institute, a centrist Democratic think tank that grew out of the party’s pro-business wing in the 1980s and ’90s, received $50,000 from Exxon Mobil in 2018 via its parent organization, the Third Way Foundation, according to the oil giant’s 2018 Worldwide Giving Report.

Exxon Mobil did not return The Intercept’s multiple requests for comment. In an email, PPI Executive Director Lindsay Lewis said the money was used for general support and that “we only accept general support funding from corporate interests, we do not do paid for work/research or have any donor run programs.”

Lewis also confirmed that this is the first time Exxon Mobil has donated to the Third Way Foundation.

Though it’s a first, PPI’s new donor isn’t so dramatic a shift from its fundraising record. The Intercept’s Akela Lacy has also found that PhRMA — the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America — has annually donated between $25,000 and $75,000 to the Third Way Foundation since 2009, upping its donation to $265,000 in 2016 — the same year that Medicare for All, which the trade group and PPI both oppose, entered the national spotlight. Donations dipped back to normal levels in 2017, although documents were not yet available for 2018 when the piece was published in late April.

PhRMA Is Funding a Democratic Think Tank Trying to Derail Medicare for All

In the last couple years, Exxon has taken up softer messaging on climate than either the Koch brothers or the Mercer family. With business all over the world, Exxon — like every other multinational oil company — is well-accustomed to operating in environments where denying the reality of the climate emergency outright is politically unthinkable. As climate concerns spike around the U.S., the company is still plenty opposed to environmental regulations and the lawsuits being lobbed its way from climate-vulnerable communities and attorneys general, who are each calling into question Exxon’s rule in fueling both the climate crisis and misinformation campaigns about it. Rather than paying people to say that there’s no problem at all, it can rebrand as a good-faith actor in the climate fight with paeans to carbon capture technology, low-carbon fuels (algae!), and carbon taxes that also conveniently exempt it from some of the lawsuits and regulations it’s most worried about. The decades of climate denial Exxon helped fund — and now the Trump administration — have dragged the national debate on climate change so far into the gutter that there are influential liberals willing to give the company credit simply for not denying the science.

This all dovetails well with a centrist approach to climate politics that’s long sought common ground with industry and harbors both temperamental and ideological opposition to big, confrontational proposals like the Green New Deal. The upshot is that they’ve started to sound a lot alike. Carbon capture, R&D, and carbon pricing — while not mutually exclusive with the Green New Deal framework that the Sunrise Movement, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and others have begun to flesh out — have reliably been wielded as a cudgel by establishment types against calls for more sweeping action.

Kert Davies, founder and director of the Climate Investigations Center, noted that the report indicates the money PPI received was through a “corporate” grant, rather than through the ExxonMobil Foundation. “We have never sussed how thesetwo black boxes of money are managed or dolled out. So if you grab the ExxonMobil Foundation 990s, there are sometimes different descriptions or breakdowns of the funding, but this grant won’t be there,” he wrote in an email. “There is no need for public accounting of such grants. No obligation. But they have seemed compelled to disclosed them through the years.”

Of course, $50,000 is not an enormous amount of money either for PPI or Exxon Mobil. But it may well signal a shift in the fossil fuel industry’s relationship to climate politics.

In March, [who?] Goldberg co-authored a reportfor the industry front group Grow America’s Infrastructure Now on how to bring legal action against anti-pipeline organizers. “Allowing vigilante regulation to go unchecked undermines our democracy. We honor civil protests in this country, but we should not have to accept improper efforts to overturn the rule of law,” Goldberg said in a press release. “People who violate the law by improperly interfering with legitimate business activities, even to advance a political or public policy preference, can be held accountable for their actions through civil litigation.”

While not disclosed on the group’s website, GAIN spokesperson Craig Stevensis a partner at the DCI Group, which specializes in astroturf campaigns that have fought everything from anti-smoking laws to climate legislation. From 2005 through 2016, Exxon Mobil was a DCI client. In another detail not mentioned on the GAIN site, the group’s strategic adviser is James “Spider” Marks,who as of 2017 was the advisory board chair of the security firm TigerSwan, which — as The Intercept has documented extensively — engaged in “military-style counterterrorism measures” against anti-pipeline protesters.

For years, Exxon Mobil prolifically funded climate denier groups like the Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute. Under pressure, the company pledged to stop funding deniers in 2007, although it kept bankrolling politicians who deny the reality of the climate crisis. Exxon also still support right-wing think tanks like theManhattan Institute, which received $970,200 from Exxon between 2008 and 2018. As recently as 2011, MI Senior Fellow Robert Bryce said “the science is not settled” on climate change. Another MI Senior Fellow, Oren Cass, last year — the year after three of the five most expensive hurricanes to have ever hit the Atlantic — authored a report arguing that the potential costs of climate change are overblown, suggesting that many people prefer warmer temperatures and could adapt easily to global warming. In addition to Exxon, MI is — like other flagrant denier groups — funded by the Mercer Family Foundation; Rebekah Mercer,a key financier of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, runs the foundation and sits on the MI board. Exxon also continues to give large donations the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and remains a member of the American Petroleum Institute, each of which has fought hard against environmental regulations and climate measures. The oil company only left the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council in 2017, four years after it pushed model legislation in Oklahoma, Colorado, and Arizona that described global warming as a “theory.”

Itai Vardi reported at DeSmog this summer that Phil Goldberg, director of PPI’s Center for Civil Justice, has come out swinging against climate lawsuits being brought by cities and states against fossil fuel companies. The law firm at which Goldberg is a partner — Shook, Hardy & Bacon — defended the tobacco industryfor decades and was the inspiration for the fictional firm Smoot, Hawking in the 2005 film “Thank You For Smoking.” As a slew of lawsuits has begun to call into question fossil fuel companies’ role in fueling and spreading misinformation about the climate crisis, the industry has stepped into high gear to fight off litigation.

Goldberg is a former lobbyist for the coal company Peabody Energywho was brought on as special counsel by the National Association of Manufacturers in January as part of its Manufacturers Accountability Project, founded in 2017 to take on “activist litigation” against big oil companies; Exxon Mobil is a NAM member, and the MAP project has been among the most active bodies fighting off climate-related legal action. Both Peabody and NAM have also donated generously to climate denial groups over the years. Both, for instance, were members of the now-defunct Global Climate Coalition, which through the 1990s sought to undermine U.N. climate negotiations and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Goldberg has also been an adviser for ALEC’s Civil Justice Task Force. In addition to the model legislation on global warming, ALEC has vigorously opposed climate and clean energy legislation around the country.

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https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/exxonmobil-still-funding-climate-science-denier-groups

2x?

Why is ExxonMobil Still Funding Climate Science Denier Groups?

ELLIOTT NEGIN, SENIOR WRITER | AUGUST 31,2018,

A decade after pledging to end its support for climate science deniers, ExxonMobil gave $1.5 million last year to 11 think tanks and lobby groups that reject established climate science and openly oppose the oil and gas giant’s professed climate policy preferences, according to the company’s annual charitable giving report released this week.

Nearly 90 percent of ExxonMobil’s 2017 donations to climate science denier groups went to the US Chamberof Commerce and three organizations that have been receiving funds from the company since it started bankrolling climate disinformation 20 years ago: the American Enterprise Institute, Manhattan Institute and American Legislative Exchange Council, which — in a surprise move — ExxonMobil recently quit. (More on that later.)

The other ExxonMobil denier grantees last year were the Center for American and International Law($23,000), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000), National Taxpayers Union Foundation ($40,000), and WashingtonLegal Foundation ($40,000).

ExxonMobil’s funding priorities belie the company’s purported support for a carbon tax, the Paris climate agreement and other related policies, which it reaffirmed in a January blog post by its public affairs director, Suzanne McCarron. If, as McCarron claims, ExxonMobil is “committed to being part of the solution,” why is the company still spending millions of dollars a year on groups that are a major part of the problem?

ExxonMobil’s history of deceit

There is ample evidence that Exxon was fully aware of the danger its products pose to the planet since the 1980s and likely even earlier. Nonetheless, the company helped initiate a fossil fuel industry-backed climate disinformation campaign in 1998, a year before it merged with Mobil.

The company’s behind-the-scenes role went largely unnoticed for nearly a decade, but in early 2007, a report by the Union of Concerned Scientists revealed that it had spent at least $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to fund a network of more than 40 think tanks and advocacy groups to manufacture doubt about climate science under the guise of being neutral, independent analysts.

In response to the negative press generated by the UCS report, ExxonMobil vowed in its “2007 Corporate Citizenship Report” to “discontinue contributions [in 2008] to several public policy research groups whose positions on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

Note that the company only promised to stop funding several policy groups, not all, and it did in fact drop some high-profile grantees, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Heartland Institute and Institute for Energy Research. But it never completely ended its support for the disinformation network. From 1998 to 2007 — the year of the pledge — it spent nearly $23 million on it. From 2008 through last year, it spent another $13.17 million, for a total of $36.13 million over the last 20 years. As far as anyone has been able to determine from publicly available data, only Charles and David Koch, the multibillionaire owners of Koch Industries, have spent more to deceive the public about climate science and block government action on climate change.

Last year, $1.35 million of the $1.5 million ExxonMobil spent went to the following four organizations:

US Chamber of Commerce: Sponsoring slanted studies

In 2014, ExxonMobil committed to give $5 million to the US Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign in $1 million-a-year increments on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total donation to $1,015,000.

If one takes ExxonMobil’s climate policy claims at face value, the Chamber’s positions are polar opposite.

ExxonMobil has been very vocal about its support for the Paris climate agreement, for example, and during its former CEO Rex Tillerson’s brief stint as US secretary of state, he reportedly implored President Trump to keep the United States in it. What did Trump cite last year when he announced he was pulling out of the accord? A widely debunked report from the US Chamber of Commerce.

Cosponsored by a former ExxonMobil grantee — the American Council for Capital Formation (ACCF) —the report maintained that the Paris accord would cost the US economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades and eliminate 6.5 million industrial sector jobs by 2040.

According to analyses by the Associated Press (AP), Politifact and The Washington Post, however, the Chamber and ACCF cooked the books. As the AP put it: “The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting US targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to US businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.”

American Enterprise Institute: Undue faith in the market

The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an 80-year-old free-market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2017, ExxonMobil gave AEI $160,000, bringing its total to $4.49 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, the only AEI staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, rejects mainstream climate science, insists a carbon tax would be “ineffective,” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He not only disagrees with ExxonMobil’s professed climate policy positions, he has attacked the company for taking them.

Zycher’s colleague Mark Thiessen, a regular contributor to The Washington Post, also dismisses the Paris accord, maintaining that “free enterprise, technology, and innovation—not pieces of parchment signed in Paris and Kyoto — will revolutionize how we produce and consume energy.” Never mind that it often takes regulations to drive innovation and force corporations to adopt cleaner technology. Without federally mandated air pollution controls, for example, power plants and other industrial facilities would be emitting considerably more toxic pollution than they do today.

Manhattan Institute: Propaganda masquerading as news

Another free-market think tank, the Manhattan Institute, received $115,200 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, it has received $1.25 million. Like Zycher and Thiessen at AEI, Manhattan Institute fellows oppose a carbon tax and the Paris accord.

Earlier this year, the New York City-based organization hired longtime TV newsman John Stossel, former host of Fox Business Network’s “Stossel” and ABC’s “20/20,” to interview Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow Oren Cass for a slickly produced, 4-minute YouTube segment titled “The Overheated Costs of Climate Change.”

Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, told Stossel that the Paris climate agreement “was somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” Stossel wholeheartedly agreed. “The Earth is warming,” Stossel intoned in his wrap-up. “Man may well be increasing that. But the solution isn’t to waste billions by forcing emissions cuts here while other countries do nothing. Well, pretend to make cuts. Trump was right to repudiate this phony treaty.”

Waste billions while other countries do nothing? Besides the fact that it is now cheaper to produce electricity from utility-scale solar and wind energy in the United States than nuclear, coal and even natural gas, as of last November — a year after the Paris agreement officially went into effect — China, India and other major carbon emitters were already making significant progress in meeting their Paris accord commitments.

The other glaring problem with the segment is it’s a prime example of fake news. With a former network news show host playing anchor, viewers could easily mistake the piece as a clip from of a legitimate newscast. At least one member of the conservative echo chamber treated it that way.The Washington Free Beacon, an online news organization funded by GOP megadonor Paul Singer, ran a news story about the Stossel-Cass interview on March 19.

American Legislative Exchange Council: Fossil fuel industry ‘bill mill’

On July 12, ExxonMobil announced it had ended its longtime membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council after a disagreement over the corporate lobby group’s climate policy. From 1998 through last year — when Exxon Mobil reported it gave the group $60,000 — ALEC received $1.93 million from the oil company.

Over the last two decades, ALEC has routinely featured climate science deniers at its conferences and supplied state lawmakers with a range of fossil fuel industry-drafted sample legislation, including bills that would restrict investment in renewables, eliminate incentives for electric vehicles, and hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to residential and business customers.

Since 2012, more than 100 corporations, including BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and electric utilities Entergy, Pacific Gas & Electric and Xcel Energy, have severed ties with ALEC, in many cases because of its regressive policy positions.

ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC came just months after the company fought to defeat a draft resolution sponsored by the Heartland Institute — an ExxonMobil grantee from 1998 through 2006 — calling on the Environmental Protection Agency to “reopen and review” its “flawed” conclusion that climate change poses a threat to human health. The EPA’s “endangerment finding” requires the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions as hazardous pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

After ExxonMobil and the Edison Electric Institute (EEI), a utility trade group, objected to the resolution, the Heartland Institute withdrew it and accused the two of being in league with the likes of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club.

“Big corporations like ExxonMobil and trade groups like EEI have long been members of the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement,” Heartland’s president, Tim Huelskamp, said in a December 7 press release. “They’ve put their profits and ‘green’ virtue signaling above sound science and the interests of their customers.”

Huelskamp’s ludicrous assertion notwithstanding,some might construe ExxonMobil’s exit from ALEC as a welcome change in direction. The company’s money trail, however, clearly shows that it is still financing climate science denier groups that denigrate any and all climate policy options and provide cover for Congress and the current administration to do nothing. Until ExxonMobil stops funding these groups, its avowed support for a carbon tax, the Paris agreement and other climate initiatives can’t be seen as anything more than a cynical PR ploy.

Posted in: Energy, Global Warming Tags: carbon tax, Climate Denier, Climate Science, ExxonMobil, fossil fuel, Global warming

https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/:{2018/12/10:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:/ny-attorney-general-underwood-exxon-ethics/

Karen Savage

A nonprofit with ties to the fossil fuel industry has filed an ethics complaint against the New York attorney general’s office, alleging that Attorney General Barbara Underwood and two special assistant attorneys general are violating state ethics laws in their climate-related litigation against Exxon.

The Government Justice Center, led by board members who work for organizations that have received funding from oil industry and climate denial groups, alleges that Underwood is “accepting funding from an entity to conduct litigation by New York State on that entity’s behalf.”

The complaint alleges that Matthew Eisenson and Gavin McCabe, two special assistant attorneys general working on the office’s securities fraud case against Exxon as well as other work, are violating state law because they are paid through the NYU School of Law’sState Energy & Environment Impact Center.

Known as the State Impact Center, it wasestablished last year with funding fromBloomberg Philanthropies, a nonprofit founded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg to support state attorneys general in “defending and promoting clean energy, climate and environmental laws and policies.”

Eisenson and McCabe were both hired by the New York attorney general’s office through the State Impact Center’s fellows program. According to the Center’s website the Center “has offered all state attorneys general the opportunity to hire NYU Law Fellows to work under their direction as special assistant attorney generals on clean energy, climate change, and environmental issues.”

The Government Justice Center contends that Underwood’s office hired Eisenson and McCabe specifically to “help pursue a private party’s political and litigation agenda.” The Center says the use of the NYU fellows program also violates the law by giving the impression that Underwood’s office can be improperly influenced by Bloomberg.

The attorney general’s office said the arrangement violates no ethics laws and has been cleared by the state’s Joint Commission on Public Ethics.

The Government Justice Center said the alleged violations stem from Eisenson’s and McCabe’s names being included in signature blocks of recent climate change-related litigation, including Underwood’ssuit against Exxon for securities fraud, and a friend-of-the-court brief supporting New York City’s climate liability suit against five major oil companies.

“The presence of the special assistants in those cases, funded by Mr. Bloomberg, raises questions regarding whether Mr. Bloomberg and the Center are unduly influencing decision-making and litigation,” wrote Cameron J. Macdonald, executive director and general counsel for the Government Justice Center, who wrote the complaint.

Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies state attorneys general and their role in national policy making, said it is common for attorneys general to tap into the expertise of various interest groups.

“Overall I don’t see it [the complaint] as a particularly strong argument, in part because this type of arrangement has been very common amongst AGs for quite some time and that includes situations where AGs have worked with private class actionattorneys on a contingency fee basis, which has also raised ethics concerns, but generally speaking, courts across the country have allowed that arrangement to occur,” Nolette said.

“Clearly the [State Impact] Center has an agenda of ‘we want to fight climate change’ but that alone is not particularly unusual or what I would consider unethical,” he said.

“We don’t hide anything that we do,” said Christopher Gray, communications director for the State Impact Center. “We are not securities lawyers, we work on environmental policy. The idea that we’re directly involved in a meaningful way, doesn’t meet the facts.”

“This is another attempt by what appears to be a dark money group to de-legitimize the ExxonMobil investigation, which pre-existed the founding of the State Impact Center and which we don’t have any oversight or influence over,” Gray said.

According to its charity registration statement, the Government Justice Centerwas founded in 2016 to provide “public interest litigation focused on government waste, negligence, misappropriation and other improper actions.”

The organization’s board members include director James Copeland, a senior fellow and director of legal policy at the Manhattan Institute. Exxon gave $115,200 to the Manhattan Institute in 2017 for public information and policy research. The group posted a Youtube video in March that was made to look like a real news story titled “The ‘Overheated’ Costs of Climate Change.” It featured former TV newscaster John Stossel, who interviewed senior fellow Oren Cass, who maintains that the costs of the climate crisis are overestimated.

Treasurer for the Government Justice Center is Brandon Muir, who is also the executive director ofReclaim New York, an organizationchairedby Rebekah Mercer.Since at least 2015, the Mercer Family Foundation has fundednumerous organizations known forpromoting climate denial, including the Manhattan Institute and the Heartland Institute.

Tim Hoefer is president of the Government Justice Center and director of the Empire Center for New York State Policy, which was aproject of the Manhattan Institute.

Government Justice Center director and retired judge Robert S. Smith, spent more than 25 years aspartner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, the firm hired by Exxon to defend itself against a growing number of climate change-related lawsuits, including Underwood’s securities fraud case.

The ethics complaint echoes a report published earlier this year by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which relied on public records requests to allege that attorneys general are involved in a coordinated scheme by private interests to persuade elected officials to hold oil giants responsible for climate change. That alleged conspiracy includes Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey, who is also investigating Exxon for possible fraud.

“This seems to me to be just one additional part of this massive brawl between the New York attorney general’s office, the Massachusetts attorney general and ExxonMobil. I’m not terribly surprised that they filed this ethics complaint, but it doesn’t strike me as something that’s really going to go anywhere,” Nolette said.

2015 climate, 2019 robot jobs

https://www.c-span.org/video/?454499-2/the-future-worker

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434412/paris-climate-agreement-americans-foot-bill-no-effect-climate

Today, Earth Day, President Obama will attach America’s name to the Paris Climate Agreement. Greatly affected, according to gushing accounts in the press, will be the president’s “legacy.” Unaffected, according to math, will be the threat of climate change. And left holding the bill, as seems to happen with each new acquisition for the Obama presidential library, will be the American people. The agreement’s uselessness stems from its negotiating structure. Each country submitted a pledge of climate action, each pledge was accepted without question, and the sum of those pledges became the deal. Doe-eyed diplomats at the United Nations envisioned this process creating an “upward spiral of ambition,” as they phrased it during the 2014 Bonn Climate Conference.

But the major developing countries, whose rapidly rising greenhouse-gas emissions are the driving force behind fears of climate change, care more about economic growth for their impoverished populations. So, as I wrote at National Review Online in December, they submitted pledges to continue with business as usual. China pledged that its emissions would peak “around 2030,” precisely when the U.S. government’s national laboratory had already estimated the peak would occur. India’s pledge amounted to a slowdown from its current rate of progress. Pakistan said simply that it would “reduce its emissions after reaching peak levels to the extent possible,” which offers nothing beyond a definition of the word “peak.”

RELATED: The President’s Climate-Change Agenda Costs American Lives

Unsurprisingly, the sum of many pledges to do nothing is: nothing. When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology compiled the pledges and compared them with its own preexisting projection, it found a temperature reduction by 2100 of only 0.2°C. When the analysts compared the pledges with the projection created by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change back in 2000, they found no improvement at all.

Unfortunately, not everyone was in on the joke. Determined to display “leadership,” President Obama made the classic mistake of the kid who hears everyone is going skinny-dipping, strips naked, plunges into the water, and then turns to find his dry and still-modest peers laughing from the shore as they run off with his clothes. While everyone else both literally and figuratively mailed in their commitments, the president pledged a dramatic reduction in U.S. emissions: 26 to 28 percent below their 2005 level by 2025. To further grease the skids of international diplomacy, he committed the United States to lead the transfer of $100 billion in annual “climate finance” from the developed world to the developing countries that are pledging nothing.

The Obama administration concedes its own policies are unlikely to fulfill its own pledge. Third-party analyses, such as that from the Rhodium Group, conclude the policies will get nowhere close. Worse, all such estimates assume that the centerpiece of the Obama agenda, the Clean Power Plan, takes effect. But the Senate has passed a motion of disapproval over the rule and, in response to a legal challenge filed by the majority of states, the Supreme Court has issued an unprecedented stay that suspends its implementation. Meanwhile, as Cato’s Chip Knappenberger has highlighted, new evidence suggests that current emissions are higher than previously thought, making the hill left to climb that much steeper.

RELATED: Yes, Let’s Prosecute Climate-Change Fraud — and Start with the Scaremongers Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434412/paris-climate-agreement-americans-foot-bill-no-effect-climate

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/433830/climate-change-prosecution-liberals-should-be-liable

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/434412/paris-climate-agreement-americans-foot-bill-no-effect-climate

--rwefd

https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/428661/climate-play-acting

OREN CASS December 31, 2015, Issue @OREN_CASS

The conference in Paris accomplished nothing much Goalposts move all the time, but rarely are they disassembled and carted away, leaving the teams to circle aimlessly while the crowd roars and the commentators prattle on as if nothing had changed. That’s what happened at the just-concluded Paris climate talks, which managed to produce an agreement but also marked the collapse of a 25-year effort to catalyze collective global action on climate change. The collapse settles the long-running debate over whether strong “leadership” by the United States would induce developing countries to make sacrifices for the sake of reducing emissions; it didn’t. By the time leaders jetted from around the world to the opening ceremonies, such actions were not even on the table .... $

Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/428661/climate-play-acting Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/428661/climate-play-acting

Read more at: https://www.nationalreview.com/nrd/articles/428661/climate-play-acting...

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8/16

carbon tax support BS

Besides its political donations and lobbying, the company is still spending millions of dollars a year on think tanks, advocacy groups and trade associations that dispute climate science and disparage climate policies, including a carbon tax. Just last month, ExxonMobil was a lead sponsor of the American Legislative Exchange Council’s (ALEC) annual conference, which featured Oren Cass, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a self-described free-market think tank ExxonMobil has been funding since 1998. According to one conference participant, Cass “absolutely eviscerated the case for conservatives adopting a carbon tax.” Conference organizers also provided ALEC state legislator members with a sample resolution against the Environmental Protection Agency’s plan to curb power plant carbon emissions.

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Manhattan Institute:

ExxonMobil gave the Manhattan Institute $200,000 in 2015, boosting the company's total donations to the self-described free-market think tank to $1 million since 1998. In turn, the institute has been cranking out papers and articles denouncing efforts to cut carbon and maligning renewable energy technologies.

Last summer, for example, Manhattan Institute Senior FellowOren Cass dismissed the idea of a carbon tax—ExxonMobil's supposed preferred policy—as a "shell game" in an article he wrote for National Affairs. He followed up that essay in October with a white paper calling the impending UN climate negotiations in Paris a "farce." What did Cass propose as a better solution? He urged policymakers to "abandon fruitless negotiations and focus instead on the realistic option of promoting innovation and preparing for any future adaptation that may be necessary."

The institute's longtime point man on energy,Robert Bryce—who previously worked for the ExxonMobil-funded Institute for Energy Research—says he's "agnostic" about climate change. Over the years he has written numerous columns for the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other publications praising oil, natural gas and coal and disparaging wind and solar. A recent Bryce column in the National Review, for instance, denounced tax breaks and subsidies for the wind industry but ignored the fact that, since 1918,federal oil and gas industry subsidies have averaged $4.85 billion a year in today's dollars.

American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC):

ALEC, a secretive lobby group that drafts sample corporate-friendly legislation for state lawmakers, has received $1.79 million from ExxonMobil since 1998 and that investment is still paying dividends. At ALEC's annual meeting last July, for example, corporate and legislator members collaborated on bills and resolutions that would inhibit state implementation of the Clean Power Plan, hamper the solar industry from selling electricity directly to homes and businesses and undermine state renewable energy standards by restricting investment in wind and solar.

One of the keynote speakers at that meeting, Stephen Moore—founder of the Club for Growth and a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation—declared at a plenary session that the "biggest scam of the last 100 years is global warming." ALEC's official position on climate change is only slightly more nuanced, leaving open the question of the role human activity plays. "Climate change is a historical phenomenon," its website states "and the debate will continue on the significance of natural and anthropogenic contributions."

With that scientifically challenged position, it's no wonder ALEC invites speakers for its conferences from such notorious climate science denier groups as the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the Heartland Institute and, of course, the Heritage Foundation—all former ExxonMobil grantees.

While ExxonMobil and other major carbon producers Chevron and Peabody Energy remain steadfast ALEC members, more than 100 corporations have severed ties with the organization for a variety of reasons, including its stance on climate change. Those companies include a number of heavy hitters in the energy sector, including American Electric Power, BP, ConocoPhillips and Shell.

National Black Chamber of Commerce: ...