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see FF CEO clark

see 1st amend corp person exxon 11 25

MONTANA HAWAII 10 26

tariff trump?

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4/16 see USCoc 1 and 2, plus tag

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http://www.desmogblog.com/us-chamber-commerce

extensive, see harbert

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MTA 10 26

Signed into law on May 14, 2026, Act 11 uses the state’s authority over corporations and other artificial entities to remove their power to spend money influencing elections and ballot measures. The law is scheduled to take effect July 1, 2027. It targets corporate political spending rather than eliminating all money from elections.

For Move to Amend, this fight raises a fundamental question: Who governs—the people, or the artificial entities our laws create?

What Hawaiʻi’s law does

The approach begins with a straightforward principle: corporations exist because laws create them. Those laws grant privileges, including limited liability, and define the powers corporations may exercise.

Hawaiʻi’s legislature asserts that those powers should not include spending money to support or oppose candidates, political parties, political committees, or ballot measures. The legislation distinguishes the powers granted to artificial entities from the speech, petition, and association rights of human beings. It also includes exceptions for bona fide news coverage, commentary, and editorials, and provisions allowing qualifying political committees to operate.

Known as the Corporate Power Reset, this strategy seeks to address corporate election spending through the laws that define corporations themselves. Its supporters argue that states can withdraw political spending powers without directly overturning Citizens United. Whether courts accept that distinction is now being tested.

Who is challenging it?

The Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, represented by the Institute for Free Speech, filed its challenge in June. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce filed a separate lawsuit on September 24. Both seek to block the law.

The Chamber argues that Act 11 violates First Amendment protections for corporations and other organizations and conflicts with Supreme Court precedent. Hawaiʻi’s defense centers on its authority to define corporate powers.

At an October 13 hearing, U.S. District Judge Leslie Kobayashi expressed skepticism toward the state’s arguments and indicated that she viewed the law as restricting political speech. She did not issue a ruling at the hearing, taking the competing motions under advisement. The law has not been struck down by that hearing.

Why this matters beyond Hawaiʻi

Move to Amend supports efforts to challenge corporate political power at the state level. Organizing around corporate powers can educate communities, build coalitions, and put a basic democratic principle into practice: the people should determine the privileges of the entities their laws create.

But the lawsuits also expose the constitutional obstacle confronting that work. When corporations invoke constitutional rights to resist public control, communities must defend their decisions within a legal framework that grants artificial entities protections intended for people.

That is why state action and constitutional change belong together.

Overturning Citizens United alone is not enough. Move to Amend’s goal reaches beyond one decision: ending corporate constitutional rights and the treatment of money spent influencing elections as protected speech.

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AN 12 25

On Friday, a nonprofit forced the Trump administration to unseal a damning complaint lodged by the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission against Pepsi for colluding with Walmart to raise food prices across the nation. New un-redacted information claims FTC Chair Ferguson and his colleague Mark Meador (both Trump appointees) were hiding the mechanics of Pepsi’s and Wal-Mart’s price fixing.

Pepsi is a “must-have” product for grocery stores, and Walmart is also massively powerful,” reports BIG Newsletter writer Matt Stoller. Critics say Pepsi allegedly engages in price discrimination to maintain the approval of Walmart, its biggest buyer — even going so far as to police prices at smaller rival stores. And it prepares reports for Walmart showing them their pricing advantages on Pepsi products.

When the “price gap” between Wal-Mart and its tiny rivals narrow too much, Pepsi tracks where consumers were buying Pepsi products outside of Walmart. It keeps logs on stores who would “self-fund” Pepsi product discounts, nicknaming them “offenders” and then raise their stock price, forcing them to carry those costs down to their customers.

“This dynamic is why independent grocery stores are dying,” said Stoller. “… It’s led to less competition, fewer local grocery stores, and higher prices. … To the end consumer, it creates an optimal illusion. Walmart appears to be a low-cost retailer, but that’s because it induces its suppliers to push prices up at rivals.”

Much of this information was redacted by Trump officials, however, including Ferguson and Meador. Normally, when the government files an antitrust case, the complaint gets redacted to protect confidential business information. Then the corporate defendant and the government haggle over what is genuinely confidential business information and complaints are eventually unsealed with some minor blacked out phrases, and the case goes on.

“In this case, however, … Ferguson abruptly dropped the case in February after Pepsi hired well-connected lobbyists,” said Stoller. “… Ferguson ended it the day before the government was supposed to go before the judge to manage the unsealing process. And that kept the complaint redacted. With the complaint kept secret, Ferguson, and … Meador, then publicly went on the attack.”

Ferguson released a “bitter and personal” statement against Biden-era FTC Chair Lina Khan — who had brought the complaint against Pepsi — implying that she was lawless and partisan, that there was “no evidence” to support key contentions, and that Ferguson had to “clean up the Biden-Harris FTC’s mess.” Fellow commissioner Mark Meador later echoed his comments on on X.

“And that was where it was supposed to stay, secret, with mean-spirited name-calling and invective camouflaging the real secret Ferguson was trying to conceal,” said Stoller. “That secret is something we all know, but this complaint helped prove that the center of the affordability crisis in food is market power. If that got out, then Ferguson would have to litigate this case or risk deep embarrassment. So, the strategy was to handwave about that mean Lina Khan to lobbyists, while keeping the evidence secret.”

But anti-monopoly group The Institute for Local Self-Reliance filed to make the full complaint public, and Judge Jesse Matthew Furman agreed to hear ILSR’s case, with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and Pepsi bitterly opposed.

“Last week, Furman directed the FTC unseal the complaint. So we finally got to see what Ferguson and Meador were trying to hide,” Stoller said.

Read the full BIG report at this link

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ref

https://www.exxonknews.org/p/exxon-uses-free-speech-argument-to

exxon uses free speech argument to fight climate laws
It’s not the first time the oil giant has tried to ward off accountability using the First Amendment.

Emily Sanders

Oct 29, 2025

ExxonMobil has sued California over a pair of state laws that force big companies to disclose financial climate risks to shareholders and the full greenhouse gas emissions resulting from their businesses — arguing that the measures violate the company’s free speech. It’s the latest example of Exxon, the biggest U.S. oil company, wielding the First Amendment as both a shield and sword in court.

The California Climate Accountability Package, which passed in 2023, would make companies doing business in California disclose emissions that result from the use of their products — also known as “Scope 3” emissions. That category makes up the vast majority of emissions from the oil and gas industry, but companies including Exxon have fought to avoid making them transparent.

Exxon’s new lawsuit argues that by requiring it to account for the entirety of its emissions, the laws would force it to “espouse California’s preferred framing for issues of immense public concern” and to “describe its emissions and climate-related risks in terms the company fundamentally disagrees with.” The lawsuit asks a U.S. District Court to stop California from enforcing the laws.

The case targets the country’s only existing disclosure laws for greenhouse gas emissions, even as the federal government ends emissions reporting and required climate disclosures at the federal level. But it’s also part of a years-long trend of corporations using First Amendment arguments in an attempt to shield themselves from scrutiny and regulation, experts say.

“​​This is part of a long history of companies including Exxon trying to use the First Amendment to block regulation that they dislike,” said Amanda Shanor, an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, who has chronicled some of those high-stakes efforts. “That’s not really how the First Amendment works or is supposed to work.”

The fossil fuel industry, in particular, has leveraged First Amendment arguments to repel criticism over their role in the climate crisis. In recent years, oil companies have claimed that lawsuits across the country accusing them of misleading the public about climate change violate their free speech rights. From Oregon to Massachusetts, the District of Columbia to California, Exxon has brought motions to dismiss states’ and municipalities’ climate deception lawsuits under anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statutes — laws that were developed to protect the free speech of press and civil society groups.

One of those motions, responding to lawsuits filed by the state of California and eight California municipalities, argues that oil companies “have long exercised their rights to participate in the public debate over which policies best balance the challenges posed by a changing climate and the world’s increasing need for energy,” and that “This lawsuit threatens Defendants’ continued participation in those debates.”

The law firm representing Exxon in that motion, O’Melveny and Myers, is the same as in the latest First Amendment lawsuit against California. The argument seeks to cast Exxon’s public statements on climate change as political speech, which concerns public policy and has stringent First Amendment protections, rather than commercial speech, which does not enjoy the same level of protections.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” said Robert Brulle, an environmental sociologist and professor at Brown University and director of research at the Climate Social Science Network, who has co-authored briefs in support of climate deception lawsuits. “Their fallback defense is freedom of speech — ‘nobody ever said we have to be truthful.’”

Mobil Oil, now part of ExxonMobil, helped pioneer the idea of corporations as citizen-like entities with free speech rights in an effort to revive their reputation back in the 1970s. Exxon and Mobil backed other corporations’ First Amendment lawsuits, arguing that companies should be free to express their views on “matters of public concern,” including climate change. In Supreme Court cases like First National Bank v. Bellotti and Citizens United v. FEC, the idea of corporate free speech was expanded to usher in nearly unlimited corporate money in politics.

Still, none of oil companies’ anti-SLAPP arguments has been validated by judges. Under existing First Amendment law, Shanor explained, Exxon’s lawsuit against California’s disclosure laws should be very unlikely to succeed, too.

“Exxon is grasping at straws,” said Maggie Coulter, a senior attorney for the Climate Law Institute at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Courts have already rejected companies’ weak arguments rebranding their greenwashing and misinformation as free speech.”

Exxon and other corporations could be hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court might eventually use such a case to alter the boundaries between political and commercial speech — or “change what the rules are in a way that will favor them,” Shanor said.

“You just keep throwing the same basic core argument up there, wave the flag of the First Amendment and say, ‘leave us alone.’ Kind of like holding up a cross to a vampire,” said Brulle. “Now they’re playing it out in California to try to build a record in the court.”

‘Disproportionate blame’ on Exxon

According to Exxon’s lawyers, California’s disclosure framework would place “disproportionate blame on large companies like ExxonMobil for being large.”

“ExxonMobil understands the very real risks associated with climate change and supports continued efforts to address those risks,” reads the complaint. Such frameworks “send the counterproductive message that large companies are uniquely responsible for climate change no matter how efficiently they satisfy societal demand for energy, goods, and services.”

Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, said that Exxon should “let the readers decide.”

“If Exxon doesn’t like California’s framing, it’s free to supplement it with its own framing and offer an explanation of why it thinks that one is better,” he said.

The company’s own framing hasn’t gone over well so far, at least with climate experts. Exxon is the top investor-owned carbon emitter in the world, according to the latest Carbon Majors database by researchers at the nonprofit think tank InfluenceMap, and one of the most profitable. But Exxon officials have often blamed the company’s emissions largely on the habits of consumers. In an interviewwith Fortune last year, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods said that “the people who are generating the emissions need to be aware of and pay the price … for generating those emissions,” and referred to Scope 3 emissions as “essentially the emissions of our customers.”

Just before that interview, Exxon sued its own shareholders in an effort to block a proposal for the oil giant to limit its Scope 3 emissions. The lawsuit was dismissed, but not before shareholders revoked their proposal.

“What Exxon is asking for in this case is to say that shareholders should have no right to question companies on climate-related issues,” Danielle Fugere, president & chief counsel of shareholder advocacy group As You Sow, told ExxonKnewsat the time.

Both that lawsuit and another last year brought by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce against the California Air Resources Board, which also alleged California’s climate disclosure laws violated the First Amendment, were argued by law firm Gibson Dunn — a favorite of fossil fuel companies. The industry has also used the firm to pursue massive legal damages from their opponents, including this year’s nearly $667 million verdict against Greenpeace for its role in the protests against Energy Transfer’s Dakota Access pipeline.

Earlier this year, after California Attorney General Rob Bonta and a group of nonprofits sued Exxon for a “decades-long campaign of deception” about the efficacy of plastic recycling, Exxon sued them back under defamation laws — a clear example of a SLAPP, legal experts said.

Though climate deception lawsuits face growing attacks from fossil fuel allies and the Trump administration in the United States, they have seen recent successes abroad — a Paris Court just ruled that French oil giant Total’s advertising about “net zero” and leading the energy transition was misleading consumers. And over the last week, two new lawsuits have been brought against major polluters in the UK and Germany by victims of climate disasters. “I think that the evidence is pretty solid that Exxon and Mobil and all sorts of other folks knew all about climate damages and lied about it, and it’s just going to get more solid the more information we get,” said Brulle.

California officials said they would fight to uphold the disclosure laws, which could soon show up in other states, too. “These laws are about transparency,” said Christine Lee, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice, in a statement.“ExxonMobil might want to continue keeping the public in the dark, but we’re ready to litigate vigorously in court to ensure the public’s access to these important facts.”

---

fake paper CoC ILR:

https://flarecord.com/stories/512480648-fort-lauderdale-says-it-has-no-intention-of-filing-suit-against-fossil-fuel-companies-over-climate-change

John Breslin

**May 6, 2019**

FORT LAUDERDALE - Efforts by environmental groups to encourage Florida cities and counties to sue fossil fuel companies appear to be foundering as one city lobbied says it has no intention of filing one.

Municipalities, counties, and even states have filed suits against oil and gas companies, including giants such as Exxon, claiming the companies knew that burning fossil fuels contributed to damaging climate change, but concealed the information.

Last October, the Fort Lauderdale City Commission heard from Earthrights International (ERI), a Washington D.C.-based environmental advocacy group involved in a number of similar suits in various parts of the country.

Seth Platt, a lobbyist with LSN Partners.

ERI appears to have worked with other groups in pushing cities in Florida to file suits, according to emails obtained by the Florida Record. One of those groups, the Institute for Governance & Sustainable Development (IGSD), was represented by Miami Beach lobbyist, Seth Platt, of LSN Partners.

Representatives attempted to persuade the commission to file suit, arguing that fossil fuel companies should be liable for the cost to the municipality to combat the effects of climate change, including rising sea levels. It has not worked, yet.

"We have no intention of filing a lawsuit," Alain E. Boileau, city attorney, told the Florida Record after the city was asked for an update following last October's presentation.

Other government entities in south Florida were reported to be in contact with the environmental organizations, including Miami-Dade County

But a spokesperson for Mayor Carlos Gimenez told the Florida Record: “We’ve checked with the county attorney’s office, and there has been no discussion regarding any such lawsuits."

Another reported target was the City of Miami Beach.In a brief statement to the Florida Record, city spokesperson, Melissa Berthier, said, "Regrettably, the City of Miami Beach is disinclined to discuss this subject matter."

More than a dozen lawsuits have been filed across the country, from California, to Colorado, to New York City. Most are filed by coastal municipalities.

But, in one consequential decision, a suit filed by San Francisco and Oakland arguing under public nuisance laws was dismissed by a federal court in California.

Judge William Alsup, of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, found that the issue of climate change “deserves a solution on a more vast scale than can be supplied by a district judge or jury in a public nuisance case." An appeal was filed.

Some of the suits involved ERI, which promises to help organize legal action at no cost to a municipality. The group managed to secure a hearing before the Fort Lauderdale City Commission last October.

ERI program director Marco Simons, told the commissioners the suits “primarily seek reimbursement for some of the costs of adapting to climate change and its impacts - which likely requires billions of dollars for Fort Lauderdale.”

"It is that the fossil fuel industry, for years, pursued a strategy of reckless production while knowing that it would result in serious climate impacts - and both concealing and misleading the public about that knowledge,” Simons said.

Emails were sent earlier in the year to Fort Lauderdale Mayor Dean Trantalis and his chief of staff, Scott Wyman, referring to upcoming meetings.

One sent in June was from lobbyist Platt, who stated his client was IGSD.One of its projects, the Center for Climate Integrity, is headed by Richard Wiles, who also publishes Climate Liability News (CLN).

The Center for Climate Integrity's "central goal is to accelerate corporate and governmental policy changes that speed the energy transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources and that otherwise contribute to a safe climate," according to the IGSD. "One way to advance this goal is to require fossil fuel producers to bear the cost of the damage caused by their products."

Platt, in an email June 2018, referring to an upcoming meeting, stated his client was trying to collaborate with an organization called the Environmental Research Institute and an individual, Jorge Mursuli, whom he said was working with the City of Miami to file a lawsuit against the fossil fuel companies.

"I have invited Jorge Mursuli to the meeting," Platt wrote in the email, which also contained a run down of relevant information, including ongoing cases and a survey of Florida residents, which he wrote "overwhelmingly support making polluters pay."

The second email, from Mursuli to the mayor, with Wyman and Platt cc'd, was sent in the middle of July and also referred to an upcoming meeting. Mursuli made clear that ERI "(not Environmental Research Institute) was leading the efforts to explore the possibility of litigation."

He added that "it makes sense that our lead counsel at Earthrights comes see you and your team to best discuss potential strategy."

Platt is registered as a lobbyist in Fort Lauderdale for IGSD, but not ERI. He did not reply to several messages asking for comment.

William Large, of the Florida Justice Reform Institute said many want to blame a problem on a "company with deep pockets."

"An essential element of every tort case is ‘causation',” Large told the Florida Record. "There is no evidence that fossil fuel companies ‘caused’ climate change. As such, these type of lawsuits lack merit."

16 discourses

http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/uploads/2/8/4/0/28401609/chamber_of_obstruction_report.pdf

june 2021

This report should be cited as: Triedman, Cole. 2021. “Chamber of Obstruction: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s’ Shifting Discourses on Climate Change, 1989-2009.” Brown University Climate and Development Lab

Table of Contents

Executive Summary……………………………………………………………………... 2

Introduction……………………………………………………………………………….. 3

Research Methods……………………………………………………………................ 5

Key Findings……………………………………………………………………………….. 5

The Chamber Used 16 Climate Discourses………………………………....... 5

Discourses shifted strongly by presidential administration……………….. 9

From climate affirmation, to skepticism, to denial…………………………... 10

Global warming and the economy………………………………………………. 13

The Chamber presented climate change as unsolvable……………………. 15

The Chamber attacked policies when climate action loomed……………... 16

Bill Kovacs pushed the Chamber to more extreme positions…………….... 17

Key Documents…………………………………………………………………………….. 19

Discussion…………………………………………………………………………………... 25

Works Cited……………………………………………………………………………….... 29

Executive Summary

The United States Chamber of Commerce has been a central actor in the national and global countermovement

against ambitious action on climate change. During the formative period for climate change policy from 1989 to

2009, the U.S. Chamber mobilized a shifting set of discourses on the issue aimed at obstructing policy proposals

and treaties under consideration. This report analyzes how these discourses shifted through 41 primary source

documents from the Chamber over those years.

Seven key findings illuminate patterns in the Chamber’s dynamic climate discourses over the course of the 1989-

2009 period. First, the Chamber utilized 16 unique “discourses of delay” to discount climate science and dismiss

a series of policy proposals. Second, the frequency by which the Chamber employed these discourses shifted

significantly between presidential administrations. Third, after affirming climate science in an internal May 1989

presentation, the U.S. Chamber shifted to frequent climate skepticism that culminated in a public denial of climate

science during the ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ moment of 2009. Fourth, after a decade of articulating a fundamental

conflict between climate action and economic prosperity, in the 2000’s the Chamber began suggesting that a

longterm, non-transformative strategy for climate progress– referred to as a ‘paradigm shift– could combine formerly

competing objectives.

Fifth, after delaying addressing whether or not climate change was a solvable challenge,

this paradigm shift coincided with the introduction of surrender discourses that discredited the possibility of

remedying climate change. Sixth, over the course of the 1989-2009 period, the Chamber tended to ‘diagnose’

climate change and policy challenges when significant climate policy opportunities were absent, and frame

discussions in prognostic, motivational, and policy-specific terms when they were present. Finally, the Chamber’s

messaging about climate change became markedly more extreme, dramatic, and aggressive during the 2000’s,

likely related to the hiring of William Kovacs as Vice President of its Environment, Technology, and Regulatory

Affairs group.

Overall, however, the U.S. Chamber combined these discourses to form a recurring argument: The climate change

problem is elusive and the science needs more time to develop, solutions being proposed would be harmful to the

American economy and put us at disadvantage to other countries, non-transformative solutions like technological

innovation and voluntary action are a viable strategy while scientific and policy issues get resolved.

This research shows how dynamic Chamber climate discourses were over the formative period for climate policy

in the United States. Arguably, these discourses and the pressure exerted by the Chamber and its members were

successful in delaying climate action for these crucial decades. While the recent shift in Chamber public discourse

towards the “inaction is not an option” message is encouraging for climate action advocates, the findings of this

analysis suggest a heightened level of scrutiny.

...finding 3: From climate affirmation, to skepticism, to denial

Over the course of the 1989-2009 period, the uncertainty of climate science was a key issue to the Chamber’s diagnostic framings about climate change. Overall, the Chamber’s messaging about climate science was chronologically bookended by glimpses of affirmation and denial, with a sea of skepticism and uncertainty in between. Skepticism towards the validity and usefulness of climate change science appear in 14 of 41 documents reviewed in this report, and was clearly an issue of major concern to the U.S. Chamber. One of the earliest documents framing climate science is the May 1989 Harvey Alterpresentation to the International Chamber of Commerce.

This document is unique in that it can be qualified as semi-internal, at least within elite business association circles.While we were unable to confirm the exact audience for this presentation, the “Key Documents” section explains why it is unlikely that the event to which this presentation was delivered was accessible or oriented to the public. This document is unique as the sole example of climate affirmation among 41 documents, delivered as the climate change countermovement’s defining networks and strategies were just materializing. However, the document is also unique for its contradictions: it presents still-relevant climate science in great depth, while also advancing climate skepticism discourses. The climate affirmation in this transcript is robust. It states that, “There is qualitative agreement among prognosticators that sea levels will rise, wetlands will flood, salt water will infuse fresh water supplies, and there will be changes in the distribution of tree and crop species and...[p10]

US Chamber of Commerce Implodes on Climate Policy - DeSmog

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William Kovacs, the Chamber's vice president for the environment has taken the bureaucratic low road, insisting that members are happy with the Chamber's stone age climate policy and that "so far, no companies have filed a motion that they want the chamber to revisit it."

US Chamber's Long History of Killing Clean Energy ... - DeSmog

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All cited embarrassment over Chamber climate policy as the cause. The Chamber brought this rift upon itself. Vice President Bill Kovacs triggered the humiliation during the summer when he suggested that the Environmental Protection Agency be subjected to a Scopes monkey trial to review the science behind man-made climate change.

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Finally, the Chamber's messaging about climate change became markedly more extreme, dramatic, and aggressive during the 2000's, likely related to the hiring of William Kovacs as Vice President of its Environment, Technology, and Regulatory Affairs group. Overall, however, the U.S. Chamber combined these discourses to form a recurring argument:

U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Learn more about the Chamber's deception >>

New research found that the Chamber of Commerce knew about the dangers posed by the burning of fossil fuels for decades, but deliberately skewed their external messaging to sow doubt and uncertainty about climate science whenever key climate policy proposals were on the table.

Citing data from U.K.-based think tank InfluenceMap, a recent report from the Senate Committee on the Climate Crisis called the Chamber of Commerce one of “the two most influential opponents of climate action,” along with its founding organization, the National Association of Manufacturers. 

Explore the #SlipperySix

The American people deserve answers, and as the Chamber’s President and CEO, Clark must testify. Here is just some of the evidence that members of the House Oversight Committee should ask her to explain:

The Chamber of Commerce Knew About the Dangers of Climate Change Early On

The Chamber Worked Diligently on Behalf of Big Oil Member Corporations to Promote Climate Denial, Downplay Climate Risks and Obstruct Action

The Chamber is the Most Powerful Lobbying Force on Capitol Hill -- and Uses That Power to Oppose Climate Action.

CIC

...Our analysis also reveals that fossil fuel trade associations far exceed the PR and advertising spending of renewable energy trade associations. One fossil fuel industry trade association, the American Petroleum Institute, spent over six times more than four prominent renewable energy trade associations combined. In total, the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), Growth Energy, the National Biodiesel Board (NBB), and the Solar Energy Industry Association (SEIA) spent $98.4 million on PR and advertising during the 2008 to 2017 period. API alone dwarfs all four associations, spending a total of $663.2 million during the same time period.

API alone spent over six times more than the renewable energy trade associations we analyzed.

In addition to a comprehensive analysis of how industry utilizes these sizable contracts, CIC has made available all the IRS 990 tax forms used in this analysis, and produced interactive data visualizations and downloadable spreadsheets with the raw data.

In this report, the Climate Investigations Center has extended and updated the Center for Public Integrity’s groundbreaking 2015 report on public relations spending by trade associations.  Spending data we have compiled since the CPI analysis confirms that public relations firms remain in a lucrative and influential partnership with big business and energy trade associations.

The Center for Public Integrity published “Who needs lobbyists? See what big business spends to win American minds,” which was the most thorough analysis of trade association spending to date in January 2015. The report compiled IRS 990 data from 2008 through 2012 to reveal that trade associations were often spending more on public relations firms than lobbyists. For some industries, advertising and front groups seemed to be the most powerful chosen means of achieving policy goals, putting public relations firms at the center of the policy debate over clean air, climate solutions, and good governance.

Download our data here (.csv file), or view in the table below:

Trade Association Contract Recipient Year Amount Paid

Western Energy Alliance Resonate Networks 2014 $175,000.00

Western Energy Alliance FTI Consulting 2017 $217,317.00

Western Energy Alliance Resonate Networks 2013 $200,000.00

Western Energy Alliance FTI Consulting 2018 $243,000.00

Western Energy Alliance Clear Channel 2013 $125,360.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Agency 2018 $4,834,422.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2018 $5,270,805.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2017 $1,150,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce R Street Films 2018 $1,554,650.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Albright Stonebridge Group LLC 2017 $712,888.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2017 $2,919,990.00

United States Chamber of Commerce R Street Films 2016 $4,500,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2016 $9,204,150.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2016 $10,400,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Glass House Strategy 2016 $797,550.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Integrated Web Strategy 2015 $1,756,009.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2015 $1,734,327.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2014 $14,456,184.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2015 $1,200,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2014 $7,050,000.00

p2

United States Chamber of Commerce R Street Films 2014 $4,075,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Purple Strategies 2014 $4,652,568.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Craft Media Digital 2014 $6,341,375.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Integrated Web Strategy 2013 $2,208,823.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2013 $1,049,800.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Adfero Group 2013 $709,250.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2012 $23,365,676.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Craft Media Digital 2012 $8,718,330.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Designated Market Media 2012 $8,267,709.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Something Else Strategies 2012 $2,773,205.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Smart Media Group 2012 $2,650,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2011 $2,605,111.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Revolution Media Group 2010 $12,268,494.00

United States Chamber of Commerce National Media Public Affairs 2010 $9,095,731.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Mentzer Media Services 2010 $6,313,861.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Smart Media Group 2010 $8,013,628.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Designated Market Media 2010 $8,200,000.00

United States Chamber of Commerce National Media Public Affairs 2009 $60,772,056.00

United States Chamber of Commerce APCO Worldwide 2009 $17,370,239.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Integrated Web Strategy 2009 $1,858,864.00

p3

United States Chamber of Commerce Integrated Web Strategy 2008 $1,225,909.00

United States Chamber of Commerce Presentation Testing 2008 $452,450.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Crosscut Strategies 2018 $251,005.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Crosscut Strategies 2018 $451,005.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Greentech Media 2014 $161,363.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Greentech Media 2013 $206,338.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Blue Worldwide 2011 $410,790.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Tiger Communications 2011 $275,915.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Forum One Communications 2011 $160,200.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Tiger Communications 2010 $272,164.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Blake & Company 2010 $141,343.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Tiger Communications 2009 $277,035.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Pillsbury Winthrop 2009 $143,719.00

Solar Energy Industries Association Tiger Communications 2008 $282,561.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Bully Pullpit Interactive LLC 2018 $1,297,500.00

Nuclear Energy Institute APCO Worldwide 2017 $5,801,384.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Bully Pulpit Interactive 2017 $1,129,201.00

Nuclear Energy Institute APCO Worldwide 2016 $1,152,606.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2016 $1,624,600.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Kivvit 2016 $4,887,451.00

p 4

Nuclear Energy Institute Kivvit 2015 $7,231,176.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2015 $1,997,011.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2015 $931,512.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2014 $2,194,235.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Potomac Communications Group 2014 $486,715.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2014 $1,602,939.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2013 $1,876,578.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2013 $1,796,853.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Potomac Communications Group 2013 $462,956.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2012 $4,964,386.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Burson-Marsteller 2012 $294,414.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2012 $4,463,288.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Potomac Communications Group 2012 $491,602.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2011 $4,720,107.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2011 $4,107,578.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Luntz Global LLC 2011 $547,256.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2010 $1,867,491.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Hill+Knowlton 2010 $2,128,574.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Potomac Communications Group 2010 $403,107.00

Nuclear Energy Institute Smith & Harroff Inc 2009 $2,221,698.00

many more pages]

axios 2 22

INSTITUTIONAL UPHEAVAL: Several GOP institutional titans in the 2014 cycle have since receded.

The Koch network: The vast operation established by billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch was almost a parallel Republican Party. Candidates and their consultants regularly pitched themselves at Koch donor retreats and worried how the Kochs viewed them.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: In 2014, the Chamber was heavily involved in Republican primaries. "Chamber Republicans" competed against "Tea Party Republicans," claiming greater appeal to the business community than insurgent conservatives and better prospects in the general election.

Conservative movement groups: Some of the most sought-after brands on the right pre-Trump are no longer considered as important.

https://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/business-a-lobbying/573610-koch-backed-group-launches-7-figure-ad-blitz-opposing

the hill no lnx

Koch-backed group launches 7-figure ad blitz opposing $3.5T bill

Americans for Prosperity (AFP), an advocacy group backed by GOP mega-donor Charles Koch, launched a multimillion-dollar ad campaign Thursday attacking Democrats’ $3.5 trillion social spending package.

The connected TV, radio, direct mail and online ad blitz argues that the bill would lead to more government control and higher inflation. It will target 25 Democrats, including moderates who have expressed reservations about the $3.5 trillion price tag such as Sens. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) and Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.).

“A government takeover of our economy is a fundamental departure from the spirit of entrepreneurialism we’ve relied on for generations to drive prosperity, and there’s only one outcome — unmitigated economic disaster that will be difficult to reverse,” AFP President Tim Phillips said in a statement.

In recent months, AFP has orchestrated an extensive effort to oppose both Democrats’ reconciliation package and the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which it argues doesn’t make sufficient changes to regulations needed to improve roads and bridges.

The group’s most recent ad campaign comes as House Democrats prepare to vote on the infrastructure bill Monday. Democratic leaders say the bill must be passed alongside the party-line spending package that invests in climate, child care and other Democratic priorities.

The Democrats’ reconciliation package has come under fire from business lobbying groups and conservative organizations over its proposed tax increases on large corporations and wealthy individuals, as well as its measure to allow the federal government to negotiate the price of prescription drugs.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday announced a six-figure ad campaign urging moderate House Democrats to oppose the $3.5 trillion bill after warning that it would revoke endorsements for Democrats who vote for the measure.

The National Federation of Independent Business, a GOP-aligned small business group, also launched a six-figure ad campaign Wednesday urging Rep. Cindy Axne (D-Iowa) and Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) to vote against the reconciliation bill.

Senate Budget Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has punched back at the campaigns to sink the spending packages filled with Democratic priorities.

“This is what oligarchy and a corrupt political system are all about," he tweeted in response to a corporate lobbying blitz announced last month.  "The rich and large corporations get richer, and their lobbyists do everything possible to protect their wealth and greed. Not this time."

negin imi

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/exxonmobil-climate-science-denial/

lnx: The US Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the US Chamber of Commerce — a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades.

A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

in 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.”

The assertion that human activity is merelycontributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that “a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans.”

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to “do everything [it] can to prevent” the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill — which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors — “from becoming law.”

And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for “the increased use of natural gas” to make “further progress.”

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonise the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source — coal — for another — methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet.

Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants....

ref

http://www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/home/new-cdl-reports-chamber-of-obstruction

chamber of Obstruction: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Shifting Discourses on Climate Change, 1989-2009

By Cole Triedman, with support from Profs. Rachel Wetts & Timmons Roberts

A new CDL report examines key patterns of climate affirmation, uncertainty, denial and delay from several dozen historical U.S. Chamber of Commerce documents spanning the 1989-2009 period. The report finds that:

The findings suggest that, while the U.S. Chamber in 2019 adopted an "inaction is not an option" climate message and support for market-based climate policies, the shifts should be viewed with a heightened level of scrutiny. 

Contact the lead author: cole_triedman@brown.edu

FULL REPORT AVAILABLE HERE

https://ucs-documents.s3.amazonaws.com/global-warming/ExxonMobil-grants-2020.pdf

ExxonMobil Foundation and Corporate Grants to Climate Science Denier and Obstructionist Organizations

Organization 2020 Total Years

Acton Institute $365,000 1998–2007

Advancement of Sound Science Center $50,000 2000–2004

American Conservative Union Foundation $90,000 2005–2008

American Council for Capital Formation

Center for Policy Research

$1,779,523 1998–2015

American Council on Science and Health $345,000 2000–2018

American Enterprise Institute $100,000 $4,860,000 1998–2020

American Legislative Exchange Council $1,928,200 1998–2017

American Spectator Foundation $115,000 2005–2009

Annapolis Center $1,153,500 1998–2009

Atlas Economic Research Foundation $1,082,500 1998–2009

Capital Research Center / Greenwatch $265,000 2000–2007

Cato Institute $125,000 1998–2006

Center for a New Europe-USA $170,000 2003–2005

Center for American and International Law

(formerly Southwestern Legal Foundation)

$560,650 1998–2019

Center for Defense of Free Enterprise $230,000 2003–2005

Center for the Study of CO2 and Global Change $100,000 1998–2006

Chemical Education Foundation $155,000 2001–2007

Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow $582,000 1998–2007

Communications Institute $515,000 2004–2011

Competitive Enterprise Institute $2,005,000 1998–2005

Congress of Racial Equality $325,000 2003–2008

Consumer Alert $70,000 1998–2004

Environmental Literacy Council $100,000 2005–2007

Federal Focus $125,000 2005

Federalist Society $280,000 2000–2019

Foundation for Research on Economics and the

Environment

$450,000 1998–2012

Fraser Institute $120,000 2003–2004

Free Enterprise Action Institute $50,000 2003

Free Enterprise Education Institute $80,000 2004–2005

FreedomWorks (formerly Citizens for a

Sound Economy)

$380,250 1998–2001

Frontiers of Freedom $1,272,000 2000–2007

George C. Marshall Institute $865,000 1999–2011

Heartland Institute $676,500 1998–2006

Heritage Foundation $830,000 1998–2013

Hoover Institution (Stanford University) $430,000 1998–2019

ExxonMobil Foundation and Corporate Grants

to Climate Science Denier and Obstructionist Organizations

Organization 2020 Total Years

Hudson Institute $40,000 2000–2015

Independent Institute $85,000 1998–2007

Independent Women's Forum $65,000 2002–2013

Institute for Energy Research /

American Energy Alliance

$337,000 2002–2007

Institute for Senior Studies $30,000 2005

Institute for Study of Earth and Man $76,500 2000–2005

International Policy Network - North America $390,000 2003–2006

International Republican Institute $115,000 1998–2005

Landmark Legal Foundation $90,000 2002–2010

Law and Economics Center

(George Mason University)

$475,000 1998–2015

Lexington Institute $10,000 2002

Lindenwood University $40,000 2004–2008

Manhattan Institute $1,415,200 1998–2019

Media Institute $120,000 1998–2005

Media Research Center / Cybercast News Service $362,500 2003–2009

Mercatus Center (George Mason University) $415,000 2003–2016

Mountain States Legal Foundation $90,000 2008–2019

National Association of Neighborhoods $225,000 2002–2010

National Black Chamber of Commerce $1,195,000 2002–2018

National Center for Policy Analysis $645,900 1998–2008

National Center for Public Policy Research $445,000 1998–2008

National Legal Center for the Public Interest $216,500 1998–2006

National Taxpayers Union Foundation $865,000 2006–2017

Pacific Legal Foundation $285,000 1998–2015

Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy $665,000 1998–2009

Property and Environment Research Center

(formerly Political Economy Research Center)

$155,000 1998–2007

Reason Foundation / Reason Public Policy Institute $321,000 1998–2005

Regulatory Checkbook $50,000 2006

Regulatory Studies Center

(George Washington University)

$140,000 $1,207,000 2013–2020

Science and Environmental Policy Project $20,000 1998–2000

Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory $417,212 2005–2009

Tech Central Science Foundation $95,000 2003

Texas Public Policy Foundation $80,000 1998–2011

U.S. Chamber of Commerce $250,000 $5,045,000 2014–2020

Washington Legal Foundation $655,000 1998–2019

Totals $490,000 $39,273,935 1998-2020

also ref

also seth borenstein

wASHINGTON (AP) —Announcing that the U.S. will withdraw from the Paris climate accord, President Donald Trump misplaced the blame for what ails the coal industry and laid a shaky factual foundation for his decision.A look at some of the claims in a Rose Garden speech and an accompanying fact sheet about the deal to curtail emissions responsible for global warming:

WHITE HOUSE: The Paris climate accord “would effectively decapitate our coal industry, which now supplies about one-third of our electric power.”

THE FACTS: The U.S. coal industry was in decline long before the Paris accord was signed in 2015. The primary cause has been competition from cleaner-burning natural gas, which has been made cheaper and more abundant by hydraulic fracturing. Electric utilities have been replacing coal plants with gas-fired facilities because they are more efficient and less expensive to operate.

TRUMP: Claims “absolutely tremendous economic progress since Election Day,” adding “more than a million private-sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: That’s basically right, but he earns no credit for jobs created in the months before he became president. To rack up that number, the president had to reach back to October. Even then, private-sector job creation from October through April (171,000 private-sector jobs a month) lags just slightly behind the pace of job creation for the previous six months (172,000), entirely under President Barack Obama.

TRUMP: “I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris.”

THE FACTS: That may be so, but Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh, is not Trump country. It voted overwhelmingly for Hillary Clinton in November, favoring her by a margin of 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent. The city has a climate action plan committing to boost the use of renewable energy. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto, a Democrat, has been an outspoken supporter of the Paris accord, and tweeted after Trump’s announcement that “as the Mayor of Pittsburgh, I can assure you that we will follow the guidelines of the Paris Agreement for our people, our economy & future.”

WHITE HOUSE: “According to a study by NERA Consulting, meeting the Obama administration’s requirements in the Paris Accord would cost the U.S. economy nearly $3 trillion over the next several decades. By 2040, our economy would lose 6.5 million industrial sector jobs — including 3.1 million manufacturing sector jobs.”

THE FACTS: This study was paid for by two groups that have long opposed environmental regulation, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation. Both get financial backing from those who profit from the continued burning of fossil fuels. The latter group has received money from foundations controlled by the Koch brothers, whose company owns refineries and more than 4,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines.

The study makes worst-case assumptions that may inflate the cost of meeting U.S. targets under the Paris accord while largely ignoring the economic benefits to U.S. businesses from building and operating renewable energy projects.

Academic studies have found that increased environmental regulation doesn’t actually have much impact on employment. Jobs lost at polluting companies tend to be offset by new jobs in green technology.

WHITE HOUSE, citing a study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: “If all member nations met their obligations, the impact on the climate would be negligible,” curbing temperature rise by “less than .2 degrees Celsius in 2100.”

:{THE FACTS: The co-founder of the MIT program on climate change says the administration is citing an outdated report, taken out of context. Jake Jacoby said the actual global impact of meeting targets under the Paris accord would be to curb rising temperatures by 1 degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit.

“They found a number that made the point they want to make,” Jacoby said. “It’s kind of a debate trick.”

One degree may not sound like much, but Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute in Germany, says, “Every tenth of a degree increases the number of unprecedented extreme weather events considerably.”}:

Annotated White House talking points:[audio]

==

also ref

150 pp

https://accf.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/170316-NERA-ACCF-Full-Report.pdf

https://www.politifact.com/article/2017/jun/01/fact-checking-donald-trumps-statement-withdrawing-/

also ref

no lnx

Donald Trump announced that the United States will withdraw from the Paris accord on climate change. All but two countries signed the agreement. But Trump said the deal puts the United States at a disadvantage.

"The United States will withdraw from the Paris climate accord," Trump said June 1, 2017, "but begin negotiations to re-enter either the Paris accord or an entirely new transaction on terms that are fair to the United States."

The Paris accord had several ambitious goals. Signatories agreed to do their part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and keep the world’s temperature to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above what it was before industrial production took root.

Each country set its own targets, with reductions to begin in 2020. By mid century, the goal would be zero greenhouse gas emissions.

President Barack Obama had pledged to reduce emissions by 26 percent to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025.

Wealthy nations agreed to provide $100 billion a year to help developing countries move away from fossil fuels and use more renewable power supplies.

We reviewed a number of claims Trump made during his White House speech. (We’ll be updating this article.)

Trump: The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."

Trump cited a number of negative statistics about the predicted economic impact from the climate deal, including a $3 trillion drop in gross domestic product, 6.5 million industrial sector jobs lost and 86 percent reduction in coal production, all by 2040.

Take these statistics with a grain of salt.

All of these statistics come from a March 2017 study, prepared by NERA Economic Consulting, that estimates the potential impact of hypothetical regulatory actions necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. The study makes assumptions that gave several economics and environmental professors pause when reacting to the NERA study for ClimateFeedback.org.

Yale professor Kenneth Gillingham said the NERA model tends to result in higher costs than other economic models. The study assumes certain hypothetical regulations, but "one could easily model other actions with much lower costs," and it also ignores the benefits of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, like avoiding the negative effects of climate change.

Additional professors pointed out that the study assumes:

• that other countries don’t make emission reductions in line with the Paris Agreement, therefore leading American companies to relocate;

• that industries are static and don’t change to adapt to the regulations, and;

• that there would be no increase in clean electricity generation compared to the baseline scenario.

In other words, the NERA model makes assumptions that generate an extreme result.

"The NERA model provides useful information, but it is important for it to be taken in context of model results from other models and not cherry-picked as was done here," Gillingham said.

The Paris Agreement would result in "lost jobs, lower wages, shuttered factories and vastly diminished economic production."

In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017

Trump: "China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."

Under the Paris agreement, each country publicly declares how much it will reduce greenhouse gas emissions and what it will do to get there. So in that sense, the agreement doesn’t allow or disallow specific actions, like building plants.

Regardless, China has actually taken steps to stop building coal plants. In January, China stopped construction of 103 new coal-fired plants. The move sidelined scores of projects where work had already begun and put 120 gigawatts of capacity on hold.

Between the effects of an economic slowdown and an effort to move toward less-polluting sources, China has cut its use of coal three years in a row.

The key benchmark under the Paris agreement is the overall reduction in emissions. Climate Action Tracker, a project of three research groups, reported in May that "China’s carbon dioxide emissions appear to have peaked more than a decade ahead of its Paris Agreement commitment."

China has promised that by 2030, it would reduce the carbon intensity of its economy by 60–65 percent below 2005 levels, and increase the share of non-fossil energy to around 20 percent.

Still, the Climate Action Tracker assessment comes with a warning.

Researchers said that China’s goals are "not ambitious enough to limit warming to below 2°C, let alone the 1.5°C limit in the Paris Agreement, unless other countries make much deeper reductions and comparably greater effort than China."

Donald Trump

President

"China will be allowed to build hundreds of additional coal plants. So, we can't build the plants, but they can, according to this agreement."

In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017

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Trump: "Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."

Trump’s statement about the amount of temperature reduction expected under the treaty is broadly accurate but needs some additional context.

According to John Reilly, who co-directs the Joint Program on Science and Policy of Global Change at MIT, the Paris agreement would reduce global temperature by two-tenths of one degree Celsius compared with earlier climate treaties.

The Paris deal was expected to reduce global temperatures by building on the earlier 2009 Copenhagen Accord, imposing deeper carbon emission cuts on signatories and bringing new countries like China into an international climate pact.

Yet as the Paris Agreement was under negotiation, Reilly co-authored an MIT report that criticized the deal for not making steep enough cuts in emissions to reach the Paris agreement’s ambitious goal of capping this century’s temperature increases at 2 degrees Celsius.

"Those pledges shave 0.2 C of warming if they’re maintained through 2100, compared with what we assessed would have been the case by extending existing measures (due to expire in 2020) based on earlier international agreements in Copenhagen and Cancun," Reilly said in October 2015, when the MIT study was published. "We are making progress, but if 2 C stabilization is our goal, it’s not nearly enough."

However, Reilly said that tackling climate problems depends on taking a series of incremental steps to reduce carbon emissions, and noted that pulling out of the Paris agreement would require even bigger reductions in the future.

Donald Trump

President

"Even if the Paris Agreement were implemented in full, with total compliance from all nations, it is estimated it would only produce a two-tenths of one degree -- think of that; this much -- Celsius reduction in global temperature by the year 2100. Tiny, tiny amount."

In a speech – Thursday, June 1, 2017

Trump: China "can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us."

Trump claimed that under the agreement, China — the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases — can increase emissions for more than a decade but prevented the United States from doing so.

"They can do whatever they want for 13 years. Not us," Trump said.

This doesn’t accurately describe the agreement. All parties to the Paris Agreement communicate what’s known as their Intended Nationally Determined Contribution toward the goal of stabilizing greenhouse gas concentrations.

China’s intentions include maxing out carbon dioxide emissions around 2030, if not sooner, and to increase to about 20 percent its proportion of non-fossil fuels, such as renewables. The United States’ intentions include reducing emissions by 26 to 28 percent below its 2005 level in 2025.

These intentions draw from a November 2014 China-U.S. agreement on climate change, before the Paris deal came into effect.

Back in 2014, now Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., claimed that the bilateral deal left China off the hook for 16 years. That wasn’t accurate, either.

The agreement outlined intentions, it was not binding, and China was already planning to cut down on its emissions. Experts then told us that while theoretically China could meet its emissions target simply by shutting down major plants on Dec. 31, 2029, it would be risky to wait that long rather than slowly working toward the goal. China also pledged a 20 percent increase in non-fossil-fuel use, and that’s something that would take years to carry out, experts said.  We rated McConnell’s claim Mostly False.

Trump: "At 1 percent growth, renewable sources of energy can meet some of our domestic demand. But at 3 or 4 percent growth, which I expect, we need all forms of available American energy, or our country will be at grave risk of brownouts and blackouts."

Trump has consistently argued that the United States economy can grow at 3 percent or 4 percent a year, but that’s not a realistic expectation.

While that level of growth was common between 1948 and 2005, it hasn’t happened since -- and economists we checked with recently were skeptical that it could happen with any consistency in the near future.

So that makes Trump’s concerns about growth-related brownouts and blackouts seem unwarranted.

Economic growth, economists say, stems from two major factors: population growth and improvements in productivity. But neither of these factors are well positioned to drive 3 percent or 4 percent growth, they say.

The working-age population isn’t growing as fast as it used to due to lower birth rates. And Trump himself wants to curb the other way population can grow -- through immigration.

Meanwhile, productivity growth is equally out of reach of policymakers. "You can create bubbles to prop up GDP growth for a few years, such as the 2005 to 2008 housing bubble, but to boost productivity growth materially and durably, you need to make important changes over long numbers of years," said Chris Lafakis, a senior economist at Moody’s. "You also need transformative technological innovation, which is not predictable."

Trump: "India will be allowed to double its coal production by 2020. Think of it. India can double their coal production. We're supposed to get rid of ours."

India does have plans to nearly double its coal production, and the agreement does not prevent that. But the Paris Agreement does not even mention the word coal, nor does it do anything to put a global moratorium on coal.

Each signatory has set its own goals and has to report on its progress.

A 2015 report by the Economic Times, a financial daily from India, discussed a plan of Coal India Limited, a state-owned coal mining company, to double its coal production by 2020.

The story goes on to give the caveat that the doubling of production is subject to land acquisition and environment clearance, all of which is yet to happen.

Coal India produces around 84 percent of India's overall coal production, and its decision to double coal production would technically mean India is planning to almost double its coal production.

"The environment is non-negotiable and we are extremely careful about it," Anil Swarup, the top bureaucrat in the coal ministry, told Reuters in 2015. "(But) our dependence on coal will continue. There are no other alternatives available."

But is India allowed to double coal production by 2020?

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change says the Paris Agreement requires all parties to put forward their best efforts through "nationally determined contributions" (NDCs) and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead.

This means all parties will have to regularly report on their emissions and implementation efforts.

India, in ratifying the agreement on October 2, 2016, said it would follow a path of low carbon commitment in tandem with its national laws and development agenda, including eradication of poverty. India also committed to reduce emissions 33 to 35 percent of 2005 levels by 2030.

What it effectively means is that the agreement allows the nations who signed the Paris Agreement to set their own reduction targets to help achieve the overall target of reducing the rise in global warming below 2 degree Celsius.

Trump: "I was elected to represent the citizens of Pittsburgh, not Paris. I promised I would exit or renegotiate any deal which fails to serve America's interests."

Invoking the city of Pittsburgh, Pa., has a certain irony, because the city voted overwhelmingly for Trump's rival, Democrat Hillary Clinton.

Clinton won almost 60 percent of the vote in Allegheny County, which includes Pittsburgh. The percentage was even higher in many precincts within the city of Pittsburgh itself. (Allegheny County includes a range of suburbs in addition to the city.)

That said, the picture changes if you look at the surrounding counties, particularly Beaver, Fayette, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland counties. These areas -- which are heavily blue-collar, disproportionately rural, especially reliant on energy extraction, and historically Democratic -- went particularly strongly for Trump in 2016. Hillary Clinton managed to win only about 30 to 40 percent of the vote there.

Trump's success in counties like these helped him flip Pennsylvania to the Republican column and win the presidency. But across the country, cities such as Pittsburgh with a more urban, educated population went heavily for Clinton.

A final note on Manila

Trump opened his speech saying his team was tracking the terrorist attack in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines. The most recent reports say that the gun fire that took place at a resort came from a lone man aiming to rob gamblers.

Our Sources

Linked in the story.

no lnx full

The truth about ExxonMobil's campaign to fund climate science denial

Elliott Negin and Independent Media Institute October 26, 2021

In a secret video recording made public in late June, a top ExxonMobil lobbyist—Keith McCoy, who was fired soon afterward—not only conceded that the oil giant's support for a carbon tax is a sham, but he also admitted that the company quietly financed climate science denier groups to stave off government action and maximize its profits—a fact that my organization, the Union of Concerned Scientists, and others revealed more than a decade ago.

"Did we aggressively fight against some of the science? Yes," McCoy, then ExxonMobil's senior director of federal relations, said during the interview. "Did we join some of these 'shadow groups' to work against some of the early efforts? Yes, that's true. But there's nothing illegal about that. We were looking out for our investments. We were looking out for our shareholders."

For all his candor, McCoy got at least one thing wrong. ExxonMobil did "join"—in other words, pay—denier groups to spread disinformation to blunt initial government attempts to curb carbon emissions. But McCoy inaccurately used the past tense. In fact, the company continues to fund them.

That videotaped interview caused some major heartburn for McCoy's boss, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods, especially since theHouse Committee on Oversight and Reform has invited Woods—as well as top executives from the American Petroleum Institute, BP America, Chevron, Shell Oil and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—to testify at a hearing on October 28 on the "long-running, industry-wide campaign to spread disinformation about the role of fossil fuels in causing global warming."

ExxonMobil has been at the heart of that campaign. Since 1998, the company has paid a network of seemingly independent think tanks and advocacy groups more than $39 million to manufacture doubt about climate science and stymie government action. Only Charles Koch and his late brother David, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries, are known to have spent more.

In 2020, according to ExxonMobil's most recent corporate grantmaking report, the company spent $490,000 on three grantees—the American Enterprise Institute ($100,000), the Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington University ($140,000), and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($250,000). That amount is down from the $790,000 the company reported it spent on nine climate science denier groups in 2019 and a fraction of what it spent in the past, but there's a catch.

True, the company lost more than $22 billion in 2020 and cut back its grants across the board. But another factor for this decline is that ExxonMobil changed how it reports grants. As first reported by Salon, the company only listed grants of $100,000 or more in its 2020 annual giving report. In previous years, it included grants of $5,000 or more. The change reduces transparency and ultimately means there is no way to tell how much the company spent in smaller donations to support climate disinformation in 2020 or compare the grants it made in 2020 with previous years.

Only three denier groups—the same three named in the 2020 grantmaking report—received $100,000 or more from ExxonMobil in 2019. That year, their grants collectively amounted to $625,000. The other six denier groups the company funded in 2019—the Center for American and International Law ($5,000), the Federalist Society ($10,000), the Hoover Institution ($15,000), the Manhattan Institute ($90,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000)—collectively received $165,000. None of those grants, even if ExxonMobil continued them, would wind up in the 2020 report, given the company's new threshold.

Still, it's worth taking a closer look at where the bulk of ExxonMobil's self-reported climate disinformation budget did go in 2020.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

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In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, "Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option." The assertion that human activity is merely contributing to climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that "a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans."

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to "do everything [it] can to prevent" the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—"from becoming law." And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for "the increased use of natural gas" to make "further progress."

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

The American Enterprise Institute

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Economist Benjamin Zycher might be considered the climate science denier in residence at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which has received $4.86 million from ExxonMobil since 1998. Zycher insists that a carbon tax would be "ineffective," has called the Paris climate agreement an "absurdity," and rejects the scientific consensus about the causes and seriousness of global warming.

Zycher published his most recent broadside against climate science in the Summer 2021 issue ofNational Affairs, a formerly independent conservative policy quarterly that AEI brought in-house in 2019. In his essay, "The Case for Climate-Change Realism," he falsely argued that the "available science" does not support the notion that human activity is "the single most significant cause of climate change" and the "available data" undercut the assessment that extreme weather events are "evidence of an ongoing climate crisis."

As he has in previous articles, Zycher cited roundly debunked hypotheses for the primary causes of climate change, including a shift in northern Pacific Ocean circulation patterns called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, which scientists have determined is incapable of causing a long-term warming trend, and "changes insolar activity," when, in fact, the sun's energy has declined since the 1980s while average global temperatures have continued to climb.

This summer was not a fortuitous time to be peddling discredited theories. On August 9, less than two months after Zycher posted his essay, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a landmark, nearly 4,000-page "code red for humanity" report warning that the climate crisis is close to spiraling out of control and human activity is "unequivocally" to blame.

Zycher's main objective? To make a case, no matter how specious, for continued reliance on fossil fuels, which he falsely claimed are less expensive than renewables. Proposals to cut carbon emissions, including the Paris agreement, would have little real impact, he argued, and could "be accomplished only by substituting expensive energy for cheaper energy." In fact, according to a recent analysis by Bloomberg, it is "now cheaper to build and operate new large-scale wind or solar plants in nearly half the world than it would be to run an existing coal or [natural] gas-fired power plant." To be sure, no one would confuse Zycher for a scientist or National Affairs for a peer-reviewed journal. But he serves ExxonMobil's interests as a seemingly independent expert who continues to express doubt about climate science and the viability of renewable energy, thereby providing cover for climate science deniers in Congress.

George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center

The relatively unknown Regulatory Studies Center at George Washington (GW) University received $140,000 from ExxonMobil in 2020 and $1.2 million from the company since 2013.Director Susan Dudley founded the center in 2009 after serving as President George W. Bush's "regulatory czar" at the Office of Management and Budget and, before that, running the Regulatory Studies Program at Koch-financed Mercatus Center at George Mason University. She currently serves in various capacities for other longtime climate science disinformation groups, including the Koch-founded Cato Institute, the Federalist Society, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The Regulatory Studies Center portrays itself as an "objective, unbiased" policy shop, but—like the Mercatus Center—its primary raison d'être is to weaken and quash government regulations, according to a 2019 analysis by the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. The GW center's main tools are reports and public comments it submits to Congress, and although it does not get much mainstream news media attention,it has found a receptive audience on Capitol Hill—and in the previous administration. Much of the Trump administration's deregulatory agenda, Public Citizen found, echoed the center's recommendations, including "dramatically reducing the cost that the government attributes to carbon emissions."

But should the Regulatory Studies Center be lumped in with climate science disinformation groups? In response to the Public Citizen report, as well as criticism from UnKoch My Campus and GW student groups, the center issued a statement in February disputing the charge that it rejects climate science. "Contrary to unsubstantiated claims, no one in the Regulatory Studies Center questions climate science," it said. "In fact, most of the Center's scholars do not focus on environmental or energy issues at all. Those who have written on climate issues address economic and legal questions, not the science."

Whether or not the center directly disputes climate science is beside the point. In the face of incontrovertible scientific evidence, most ExxonMobil-funded disinformation groups have revised their position on the reality of climate change. Instead of challenging the science, their efforts now tend to focus on denigrating renewable energy, overstating the costs of transitioning to a clean energy economy while ignoring the benefits, and preventing government action. That is exactly what the Regulatory Studies Center does.In recent years, for example, it has published papers and filed public comments opposing stronger efficiency standards for home appliances and vehicles that would dramatically reduce carbon emissions.

The center also has enlisted the help of unabashed climate science deniers. In the fall of 2018, for example, it tapped Julian Morris to file a public comment supporting the Trump administration's proposed rollback of Obama-era standards for cars and light trucks designed to increase fuel economy and, for the first time, substantially reduce tailpipe carbon emissions.Morris, president and founder of the International Policy Network and vice president of research at the Reason Foundation—two libertarian, climate science denier organizations—falsely declared in a paper published in March 2018 that the "effects of climate change are unknown—but the benefits may well be greater than the costs for the foreseeable future."

Millions More for Disinformation

The money ExxonMobil donated in 2020 to AEI, the GW Regulatory Studies Center and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents only a small percentage of the company's recent outlays to sway public opinion and blunt government climate action. It is difficult to document all of the company's related expenditures, but they include:

More than $5 million on Facebook ads in 2020, which is more than half of the $9.6 million that the U.S. oil and gas industry spent on the ads, according to an analysis by the think tank InfluenceMap that reviewed more than 25,000 ads on Facebook's U.S. platform. Many of the ads described natural gas as a "green" fuel source and argued that cutting carbon emissions would drive up energy costs.

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An estimated $10 million in annual dues to the American Petroleum Institute (API) (based on how much Shell Oil recently revealed it paid). The U.S. oil and gas industry's oldest and largest trade association, API is working overtime to block stricter methane emissions standards. McCoy indirectly referenced API during the secretly taped interview when he said ExxonMobil relied on third parties to publicly represent its interests in Congress. "We don't want it to be us, to have these conversations, especially in a hearing," he said. "It's getting our associations to step in and have those conversations and answer those tough questions and be, for the lack of a better term, the whipping boy for some of these members of Congress."

At least $100,000 in annual dues to trade associations (based on what it reported it spent in 2019) that have a long track record of peddling climate disinformation, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.[ipaa]

Nearly $834,000 during the 2018 and 2020 election cycles to 118 of the 139 climate science deniers currently in Congress. Over that same time period, the company reportedly spent nearly$41 million to lobby in Washington, but neither McCoy nor ExxonMobil's other in-house lobbyists have broached the topic of a carbon tax—the company's avowed top priority—with legislators since 2018, according to its quarterly lobbying reports.

So while ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods and his colleagues proclaim that they fully understand the threat posed by climate change and are "committed to being part of the solution," the evidence shows they continue to spend tens of millions of dollars every year to promote gridlock in Congress on the issue.The future of the planet as we know it hangs in the balance, but as McCoy acknowledged in his interview, ExxonMobil was—and still is—looking out for its investments and its shareholders' short-term interests, regardless of the long-term consequences.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, D.C.

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The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Since 2014, ExxonMobil has given more than $5 million on top of its annual dues to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—a major player in blocking action on climate change for decades. A few years after becoming an ExxonMobil grantee, the Chamber gained some unwanted notoriety by financing a widely debunked report that then-President Trump cited as a primary rationale for pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement.

In 2019, however, the Chamber appeared to flip 180 degrees, declaring on its website, "Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option." The assertion that human activity is merelycontributingto climate change is inaccurate, given that burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, but the statement did represent a quantum leap from when the association spuriously maintained in comments submitted to the Environmental Protection Agency in 2009 that "a warming of even 3 [degrees Celsius] in the next 100 years would, on balance, be beneficial to humans."

That said, the Chamber vowed in an August 24 press release to "do everything [it] can to prevent" the proposed $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill—which would slash carbon emissions from the electric power and transportation sectors—"from becoming law." And in a section on its website addressing climate change, the Chamber calls for "the increased use of natural gas" to make "further progress."

Increase the use of natural gas?! That runs counter to what climate science says about the need to swiftly decarbonize the energy sector, essentially trading one major carbon pollution source—coal—for another—methane, which is 86 times more potent than carbon dioxide in warming the planet. Moreover, according to a December 2019 study in the scientific journal Environmental Research Letters, the carbon dioxide emissions attributable to the boom in natural gas use over the last decade alone have now surpassed the emissions avoided by closing coal-fired power plants.

ballotopedia  https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Chamber_of_Commerce

United States Chamber of Commerce is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit membership organization that aims to advocate for pro-business policies at the federal level. The organization is based in Washington, D.C., and has seven regional offices across the country. Members include businesses, local chambers of commerce, trade and professional associations and organizations representing American business interests abroad.[1][2]

Mission

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

“...serves its members and the nation's business community by analyzing national economic and social issues and by helping legislators and national leaders to shape policies and proposals to foster the development of American business.[3]”

[4]

History

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce was established in 1912, when President William Howard Taft asked for a group of business community representatives to work with the government on business affairs. The organization's initial work concerned infrastructure and transportation, with the group supporting the creation of the Federal Trade Commission in April 1914. During the Great Depression, the organization supported the Revenue Act of 1938. After World War II, they supported further infrastructure development, advocating the creation of the U.S. Department of Transportation in 1966.[2]

In 1994, the organization supported the signing and implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). According to the Chamber of Commerce's website, the group began lobbying the federal government in 1997. Their website notes that the group's "primary mission is to win legislative victories for business on Capitol Hill."[2]

Work

The Chamber has advocated for public policy initiatives in the following issue areas, according to its website:[5]

The Chamber's 2015 priorities focused on the organization's Jobs, Growth and Opportunity Agenda. These priorities include "expanding trade, producing more domestic energy, improving infrastructure, modernizing the regulatory process, making essential changes to entitlements, fixing the flaws in Obamacare, curbing lawsuit abuse, and advancing American innovation by protecting intellectual property." The agenda also focuses on revitalizing capital markets, passing immigration reform and improving education and training, which will expand opportunity, address inequality, and create jobs."[6]

In 2016, the Chamber continued to support the Jobs, Growth, and Opportunity Agenda.[7]

In 2020, the Chamber focused on 17 policy areas including energy, immigration, intellectual property, and legal reform.[8] The Chamber also responded to the coronavirus pandemic, saying, "No business or family should go bankrupt because of this crisis. The U.S. Chamber is committed to providing every business and worker the help they need."[9]

Political activity

2018 elections
Endorsement of Mary Glassman (D) in CT-5

The day before the August 14 Democratic primary for Connecticut's 5th Congressional District, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce endorsed Mary Glassman over Jahana Hayes. The group said Glassman "has a clear vision to champion free trade, develop a sound immigration policy, fix America’s crumbling infrastructure, and support students from classroom to career.” Hayes, by contrast, was endorsed by progressive groups like Democracy for America and Our Revolution and, unlike Glassman, supported single-payer healthcare.[10] Hayes defeated Glassman in the primary.

According to the Daily Kos, this was the first time the U.S. Chamber had endorsed a candidate in a Democratic primary since it backed U.S. Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-Ark.) in 2010.[11]

2016 elections
Donald Trump trade speech

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce took to Twitter to criticize Donald Trump's policy positions on international trade deals during his June, 28, 2016, speech in Pennsylvania. "Under Trump's trade plans, we would see higher prices, fewer jobs, and a weaker economy," the Chamber claimed among a series of tweets highlighting the positive aspects of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the potential benefits of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).[12]

Trump responded to the Chamber's criticism by reasserting his opposition to NAFTA and the TPP while claiming that the Chamber is controlled by special interests. "They’re a special interest that wants to have the deals that they want to have,” said Trump at a rally in Maine the following day. "They want to have TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the worst deals, and it’ll be the worst deal since NAFTA.”[13]

Save the Senate initiative

The Chamber introduced the Save the Senate initiative in May 2016 in order to boost fundraising for Republican candidates and maintain a Republican majority in the United States Senate. The initiative aimed to bring together Republican activists, regardless of their support for 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, in an effort to bolster Republican candidates at the congressional level. The Wall Street Journal identified the following Republican leaders in the Save the Senate movement:[14][15]

Candidate endorsements

The Chamber endorsed the following candidates during the 2016 election cycle:

Amicus brief activity

The U.S. Chamber Litigation Center, a nonprofit affiliated entity of the United States Chamber of Commerce, files amicus curiae briefs in courts throughout the country. The group files amicus briefs "that present unique and compelling legal arguments, and that educate courts on the practical implications of legal decisions to the broader business community."[22]

According to the organization's website, the Chamber filed amicus briefs in the following U.S. Supreme Court cases from 2013 to 2016:

Amicus briefs filed by the U.S. Chamber Litigation Center in the U.S. Supreme Court, 2013-2016
2013[23]
  • Air Wisconsin Airlines Corp. v. Hoeper
  • Atlantic Marine Construction Co. v. U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas et al. (J-Crew Management Inc.)
  • Carmax Auto Superstores California LLC et al. v. Fowler
  • DaimlerChrysler AG v. Bauman et al.
  • Environmental Protection Agency v. EME Homer City Generation; American Lung Association v. EME Homer City Generation
  • Fifth Third Bancorp, et al. v. John Dudenhoeffer et al.
  • Ford Motor Co. v. U.S.
  • Halliburton Co. v. Erica P. John Fund Inc. (II)
  • Heimeshoff v. Hartford Life & Accident Insurance Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc.
  • Lawson v. FMR LLC
  • Mount Holly v. Mt. Holly Gardens Citizens in Action Inc.
  • National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) v. Noel Canning
  • Northwest Inc. v. Ginsberg
  • Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.
  • Pom Wonderful LLC v. Coca Cola Co.
  • Sandifer v. United States Steel Corp.
  • Sprint Communications Company v. Jacobs
  • U.S. Chamber of Commerce, American Farm Bureau Federation, and State of Alaska v. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (consolidated with UARG v. EPA)
  • Walden v. Fiore
2014[24]
  • Armstrong v. Exceptional Child Center Inc.
  • City of Los Angeles v. Patel
  • Comptroller v. Wynne
  • Dart Cherokee Basin Operating Co. v. Owens
  • Department of Transportation v. Association of American Railroads
  • Direct Marketing Association v. Brohl
  • Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. Abercrombie & Fitch Stores Inc.
  • Gelboim et al. v. Bank of America Corporation et al.
  • Horne v. Department of Agriculture (II)
  • Integrity Staffing Solutions Inc. v. Busk et al.
  • Kellogg Brown & Root Services v. United States ex rel. Carter
  • M&G Polymers USA LLC v. Tackett
  • Mach Mining v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)
  • Omnicare, Inc. v. Laborers District Council Construction Industry Pension Fund
  • Perez v. Mortgage Bankers Association
  • State of Michigan et al. v. EPA
  • T-Mobile South LLC v. City of Roswell
  • Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project Inc.
  • Tibble v. Edison International et al.
  • Yates v. United States
  • Young v. United Parcel Service
2015[25]
  • Amgen Inc. v. Harris
  • Campbell-Ewald v. Gomez
  • CRST Van Expedited Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission
  • DIRECTV Inc. v. Imburgia
  • Encino Motorcars LLC v. Navarro
  • Gobeille v. Liberty Mutual Insurance Company
  • Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Smith Inc. v. Manning
  • MHN Government Services Inc. v. Zaborowski
  • Montanile v. Board of Trustees of the National Elevator Industry Health Benefit Plan
  • Puerto Rico v. Franklin California Tax-Free Trust (II)
  • Schumacher Homes of Circleville Inc. v. Spencer
  • Self-Insurance Institute of America v. Snyder, Governor of Michigan et al.
  • Spokeo Inc. v. Robins
  • The Dow Chemical Company v. Cook
  • The Ritz-Carlton Development Company Inc. v. Narayan
  • Tyson Foods Inc. v. Bouaphakeo et al.
  • United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co. Inc.
  • Universal Health Services Inc. v. United States ex rel. Escobar
2016[26]
  • State Farm Fire and Casualty Company v. United States ex rel. Rigsby
  • Microsoft Corporation v. Baker
  • Murr v. Wisconsin
  • Bank of America Corp. v. City of Miami; Wells Fargo & Co. v. City of Miami

Leadership

The following were listed as the Chamber of Commerce's board of directors, as of May 2020:[27]

For a full list of members of the Board of Directors as of May 2020, click here.

Finances

As a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization, the Chamber receives the majority of its funding through contributions and grants. The organization also generates revenue through program services and investment income.[28]

Annual revenue and expenses for U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2011-2014[28]Annual revenue and expenses for U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2011-2014[28]Annual revenue and expenses for U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2011-2014[28]
Tax YearTotal RevenueTotal Expenses
2014$206,005,860$203,820,959
2013$164,930,174$161,972,221
2012$188,374,764$207,327,194
2011$147,372,355$145,695,316
Lobbying expenditures for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1998-2014[29]Lobbying expenditures for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 1998-2014[29]
YearTotal Expenditures
2014$124,080,000
2013$74,470,000
2012$136,300,000
2011$66,370,000
2010$132,067,500
2009$144,606,000
2008$91,955,000
2007$53,082,500
2006$72,995,000
2005$39,805,000
2004$53,380,000
2003$34,602,640
2002$41,560,000
2001$20,662,880
2000$18,689,160
1999$18,760,000
1998$17,000,000

Recent news

The link below is to the most recent stories in a Google news search for the terms United States Chamber Commerce. These results are automatically generated from Google. Ballotpedia does not curate or endorse these articles.

United States Chamber of Commerce - Google News

See also

External links

Footnotes

got rolled?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/10/gop-mitch-mcconnell/

corp tax hike?!

salon

After being closely aligned for decades, it appears that Republicans and top business lobbying groups are having a very public falling-out over conservative lawmakers' lack of support for a bipartisan infrastructure deal currently languishing in Congress.

According to digital politics site The Hill, every major business group in Washington, D.C. — including Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers, among others — has expressed some measure of support for the bill, which was crafted by a group of lawmakers in both parties alongside the White House.

Business groups have long been a key constituency for Republicans, who worked closely with K Street lobbyists to craft a 2017 tax cut that offered hefty benefits to both corporations and the wealthiest Americans. Yet no more than a small handful of Republican members of Congress have agreed to vote for the legislation favored by these groups this time around.

In a conference call with reporters last month Michael Johnson, CEO of the National Stone, Sand and Gravel Association, a longtime conservative-leaning lobby that stands to gain heavily if the bill passes, seemed flabbergasted by Republicans' refusal to vote for such a popular piece of popular piece of legislation, which polls well across most demographics, including conservatives.

"That's why it boggles the mind that the progressives in the House have decided to take a very popular hostage and Republican leadership has decided to not rescue that very popular hostage when they easily could," Johnson said.

So what's behind this right-wing change-of-heart?

Neil Bradley, the executive VP and chief policy officer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, blamed "misinformation" surrounding the bill during an interview with CQ Roll Call last month — adding that some House GOP members have privately told him that they'd like to vote for the infrastructure deal but feared angering Trump and the new constellation of ultra-conservative groups that were empowered during his tenure.

"I think there are some unfortunate things going on, and I'm being generous with the term unfortunate," Bradley said.

"If this vote today was occurring on the merits of the bill, the outcome wouldn't be in doubt and we'd have a supermajority," he added. "It's not the substance that people are disagreeing with here."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in particular has become a flashpoint of conservative ire after endorsing a small number of Democratic candidates in Congressional races last year. The group, along with a number of other influential pro-business organizations, also stopped PAC donations to hundreds of Republican lawmakers who voted to overturn the 2020 election results on the evening of Jan. 6.

Following that news, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has taken to saying the U.S. Chamber "sold out" and that he no longer considers it an ally.

"I didn't even know the Chamber was around anymore," McCarthy told the political newsletter Punchbowl News.

The feud reached a head this week when Republican leaders kicked representatives for the U.S. Chamber off its conference calls.

Brett Horton, the chief of staff for House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, R-La., didn't hold back when asked about Republicans shunning the pro-business group.

"People care what their local Chambers of Commerce and business owners have to say, not the U.S. Chamber," Horton told The Hill. "If the U.S. Chamber sent me a meeting request right now, I wouldn't even staff that meeting out to an intern, and I don't see that changing."

In response to being iced out of the Republican inner circle, Axios reported this week, the group abruptly reversed its support for the bill. The Chamber disputed the report by arguing that it still supports the bill "as a stand-alone bill unlinked to the proposed tax and spend reconciliation bill" that it has been linked to from its inception — which makes its support for the infrastructure package merely theoretical.

In addition to the Republicans' beef with business groups over the pending infrastructure legislation, the two sides also clashed over their differing opinions on raising the U.S. debt ceiling this past week. Business groups saw the writing on the wall if Congress decided to default on the country's sizeable debts, and feared catastrophic consequences if the limit was not raised.

But most Republican lawmakers, especially Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, instead concluded that their responsibilities to their constitutents lay in obstructing the Democratic agenda — no matter what.

"Democrats have the full ability to raise the debt ceiling as a part of reconciliation," Cruz told POLITICO on Thursday. "They want political cover."

After a last-minute deal brokered by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the debt ceiling was ultimately raised Thursday night — though only for a few months. McConnell said Saturday that he does not intend to make another deal come December, when the deal will likely expire — regardless of what business groups say.

McConnell's justification for the obstruction appeared to be rooted in a statement Sen. Chuck Schumer made after the Thursday vote, blasting Republican efforts to stymie any change to the debt ceiling.

"I am writing to make it clear that in light of Senator Schumer's hysterics and my grave concerns about the ways that another vast, reckless, partisan spending bill would hurt Americans and help China, I will not be a party to any future effort to mitigate the consequences of Democratic mismanagement," McConnell said in a statement.

The first bit of news today is that the United States Chamber of Commerce has been sitting in on strategy calls by the GOP leadership of the United States House of Representatives. That's news, because the chamber speaks for every major corporation you can think of. It claims to be nonpartisan and strictly business-focused. That was a lie.

The second bit of news is the decision by the chamber to flip-flop on its support of a Democratic plan for nation-building at home.After months of lobbying for a bipartisan $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill, at a cost of millions, it decided this morning to oppose it. That's news, because its decision was announced after reporters revealed the House GOP leadership was kicking the chamber off its strategy calls.

What can we take away from this news? First, as I said, the chamber has been lying to us. It has been an active participant in advancing the House Republican agenda, even when that agenda is a hit-and-run over democracy itself. (Many of its members have resumed making donations to Republicans who voted to overturn the 2020 election.)

Second, the interests of business are becoming subordinate to the interests of the party. That's a third bit of news, actually. For decades, wherever corporations went, so did the Republican Party. Now it's corporations, represented by the chamber, are struggling to hang on. Indeed, it was Mitch McConnell, the Senate GOP leader, who said earlier this year that corporations should "stay out of politics."

In reality, everyone benefits from federal investment in public works, but especially multinational firms that use the roads, bridges, airports and harbors to get their goods and services to consumers. Yet here's business saying its interests are secondary to staying on those calls.

I don't want to make too much of this. The GOP has long served the very obscenely rich. But rare is the moment in which one partner turns to the other and says, it's time for you to choose: us or them?

This seems to be one such moment. The biggest business lobby in the United States decided today that it's better to support the Republicans than oppose them, though its members lose. How much gain is there in staying on good terms? How much loss is there in being on the outside of the party looking in? This is something new. This is the Republicans assimilating corporations into an authoritarian collective.

Well, not that new. In 1964, Eugen Weber wrote Varieties of Fascism. In it, the late historian wrote that assimilation into the authoritarian collective, or "mass conformity," as he put it, was necessary to achieving the goals of fascism. A nation's "ideal cannot be one of individual freedom, free enterprise, and enlightened self-regard," he wrote, "because such concepts are disintegrating and divisive."

Fascists sought a "group ideal which will encourage the individual to transcend his private interests and give, abandon, and devote himself to the greater good of the greater whole."

That ideal was called "corporatism." It was organizing the economy such that "the state is no longer an instrument for the conservation of individuals and the achievement of their ends," Weber wrote. Instead, "individuals become means, instruments of the life of the State."

Benito Mussolini was clear about his vision. "The individual exists only insofar as he is in the State and subordinate to the necessities of the State," the Italian dictator said in 1929. "The more complex the forms of civilization become, the more freedom of the individual is restricted."

Where is capital in this scheme? Not good. "The Fascist tendency is towards collectivism," Professor Weber wrote, which welcomes "the gradual squeezing out of capital and the diminution of its influence."

So again, with feeling: What we saw today is something new. It's the GOP's assimilation of corporations into its authoritarian collective. The spokesmen of capital should bear in mind the possibility of "the gradual squeezing out of capital and the diminution of its influence."

This isn't new but it's unfamiliar. The greatest achievement among conservatives over the last half-century was getting a majority of (white) Americans to believe they stood for the rights of individuals, private enterprise and private property. Conservatives have always stood for ordered power, rights be damned, but pretending otherwise was useful during the postwar years during which Americans still had memories of right-wing collectivism (the Nazis) and, later with the Cold War, left-wing collectivism (the Soviets). It's been so long since its authoritarian wing dominated the party, no one remembers. But by forcing the chamber to choose sides, the GOP is returning to form.

Liberals have long accused the Republicans of being hypocrites. Why is it bad to give poor people "handouts" but good to give rich people "stimulus"? Why are one "welfare queens" and the other "job creators"?

My hope is that liberals will see today's decision by the chamber as an opportunity. Not only are the Republicans assimilating corporations into their authoritarian collective. The representatives of capital are willing to be assimilated, risking themselves and democracy along the way. So forget hypocrisy. A fully fascist target is coming into view.

Liberals should hit it. Hit it hard.

oh, it's gonna put ACA  medicare in gop red states that refused tho have most poor sick ppl?!

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/corporate-scheme-biden-agenda/

common dr

Corporations threatened by the prospect of paying a slightly higher tax rate and exercising a little less power over working people are spending millions to sabotage a far-reaching Democratic reconciliation bill that would expand the social safety net and bolster climate action.

That's according to Behind the Curtain: The Corporate Plot to Upend Democracy, a new report released Wednesday by People's Action, a nationwide network of groups organizing for social justice, and Dēmos, a progressive think tank.

"While everyday people are calling on Congress to put people first and safeguard their basic rights to housing, healthcare, and a clean environment, corporations are prioritizing profits and working hard to preserve an inequitable status quo," Dēmos senior policy analyst Daniella Zessoules said in a statement. "As we've witnessed throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, this greed hits Black, brown, and low-income people hardest."

The report exposes how corporations are trying to ensure that the United States' wealthiest and most powerful entities "can reap obscene profits year after year at our expense" and "keep our elected officials from taking action to restore communities."

Just 20 corporations or industry groups—keen to preserve nearly $2.3 trillion in tax cuts the GOP passed in 2017and to make permanent billionaires' $1.8 trillion pandemic windfall—have spent more than $201 million in lobbying so far this year, the report finds. Much of that corporate cash has been aimed at derailing progressive provisions in the popular and potentially historic tax reform and spending package that would invest up to $3.5 trillion over a decade to strengthen the welfare state and decarbonize the economy.

Although the reconciliation bill encapsulates the agenda demanded by tens of millions of voters who elected President Joe Biden and put Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, an ongoing "power grab"—led by several corporations and trade associations that represent them, such as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Realtors Asscoaition, and supported by aligned right-wing lawmakers—has put its passage in jeopardy, the report notes.

"We pulled the curtain back on corporate America to find they were trying to put Congress in a headlock," People's Action campaign director Sondra Youdelman said in a statement. "Now, Congress needs to do its job, fight these bullies, and pass a budget package for the people."

While "corporate influence to stop progressive change is nothing new," the report states, "the concentration of wealth and monopoly powers in recent years has added fuel to the flame."

"Corporate America wants to keep profits high and taxes low forever," adds the report. "They simply don't want to pay their fair share. That's why they're throwing millions of dollars into lobbying, campaigns, and political advertising to divide us and get legislators to back their agenda of permanent inequality."

The report highlights anti-democratic corporate spending and opposition to the Build Back Better Act's proposed reforms in the following six key issue areas, all of which are backed by a majority in the U.S.: increasing taxes on corporations and the ultra-rich, lowering drug prices, providing affordable healthcare, investing in public and affordable housing, tackling climate change, and providing a pathway to citizenship for undocumented people.

For each issue area, the report explains measures included in the reconciliation package, shows polling results indicating popular support for the proposed investments and policies, and details what corporations are doing to obstruct the bill's passage.

According to the report:

And yet—even though the Build Back Better Act would take steps toward meeting the needs of millions of Americans who are facing rampant tax injustices, the world's highest prescription drug prices, skyrocketing healthcare costs and lack of insurance, evictions and foreclosures, extreme weather disasters, or the threat of deportation—corporations have vehemently fought against the reconciliation bill.

Leading offenders include Anthem, JPMorgan Chase, FedEx, Walmart, Exxon, Amazon, Pfizer, and Blue Cross Blue Shield, the report finds. Big Pharma and private health insurance companies have spent $171 million so far in 2021 on lobbying, the most of any industry.

As the report notes:

Rich corporations are fighting tooth and nail to prevent the American people from getting what they want: a government that works for everyone, not just a wealthy few. Their massive use of corporate power to frustrate the will of the people on an issue-by-issue basis is part of a larger anti-democracy effort backed by corporate America.

As corporations seek to undermine the Biden plan's much-needed tax provisions, historic investments in drug pricing reform, healthcare, housing, climate, and immigration reform, they are also attacking our freedom to vote. Many of the same companies combating elements of the Build Back Better proposal are also bankrolling voter suppression legislation.

"Now we know who the real villains are behind the curtain, who want to keep our communities from getting what we need and deserve," the report concludes. "Corporations and the wealthy few are undermining our democracy. They are lobbying hard to preserve an unequal status quo, using money to steer government rather than allow a real democracy to bring about what the people overwhelmingly want—a country that works for all of us."

The report's publication coincides with a National Day of Actionduring which People's Action members plan to hold rallies denouncing opponents of the Build Back Better Act for undermining the well-being of the nation's economy and democracy.

Following Tuesday's action against JPMorgan in New York, demonstrations against these organizations are planned for Wednesday:

"We can't call the U.S. the greatest democracy in the world if our legislators allow a handful of corporations to derail the critical and wildly popular provisions in the Build Back Better package," Lisa Tyson, director of the Long Island Progressive Coalition, said in a statement (pdf).

"These companies are lining politicians' pockets in hopes of securing a future of extreme inequality and climate catastrophe," Tyson added. "It's time for lawmakers to grow spines and show us who they work for: the people, not massive corporations."

AFP and CoC in covid corp liability and cedar pt taking case, both major anti-union/worker safety?

...In a memo to its members last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the most powerful business lobbying group in the nation—said that legal action from workers who are infected by Covid-19 on the job is “perhaps the largest area of concern for the overall business community.”

The Chamber of Commerce “argues the sheer number of lawsuits could overwhelm businesses,” Roll Call reported.

“Businesses say they keep their workplaces safe,” Roll Call noted, “but the memo indicates that major corporations privately acknowledge that many so-called essential employees will get sick or die.”

Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed organization, is also urging lawmakers to protect corporations from responsibility for exposing their workers to the coronavirus.

As Common Dreams reported last week, theOccupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been flooded with thousands of complaints from workers in recent weeks accusing employers of violating federal coronavirus guidelines and failing to provide adequate protective equipment.

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a series of tweets last week that “the whole point of making employers liable for risking the lives of their staff is to prevent them from exposing their staff to undue risk.”

“Businesses are asking for the right to expose their workers to fatal risks with no consequences. It’s bad economics and bad policy,”said Wolfers. “If this tweet sounds to you at all anti-business, let me be clear: I am absolutely against businesses profiting by exposing their workers to unconscionable risks of death.”...

KYRSTEN SINEMA USED THE WINERY WHERE SHE INTERNED TO FUNDRAISE WITH PRIVATE EQUITY

The Arizona senator, who is blocking tax increases on the rich, spent the summer courting donors who stand to lose under major tax reform.

Daniel BoguslawDaniel Boguslaw

September 26 2021,

THE DEMOCRATIC SENATOR threatening to block the party’s ambitious social policy agenda in order to preserve former President Donald Trump’s tax cuts for corporations and for the wealthy spent last summer interning at a winery owned by the private equity baron Bill Price.

In the summer of 2020, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., interned at Three Sticks, a winery in Sonoma, California, owned by Bill Price, co-founder of the private equity leviathan TPG Capital. According to the job description, interns “assist in all facets of harvest work including cleaning and sanitizing equipment, sorting fruit, punchdowns, making basic additions and managing fermentations according to winemaker instructions, barrel work, and other winery-related tasks.”

Sinema’s personal financial disclosures show that she was paid $1,117.40 in wages for her work. But an ensuing fundraiser at Three Sticks, held in August, netted her campaign coffers much more.

Sinema has told Democratic colleagues, according to the New York Times, that she will oppose any tax increases on either corporate or personal rates, essential pillars of the legislation. Her opposition to tax hikes on the rich comes amid a major spending blitz to encourage her to stand against any tax increases on private equity executives or hedge funds.

The same summer that Sinema completed her internship, Three Sticks was one of three stops on a weekend fundraising tour. Tickets to the fundraiser cost $5,000 per guest, with contributions going toward both her own campaign committee and the Getting Things Done political action committee, a leadership PAC used to support fellow congressional moderates such as New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer. Sinema courted major donors that summer, including Lyft CEO Logan Green, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and of course Price himself, who contributed $5,000.

In the past two years, Sinema has received tens of thousands of dollars in maxed out donations from private equity partners like Price and investment firm CEOs.Now, many of those same senior firm executives stand to lose millions to the IRS if a bill targeting the carried interest tax loophole is included as part of the Senate’s budget reconciliation process. Those executive donors include senior directors at TPG and billionaire Blackstone CEO Jonathan Gray.

Sponsored by Sens. Ron Wyden and Sheldon Whitehouse, the Ending the Carried Interest Loophole Act would require hedge fund managers and private equity executives to pay taxes on their income at the same rates as other workers, ending favored treatment for such executives. Right now, their compensation is not considered income. It is instead classified as a tax deferrable capital gain, subject to far lower rates, despite its near-identical function.

In June, the private equity industry lobby launched a pressure campaign targeting Sinema and fellow Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly to leave the carried interest tax loophole intact.

The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates the bill would raise more than $63 billion over 10 years, serving as an important part of the pay for — the taxes used to offset new spending — in Democrats’ proposed $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation plan. Sinema has repeatedly described the plan as too expensive.

Multiple congressional aides who spoke to The Intercept on the condition of anonymity said that Sinema’s office has been silent on whether or not she will support closing the loophole, despite her concern over the price tag of her party’s budget reconciliation bill and the vast sums the carried interest tax could raise.

BEFORE OPENING HIS winery, Price co-founded TPG, one of the largest private equity firms in the world, in 1992. Despite announcing his departure from TPG in 2006, Price listed TPG as his employer on a 2020 Federal Election Commission filing with the title of “partner emeritus.” A spokesperson for Price told The Intercept, “Bill Price no longer has any affiliation with TPG and has not for a decade.” When shown a copy of the FEC filing, the same spokesperson did not respond for further comment. In 2019, during the college admissions pay-to-play scandal, Price’s connection to the firm resurfaced when he defended Bill McGlashan, the husband of his wife’s sister and a senior TPG partner he brought to the firm in 2004. TPG did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Last week, Sinema announced explicit opposition to yet another critical budget reconciliation revenue mechanism:Democrats’ drug pricing plan,which various estimates say could save the government between $450 and $700 billion over 10 years. In July, Sen. Mitch McConnell called Sinema’s rejection of the budget reconciliation price tag “very courageous.”

As The Daily Poster first reported, Sinema, who has raised over $500,000 from the pharmaceutical and health products industry, was featured in ads by a pharma-funded dark-money group just before she went public with her opposition to drug pricing legislation. Data from the Center for Responsive Politics shows that since entering Congress, Sinema has also grossed well over $6 million in donations from the finance, insurance, and real estate industry.

Earlier this month, the Chamber of Commerce put out a report claiming that closing the carried interest tax loophole would cost almost 5 million jobs and create billions in tax shortfalls.

“The carried interest loophole rewards one narrow class of workers, fund managers, whose compensation already is in the stratosphere compared to almost everyone else, with a deeply discounted income tax rate. It’s indefensible,” Bob Lord, tax counsel at Americans for Tax Fairness, told The Intercept.

“Carried interest also allows fund managers to defer tax on their compensation until the fund’s investments are sold. The rest of us pay tax on our labor income currently, not years later,” Lord said. “Apologists at the Chamber of Commerce justify this travesty with claims the country would lose jobs if fund managers paid tax at the same rate as the rest of us. By that logic, why wouldn’t we reduce their rate to zero? More jobs, right? Or perhaps the IRS should pay them? Even more jobs, right? How any member of Congress would take the Chamber of Commerce seriously here mystifies me.”

COMPARED TO HER Democratic colleagues and corporate donors, Sinema’s personal financial disclosures are sparse. Her 2020 filing lists two retirement plans, adormant consulting business, and income generated from a teaching job at Arizona State University alongside her paltry internship income. This places Sinema’s personal finances in sharp contrast to the income generated by congressional allies like Joe Manchin, who has grossed millions from his coal interests over the course of the past decade.

When it comes to raising campaign cash though, few outmatch Sinema’s zeal for fundraisers and phone banking. According to multiple Democrats who served with Sinema in the House, she was the only member who seemed to actively love being in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee call center, claiming a couch for her sole personal use and complaining to other members when they had to leave to vote.

In 2020, she delivered a keynote speech followed by a fundraiser at SFVegas, the lavish securities conference held at the Aria Resort and Casino in Las Vegas and featured in the film “The Big Short.” Former British Prime Minister Theresa May headlined last year’s conference.

Sinema gave a keynote address at a Women in Securitization event before a fundraising reception sponsored by the Structured Finance PAC, which has donated tens of thousands of dollars to powerful members of the House Financial Services Committee such as Reps. Gregory Meeks and Carolyn Maloney. Sinema’s recent votes and public posturing suggest that the cash and advertising blitz launched by financial industry lobbyists may have achieved their intended effect.

In August, Sinema was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment to “establish a reserve fund relating to protecting family farms, ranches, and small businesses while ensuring the wealthy pay their fair share.” A day later, she voted against “a reserve fund relating to increasing the progressivity of the tax code.”

Sinema’s dramatic rightward shift toward the barons of finance and pharmaceuticals at the cost of progressive tax reform stands in sharp contrast to her childhood origin story, in which she talks about having grown up in an abandoned gas station without electricity or running water, at one point living out of a car.

In response to a colleague’s expression of support after anNPR story detailing her family’s struggles with financial hardship, Sinema, then a representative, speaking to colleagues in the Democratic cloakroom just off the House floor, deadpanned: “Yeah, voters love that stupid shit. They eat it up.”

921

infra twin bill

https://www.alternet.org/2021/09/lobbying-congress/

New report details a 'massive lobbying blitz' against Biden's agenda — but Sanders has a warning for them

an 921

...no lnx

...the Post, which published Sanders' remarks on Tuesday, offered a detailed look at the "massive lobbying blitz" that corporate America has launched in recent days in a bid to water down—or kill entirely—the reconciliation package, a centerpiece of President Joe Biden's economic and climate agenda.

The range of big-name corporations involved in the campaign—from the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer to the fossil fuel behemoth ExxonMobil—reflects the potentially far-reaching scope of the nascent reconciliation bill, which could allow Medicare to negotiate drug prices, reverse former President Donald Trump's corporate tax cut, institute paid family and medical leave, strengthen workers' rights, and establish a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.

"The emerging opposition appears to be vast, spanning drug manufacturers, big banks, tech titans, major retailers, and oil-and-gas giants,"the Post's Tony Romm reported. "In recent weeks, top Washington organizations representing these and other industries have started strategizing behind the scenes, seeking to battle back key elements in Democrats proposed overhaul to federal healthcare, education, and safety net programs."

One of the organizations that has been "most active" in the effort to prevent passage of the reconciliation bill, according to the Post, is theU.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying organization in the country. Romm reported that the Chamber is "in the early stages of putting together an economywide coalition to coordinate the fight against the still-forming economic package, including its significant price tag, policy scope, and potential for tax increases."

"The Chamber-organized effort could encompass traditional lobbying on Capitol Hill as well as advertising campaigns targeting Democratic lawmakers," Romm noted. "The group has been in talks with potential allies such as the National Association of Manufacturers, whose board includes executives from firms such as Dow Inc., Exxon, Caterpillar, and Johnson & Johnson... Other opponents include the Business Roundtable, whose board counts the chief executives from Apple and Walmart."

As Democrats move further along in the process of translating their newly approved $3.5 trillion budget blueprint into legislative text—a process lawmakers hope to complete by next month—the lobbying push is likely to intensify. The Hill reported Monday that corporate influence-peddlers are growing "increasingly optimistic" that they will succeed in keeping major tax hikes, Medicare expansion, and other critical measures out of the final package...

"The business community has made progress with certain Democrats on legitimate policy concerns with some of these proposals and their implications on the economy and international competitiveness," an unnamed lobbyist with ties to Senate Democrats told The Hill. "A lot of those arguments are landing."

While The Hill does not name the "certain Democrats" who have been receptive to lobbyists' arguments, the outlet noted that "business interests have Democratic allies in Sens. Joe Manchin (W.Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (Ariz.) and the group of House moderates led by Rep. Josh Gottheimer (N.J.)"—all of whom have voiced opposition to the $3.5 trillion price tag.

But Sanders—who has characterized the reconciliation bill as potentially the most consequential legislation since the New Deal—said in an interview last week that $3.5 trillion is "the minimum of what we should be spending."...

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/05/voter-suppression-capitol-riot-chamber-commerce

major corporations won praise in the weeks after the January 6 Capital riot by expressing support for voting rights and promising to suspend their political action committee donations to Republican lawmakers who had tried to overturn the election. Corporate America would be a vanguard in the defense of democracy, some headlines suggested.

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Left largely unmentioned: brand-name corporations and corporate lobbying groups still funneled $15 million last year to two major GOP groups — the Republican Attorneys General Association and the Republican State Leadership Committee — after the organizations and their officials pushed to curtail voting rights and overturn the 2020 election, according to IRS records we reviewed.

Meanwhile, many major companies continue to support the US Chamber of Commerce — even as the powerful lobby group has been leading the fight against federal legislation protecting voting rights.

RAGA Rakes in Cash

In November 2020, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA) backed a Supreme Court amicus brief requesting that the high court prevent Pennsylvania election officials from counting mail-in ballots postmarked on election day.

The brief alleged that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had opened the door for “unscrupulous actors” to “attempt to influence a close Presidential election in Pennsylvania and elsewhere” by granting a three-day extension for ballot counting because of problems with the COVID-19 pandemic and US Postal Service delays.

A month later, Texas Republican attorney general Ken Paxton brought suit to withhold the certified vote count from Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin ahead of the Electoral College vote on December 14, on the grounds that the states had violated the Constitution when they changed their election rules to make accommodations for COVID.

Supporting Paxton’s lawsuit were the Republican attorneys general from seventeen states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, and West Virginia. The group filed an amicus brief in the case. All but one of RAGA’s executive committee members at the time — Georgia attorney general Chris Carr — were represented among the signatories.

Amid those brazen attempts to overturn the national election, forty-seven companies and trade associations donated nearly $1.5 million to the Republican Attorneys General Association in December 2020. Several of the donor companies have subsequently claimed to support voting rights.

For instance, Philadelphia-based international law firm Cozen O’Connor signed the well-publicized “We Stand for Democracy” letter against voter suppression laws in April. Yet the firm funneled $50,000 to RAGA weeks after the group tried to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the election in Cozen’s home state of Pennsylvania.

Other signatories to the letter that also gave to RAGA in December were PayPal ($50,000) and Lyft ($25,000).

A number of companies gave to RAGA in the days immediately after it filed the brief. Those include Johnson & Johnson ($50,000), PepsiCo ($25,000), U.S. Sugar Corporation ($15,000), and Microsoft ($25,000).

Walmart, which would later decline to sign on to a letter pledging support for democracy and voting access, gave $125,000 to RAGA in late December. Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, meanwhile, gave $15,000 to RAGA in December, only to pledge three weeks later not to give PAC donations to the lawmakers who voted against accepting the Electoral College results.

Soon after the money flowed to RAGA, the group helped direct people to the January 6 protest preceding the Capitol insurrection through its dark money arm, the Rule of Law Defense Fund (RLDF). RLDF appeared on the “March to Save America” website and even made robocalls promoting the protest that eventually resulted in the storming of the US Capitol building.

“The March to Save America is tomorrow in Washington, DC, at the Ellipse in President’s Park between E St. and Constitution Avenue on the south side of the White House, with doors opening at 7:00 a.m.,” the calls stated. “At 1:00 p.m., we will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal. We are hoping patriots like you will join us to continue to fight to protect the integrity of our elections. For more information, visit MarchtoSaveAmerica.com.”

Since then, Republican attorneys general backed by RAGA have continued to try to make voting more difficult. Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, for example, urged states with Republican legislatures to tighten their election laws in March.

“There are certain states where we still control legislatures and we still have governors,” Paxton said in an interview with Breitbart. “I would encourage them to work with the legislature in those states and make sure that their laws are tightened up.”

Meanwhile, Arizona attorney general Mark Brnovich has been fighting to uphold restrictive voting laws, claiming to do so in the name of “election integrity.”

“There is a whole menu of options of how people can exercise their right to vote. Nobody is disenfranchising anybody in Arizona,” he said in February. “This litigation is all about, ‘Can we protect the integrity of our ballots?’”

The laws — the first invalidating ballots cast in the wrong precinct; the second banning third-party ballot collection, or “ballot harvesting” — were challenged by the Democratic National Committee, which argued that they had a discriminatory impact on racial minorities that connects to a history of discrimination in the state.

In January 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals struck the laws down on the grounds that they violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits voting procedures that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership to minority groups.

As the case headed to the Supreme Court, Brnovich dismissed Democratic complaints that the laws would disproportionately impact minority voters, claiming that “they always play the race card.” The case is ongoing.

RSLC Scores Millions After Trying to Restrict Voting Rights

In the months before the election, another GOP group, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC), filed a Supreme Court amicus brief pressing justices to uphold Arizona’s restrictive voter laws. If the court sides with the GOP, the decision could gut the main remaining enforcement mechanism in the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“RSLC submits this brief in support of Petitioners because the Ninth Circuit’s ruling, if allowed to stand, will significantly undermine the ability of states to safeguard election integrity and maintain voter confidence, and will cause paralyzing uncertainty as to the continued validity of innumerable facially-neutral time, place, and manner election regulations,” the June 1, 2020, brief reads.

More than two hundred corporations and trade associations gave RSLC nearly $13.7 million after the organization filed its brief, according to data compiled by CQ Roll Call’s Political MoneyLine. Some of the biggest donors included BNSF Railway ($280,000) and Dominion Energy ($170,000).

Health insurance giant Centene Corporation contributed $250,000, while Anthem chipped in $50,000. Pharmaceutical companies continued donating, too, including Novo Nordisk ($125,000), Novartis ($60,000), AbbVie ($50,000), and Gilead Sciences ($50,000).

Fossil fuel companies ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips both gave $100,000 to RSLC. Tech money poured in as well, including donations from Google ($25,000), Uber Technologies ($25,000), PayPal ($25,000), and Amazon ($10,000). Other corporate names, like Bank of America and Best Buy, each donated $25,000 to RSLC. General Motors chipped in $10,000.

Some of those same corporate donors signed the “We Stand for Democracy” letter last month, including Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Bank of America, Best Buy, General Motors, and PayPal.

The RSLC is now encouraging state legislatures to purge voter rolls, change voter registration deadlines, and enact new voter ID requirements, as *Documented* recently reported.

The Texas state house is currently considering a bill that would close polling locations primarily in Democratic and minority areas. In Harris County, for example, thirteen of the twenty-four House districts — all represented by Democrats — would lose polling stations. Texas isn’t the only state aiming to restrict voting rights. According to a report from the Brennan Center for Justice, “As of March 24, legislators have introduced 361 bills with restrictive provisions in 47 states.”

“Five restrictive bills have already been signed into law,” the report continues. “In addition, at least 55 restrictive bills in 24 states are moving through legislatures: 29 have passed at least one chamber, while another 26 have had some sort of committee action (e.g., a hearing, an amendment, or a committee vote).”

Julian Brookes, a spokesperson for the Brennan Center, said that the “vast majority” of those bills were introduced by Republicans.

Both RAGA and RSLC are due to next report their election filings in July.

Breaking Up With the Chamber

In the wake of the January 6 Capitol insurrection and in the face of ongoing Republican efforts to restrict voting rights, political watchdog Accountable.US has started a new campaign asking companies, including Microsoft, Target, and Salesforce, to disaffiliate from the US Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s preeminent business lobbying group, on the grounds that the Chamber has been bankrolling the GOP’s anti-democratic agenda.

The Chamber’s long history of complicity and enablement of Republican assaults on voting rights is documented in a recent report from Accountable.US. The report notes that in 2010, the Chamber, joined by Republican strategists, “hatched” and funded REDMAP, the notorious GOP redistricting project focused on flipping state legislatures ahead of the 2010 census.

REDMAP was so successful that Republicans picked up nearly seven hundred state legislative seats in 2010, flipping twenty chambers. After that, the project focused its efforts on redrawing congressional and state legislative districts to favor Republican majorities. Through REDMAP, the GOP was able to gerrymander a standing majority in the House that held until 2018, despite losing by 1 million votes in 2012. Even in 2018, in at least three states, the GOP held its congressional majority despite a majority of voters selecting Democrats to represent them.

Beyond REDMAP, the Chamber and its affiliated entities have been major funders of RAGA and RSLC, giving the groups a combined $13.6 million since the 2016 election cycle, based on data from Political MoneyLine. It has also contributed to Republicans who support cracking down on voting rights.

The Chamber is currently waging a campaign against H.R. 1, the For the People Act, which is the Democratic Party’s response to Republican voter suppression laws.

manchin POW

pretended principled bi-part stance w/ sinema on filibuster but

manchin he just got CoC $  https://www.salon.com/2021/06/10/joe-manchins-highly-suspicious-reversal-on-voting-bill-follows-donation-from-corporate-lobby/

Sen. Joe Manchin, the West Virginia Democrat famous for his vow to maintain the Senate filibuster and thereby scuttle much of President Biden's agenda, recently published an op-ed opposing the For the People Act, Democrats' whopping voting-rights bill. That article strongly echoed talking points from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce — and appeared shortly after the influential pro-business lobby resumed donations to Manchin's campaign after nearly a decade.

Manchin, who co-sponsored the sweeping voting rights legislation in 2019 and has supported filibuster reform in the past, became the first Senate Democrat to oppose the bill this week while reiterating his opposition to changing the filibuster, a key roadblock to voting reform. Skeptical members of Manchin's party have questioned the reasons for his opposition, especially after after a recent poll found that a majority of West Virginia voters support changing the filibuster rules and that 79% of the state's voters — including a large majority of Republicans — support the For the People Act.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., suggested that Manchin's opposition to the proposal and filibuster reform may really be about measures in the bill aimed at cracking down on lobbyists and dark money. ...

no lnx many

"This is probably just as much a part of Joe Manchin's calculus than anything else," she told MSNBC on Tuesday. "You look at the Koch brothers and you look at organizations like the Heritage Foundation and conservative lobby groups that are doing a victory lap ... over the fact that Manchin refuses to change on the filibuster. And I think that these two things are very closely intertwined."

Americans for Prosperity, a group backed by billionaire Republican donor Charles Koch, has explicitly targeted Manchin in its pressure campaign to defeat the legislation even though their own data shows that provisions cracking down on dark money are highly popular, including among Republican voters. Heritage Action, the advocacy arm of the Koch-backed Heritage Foundation, organized a rally earlier this year to pressure Manchin to oppose the bill. Heritage Action has also partnered with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to craft model voting-restriction laws for Republican state legislators. A Heritage Action organizer boasted in a video obtained by Mother Jones that the group was behind key provisions of the controversial law recently passed in Georgia.

"Joe Manchin isn't moved by leaders who have spent decades organizing for civil rights," Rep. Jamaal Bowman, D-N.Y., tweeted after Manchin that said his position on the For the People Act had not changed after meeting with civil rights leaders on Tuesday. "Manchin isn't moved by the views of his constituents. Manchin isn't moved by GOP voter suppression bills in 43 states.Because Manchin is only moved by corporate donors and their agenda."

One group that has been a major cheerleader of Manchin's staunch opposition is the aforementioned U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a powerful pro-business group that also receives Koch money and generally supports Republicans.

Manchin's op-ed announcing his opposition echoed the Chamber's talking points in a letter to senators alleging that "partisan" legislation would "undermine" public confidence in democracy, even though Republicans across the country have advanced and enacted overtly partisan bills aimed at restricting ballot access.

"When it comes to this 'bipartisan' argument, I gotta tell you, I don't buy it," Ocasio-Cortez said. "Joe Manchin has voted for bills that have not been bipartisan before. Look at the American Rescue Plan. So this is not just about bipartisanship."

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The op-ed came after the Chamber, which has launched an expensive lobbying effort against the bill, resumed donations to Manchin's campaign for the first time since 2012. Reuters described this flow of corporate dollars as a "reward" for Manchin's opposition to numerous Biden administration's initiatives, as well as his stalwart support for the filibuster, which has almost certainly doomed the For the People Act.

"The timing of Sen. Manchin's announcement is highly suspicious," Kyle Herrig, president of the progressive government watchdog group Accountable.US,said in a statement to Salon. "Not long after the Chamber reopened their corporate checkbook for him, he made his opposition to voting rights known. Now millions of Americans may face significant roadblocks when they try to exercise their constitutional right to vote. Once again the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has found a way to stop any progress on voting rights from progressing on Capitol Hill."

Manchin's office and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce did not respond to questions from Salon.

The Chamber is one of the most powerful trade groups in the country, spending more than $80 million on lobbying last year, second only to the National Association of Realtors. It is the single largest lobbying spender this year, dropping over $17 million to influence policy, nearly twice as much as the pharmaceutical trade group PhRMA. The group has been aggressively lobbying against the For the People Act since 2019, spending more than $129 million on opposing the bill and related issues since it was first introduced in the House, according to lobbying disclosures.

While the U.S. Chamber's corporate members pay for its lobbying, its PAC donations come from the group's executives, staff members and other affiliated individuals. The Chamber's PAC made a contribution to Manchin in the first quarter of this year, its first since 2012. Shortly after, the Chamber issued an alert to all members of the Senate threatening to include "votes related to this bill in our annual How They Voted scorecard" and mentioning some of its specific provisions, including a requirement to disclose big donors and communications with candidates, a plan to strengthen the Federal Election Commission, and public financing of campaigns.

"The Chamber is deeply troubled by efforts at the state and federal level to enact election law changes on a partisan basis," the letter said. "Changes enacted on a partisan basis are the most likely to erode access and security and undermine public confidence and the willingness of the American people to trust and accept future election outcomes."

Manchin echoed that argument in his op-ed, writing that he believes "partisan voting legislation will destroy the already weakening binds of our democracy" and "partisan policymaking won't instill confidence in our democracy — it will destroy it."

Both the Chamber and Manchin have called for lawmakers to advance voting legislation on a "bipartisan" basis, although it's inarguable that one party is seeking to expand voting rights while the other is actively trying to restrict them. Manchin has claimed there is bipartisan support for the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would require states to pre-clear voting changes with the Justice Department. That's technically true: Exactly one Republican senator (Lisa Murkowski of Alaska) has expressed support for the bill. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared on Tuesday that his party would not support the legislation and denied that there was any threat to voting rights.

:{

Manchin, whose ties to the U.S. Chamber date back to at least 2010, when he was West Virginia governor, drew public praise from Chamber president and CEO Suzanne Clark earlier this year for his "principled stand" on preserving the filibuster, which is the most significant roadblock to the voting legislation.}:

Nick Vaugh, a lobbyist for the Chamber, presented Manchin with a "Spirit of Free Enterprise Award" in 2019, which the group says it gives to lawmakers who have supported its positions at least 70% of the time.

As it happens, Vaugh has been registered to lobby senators on the For the People Act and other issues since 2019, according to federal disclosure forms.

"It's unfortunate Sen. Manchin has bought into the U.S. Chamber's smears against the For The People Act," Herrig told Salon. "And just like the Chamber, he is wrong — there is nothing 'partisan' about protecting the right to vote for all Americans. In carrying the Chamber's water, Sen. Manchin is only inviting further voter suppression."

The Chamber's pressure on senators to oppose the voting rights legislation comes as many of its corporate members have joined forces to oppose Republican voting restrictions in state legislatures.

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Accountable.US has launched a six-figure "Drop the Chamber" campaign challenging corporations like Microsoft, Target and Salesforce to back up their public support of voting rights by cutting ties with the group, accusing it of "siding against millions of Americans who will be subject to these racist voter suppression laws."

"It's on Chamber members that claim to support voting rights to end their relationships and speak out against this assault on Americans' rights to vote," Herrig said, "because anything less makes them complicit."

Igor Derysh is a staff writer at Salon. His work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

Tips/Email: iderysh@salon.com Twitter: @IgorDerysh

~ called out

https://www.alternet.org/2021/06/aoc/

beware lip service as cover for inaction

https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/fossil-fuels-and-climate-change/

American Petroleum Institute, a major fossil fuels lobby group that includes members of companies like Chevron and ExxonMobil, has been opposed to setting a national price on carbon dioxide emissions in the United States. But this week, NBC News is reporting, API reversed that policy — and the group's CEO is acknowledging climate change as a reality.

NBC News' Josh Lederman reports that this change "follows a fierce internal debate within the organization over whether to embrace a carbon price, which several of the group's members had already publicly backed."

Many strident proponents of fossil fuels, from former President Donald Trump to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to Fox News pundits like Sean Hannity, are climate change deniers. But API CEO Mike Sommers, in an interview with NBC News, acknowledged climate change as a reality.

Sommers, discussing API's change of policy on a national carbon emissions price, told NBC News, "It's a recognition of the situation that we're in today and the importance of dealing with this important issue. This is a top priority of the Biden Administration, and we also know that climate change is real and that we need to be part of the discussion on one of the marquee items of our time."

Lederman, however, notes that API "is not endorsing a specific approach to putting a price on carbon." But Sommers, during his interview with NBC News, called for "investments in clean [coal? nuke?] technologies."

Lederman explains, "Although major business and industry groups long fiercely opposed making emitters pay for their emissions, that opposition has ebbed as (the) industry has seen major government action as inevitable and began coalescing around a market-based approach that avoids the federal government issuing mandates. In recent years, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Business Roundtable and other groups have voiced support for a carbon price."

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

how odd

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2020/12/04/koch-fought-u-s-chamber-of-commerce-ten-2020-house-races/

note did not want to trade current mercury rollback b/c $ already spent so they can kill regs in future?!

no lnx

https://www.nytimes.com/:{2020/04/:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:16/climate/epa-mercury-coal.html

E.P.A. Weakens Controls on Mercury

The agency is changing the way it calculates the benefits of mercury controls, a move that would effectively loosen the rules on other toxic pollutants.

By Lisa Friedman and Coral Davenport

April 16, 2020

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Thursday  weakened regulations on the release of mercury and other toxic metals from oil and coal-fired power plants, another step toward rolling back health protections in the middle of a pandemic.

The new Environmental Protection Agencyrule does not eliminate restrictions on the release of mercury, a heavy metal linked to brain damage. Instead, it creates a new method of calculating the costs and benefits of curbing mercury pollution that environmental lawyers said would fundamentally undermine the legal underpinnings of controls on mercury and many other pollutants.

By reducing the positive health effects of regulations on paper and raising their economic costs, the new method could be used to justify loosening restrictions on any pollutant that the fossil fuel industry has deemed too costly to control.

“That is the big unstated goal,” said David Konisky, a professor of public and environmental affairs at Indiana University. “This is less about mercury than about potentially constraining or handcuffing future efforts by the E.P.A. to regulate air pollution.”

The proposed change is the latest in the Trump administration’s long-running effort to roll back environmental regulations and reduce regulatory burdens, particularly on the coal, oil and gas industries. Over the past three years the administration has weakened rules to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants, restrict coal companies from dumping debris in streams and claimed falsely that that President Trump has revived the dying coal industry.

Over the past few weeks as the nation struggled with the coronavirus, the administration has also rushed to loosen curbs on automobile tailpipe emissions, opted not to strengthen a regulation on industrial soot emissions and moved to drop the threat of punishment to companies that kill birds “incidentally.”

The deregulatory push appears designed to secure less restrictive rules quickly, in case Republicans lose control of Congress and the White House in November. A new government could move quickly under the Congressional Review Act to overturn any regulation or federal rule within 60 days of it being finalized — making any rule completed after late May or early June vulnerable.

The mercury rollback is a particular victory for Robert E. Murray,the former chief executive of Murray Energy Corporation and a top fund-raiser for Mr. Trump. Mr. Murray personally requested the rollback in a written “wish list” to top officials shortly after the president took office. The company has since declared bankruptcy and is undergoing a reorganization.

“Under this action, no more mercury will be emitted into the air than before,” Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator said in announcing the rule.

Climate and Environment ›

[Keep Up on the Latest Climate News

Once nonexistent, campaign cash earmarked as "climate donations" is flowing to Joe Biden as a small but growing counterweight to the monied muscle of fossil fuels.

Environmental lawyers and public health leaders called the timing of the final mercury rule, as well as its substance, an attack on air quality.]

“What is most disconcerting to me is this administration’s lack of interest in science and, frankly, their lack of concern for our nation’s children,” said Aaron Bernstein, interim director of the Center for Climate, Health and the Global Environment at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “Mercury pollution in the United States damages our children’s brains before they even come into the world, and estimates are that that cost is in the billions of dollars.”

Patrick Parenteau, a professor at the Vermont Law School, noted that in virtually every environmental rollback, Mr. Trump’s E.P.A. has acknowledged in the fine print that enormous increases in health problems and deaths will occur because of increased pollution.

A plan to weaken carbon dioxide emissions at power plants, for example, predicted as many as 1,400 additional premature deaths a year. A draft analysis of the soot policy put forward this week showed that tightening the existing standard by 25 percent could save as many as 12,150 lives a year.

Two people close to the administration said the White House was concerned enough about the public perception of loosening environmental rules during the outbreak that it held the mercury plan for several weeks after it passed a review from the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. E.P.A. officials assured the White House that the agency was merely responding as required to a 2015 Supreme Court ruling that found it must justify the economic impact of the mercury standards.

The weakening of the mercury rule would be one of the most significant regulatory rollbacks engineered by the Trump administration. The existing federal regulation on mercury pollution, completed in 2012, is the most expensive clean air regulation ever written by the E.P.A.

When it published its draft cost-benefit changes last year, the Trump administration’s E.P.A. said the cost of cutting mercury from power plant emissions “dwarfs” the economic benefits and argued that the Obama rule could not be justified as “appropriate and necessary.”

The E.P.A.’s 2012 regulation was the first federal standard to require power plants to install pricey pollution controls to limit mercury emissions — at a cost to industry of $9.6 billion a year. The Obama administration justified that cost with some mathematical legerdemain of its own. The Obama E.P.A. tallied not just the benefits of reducing mercury but also “co-benefits” like reducing sulfur dioxide, fine particulate matter and other pollutants that were also curbed by the equipment.

In his announcement on Thursday, Mr. Wheeler called the Obama administration’s accounting of health benefits “dishonest.”

Driving down mercury emissions alone, the studies at the time found, would yield a $6 million annual benefit, a fraction of the cost of the controls. But by adding in co-benefits like projected gains in avoided heart disease, asthma attacks and other health problems, the total benefits reached $80 billion over five years. Overall, the Obama administration estimated that the rule would prevent 4,700 heart attacks, 130,000 asthma attacks and 11,000 premature deaths each year.

Under the Trump administration’s new rule, such co-benefits will no longer be calculated with cost, only direct benefits.

While coal producers urged Mr. Trump to roll back the rule, the vast majority of electric utility companies have agreed the cost-benefit changes may be of little help to them, because they have already spent the billions of dollars needed to come into compliance. Many of those companies urged the Trump administration to leave the mercury measure in place.

Coal plants subject to the rule “have already spent millions of dollars to install mercury equipment to reduce mercury emissions,” wrote Scott A. Weaver, the director of air quality services for American Electric Power, an Ohio-based electric utility company that operates power plants in 11 states, in a public comment on a draft of the rule.

“Rescinding the standards at this point will create new problems” Mr. Weaver wrote, noting that companies that have sought to recoup the cost of installing mercury control equipment through bills to customers may no longer legally be able to do so. That means the new rule could actually cost companies more money.

Yet in comments to the E.P.A, major coal companies and the United States Chamber of Commerce also supported changing the underlying cost-benefit analysis to prevent future rules that they might consider onerous.

Matthew Davis, a former E.P.A. scientist who worked with the agency’s office of children’s health protection to develop the original rule, said weakening the rule still represented a threat to children’s health.

“The reason we did this rule is because children and developing fetuses are harmed by mercury,” said Mr. Davis, who now works at the League of Conservation Voters.

Jeffrey R. Holmstead, an attorney for the electric utility industry who served in the E.P.A. under the second President George Bush, rejected the idea that the decision was a cynical calculation to set the stage for other regulatory rollbacks.

“It’s not as if the administration has been shy about rolling back other things,” Mr. Holmstead said, dismissing environmental concerns. “I don’t think there’s any impact whatsoever from this.”

In Congress, the Obama-era mercury rule has bipartisan support. Senator Thomas R. Carper of Delaware, the top Democrat on the Environment and Public Works committee, and Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, the chairman of an energy and water appropriations subcommittee, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today in November urging the Trump administration to leave the regulation unchanged.

“Changing the rule after billions of dollars have already been spent means that utilities will have less certainty about federal regulations,” they wrote. “The gains we have made over the past decade to protect children and families from dangerous mercury pollution should not be lost.”

==

https://news.yahoo.com/chamber-commerce-backs-freshmen-house-172346136.html

wASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has decided to endorse 23 freshmen House Democrats in this fall's elections, a bipartisan move by an organization that has long leaned strongly toward Republicans.

The country's largest business group is also endorsing 29 freshmen House Republicans, said a person familiar with the organization's decision who described the actions. Even so, the decision has prompted internal divisions, with some state chamber officials criticizing the national group's decision to back freshmen Democrats in their areas.

The House freshmen the chamber is endorsing include several who face tough reelections, such as Reps. Abby Finkenauer and Cindy Axne of Iowa, Andy Kim of New Jersey, Xochitl Torres Small of New Mexico, Anthony Brindisi of New York, Kendra Horn of Oklahoma, Joe Cunningham of South Carolina and Elaine Luria and Abigail Spanberger of Virginia.

The chamber has a long track record of using most of its political might to back Republican candidates, especially with money. But the organization has had to recalibrate its tactics as the once-reliably pro-business GOP has taken a more populist, conservative hue on issues like immigration and trade, reflecting the views of President Donald Trump and hard-right tea party adherents whose numbers in Congress have grown.

In earlier indications of the chamber's more bipartisan approach, it has boosted some campaign contributions to Democrats and changed how it assigns publicly released scores about whether lawmakers help business, now factoring in whether they try reaching across party lines.

The moves come as Democrats seem all but certain to continue running the House after November’s elections. Any support for Democrats helps the chamber maintain lines of communication with them, especially as growing numbers of progressive Democrats in Congress makes it harder for business groups to find allies in the party.

Democrats in tough reelection fights can cite the chamber's backing "as a sort of Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said Liam Donovan, a lobbyist and former GOP political operative.

The chamber is also endorsing freshmen Democratic Reps. Greg Stanton of Arizona; Josh Harder, TJ Cox and Harley Rouda of California; Sharice Davids of Kansas; David Trone of Maryland; Haley Stevens of Michigan; Angie Craig and Dean Phillips of Minnesota; Susie Lee of Nevada; Antonio Delgado of New York; Colin Allred and Lizzie Fletcher of Texas and Ben McAdams of Utah.

The person describing the chamber's endorsements would only do so on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the moves publicly. The decision by the chamber, which issued no statement about the matter, was first reported by The Hill newspaper.

Earlier this year, the chamber said it spent six figures on digital ads opposing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., in a primary that the progressive lawmaker won easily.

Otherwise, all of the chamber's $2 million so far in the 2020 campaign on outside spending — money spent without coordinating with candidates — went to helping Republicans, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. So did all of the $40 million in outside spending by the chamber during the 2018 and 2016 campaigns.

Yet the chamber’s much smaller, direct contributions to candidates have been more evenhanded, if politically pragmatic.

The $210,000 the chamber's political action committee has donated directly to 2020 candidates' campaigns has been split about evenly between Democrats and Republicans, the center's data shows. In 2018, about 2-in-3 dollars it gave to House candidates went to Republicans.

The chamber has also contributed $168,000 this year to GOP candidates for the Senate and nothing to Democrats. Since it is unclear if Republicans will continue running the Senate, the chamber's contributions to Senate GOP candidates have more political weight than spending on the House, where control isn't in serious doubt.

Some state chambers complained to U.S. chamber officials about the expected endorsements, arguing that the Democratic lawmakers did not have sufficiently pro-business records.

Chad Warmington, president of the Oklahoma state chamber, opposed the expected endorsement of Horn, who was narrowly elected in 2018 to a district centered on Oklahoma City. Warmington said he believes Horn hasn't been supportive enough of the state's oil and gas industry.

“A U.S. chamber endorsement can be persuasive in convincing voters that she's pro-business," Warmington said in an interview last week. “And I don't believe there is enough evidence to say she is. I was saying to them, ‘Stay out’” and don't endorse anyone.

Alan Cobb, president of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, said he objected to the U.S. organization's expected endorsement of Davids, from the Kansas City area. Cobb said he prefers Davids' GOP opponent, Amanda Adkins, a businesswoman and former member of the state chamber's board.

Warmington and Cobb both said they'd not been consulted by the national chamber about the endorsements.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/07/how-the-so-called-champion-of-american-business-fought-to-protect-profiteering-and-endangered-millions

As hospital intensive care units overflow again, and delays in COVID-19 testing reports reach record levels in many cities, a conversation I recently with Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, reminded me that I had forgotten something utterly critical: Donald Trump’s decision to unilaterally disarm America in the face of the coronavirus invasion was urged upon him by an ostensible defender of American business: the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

When the pandemic reached America, we weren’t ready — any more than we were ready when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. But Trump had the tools to do what the U.S. has often done: make up for lack of preparedness. The crucial gaps to fill in March were supplies for testing to limit the spread of the virus, and medical equipment to treat those who got sick — testing kits, swabs, reagents, masks, gowns and gloves — by the billions. Government health agencies estimated that if the pandemic took hold, the country would need, for example, 3.5 billion N95 medical masks. We had 12 million.

Presidents have available, and have routinely used, the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to overcome such critical supply shortages— not just in wartime, but also to ensure adequate relief supplies after natural disasters. DPA can be used to put emergency purchases at the head of a supply chain, but also to require factories to convert their output to provide needed equipment in adequate volumes. Members of Congress urged Trump to appoint a military official as DPA czar to coordinate production and distribution of essential pandemic-related medical supplies, as was done in the Korean War.

In March, Trump was leaning towards robust use of the DPA, fashioning himself as a wartime president and the battle against the coronavirus as America’s “big war.” He invoked the DPA to require General Motors to speed up its production of ventilators. But he quickly discovered that he had an enemy within — not the virus as such, but the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

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Within days of Trump’s announcement that he would mobilize as if for war and use the DPA, the Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying army swung into action. Among the Chamber’s arguments: DPA would impose “red tape on companies precisely when they need flexibility to deal with closed borders and shuttered factories.” Unstated: if the government took charge of the supply chain for tests, masks and gowns, it could also prevent bidding wars from competing hospitals and states that would, and did, drive prices — and profits — through the roof.

In response, labor unions representing nurses, hospital staff and other frontline workers who were unable to be tested, or to obtain masks or gowns, protested and urged the Chamber to join a national mobilization to defeat the coronavirus. The appeal was not answered. On March 23, Markey and his Massachusetts colleague, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, wrote to the Chamber demanding an explanation. The Chamber’s response: Defense Production Act reliance was unnecessary, because “American companies will do whatever it takes to support America’s response to the pandemic and shore up the economy.”

But what the workers had feared — insufficient production, soaring prices and profits, chaotic delivery mechanisms — took over the health care market during the first wave of virus spikes in the Northeast. Some hospitals were paying 15 times the usual price for masks.

The Chamber continued its strenuous opposition to enabling the government to ensure an adequate supply of tests and PPE. Even Trump conceded that profiteering had taken over the market, and ultimately he did invoke the DPA to prevent it — but when it came to the export market.

Supplies increased, but often at exorbitant prices. Only when the shutdowns of most of the American economy brought the number of hospitalizations down sharply did supply and demand come into temporary balance. Americans believed that if there was a second wave later in the year, at least health care workers on the front lines would have the tools they needed.

Trump, denied by Chamber opposition of an easy pathway to acting like a heroic wartime president, seemingly lost interest. By June his focus had shifted from fighting the virus to reopening the economy and then reigniting the culture wars. Media headlines proclaiming his lack of interest didn’t even provoke “fake news” tweets from the East Wing of the White House.

The virus had a longer attention span. With major states like Florida, Texas and Arizona opening rapidly and prematurely, the holes in the jerry-built testing, tracing and quarantine systems each state had fashioned without federal guidance gave the virus its chance.

Cases — although not, initially, fatalities — began to soar. Suddenly, what any nationally coordinated effort would have been tracking and resolving all along — that the nation had stepped up production of tests, masks and gowns to meet the needs of an economy in shutdown, but had nowhere near the level of supplies for a massive second wave — came home to roost. By early July, new cases were flooding the hospital capacity of even some of the nation’s major health care centers, such as Houston.

In New Orleans, testing centers had to close eight minutes after they opened. In 100-degree heat in Phoenix, lines at testing centers were eight hours long. San Antonio and Austin were forced to limit testing to those with symptoms, leaving the system utterly unable to detect asymptomatic cases, when research suggests that to 40% of infections take place. Wait times for test results soared with caseloads, so that even those who got tested might not find out they were positive until they were well past the contagious stage.

Nurses were again forced to use one N95 mask for weeks at a time. Prices for what was actually available soared. States reported they could only fulfill 10% of their orders. Even now, in July, the U.S. has nothing like the 3.5 billion N95 masks that we knew in January we would need. Indeed, how could we? No manufacturer could have guessed in March how severe the crisis would be by fall. With no one managing the system, it was clearly foolish for any private company to produce, on speculation, several billion masks. Market signals cannot prepare America for the massive increase in possible scale required by such a pandemic. Nor can individual cities and states trigger the necessary ramp-up of supplies. Only a systematic national plan designed to ensure that we were ready for the worst-case scenario could have protected us.

Inevitably, the “market solutions” favored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have failed America not once but twice. In failing, they have taken the nation’s economy over the precipice into a deep, long, economic decline. That the loudest voice claiming to represent U.S. business chose to defend profiteering, embrace short-term thinking and risk the collapse of the American health care system and economy is both shameful and shocking.

And that most Americans, including me, had already forgotten this is scary. This is not the first time the Chamber has successfully pursued policies that put us enormously at risk — for years it has been one of the major forces preventing Washington from adopting even the most modest efforts to accelerate a transition off fossil fuels to save lives and protect the climate. But if the Chamber can get away once again with having caused massive economic damage while risking the health of millions, and with its public reputation unscathed, it’s unlikely to change its behavior.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/trump-says-hes-aiming-to-shield-corporations-from-legal-liability-for-workers-who-contract-covi-19-on-the-job

no lnx

Trump says he’s aiming to shield corporations from legal liability for workers who contract COVI-19 on the job

Written by Jake Johnson / Common Dreams April 21, 2020

President Donald Trump said during a press briefing Monday evening that his administration is aiming to shield corporations from legal responsibility for workers who contract the novel coronavirus on the job, a move that the Chamber of Commerce and right-wing advocacy groups are aggressively lobbying for as the White House pushes to reopen the U.S. economy against the warnings of public health experts.

“We are trying to take liability away from these companies,” Trump said in response to a reporter’s question on the subject. “We just don’t want that because we want the companies to open and to open strong. But I’ll get you a legal opinion on that.”

The president claimed that his administration has not previously discussed the issue of corporate liability, but the New York Times reported that business executives raised the matter with Trump in a conference call last week.

An “issue of great concern to the executives on the call,” according to the Times, “was the need to address the liability companies could face if employees got sick after returning to work, given the possibility that workers who felt that they were brought back too soon—or were not placed in a safe environment—could sue en masse.”

Additionally, the Washington Post reported earlier this month that Trump administration officials discussed including in the next stimulus package “a waiver that would clear businesses of liability from employees who contract the coronavirus on the job.”

Watch Trump’s remarks:

JM Rieger

@RiegerReport

REPORTER: [If companies] have employees come back to work and they get sick will these companies be liable?

…

TRUMP: I’ll give you a legal answer to that when we look it up.

…

REPORTER: You guys haven’t discussed that yet?

TRUMP: Nobody’s discussed it, no. But we will now.

Embedded video

In a memo to its members last week, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the most powerful business lobbying group in the nation—said that legal action from workers who are infected by Covid-19 on the job is “perhaps the largest area of concern for the overall business community.”

The Chamber of Commerce “argues the sheer number of lawsuits could overwhelm businesses,” Roll Call reported.

“Businesses say they keep their workplaces safe,” Roll Call noted, “but the memo indicates that major corporations privately acknowledge that many so-called essential employees will get sick or die.”

Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-backed organization, is also urging lawmakers to protect corporations from responsibility for exposing their workers to the coronavirus.

As Common Dreams reported last week, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has been flooded with thousands of complaints from workers in recent weeks accusing employers of violating federal coronavirus guidelines and failing to provide adequate protective equipment.

Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan, wrote in a series of tweets last week that “the whole point of making employers liable for risking the lives of their staff is to prevent them from exposing their staff to undue risk.”

“Businesses are asking for the right to expose their workers to fatal risks with no consequences. It’s bad economics and bad policy,” said Wolfers. “If this tweet sounds to you at all anti-business, let me be clear: I am absolutely against businesses profiting by exposing their workers to unconscionable risks of death.”

==

https://theintercept.com/2020/04/14/one-nation-pfizer-lobbyist-drug-prices/

one  NATION, ONE of the dark-money groups spending the most to back Republican candidates for Senate, added a former Pfizer lobbyist and U.S. Chamber of Commerce board member to its board of directors at the end of 2019. One Nation has spent $1.7 million already this year on ads praising the efforts of Republican senators, including the push for lower drug prices, a cause both Pfizer and the Chamber have lobbied against.

The group is part of the network of conservative fundraisers — under the “Crossroads” umbrella — launched by Karl Rove and Ed Gillespie after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United. Former staffers for Crossroads GPS, the 501(c)(4) wing of Rove and Gillespie’s Super PAC, American Crossroads, started One Nation in 2015 after a yearslong fight with the Internal Revenue Service for tax-exempt status. Crossroads eventually received that status in 2016. Although the group has been relatively dormant since 2014, it maintains fundraising efforts and ended 2019 with $35.5 million cash on hand.

Ken W. Cole, who has long worked in government relations for companies like General Motors and Honeywell, as well as the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer, joined the board of One Nation last year. The group listed Cole as a director on its latest annual report, filed to the Virginia State Corporation Commission in March, but he’s not yet listed publicly on its website.

Cole lobbied on behalf of Pfizer as senior vice president of government relations from 2010 to February 2018, on issues including drug pricing and drug shortages. Pfizer has placed the blame for high drug prices on health care providers and insurers, while it has fought recent legislative efforts aimed at reducing drug prices. Since at least 2014, Cole has also served on the board for the Chamber of Commerce, which has similarly opposed legislative efforts to cut drug costs or allow the government to fine companies for inflating prices.

Pfizer and the Chamber of Commerce have collectively spent just under $1 billion on lobbying over the last decade, with Pfizer typically spending around $10 million each year, and the Chamber spending more than $60 million. In recent years, that included efforts to kill legislation aimed at lowering the cost of prescription drug prices, including a bipartisan prescription drug-pricing bill put forward last September by Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley and Oregon Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden. President Donald Trump has praised the bill and earlier this year called on Congress to pass legislation to address rising drug costs. The Senate bill, which Grassley has accused Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of sabotaging, remains deadlocked, while a companion bill in the House, which Pfizer and the Chamber also lobbied against, passed last year. The Chamber, meanwhile, supported a separate drug-pricing bill from Idaho Republican Sen. Mike Crapo, saying that it “would help reduce drug prices without resorting to destructive price controls,” citing “inflation cap penalties” in the Grassley-Wyden bill and “government negotiation provisions” in the House bill.

Cole is currently the CEO and managing director of Cactus Consulting LLC, a firm registered in January 2019 in the District of Columbia, with principal offices based in Florida.

One Nation defended its board appointment of Cole, claiming that his work for Pfizer was not a conflict since he left the company early last year. “Ken has been a respected leader in a variety of different companies and industries. After he retired, we sought him out for his breadth of management experience and judgment,” One Nation President Steven Law said in a statement to The Intercept. “Our boards provide guidance on macro issues like financial controls, budgets, compensation and management policies. They do not direct day-to-day activities.”

Law, the CEO of Crossroads GPS, American Crossroads, Senate Leadership Fund, and One Nation, is also a former chief of staff to McConnell and a former legal officer for the Chamber of Commerce.

AS A 501(C)(4) GROUP, One Nation is not required to disclose its donors, but voluntary disclosures from a number of interest groups shed light on its funds. The dark-money group received major contributions of $1 million in 2016 and 2017 from Andeavor, an oil company bought in 2018 by an Ohio petroleum conglomerate. In 2018, One Nation also received $50,000 from the American Petroleum Institute, and another $50,000 from the Real Estate Roundtable in 2017.

One Nation is the single largest group contributing to the Senate Leadership Fund, the McConnell-aligned Super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates. It’s the political action committee’s second-largest donor overall this cycle, after Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman. It has also contributed to conservative groups working on policy issues like abortion and gun rights, like the National Rifle Association and the Susan B. Anthony List, an anti-abortion group. The group has spent more than $1 million already this year backing Maine Sen. Susan Collins, including ads in January, February, and March highlighting “Collins’ effort to lower the price of insulin.” Democrats note that Collins — like almost every other Republican — voted repeatedly against the Affordable Care Act and closing the Medicare Part D coverage gap. Collins has taken $431,604 from the pharmaceutical industry throughout her career.

Collins, whose chances of securing a fifth term became less certain after her vote to confirm Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018 and increased criticism over her stance on abortion rights, is facing a challenge from Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon, backed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, and Betsy Sweet, backed by Justice Democrats. In the wake of Collins’s vote to confirm Kavanaugh, activist Ady Barkan helped raise more than $4 million to support whoever wins the state’s Democratic primary in July.

In addition to Collins, One Nation is backing Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst and started running ads supporting her last year. On March 18, One Nation announced another $970,000 in television, radio, and digital ads praising Ernst as a champion for lower drug prices. Ernst said she supported, but did not sponsor, the Wyden-Grassley bill that Pfizer and the Chamber lobbied against, but voted against a 2017 bill that would have allowed the U.S. to import cheaper drugs from Canada.

Ernst in 2018 co-sponsored a Republican-led bill as part of a party effort to assuage fears among its base after its successful repeal of parts of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans said the bill would protect people with preexisting conditions, but it would still have allowed insurers to discriminate against patients  for other reasons, or sell policies that don’t cover other medical problems, HuffPost reported.

Critics say it’s unsettling, if not unsurprising, that a McConnell-aligned dark-money group would add a former pharmaceutical lobbyist to its board while running ads celebrating Republican senators for pushing lower drug prices, a cause McConnell himself has stymied in Congress.

“One Nation’s mission is to make sure that Republicans hold their majority in the Senate. They are going to craft their message around that,” said Robert Maguire, research director at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It does not mean that One Nation has staked out that policy. They think that voters in Maine want to hear that.”

==

320

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-gutting-nepa-2645437802.html

The Trump administration is trying mightily to gut the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that mandates rigorous, science-based environmental impact reviews for major infrastructure and construction projects prior to federal permitting. NEPA also reserves significant time for the public to weigh in on the impact of projects to their communities.

The loss of public input in the administration's proposed changes to NEPA has environmental justice leaders up in arms. For them, the silencing amounts to regulatory racism.

At a Feb. 25 public hearing on the proposal in Washington, DC, Hilton Kelley, a 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize winner for his work in reducing emissions from petrochemical facilities and incinerators in Port Arthur, Texas, told the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that, with at least six explosions and plant accidents in his city over the last year, the events had become so common that children play basketball right through the noise and plumes.

"When you're talking about weakening NEPA and expediting a process, this is what happens," Kelley said, as reported by The Associated Press. "Don't lessen the regulation. Don't silence our voices."

That is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to do in rewriting the implementation guidelines for this bipartisan act signed by President Nixon and designed to allow the public input needed to ensure that "man and nature can exist in productive harmony."

Cheered on by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the nation's leading fossil fuel, chemical, construction, manufacturing, airline, trucking and farming interests, the Trump administration is trying to cut the average time for environmental reviews by more than half.

The Trump NEPA rewrite would undermine the act by allowing companies and contractors to write up their own environmental reviews. It would free builders of chemical and petrochemical factories, oil and gas pipelines, highways, port terminals and other infrastructure from accounting for the cumulative effects over time of pollution, land and wetland loss and erosion.

Plant owners seeking federal approval would no longer need to fret about indirect effects of downstream and downwind pollution, nor about a facility's contribution to climate change.

More Harm to Communities Already Under Siege

For communities long polluted by industry, which are disproportionately poor and of color, the Trump administration's changes promise particular devastation. Such communities already suffer higher rates of illnesses from asthma to cancer, life-altering effects such as low birth weight and cognitive child development, and daily insults to quality of life in diesel exhaust, soot penetrating into homes and contaminated yards and playgrounds.

If the administration has its way, NEPA implementation guidelines would be rewritten so that even in neighborhoods already densely packed with toxic industries, a proposed facility need only assess its own pollutants, not how much they combine and compound those of nearby facilities to worsen the overall quality of air, water and land.

To make sure residents cannot complain about such compounded damage, the Trump administration is trying to severely limit the opportunity for mothers, fathers, seniors, teens and community leaders to speak directly to the government.

The rollout of the proposed changes is a case in point. Despite the sweeping environmental risks Americans currently face, with air pollution that kills 100,000 people per year and 77 million Americans drinking tap water in violation of health regulations, the White House Council on Environmental Quality allowed only two hearings on the proposed changes to NEPA before the close of public comment period March 10, in Washington, DC, and in Denver. By way of comparison, The Washington Post reported that major issues involving NEPA usually get around nine hearings.

One community leader who did get into the Washington hearing called out the cynicism of the Trump administration for its scant public scheduling. Belinda Joyner of Northampton County, North Carolina, who has spoken out against dumping in her lower-income African American community by a wood pellet facility, industrial-scale hog farms and a part of the proposed Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, told the CEQ panel, "You act like you're listening, and I'm not going to say you're not. But we see the results of these hearings."

In Denver, indigenous Americans spoke out strongly against the destruction of NEPA. Seventeen-year-old Navajo Najhozhoni Rain Ben drove seven and a half hours to say to the CEQ panel, "We shouldn't be talking about this. We should be implementing plans for the future. This is not for the future. This is for profit." Musician and spoken word artist Lyla June Johnston, also Navajo, drove six hours from Santa Fe to tell the panel that the proposed changes were "a slap in the face to our democracy — a slap in the face to the integrity of our mother earth."

The Modern Need for NEPA

NEPA originally was conceived amid growing public awareness and outrage in the 1960s over river and lake pollution, pesticide poisoning of birds, highway proposals that would blast communities apart, and tanker oil spills that fouled beaches and wiped out wildlife. There is no less need for it today as climate change is already slapping America and the world in the face with more devastating storms, chronic coastal flooding, deadly heat waves, western and Alaskan wildfires and acceleration of species extinction.

There is arguably even more of an immediate need for NEPA in communities that were dumping grounds long before the concept of climate change, even before the signing of the act itself. It has been proven beyond coincidence that — similar to the tobacco industry marketing to vulnerable populations — toxic industries and builders of massive infrastructure projects target locales where they assume residents will offer the least political resistance.

That significantly explains the shameless shoehorning of petrochemical plants into Louisiana's Cancer Alley in predominantly African American areas. That explains the routing of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline through lands and over waters indigenous Americans consider sacred, and the Atlantic Bridge pipeline protested by Joyner. It explains the concentration of industry in heavily Latino and African American Southeast Chicago, which is dealing with an endless siege of dust and neurotoxic contamination from coal ash, lead, and manganese dust.

That explains the ramrodding of roads through redlined communities and why people of color drove or flew hundreds and thousands of miles for the only two hearings offered by this administration. They said the NEPA, especially in a White House that is also hollowing out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of the last tools standing between them and a wholesale hostile invasion by industry.

Hope in the Courts

There is a glimmer of hope that the U.S. courts will determine that President Trump and his industrial partners are reaching too far in the rewrite of NEPA, as it relates to environmental racism. Take the Atlantic Bridge Pipeline, which is in the public eye for its upcoming Supreme Court case on whether it can transect the hallowed federal Appalachian Trail.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia recently vacated a Virginia state permit for a compressor station along the pipeline because developer Dominion Energy did not adequately assess its environmental impact on the historic African American host town of Union Hill. The town was founded by free African Americans and formerly enslaved people. The federal courts have also sent other fossil fuel projects and Trump administration oil and gas leases back to the drawing board for their inadequate consideration of environmental and climate impacts.

"Five years ago, Dominion told us that there was going to be a compressor station in Union Hill and there was nothing we could do about it," Chad Oba, president of a Union Hill coalition protesting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline compressor, said in The Hill. "That's not fair, and it's not American. This is a win for a group of citizens who were committed to protecting their community and never ever gave up."

Such victories give hope that this is one rollback the Trump administration may not ultimately get away with. The assault on NEPA is so sweeping and blatant in its turning control of the environment over to industry, it is sure to receive a massive court challenge from environmental groups and environmental justice advocates. If communities like Union Hill refused to give up, there is no reason for anyone opposed to the rewriting of NEPA to throw in the towel, either. There is still time before the March 10 deadline for public comment.

Recently, Union of Concerned Scientists colleague Adrienne Hollis interviewed Mildred McClain, an environmental justice leader in Savannah, Georgia, about the importance of NEPA. McClain recalled how the act gave her community a voice against the dumping of nuclear waste and unchecked widening of the Savannah River for container ships.

"If it had not been for NEPA," McClain said, "the community would not have been a part of the process."

It's important to recognize that taking communities of color out of the process is a major goal in the administration's efforts to gut NEPA. When President Trump announced the rewrite, he was — by no small coincidence — flanked by a nearly all-white phalanx of supporters as he claimed with a straight face, "We're maintaining America's world-class standards of environmental protection. We have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water on Earth. And for our country, the air is, right now, cleaner than it's been in 40 years."

For the past two generations, NEPA has offered a powerful tool for the protection of the nation's environment. If the Trump administration succeeds in ripping it apart and turning environmental reviews over to industry, we will risk the dirtiest air and water of any developed nation on Earth, cementing this nation as a hotbed of environmental racism.

The deadline for public comments on the proposed changes to NEPA closes this Tuesday. Submit your comment today.

Reposted with permission from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

==

320

https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-gutting-nepa-2645437802.html

The Trump administration is trying mightily to gut the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the law that mandates rigorous, science-based environmental impact reviews for major infrastructure and construction projects prior to federal permitting. NEPA also reserves significant time for the public to weigh in on the impact of projects to their communities.

The loss of public input in the administration's proposed changes to NEPA has environmental justice leaders up in arms. For them, the silencing amounts to regulatory racism.

At a Feb. 25 public hearing on the proposal in Washington, DC, Hilton Kelley, a 2011 Goldman Environmental Prize winner for his work in reducing emissions from petrochemical facilities and incinerators in Port Arthur, Texas, told the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) that, with at least six explosions and plant accidents in his city over the last year, the events had become so common that children play basketball right through the noise and plumes.

"When you're talking about weakening NEPA and expediting a process, this is what happens," Kelley said, as reported by The Associated Press. "Don't lessen the regulation. Don't silence our voices."

That is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to do in rewriting the implementation guidelines for this bipartisan act signed by President Nixon and designed to allow the public input needed to ensure that "man and nature can exist in productive harmony."

Cheered on by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the nation's leading fossil fuel, chemical, construction, manufacturing, airline, trucking and farming interests, the Trump administration is trying to cut the average time for environmental reviews by more than half.

The Trump NEPA rewrite would undermine the act by allowing companies and contractors to write up their own environmental reviews. It would free builders of chemical and petrochemical factories, oil and gas pipelines, highways, port terminals and other infrastructure from accounting for the cumulative effects over time of pollution, land and wetland loss and erosion.

Plant owners seeking federal approval would no longer need to fret about indirect effects of downstream and downwind pollution, nor about a facility's contribution to climate change.

More Harm to Communities Already Under Siege

For communities long polluted by industry, which are disproportionately poor and of color, the Trump administration's changes promise particular devastation. Such communities already suffer higher rates of illnesses from asthma to cancer, life-altering effects such as low birth weight and cognitive child development, and daily insults to quality of life in diesel exhaust, soot penetrating into homes and contaminated yards and playgrounds.

If the administration has its way, NEPA implementation guidelines would be rewritten so that even in neighborhoods already densely packed with toxic industries, a proposed facility need only assess its own pollutants, not how much they combine and compound those of nearby facilities to worsen the overall quality of air, water and land.

To make sure residents cannot complain about such compounded damage, the Trump administration is trying to severely limit the opportunity for mothers, fathers, seniors, teens and community leaders to speak directly to the government.

The rollout of the proposed changes is a case in point. Despite the sweeping environmental risks Americans currently face, with air pollution that kills 100,000 people per year and 77 million Americans drinking tap water in violation of health regulations, the White House Council on Environmental Quality allowed only two hearings on the proposed changes to NEPA before the close of public comment period March 10, in Washington, DC, and in Denver. By way of comparison, The Washington Post reported that major issues involving NEPA usually get around nine hearings.

One community leader who did get into the Washington hearing called out the cynicism of the Trump administration for its scant public scheduling. Belinda Joyner of Northampton County, North Carolina, who has spoken out against dumping in her lower-income African American community by a wood pellet facility, industrial-scale hog farms and a part of the proposed Atlantic Coast natural gas pipeline, told the CEQ panel, "You act like you're listening, and I'm not going to say you're not. But we see the results of these hearings."

In Denver, indigenous Americans spoke out strongly against the destruction of NEPA. Seventeen-year-old Navajo Najhozhoni Rain Ben drove seven and a half hours to say to the CEQ panel, "We shouldn't be talking about this. We should be implementing plans for the future. This is not for the future. This is for profit." Musician and spoken word artist Lyla June Johnston, also Navajo, drove six hours from Santa Fe to tell the panel that the proposed changes were "a slap in the face to our democracy — a slap in the face to the integrity of our mother earth."

The Modern Need for NEPA

NEPA originally was conceived amid growing public awareness and outrage in the 1960s over river and lake pollution, pesticide poisoning of birds, highway proposals that would blast communities apart, and tanker oil spills that fouled beaches and wiped out wildlife. There is no less need for it today as climate change is already slapping America and the world in the face with more devastating storms, chronic coastal flooding, deadly heat waves, western and Alaskan wildfires and acceleration of species extinction.

There is arguably even more of an immediate need for NEPA in communities that were dumping grounds long before the concept of climate change, even before the signing of the act itself. It has been proven beyond coincidence that — similar to the tobacco industry marketing to vulnerable populations — toxic industries and builders of massive infrastructure projects target locales where they assume residents will offer the least political resistance.

That significantly explains the shameless shoehorning of petrochemical plants into Louisiana's Cancer Alley in predominantly African American areas. That explains the routing of the Keystone XL pipeline and the Dakota Access Pipeline through lands and over waters indigenous Americans consider sacred, and the Atlantic Bridge pipeline protested by Joyner. It explains the concentration of industry in heavily Latino and African American Southeast Chicago, which is dealing with an endless siege of dust and neurotoxic contamination from coal ash, lead, and manganese dust.

That explains the ramrodding of roads through redlined communities and why people of color drove or flew hundreds and thousands of miles for the only two hearings offered by this administration. They said the NEPA, especially in a White House that is also hollowing out the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of the last tools standing between them and a wholesale hostile invasion by industry.

Hope in the Courts

There is a glimmer of hope that the U.S. courts will determine that President Trump and his industrial partners are reaching too far in the rewrite of NEPA, as it relates to environmental racism. Take the Atlantic Bridge Pipeline, which is in the public eye for its upcoming Supreme Court case on whether it can transect the hallowed federal Appalachian Trail.

The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia recently vacated a Virginia state permit for a compressor station along the pipeline because developer Dominion Energy did not adequately assess its environmental impact on the historic African American host town of Union Hill. The town was founded by free African Americans and formerly enslaved people. The federal courts have also sent other fossil fuel projects and Trump administration oil and gas leases back to the drawing board for their inadequate consideration of environmental and climate impacts.

"Five years ago, Dominion told us that there was going to be a compressor station in Union Hill and there was nothing we could do about it," Chad Oba, president of a Union Hill coalition protesting the Atlantic Coast Pipeline compressor, said in The Hill. "That's not fair, and it's not American. This is a win for a group of citizens who were committed to protecting their community and never ever gave up."

Such victories give hope that this is one rollback the Trump administration may not ultimately get away with. The assault on NEPA is so sweeping and blatant in its turning control of the environment over to industry, it is sure to receive a massive court challenge from environmental groups and environmental justice advocates. If communities like Union Hill refused to give up, there is no reason for anyone opposed to the rewriting of NEPA to throw in the towel, either. There is still time before the March 10 deadline for public comment.

Recently, Union of Concerned Scientists colleague Adrienne Hollis interviewed Mildred McClain, an environmental justice leader in Savannah, Georgia, about the importance of NEPA. McClain recalled how the act gave her community a voice against the dumping of nuclear waste and unchecked widening of the Savannah River for container ships.

"If it had not been for NEPA," McClain said, "the community would not have been a part of the process."

It's important to recognize that taking communities of color out of the process is a major goal in the administration's efforts to gut NEPA. When President Trump announced the rewrite, he was — by no small coincidence — flanked by a nearly all-white phalanx of supporters as he claimed with a straight face, "We're maintaining America's world-class standards of environmental protection. We have some of the cleanest air and cleanest water on Earth. And for our country, the air is, right now, cleaner than it's been in 40 years."

For the past two generations, NEPA has offered a powerful tool for the protection of the nation's environment. If the Trump administration succeeds in ripping it apart and turning environmental reviews over to industry, we will risk the dirtiest air and water of any developed nation on Earth, cementing this nation as a hotbed of environmental racism.

The deadline for public comments on the proposed changes to NEPA closes this Tuesday. Submit your comment today.

Reposted with permission from the Union of Concerned Scientists.

==

BP Calls It Quits with 3 Trade Associations, but Continues Membership in NAM, API, US Chamber

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British Petroleum (BP) is working to clean up its climate image. In the two months since environmental law nonprofit Client Earth filed a complaint against the UK oil giant with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) alleging its ads were misleading, BP has announced intentions to reach “net zero” carbon emissions by 2050,  stop all “corporate reputation” advertising and, now, withdraw from trade associations with approaches on climate that are out of step with its values.

The company announced this week it will resign its membership in the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM) and the Western States Petroleum Association (WSPA) and will not renew its membership with the Western Energy Alliance (WEA).

The decision came after BP conducted a review comparing the climate-related policies of several trade associations to its own. The company found its policies are not aligned with those of the AFPM, WSPA and WEA.

BP cited WEA’s opposition of federal methane regulation as a main area of misalignment. BP said “recent and developing differences in the area of carbon pricing” have contributed to its decision to leave the WSPA, as has its current focus on stopping a low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) initiative in Washington state. But while proclaiming to support a tax on carbon, BP contributed nearly $13 million to a campaign by the WSPA to help defeat a Washington state carbon emissions fee initiative in 2018.

BP listed disagreements over carbon pricing as the main reason for leaving the AFPM.

However, BP will remain a member of the American Petroleum Institute (AP), the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) and the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), despite finding that its policies are only partially aligned with those groups. According to its review, BP disagrees with the API’s opposition to the federal regulation of methane, disagrees with NAM over its opposition to carbon pricing and differs from the Chamber’s approach to climate science and emissions reduction efforts.

Yet for now, BP will remain a member of these groups, despite the fact that the API, U.S. Chamber and NAM are well-known architects of climate science denial.

“A company like BP that engages with trade associations is doing a constant cost-benefit calculation--to what extent does this group represent BP's interest and its policy advocacy versus pose a reputational risk for the company with its own investors, and with the public," said Kathryn Mulvey, climate accountability campaign manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists. "Clearly the fact that the company is staying with the American Petroleum Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce, and the National Association of Manufacturers, despite finding only partial alignment indicates that there's a calculation being made on its part.”

BP is not the first oil major to call it quits with the AFPM. Shell withdrew its membership last year in response to pressure from investors. It continued its membership with the WSPA despite finding “some misalignment” between its own policies and those of the WSPA. Shell appears to have discontinued its WEA membership in 2016.

AFPM president and chief executive officer Chet Thompson said the association is disappointed.

"As a member of our executive committee they know that AFPM is and has been committed to supporting policies that address climate change. Because of that, it leads us to assume that this decision was made based on factors other than our actual positions on the issues,” Thompson said in a statement without specifying what those factors are.

The split could ratchet up the pressure on ExxonMobil and Chevron, along with other oil companies to examine their trade association membership, Mulvey said.

"We would expect it would make it a good deal harder for major oil and gas companies to hide behind third-party lobby groups,” she said.  “We're starting to see a real new norm in terms of transparency, regarding climate policy positions and also action to address misalignment and inconsistency of trade group positions with stated company positions.”

BP said it will conduct its next review in two years and plans to provide periodic, internal updates to its board of directors and stakeholders. It did not rule out potentially withdrawing from more trade associations in the future.

“BP will pursue opportunities to work with organizations who share our ambitious and progressive approach to the energy transition. And when differences arise we will be transparent. But if our views cannot be reconciled, we will be prepared to part company,” said BP chief executive officer Bernard Looney in a statement, adding that the industry has long demonstrated it can collaborate effectively through trade associations.

“My hope is that in the coming years we can add climate to the long list of areas where, as an industry, we work together for a greater good,” Looney added.

Catherine Rheis-Boyd, president of the WSPA resident said her group and its members will continue to talk with BP and other stakeholders regarding the creation of a sustainable energy future.

“Our members know the way the world produces, distributes and consumes energy is evolving, and our industry will remain leaders in investing in and developing the diverse energy sources and technologies we need for the future,” Reheis-Boyd said. “Working together as an industry, we will rise to the challenge of a changing climate.”

The WEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mulvey said while BP is clearly concerned about its reputation and has pledged to be at net zero, whether the company will take the necessary steps remains to be seen. The company has so far only mentioned carbon capture technology and carbon offsets as methods to achieving net zero, promising to provide more details in September, nine months after its announcement.

Meanwhile, the company has pulled its “Possibilities Everywhere” campaign (the source of the Client Earth OECD complaint), but has been advertising its net zero commitment quite a bit on social media and in search engines.

BP’s withdrawal from the three associations does make one thing clear, Mulvey said.

"It lays down a gauntlet for ExxonMobil and Chevron to really step up or they may be understood, by the investor community in particular, to be falling behind their competitors."

BP Calls It Quits with 3 Trade Associations, but Continues Membership in NAM, API, US Chamber

On the heels of its net zero announcement and commitment to stop corporate reputation ads, BP withdraws from three trade groups over climate

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https://theintercept.com/2020/02/15/dark-money-irs-reporting-501c

DARK MONEY GROUPS backed by foreign corporate donors are supporting the Trump administration’s decision to roll back one of the last remaining ways for authorities to monitor the flow of unlawful campaign cash in American elections.

In recent years, 501(c) nonprofits have become the entities of choice for secret campaign spending. These nonprofit groups, which do not have to report any donor information to the public, can receive unlimited contributions from any source and, thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, spend unlimited amounts on elections.

Foreign spending, whether by a foreign national or a foreign-owned corporation, is still illegal under federal law. But the law has been poorly enforced, and the few instances in which penalties have been applied in recent years have come in reaction to publicly reported foreign corporate spending to Super PACs, such as The Intercept’s reporting on Chinese corporate donations in 2016 and the recent federal indictment over a shell company owned by a Russian national that gave to President Donald Trump’s Super PAC in 2018.

The one check on foreign contributions to dark-money groups has been the Schedule B form, which reports 501(c) donor information confidentially to the Internal Revenue Service. Under a new rule proposed last September by the Treasury Department and the IRS, nonprofits will no longer be required to report donor information, even to the government, allowing an unprecedented level of secrecy.

Lobbyists for foreign-funded groups have pushed the administration to move forward with the rule, which is close to being finalized.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobby organization in the world, spent over $10 million to influence the last 2018 midterm election cycle using its general fund. The group, which has foreign corporate donors, has lobbied in support of the IRS rule to repeal the Schedule B requirement, claiming in a letter to officials that the accidental leak of donors could reduce corporate free speech rights.

“Identifying, harassing, and intimidating the organization’s supporters is a chief means of silencing that organization’s speech,” wrote Caroline L. Harris, the Chambers’ chief tax policy counsel, and Ryan P. Meyers, the deputy general counsel of the group, in a regulatory letter to officials overseeing the rule change. “The Chamber applauds the work of Treasury and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) in eliminating onerous reporting requirements.”

The National Association of Manufacturers, which counts several corporations based in foreign countries as members, in a letter to IRS officials, similarly called the Schedule B requirement an “unnecessary administrative filings that raise the potential for misuse in a way that chills protected speech.”

Both NAM and the Chamber of Commerce, which spends more than $160 million a year, are organized as 501(c)(6) trade associations and under no obligation to disclose donor money to the public — only to the government through the annual Schedule B form to its 990 annual filing. After the Citizens United decision, the two groups led an effort to defeat the DISCLOSE Act, legislation that would have forced groups engaged high-dollar election advocacy to reveal donor information. The Chamber also lobbied successfully to stop President Barack Obama from issuing an executive order to force government contractors to disclose grants to 501(c) groups.

Foreign-based firms such as Brazilian petrochemical firm Braskem, Al Zayani Investments in Bahrain, and Turkish conglomerate Tekfen are listed on the Chamber’s website as dues-paying members. Faced with criticism in the past that its foreign funding might bleed into the Chamber’s vast domestic lobbying and campaign spending budget, the group has claimed that any foreign donations are walled off from domestic funds, and that foreign donors make up a small percentage of its overall budget.

But the removal of the Schedule B requirement could make those claims impossible to verify. A large foreign national firm could provide multimillion-dollar donations for use in U.S. elections to the Chamber under the new rule and such giving would never be reported to government officials.

That’s precisely the danger of removing Schedule B forms, campaign finance experts warn. The Campaign Legal Center, a campaign finance watchdog that has filed the ethics complaints that led to enforcement action on foreign money in the past, cautioned the IRS that the rule would simply open the door to more foreign spending.

“Congress has failed to pass new transparency legislation, and the FEC has failed to enforce the transparency laws that are on the books,” said Brendan Fischer, director of Campaign Legal Center’s federal reform program. “As a result, the only donor disclosure reports that dark-money groups file with any federal agency are the confidential Schedule B reports filed with the IRS. These confidential donor reports are one of the few ways that federal agencies could detect and deter foreign money in U.S. elections.”

It’s not hard to comprehend the many ways in which completely secret legal entities could incentivize illegal election behavior. In 2016, reporters from the Telegraph conducted a sting operation on a Republican campaign operative working in support of Trump. The operative was offered a $2 million check from a Chinese businessman by the reporters. He responded by offering a plan for how to conceal the money, suggesting that it be routed through his consulting firm to a pair of 501(c)4 groups and then to a pro-Trump Ssuper PAC.

The FBI is also investigating the National Rifle Association over allegations that the group, which is organized as a 501(c)4, may have received financial support from Russian sources. McClatchy reported that counterintelligence officials believe that Russian interests may have contributed to the NRA’s $30 million election advertising campaign in 2016.

Foreign firms increasingly finance major American business associations. As The Intercept has previously reported, a major Chinese chemical company joined the American Chemistry Council, a 501(c)6 that routinely lobbies lawmakers and spends money in elections.

The Trump administration had originally tried to remove the Schedule B form last summer in a surprise decision. A federal judge in Montana, however, ruled that the IRS had failed to follow proper regulatory procedure and ordered the agency to conduct a formal rule-making to allow the public and stakeholders to weigh in on the change.

“The rise of ‘dark money’ in U.S. elections has made it easy for foreign entities to contravene these laws by funneling money into U.S. elections through groups that that [sic] do not publicly disclose their donors, such as 501(c)(4) social welfare organizations and 501(c)(6) trade associations,” wrote the Campaign Legal Center in a letter to the IRS. “This change would further enable foreign entities to donate millions of dollars to such organizations for the purpose of influencing U.S. elections without any risk of scrutiny by federal regulators.”

Republican-aligned think tanks have joined the business-backed push to eliminate the Schedule B. Several nonprofits backed by billionaire Charles Koch, including his marquee group Americans for Prosperity, testified on February 7 in support of the rule change. FreedomWorks, a conservative grassroots group backed by business interests, has also mobilized hundreds of letters to the agency.

Hans von Spakovsky, a former Federal Election Commission member now with the Heritage Foundation, appeared at the hearing alongside other conservative activists in support of the rule change.

Von Spakosvsky, an avowed critic of campaign finance regulations and voting rights laws, testified that “their claim that this will somehow allow foreign money to suddenly flood into American elections is absurd,” according to a transcript of his remarks. Von Spakovsky said the FEC had plenty of authority and expertise in combating foreign money during his tenure, despite the fact that the agency has historically only intervened to investigate foreign money through disclosed political action committees on a few occasions in its 45-year history. He did not cite any examples of the FEC investigating 501(c) groups.

==

==

2020

...

The biggest recent change is Republicans' increasingly precarious hold on the Senate.

National Journal's Josh Kraushaar writes in his "Against the Grain" column that "the pathway for a narrow Democratic takeover of the upper chamber is looking clearer than ever": "If Trump doesn’t win a second term, Democrats only need to net three seats to win back the majority."

Scott Reed, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce senior political strategist, tells me that third-quarter fundraising reports showing three Republican senators being out-raised by Democratic challengers (in Arizona, Iowa and Maine) "are a three-alarm fire."

"The party was shaken by that," Reed said. "We're all worried."

The well-funded Chamber started TV ads in Arizona last week, launches an ad today in Maine, and will add a third state next week.

That's the earliest the group has ever gone on the air: Ads typically begin after Thanksgiving or New Year's.

"We have to spend early because the climate stinks," Reed said. "All these incumbent senators have terrible job approvals and terrible favorables."

But Reed thinks Trump has a better than 50-50 chance of hanging on: "He's still wildly popular in the middle of the country."...

==

==

1219 win

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/05/reuters-america-update-1-u-s-sec-proposes-rules-that-could-limit-shareholder-voices.html

Nov 5 (Reuters) - Wall Street’s top regulator on Tuesday proposed a pair of long-awaited rules that would set new limits on shareholders ability to call for corporate changes on thorny issues like climate change disclosures and executive compensation In one of the biggest wins for the corporate lobby under President Donald Trump, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission voted 3-2 along partisan lines to raise the re-submission thresholds for motions that shareholders file on company ballots and to put new requirements on firms guiding investors how to vote in corporate elections.

Both shareholder proposals and proxy advisory firms are cornerstones of corporate governance and how investors hold management accountable.

Both changes will be subject to public comment.

Democrats Rob Jackson and Allison Herren Lee voted against the rules, saying they tilted the playing field toward corporate management.

“In each aspect of todays two proposals, the odds are stacked against shareholders,” Lee said.

The current thresholds for re-submissions of proposals date from 1954, SEC officials said. Under the new rule, proposals resubmitted to companies within five years must have won 5% support in the past, up from 3% under current guidelines, with other minimum thresholds increasing for the second and third times proposals are submitted, SEC officials said.

The agency’s proposed rule aims to end shareholder proposals that appear on corporate ballots with diminishing levels of support, officials said.

The SEC also proposed to require proxy advisory firms to give companies two chances to review their recommendations before they are sent to shareholders.

Proxy advisory firms, including Institutional Shareholder Services Inc., recommend to investors how to vote and cast ballots on behalf of some asset managers.

Tuesday’s proposal seeks to impose a “review and response process” by allowing companies five days to review proxy adviser proposals and provide feedback to the advisers, who would then have two days to notify companies when they will send their recommendations, SEC officials said.

The process aims to “allow advisers and companies to better communicate about the aspects of the proxy advisory report that meets a standard of interest” on proposed issues, they said.

Industry groups, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which lobbied aggressively for the proposals, praised the SEC’s moves.

“The current opaque system of proxy advice degrades the information available to investors,” Tom Quaadman of the Chamber told Reuters.

==

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/exxonmobil-is-still-bankrolling-climate-science-deniers/

no lnx

ExxonMobil is still bankrolling climate science deniers

Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2019

ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?

According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.

Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.

So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?

Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber

In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period 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 $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.

Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.

Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”

Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career.

Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.

Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.

Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.

Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.

Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock

On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the 2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent $11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.

One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.

ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.

In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.

Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

==

==

two cabinet seats?!

despite promise/chant drain the swamp and some fig-leaf refrom on how long wait revolve door?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-bc-us--trump-former-lobbyists-20190917-story.html

In less than three years, President Donald Trump has named more former lobbyists to Cabinet-level posts than his most recent predecessors did in eight, putting a substantial amount of oversight in the hands of people with ties to the industries they're regulating.

The Cabinet choices are another sign that Trump's populist pledge to "drain the swamp" is a catchy campaign slogan but not a serious attempt to change the way Washington works. Instead of staring down "the unholy alliance of lobbyists and donors and special interests" as Trump recently declared, the influence industry has flourished during his administration.

The amount spent in 2019 on lobbying the U.S. government is on pace to match or exceed last year's total of $3.4 billion, the most since 2010, according to the political money website Open Secrets. Trump also has pulled in hefty contributions from industries with business before his administration, and his hotel near the White House has been a magnet for lobbyists and foreign interests since he was elected.

"An administration staffed by former industry lobbyists will almost certainly favor industry over the general public, because that's the outlook they're bringing to the job," said Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the political reform program at the think tank New America and author of the book "The Business of America is Lobbying."

Former lobbyists run the Defense and Interior departments, Environmental Protection Agency and office of the U.S. Trade Representative. The acting Labor secretary, Pat Pizzella, is a former lobbyist and Trump's pick to run the department, Eugene Scalia , also is an ex-lobbyist. Scalia's confirmation hearing before a GOP -controlled Senate committee is scheduled for Thursday and Democrats are expected to grill him on his long record of opposing federal regulations .

A seventh ex-lobbyist, Dan Coats , resigned as Trump's intelligence chief in August.

President Barack Obama had five former lobbyists in his Cabinet during two terms in office and President George W. Bush had three, also during eight years in the White House, according to lobbying and foreign agent disclosure records. The review was limited to the Trump, Obama and Bush administrations because prior to 1995 there was no central database of federal lobbying registrations and the law was hazy about who was supposed to register.

Shortly after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that revoked an Obama directive prohibiting lobbyists from being appointed to a post at a federal agency they'd lobbied within the last two years. While this "cooling off" period was cast aside, Trump's order continued to bar for two years lobbyists-turned-government-employees from participating in particular matters that they'd lobbied on during the two preceding years.

"Without the cooling off period, these Cabinet heads appear to be serving their former employers' and clients' special interests," said Virginia Canter, chief ethics counsel of the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Trump's Cabinet includes the heads of the 15 executive departments and seven other senior-level posts, such as EPA administrator and director of national intelligence. Obama's Cabinet had the same number of members and Bush's Cabinet had two fewer.

Scalia, the Labor Department nominee, has spent much of his career as a partner in the Washington office of the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher firm, where he ran up a string of victories in court cases on behalf of business interests challenging labor and financial regulations. Scalia, the son of the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, served for a year as the Labor Department's top lawyer during the George W. Bush administration.

His financial disclosure report lists 49 clients who paid him $5,000 or more for legal services, including e-cigarette giant Juul Labs, Facebook, Walmart and Bank of America. Disclosure records show Scalia was registered in 2010 and 2011 to lobby for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Pizzella has been the acting secretary since Alexander Acosta resigned the post in July amid renewed criticism of how, as a federal prosecutor, he handled a 2008 secret plea deal with wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Pizzella lobbied for clients that ranged from Microsoft Corp. to the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians. He also worked on several accounts with disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff , although Pizzella was never accused of any misconduct or wrongdoing.

Obama chose Pizzella for a GOP seat on the Federal Labor Relations Authority and he was an assistant Labor secretary during the George W. Bush administration.

Two Trump Cabinet officials, Interior Secretary David Bernhardt and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler, have been accused by congressional Democrats and public interest groups of failing to honor their ethics pledges.

Both Bernhardt and Wheeler, backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have played leading roles in the administration's rollback of environmental regulations. They also both worked at the agency they now lead during prior administrations.

Interior's inspector general launched an investigation of Bernhardt earlier this year after receiving seven separate ethics allegations against him. A complaint filed by the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center alleged that shortly after joining the department in August 2017 Bernhardt became involved in matters that were the focus of his lobbying for California's Westlands Water District that lasted until mid-November 2016.

Westlands has federal contracts to provide irrigation water to 700 family-owned farms in the fertile San Joaquin Valley. The complaint said Bernhardt had "lobbied on discrete provisions of a law directing Interior to maximize water supplies to his clients, and to minimize Endangered Species Act protections in that region."

Then, after joining Interior, Bernhardt breached his ethics pledge by directing government officials under him "to advance the particular matters he had previously lobbied on," according to the complaint.

"It is very hard to tell where Bernhardt's lobbying career ended and where his public service begins," said Brendan Fischer, director of the Campaign Legal Center's federal reform program.

An Interior spokesman said in a statement, "Secretary Bernhardt is and always has been committed to upholding his ethical responsibilities, and he has fully complied with those obligations."

Thomas Birmingham, Westlands' general manager, said the agency is actually disadvantaged with Bernhardt as secretary because he's not been able to engage with him as he did past Interior secretaries, like Ken Salazar and Sally Jewell .

"I don't know what Mr. Bernhardt has done or has not done at Interior," Birmingham said.

Wheeler worked as a lobbyist for eight years and his more than 20 different clients included coal magnate Bob Murray, who pushed hard on the Trump administration to grant a series of breaks for the sagging domestic coal industry.

"I think he's doing a great job," Betsy Monseu, CEO of the American Coal Council, said of Wheeler. "We're pleased to see the regulatory reform agenda moving forward."

But Canter's organization, known as CREW, urged the EPA inspector general earlier this year to investigate whether Wheeler broke his ethics pledge. Among the allegations, CREW said Wheeler had participated in the easing of standards for storing coal ash in 2018 even though he had lobbied on those regulations the year before for Murray Energy.

The inspector general's office declined to say if it had open an investigation, directing a reporter to file a Freedom of Information Act request.

An EPA statement called CREW's complaint "baseless and just flat out false." It said Wheeler works closely with career EPA ethics officials and abides by all ethics requirements.

The Pentagon's top official, Mark Esper , spent seven years lobbying for defense industry juggernaut Raytheon, a company that stands to gain handsomely from Trump's push to boost military spending by billions of dollars. The company closed out 2018 by hitting a record $27.1 billion in net sales, up nearly seven percent from the $25.3 billion the year before.

Esper, who was secretary of the Army when Trump chose him to be defense secretary, faced opposition from only a handful of Democrats and he was confirmed in July by a 90-8 margin.

As Army secretary, Esper hasn't participated in Raytheon-related matters under the terms of an ethics agreement that runs through this November. After that, Esper told Pentagon ethics officials that he will continue to avoid Raytheon issues unless his participation as defense secretary is determined to be essential.

Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative, lobbied primarily for steel companies between 1999 and 2003. Beginning in 2004, he represented just one company, U.S. Steel, which paid his firm, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, $3.2 million over a seven-year period.

might not fund trump 2020?

https://www.alternet.org/2019/07/the-nra-is-in-total-meltdown-and-making-folks-nervous-about-trumps-2020-campaign-report/

no lnx

henderson

NRA ‘is in total meltdown’ — and making ‘folks nervous’ about Trump’s 2020 campaign: report

Michael Vadon

written by Alex Henderson July 3, 2019

It isn’t hard to figure out why President Donald Trump has been claiming that Democrats are hell-bent on destroying the 2nd Amendment: he realizes that the National Rifle Association (NRA) is one of the top supporters of the Republican Party. But the NRA’s recent problems have been well-documented, and a Politico report published on July 3 stresses that turmoil and instability within the NRA are a major worry for Trump’s 2020 campaign.

In Politico, journalist Alex Isenstadt explains that the NRA “is in total meltdown” thanks to “everything from a failed coup attempt to the departure of its longtime political architect to embarrassing tales of self-dealing by top leaders.” And GOP leaders, according to Isenstadt, fear that if the NRA is “profoundly diminished heading into the election,” the GOP will be facing “a gaping hole in its political machinery.”

Gregg Keller, former executive director of the American Conservative Union, explained to Politico why the NRA’s problems “have folks nervous” in the Republican Party — asserting, “No organization has been more important to conservative voter education and engagement than the NRA. We all hope they’re able to mount the kind of effort in the 2020 cycle they have in the past. But in case they can’t, given their current situation, I hope they’re being forthright about that within the movement so others can pick up the slack.”

Republican strategist Chris LaCivita told Politico that the “infighting and accusations” troubling the NRA will “have an impact in the NRA’s ability to raise money, which would be used in elections to turn out its membership.”

Isenstadt notes that following the recent resignation of Chris Cox (who had been in charge of NRA lobbying since 2002), it remains to be seen “who will oversee the NRA’s 2020 strategy.” Steven Law, who heads the Senate Leadership Fund (a right-wing political action committee with close ties to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell), described Cox as “the guy everybody dealt with” in the GOP.

@realDonaldTrump

People are fleeing New York like never before. If they own a business, they are twice as likely to flee. And if they are a victim of harassment by the A.G. of the state, like what they are doing to our great NRA, which I think will move quickly to Texas, where they are loved.....

If the NRA’s problems harm Republican fundraising in 2020, the burning question is: who would fill the void? And Isenstadt points out that other possible worries for the Trump campaign include less spending by the Chamber of Commerce and a recent announcement by the Koch Brothers-affiliated Americans for Prosperity that it is open to the possibility of supporting centrist Democratic candidates in some cases.

Former Republican Rep. David McIntosh, now president of the right-wing Club for Growth, expressed concerns over Americans for Prosperity’s announcement of possible support for some Democrats.

Interviewed by Politico, McIntosh said of the GOP, “Right now, the party is functioning. But if you see another collapse or if we lose the White House, I think you’re going to see Republicans frankly in a world of hurt without a major funding group like that.”

==

==

https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/05/07/chamber-of-commerce-climate-suits/

Dana Drugmand

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which historically has worked to block climate policy and undermine international action, has proposed sweeping new rules to help fossil fuel companies fend off liability lawsuits seeking to hold them accountable for costly climate impacts.

The Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform released a pair of reports in March that sharply criticize public nuisance and municipal lawsuits against large corporations including fossil fuel producers. One of the reports contains a list of “solutions” that include barring local governments from bringing liability suits, restricting which industries can be targeted in suits and restricting state courts’ authority to hear certain claims or their ability to order certain remedies. That report was written by three former state attorneys with long histories of defending fossil fuel interests.

“The Chamber’s real concern with municipal climate litigation is to protect its polluter funders from having to cough up the real documents and truthful testimony required by court proceedings,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, who previously served as Rhode Island’s attorney general, told Climate Liability News.

“Municipalities are independent corporate entities that have every right to sue in their own names. Municipal litigation in no way prevents states from pursuing legal action, nor does it usurp state authority.”

The Chamber’s argument is that the fossil fuel industry should be insulated from litigation because climate change is a political issue best handled by the legislative and executive branches of government. Fossil fuel companies have already used that argument to convince two federal judges to dismiss suits against them by the cities of San Francisco, Oakland and New York, although those dismissals are being appealed.

Patrick Parenteau, a professor at Vermont Law School, said the Chamber’s proposals are little more than a red herring as public nuisance cases do not threaten the authority of the other branches of government. “Indeed, municipalities have been forced to turn to the courts for relief due to the failure of the other branches to take decisive corrective action and in the case of the Trump administration, to take actions designed to propel the country off the climate cliff,” Parenteau said. “Courts are understandably cautious about not overstepping their authorities but they are also constitutionally bound to adjudicate the rights and responsibilities of the parties that come before them.

“In our system of justice, it is up to a jury to decide questions of causation, damage, and liability,” he added. “Of course that is the last thing that the oil companies or the Chamber of Commerce want to see happen, and why they are so intent on throwing these cases out of court or shielding them from liability.”

According to Catherine M. Sharkey, a New York University law professor and an expert in torts, products liability and administrative law, the claims in these climate suits are nothing extraordinary. In her amicus brief supporting New York City in its appeal, she wrote, “nuisance liability plays a potentially positive and economically justified role in forcing actors to internalize the harms that their activities cause.”

The Chamber has written friend-of-the-court briefs supporting the companies in that litigation. The pair of reports released in March attempt to extend those arguments to forestall future suits.

One report, titled “Waking the Litigation Monster: The Misuse of Public Nuisance,” reviews the history of public nuisance as a tort, arguing that it was improperly expanded beyond its narrow origin to address hazards resulting from industrial activities like chemical dumping and asbestos use and the sale of dangerous products such as tobacco and lead paint.

The report claims that “public nuisance is not needed to fill gaps” that the political branches already occupy. But as Karen Sokol, associate professor of law at Loyola University College of Law in New Orleans, wrote in an op-ed for the Center for Progressive reform, the courts do have a role because the political branches have failed to address the climate crisis.

“State tort law is urgently needed to address the myriad climate change harms exacerbated by the federal government’s inaction,” she wrote. “This is the gap-filling role that state tort law has been serving for this country’s citizens for decades.”

The other report, “Mitigating Municipality Litigation: Scope and Solutions,”  proposes ways to prevent more of these suits from being filed.

“The feeding frenzy of municipal lawsuits not only stands in the way of justice by making it harder to resolve cases, but also undermines states’ authority,” Harold Kim, chief operating officer of the Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform, said in a press release.

The Chamber’s report outlines strategies for states to quash municipal lawsuits, including:

Eliminate the power of local governments to bring suits altogether, or substantially limit it by requiring state approval of municipal suits. Another possibility is to prohibit the hiring of outside counsel by municipalities.

Limit the defendants that can be sued; in other words, provide immunity for certain industries or companies.

Limit what constitutes a public nuisance.

Deprive municipal plaintiffs a forum to sue by restricting state courts’ authority to hear certain claims or their ability to order certain remedies.

Parenteau called these recommendations “preposterous” and said the reports serve as “just more right wing arm-waving to divert attention from the very real environmental and economic damage that climate change is doing to communities all across the country.”

“Innocent people don’t need immunity,” he said.

Who is Behind The Reports?

To produce the report outlining ways to stop municipal suits, the Chamber turned to a roster of players with a history of defending fossil fuel companies and promoting industry interests.

They  include former Washington State Attorney General Rob McKenna, former Maine Attorney General Drew Ketterer, and former West Virginia Solicitor General Elbert Lin.

McKenna, who served two terms as AG from 2005-13, now works with the firm Orrick Herrington & Sutcliffe, where he co-chairs its public policy group and represents corporate clients such as Microsoft and Chevron. He is listed as an attorney for Chevron in the King County, Wash., climate suit against several oil companies, and last year appeared in ads opposing Washington’s carbon fee ballot initiative.

Ketterer was the attorney general of Maine from 1995-2001 and is a founding partner of Ketterer & Ketterer law firm. According to the firm’s website, the firm “represents national and multi-national corporations that are regulated or sued by state Attorneys General in all 50 states. The law firm formerly or currently represents for-profit colleges, the firearms industry, pharmaceutical companies, automobile manufacturers and petroleum companies.” Ketterer also wrote an op-ed for a Maine newspaper last year opposing climate liability suits.

Lin was Solicitor General in West Virginia from 2013-17, when he led West Virginia’s legal challenge (along with other states) to the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan. He is currently at a law firm based in Richmond, Va.

The “Waking the Litigation Monster” report was prepared by Joshua K. Payne and Jess R. Nix, attorneys with the Alabama-based law firm Spotswood Samson & Sansbury. The firm specializes in representing large corporate clients such as energy companies and financial firms.

The Chamber’s Institute for Legal Reform (ILR) touts itself as “the most influential legal reform organization in the country.” Founded in 1998, its purpose is to mitigate liability risks to businesses. ILR advocates for legal reforms through research, communications campaigns and aggressive lobbying. The organization, which does not disclose its funders, spent an average of $25.44 million annually on lobbying between 2015-18, according to data from OpenSecrets. According to Chamber Watch, a watchdog site run by the organization Public Citizen, the “ILR’s primary mission is to lobby to make it harder to for consumers, workers, and small businesses to go to court to hold corporations accountable for wrongdoing.”

The Chamber’s History of Opposing Climate Action

The Chamber of Commerce, which represents more than 3 million corporations but does not disclose its members, has a long history of fighting against consumer and environmental protections and regulations. The Chamber was a founding member of the Global Climate Coalition, an industry front group that actively worked to undermineclimate science and to influence the UN’s climate negotiations. The Global Climate Coalition disbanded in 2002, but the Chamber continued to circulate climate denial talking points and lobby against climate policies. The Chamber successfully opposed the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in 2008, and more recently has challenged the Clean Power Plan in court and funded a study vastly overstating the potential costs of the Paris Agreement, which President Trump cited in justifying his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the global climate accord. That study was debunked by numerous climate experts.

Just as Big Oil has toned down its outright denial of climate change, the Chamber has also shifted its public stance. The Chamber’s website acknowledges that humans contribute to climate change and that “inaction is not an option.” However, the Chamber continues to lobby against climate legislation while arguing that courts should leave the issue to those branches.

“The Chamber has consistently used deception, campaign spending, and bullying to fight any serious climate policy in the political branches,” said David Arkush, managing director of Public Citizen’s climate program. “It’s beyond disingenuous to argue that the political branches should solve a problem when you’re fighting hard to make sure they don’t.”

Whitehouse called out the Chamber’s behavior in an amicus brief supporting a set of California cities and counties suing fossil fuel producers. The suits are currently under appeal in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

“The fossil fuel industry and its ally the U.S. Chamber have used political pressures to block executive and legislative action on climate change. They then turn around and argue in court that climate change is an issue to be addressed by the political branches of government they have blocked,” he said. “In fact, it’s the job of courts and juries to provide a forum where the politically mighty stand as equals with those they have harmed. It’s no surprise that the Chamber as the agent of the polluters would prefer the forum they have rigged.”

Whitehouse’s brief concludes with the request that the court recognize the Chamber’s arguments as “rent-seeking, self-interested pleas to complete inaction.”

beat!

const local regs maine

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28082018/tar-sands-pipeline-court-ruling-south-portland-ban-public-health-constitutional-big-oil-maine

A federal judge has ruled that the coastal city of South Portland, Maine, did not violate the U.S. Constitution when it passed an ordinance that blocked a local pipeline company from bringing tar sands oil through its port.

For the city of 25,000, the ruling was a surprise victory after years of fighting what felt like an impossible battle against some of the world's biggest oil companies, which lined up to support the Portland Pipe Line Corporation (PPLC).

Provided the ruling survives an appeal, it slams the door on a significant plan to ship Canadian tar sands oil, one of the most carbon-intensive fuels on the planet, to the East Coast for export to international markets, and it could offer a guide for other communities hoping to block energy projects.

"For other communities looking at opposing fossil fuel infrastructure, this case is a blueprint for how you should do it," said Patrick Parenteau, an environmental law professor at the Vermont Law School. "It's a strong opinion, and it could result in a really significant precedent for local control on petroleum-based industries."  The pipeline company's plan involved a 70-year-old pipeline system that currently carries conventional crude oil in the opposite direction, from a tanker facility in South Portland to refineries in Montreal. After Canada's tar sands oil boom crippled the market for oil travelling from Maine to Montreal, PPLC saw its business dwindle.

A plan to reverse the flow and provide a route for tar sands oil to reach global markets through the port at South Portland represented a golden egg for the company—a way to redefine its business model, provide jobs and become a linchpin for oil exports.

But it also would have come at a steep price, the grassroots group Protect South Portland argued.

The plan called for the construction of a pair of 70-foot-high smokestacks next to a beloved waterfront park to burn off volatile compounds from the tar sands oil before it could be loaded into tankers. Concerns about emissions from those smokestacks led to the creation of the so-called Clear Skies Ordinance, which banned the bulk loading of crude oil onto tankers.

When the City Council passed the ordinance in 2014, it sought to protect South Portland citizens from air pollution. The ordinance's foundation lay in Maine's "home rule authority," a stipulation of the state Constitution that allows municipalities to create regulations that go beyond state rules to protect public health and welfare.

[map]

The pipeline company filed its lawsuit in 2015, and a lengthy, expensive legal battle ensued. Late last year, a federal district court judge threw out all but one of the industry's claims against the city, but left open the key question of whether the ordinance violated the Constitution.

In his 92-page decision issued on Friday, Judge John A Woodcock, Jr., found it did not.

The decision "gives communities a powerful tool," said Ken Rumelt, a Vermont Law School professor who led students at its environmental law clinic in advising groups involved in the case. "It says that a community, assuming there is no state law preempting what they're trying to do, can say no, we don't want to suffer these impacts."

A Tale of Two Portlands

The Maine decision echoes one issued earlier this month in the other Portland—Oregon.

There, a group of industry and business groups had sued over a 2016 ordinance that banned the construction of new fossil fuel infrastructure. As in Maine, the petitioners argued that the ordinance violated the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, which regulates commerce with foreign nations, among states and with Native American tribes.

After years of volleying through the courts, the Oregon Supreme Court opted not to hear a challenge to the ordinance.

"The two Portlands are setting the stage for lots of other communities in between the two coasts," said Sean Mahoney of the Conservation Law Foundation, who has advised South Portland. "The lesson is that communities have the right and the obligation to protect the public health of the people who live in them, whether that is from air pollution or water pollution or lead in drinking water or housing."

As Goes Maine?

In the Maine case, the local pipeline company enlisted powerful allies as it opposed the ordinance. The American Petroleum Institute, whose members include most major oil and gas companies, spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to defeat a 2013 ballot measure that would have blocked the project. After the ordinance was passed, API and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce both supported PPLC in its lawsuit.

Josh Axelrod, a policy analyst with Natural Resources Defense Council, said that support laid bare just how much the industry wanted to use the PPLC pipelines to gain access to the East Coast for exporting tar sands. "This is a huge win to stop that from happening," he said.

One by one, viable options to export the tar sands via pipeline have run into challenges. TransCanada abandoned its plans for the Energy East Pipeline in 2017, announcing it was uneconomical. Earlier this month, a federal judge ordered a new environmental review of the Keystone XL project. And later this week, a Canadian court will rule on whether First Nations groups were adequately consulted in the plans for the Trans Mountain pipeline—a decision that could delay or cancel the plans for that pipeline.

These challenges "put some upper limit on where the industry would like to go," Axelrod said. "Back almost 10 years ago, they would talk about growing to 9 million barrels of oil per day of [tar sands] production. Their most optimistic projections now are less than 4.5 million barrels of oil per day."

And that's premised on the construction of at least two new pipelines, Axelrod said—a prospect that's seeming less likely given the opposition and court rulings.

'Committed Citizens Can Change the World'

The South Portland case will most likely be appealed. But for now, the decision is being met with surprise, and relief.

Mayor Linda Cohen praised the ruling in a written statement, saying, "Faced with the prospect of hundreds of thousands of barrels of crude oil being loaded onto marine tank vessels in the City and threatening the health of the residents and preventing redevelopment of the waterfront, the City Council prohibited this new activity. We are pleased that the Court upheld the ordinance."

Rachel Burger, the co-founder and president of Protect South Portland, said she was overjoyed. "I didn't count on this happening, necessarily. I thought the ruling was more likely to be negative," she said. "I'm just amazed that a group of people can do something like this."

Thinking back on years of canvassing, fundraisers, marches and grassroots organizing, Burger said she keeps coming back to a Margaret Mead quote: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."

PUBLISHED UNDER:

OIL/TAR SANDS REGULATION ACTIVISM

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TOOL:

https://www.exposedbycmd.org/chambers-of-commerce/

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surprising defection: greenwash?

https://www.ecowatch.com/bhp-climate-change-2518910663.html

World's Largest Mining Company Breaks With Global Trade Groups That Deny Climate Change

One of the world's largest coal companies is making plans to quit the World Coal Association over a disagreement on climate policies.

British-Australian mining giant BHP Billiton noted in a review of the company's industry associations issued Tuesday that it may end its membership in the international lobbying group and will reconsider its membership in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce due in part to the U.S. planned withdrawal from the Paris agreement.

BHP's review comes on the heels of mounting shareholder pressure to reconsider its memberships with groups that espouse views contrary to the company's stated values. The report affirmed that BHP believes "the warming of the climate is unequivocal, the human influence is clear and physical impacts are unavoidable" and reasserted the company's support for the Paris agreement.

As reported by the New York Times:

The move highlights the delicate considerations huge mining companies must contend with as they seek to balance profit with social and environmental awareness.

It represents the latest example of a business that is largely built around traditional fossil fuels responding to investor and government concern over climate change. Last week, the oil and gas giant BP said it would spend $200 million to acquire a large stake in a solar power developer, while Norway's Statoil and France's Total have also made investments in renewables.

Though carefully worded, B.H.P.'s report also takes issue with the Trump administration's unilateral exit from the Paris agreement.

"While we won't always agree with our industry associations, we will continue to call out material differences where they exist and we will take action where necessary, as we have done today," Geoff Healy, the company's chief external affairs officer, said in a statement.

For a deeper dive:

New York Times, Reuters, The Guardian, FT, Deutsche Welle, WSJ, Fox Business

For more climate change and clean energy news, you can follow Climate Nexus on Twitter and Facebook, and sign up for daily Hot News.

RELATED ARTICLES AROUND THE WEB

BHP Billiton | Climate change ›

These 100 Companies Are to Blame for 71% of Greenhouse Gas ... ›

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https://www.corporateaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Executive-Summary_EN_webversionFINAL.pdf

...

Industry groups stalk the halls of the UNFCCC

In this section, Corporate Accountability discusses

one of the most egregious ways big polluting

industries undermine climate policy: by walking the

halls as “observers” to the UNFCCC negotiations.

Currently, groups like the U.S. Chamber of

Commerce, Business Europe, and the Business

Council of Australia, which have all undermined

climate action on behalf of their corporate

members, have unfettered access to the climate

talks. Such access allows for not only direct

lobbying of delegates, but also for unparalleled

information gathering, as well as the greenwashing

of corporate images. To address the myriad ways

the presence of trade associations undermines

the talks and to strengthen the implementation of

the Paris Agreement, the authors resolve for the

UNFCCC to adopt a standard definition of conflict

of interest and implement a binding conflict of

interest policy to help reveal and limit undue

corporate influence via observer participation.

Carbon majors masquerading as part of the

tech solution

Environmentally sound technologies, such as

renewable energy and local innovations, will play

an essential role in mitigating and adapting to

climate change. While there is a mechanism in

the UNFCCC to accelerate development, transfer,

and deployment of climate technologies to Global

South countries, this mechanism has been coopted

by Big Polluters, from Électricité de France

and Shell to the World Coal Association. As Neth

Daño of the ETC Group explains, this cooptation

prevents the Technology Mechanism from

providing sound information and technical advice.

Instead it allows polluting corporations to project

an image of being part of the solution while at the

same time continuing to operate businesses that

are primarily responsible for the climate crisis. The

UNFCCC should not allow industry involvement

to compromise this transfer. Instead, as Daño

recommends, the Secretariat should fully evaluate

the environmental, social, and economic impacts

of climate technologies and ensure that the nonState

actors invited to take part in technology

development, transfer, and deployment do not

introduce potential conflicts of interest.

Article 6 and the invisible hand of carbon chaos

Markets are often portrayed as a magical solution

to environmental pollution. Yet study after study

reveals that carbon markets not only fail to reduce

emissions but create new problems as well.

Article 6, which may provide incentives to set

up and expand carbon markets, could very well

make matters worse—providing opportunities for

Big Polluters to continue to pollute egregiously

without consequence and distracting attention

from real solutions. Not surprisingly, trade groups

and corporations have promoted these markets

and affiliated individuals have even found a place

at the negotiating table. This is unacceptable.

In this section, Corporate Accountability calls for

governments to create binding regulations that

require polluting corporations to drastically reduce

emissions and reject carbon markets.

The corrupting influence of corporations’

COP sponsorships

For almost as long as the UNFCCC has existed, the

very same transnational corporations whose profits

depend on the burning of oil, coal, and gas have

been permitted to bankroll the U.N. climate talks.

In this section, Corporate Europe Observatory’s

Pascoe Sabido makes the case for eliminating the

corporate sponsorship of international climate

negotiations. As Sabido outlines, transnational

corporations use the access to the UNFCCC that

sponsorship buys them to undermine progress

and push false solutions (like failed carbon

trading or carbon capture and storage schemes).

While addressing sponsorship alone will not fully

eliminate corporate influence at the COPs, it

would chip away at the green and blue façades

Big Polluters have erected. It would also provide

space for an honest conversation on what role

Big Polluters should have in solving a crisis that

they continue to profit from. Sabido concludes

with a call for a policy to reject sponsorship from

corporations whose interests are in conflict with

the objectives of the UNFCCC and for COPs to

instead be financed equitably by member states.

Fighting corporate interests in the

Green Climate Fund

As Lidy Nacpil of the Asian Peoples’ Movement on

Debt and Development discusses in this section...

==

eric schniederman nuke option IRS // chamber watch: AIG CoC starr fdn big effort: tort reform

The Influence Machine: The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Corporate ...

By Alyssa Katz

https://books.google.com/books?id=XhadBAAAQBAJ

When Americans hear the words “Chamber of Commerce,” many still think of the local business associations that spruce up Main Streets and sponsor Little League teams around the country. But the United States Chamber of Commerce is a different animal altogether. The Chamber was originally founded to give big business a voice during the long—and now almost inconceivable—period in American history that saw the rise of workers’ rights, consumer protections, and environmental awareness as national priorities. But over time, driven by an antigovernment ideology and its desire for financial and political power, the Chamber metastasized into a fighting force designed to protect the worst excesses of American industry.

The Chamber, through its veiled corporate sponsors, can take credit for some of the most disturbing trends in American life: the reversal of environmental protections, the destruction of unions and worker protections, the rise of virulent antigovernment ideology, the enlarged role of money in campaigns, and the creation of “astroturf” movements as cover for a corporate agenda. Through its propaganda, lobbying, and campaign cash, the Chamber has created a right-wing monster that even it struggles to control, a conservative movement that is destabilizing American democracy as never before.

The Influence Machine tells this history as a series of gripping narratives that take us into the backrooms of Washington, where the battles over how our country is run and regulated are fought, and then out into the world, where we see how the Chamber’s campaigns play out in real lives. In the end, Alyssa Katz reveals the hidden weaknesses of this seeming juggernaut and shows how its antidemocratic agenda can be reversed.

==

==

AN

The time has come for these purportedly pro-climate companies to put up or shut up. If they care about the climate, then they must stop funding the anti-climate Chamber and its bogus studies. This is not a radical step to take. Many blue-chip companies have already left the Chamber – some publicly, like Apple, CVS and Pacific Gas & Electric, and others privately, such as Costco, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Heinz, Mars, Mattel, Mondelez, Nestlé, Starbucks, Unilever and Walgreens Boots Alliance. Many of these companies quit the Chamber because of the Chamber’s anti-climate work.

==

AN

Last week, we were treated to a chorus of business voices disavowing President Trump’s decision to withdraw from 2015’s landmark Paris climate accord. While it’s nice to see business leaders voice support for action on climate change, it’s difficult to take their lamentations seriously when many of them are funding the very group that paid for a now-debunked study used by President Donald Trump as justification for quitting the Paris Agreement.

That group? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the country’s largest business lobby and a leading opponent of action on climate change. The Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy was one of two sponsors of the bogus studythat Trump cited in his reasoning for exiting the accord. The study, which uses a severely flawed methodology, features wildly inflated numbers and ignores the vast potential of energy efficiency, is completely devoid of credibility. Not only did the Chamber fund this report as a way to give opponents of the Paris Agreement a rationale for withdrawing, but it is also one of the lead plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the Clean Power Plan and has consistently opposed action on climate change.

So which “pro-climate” companies are funding the Chamber? Let’s start with Disney, whose CEO Robert Igerannounced that he was quitting Trump’s advisory council as a result of the president’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement.

Then there’s Facebook, whose CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement is bad for the environment, bad for the economy, and it puts our children's future at risk. […] Stopping climate change is something we can only do as a global community, and we have to act together before it's too late.”

And Google, whose CEO tweeted, “Disappointed with today’s decision. Google will keep working hard for a cleaner, more prosperous future for all.”

Then there are the coalitions of companies that waged high-profile advocacy campaigns in favor of the Paris Agreement in the pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.

Twelve of the 30 companies that paid for the ads in the Journal publicly disclose that they fund the Chamber. They are 3M, Bank of America, Campbell Soup, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Cummins, Dow Chemical, Johnson & Johnson, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Procter & Gamble and Salesforce. The aforementioned Disney has also confirmed its Chamber membership to Public Citizen.

Eight of the 25 companies that paid for ads in the Times publicly disclose that they fund the Chamber. In addition toFacebook and Alphabet (Google), they are Gap, The Hartford, Intel, Microsoft, Morgan Stanley and Salesforce.

The time has come for these purportedly pro-climate companies to put up or shut up. If they care about the climate, then they must stop funding the anti-climate Chamber and its bogus studies. This is not a radical step to take. Many blue-chip companies have already left the Chamber – some publicly, like Apple, CVS and Pacific Gas & Electric, and others privately, such as Costco, eBay, Hewlett-Packard, General Mills, Kellogg, Kraft Heinz, Mars, Mattel, Mondelez, Nestlé, Starbucks, Unilever and Walgreens Boots Alliance. Many of these companies quit the Chamber because of the Chamber’s anti-climate work.

With the planet at stake, the public will no longer be fooled by these companies’ pro-climate public relations campaigns. If they are serious about climate change, then they will stop funding a group that has done so much to block progress towards preserving a livable planet.

Dan Dudis is Director of Public Citizen’s Chamber Watch program.

==

https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/sites/default/files/resources/insidejobcai.pdf

downloaded

...

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce represents 3 million American businesses, making it the largest business organization in the world.48 The Chamber is funded by major corporate polluters and is currently receiving millions of dollars from Exxon Mobil. Even when directly asked, its executives have not admitted that human activity is the cause of climate change. The Chamber has criticized both the targets set out in the Paris Agreement as well as the measures proposed to meet them, and yet it is still granted a seat at the table at the UNFCCC. Further, it does nothing to promote the cutting of emissions and has aggressively sought to stop domestic climate policies in their tracks.

Links to the fossil fuel industry

In 2015 Exxon Mobil gave the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation US$1,000,000 for “public information and policy research,” pledging a total of US$5,000,000 between 2014-2018.49 It has also received funding from other big polluters, like Chevron 50 and Peabody Energy.51-52 Executives from Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips, and Sempra Energy also sit on its board of directors.53 What it says about climate change and its causes The Chamber publicly claims it “strongly supports continued environmental improvements, including sensible approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”54 In March 2014, for example, Karen Alderman Harbert, president and CEO of the Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy, insisted that the Chamber has “been a proponent on research and development, on advanced technologies, [and] the biggest supporter on energy efficiency legislation.”55

But when directly asked four times if the Chamber acknowledges that climate change is real and caused by humans, Harbert did not directly answer. Only after repeated questions on this topic did she concede that “it is caused by lots of different things,” going on to describe the scientific debate about the causes of climate change as an “ongoing discussion.”55 Public stance on the UNFCCC or the Paris Agreement In response to the Paris Agreement, Vice President for Climate and Technology Stephen Eule lamented “[t]he White House’s overall domestic strategy of making energy more expensive and less abundant,” which, he said, was meant “to satisfy international constituencies, many of whom compete against the United States.”56 He also described the U.S.’ pledged reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to keep global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius as “completely unrealistic.”57-58

Track record on climate policy

Disputed Paris Agreement but stresses inclusion in deciding its fate. At COP21 in Paris, the Chamber stressed the need for business inclusion at UNFCCC negotiations and called for climate negotiators to “establish a defined and recognized role for business engagement in the final Paris Agreement.”59 But its critiques of critical elements of the Paris Agreement raise questions as to where the Chamber’s true interest lies

. ? Opposed GHG emissions reductions. In February 2017, the Chamber lobbied for the withdrawal of a policy regulating GHG performance measures, describing it as “a particularly egregious case of regulatory overreach.”60 It asked that the U.S. government “reissue a revised rule without the GHG emissions measure and with any additional changes consistent with the administration’s focus on regulatory reform.”60

? Top priorities include increasing fossil fuel production. Its priorities for 2017 include calls for increases in oil, gas, and coal production61 and promises to oppose “efforts to regulate greenhouse gases under the existing Clean Air Act

https://www.stopcorporateabuse.org/

Even just two years ago, it was almost unimaginable that the conflicts of interest posed by the presence of fossil fuel corporations would be a primary topic at any U.N. climate treaty meeting. But our steady campaigning has paid off in a big way: During the last two weeks, practically everyone involved in and covering the treaty meetings in Bonn, Germany, had something to say about the fossil fuel industry's conflicts of interest.

A few days before the meeting, we released a report, Inside Job, which exposed how groups representing industry interests are allowed access to climate treaty negotiations despite a hefty track record of undermining climate action. Media outlets from the Financial Times, to NPR, to Mother Jones, to mainstream German outlets, to the French Le Monde covered the report. And when our team arrived in Germany, it was clear many government delegates had already read the exposé.

Big polluters and governments that represent their interests (namely the U.S., Australia, and the European Union) quickly shifted from doubting this issue would gain traction to spending the first day and a half of the meetings intensifying their attempts to keep the issue from being discussed.

You know you are doing something right when one of the most powerful industry front groups feels compelled to respond to your research. The Chamber of Commerce, which was featured in Inside Job and has received millions of dollars from Exxon Mobil, wrote an unconvincing blog post about why fossil fuel corporations need to be at the negotiating table.

But despite the attempts by the industry to put the kibosh on discussions of conflicts of interests, we successfully made it the centerpiece topic during a workshop about the participation of non-Parties (read: all entities that are not government delegates). During the workshop, governments and civil society representatives demanded the U.N. treaty body address the irreconcilable conflicts of interest between the fossil fuel industry and the policies that must be made to slow and address the effects of climate change. International Policy Director Tamar Lawrence-Samuel reminded everyone that weeding out vested interests through conflict of interest policies is not the exception, but the norm, in governments and similar forums around the globe.

Predictably, business groups and the governments that represent their interests intervened in defense of corporate inclusion. At one point, a delegate from Australia even went so far as to call Exxon Mobil a corporation that was leading on climate action!

We followed the workshop with a packed press conference, and continued to keep this issue front and center throughout the rest of the meetings.

With this success under our belts, we will continue to organize governments and allies to support the adoption of a policy that kicks big polluters out of the U.N. climate treaty for good. We know it's ambitious, and we also know it's possible. Most importantly, we know it must be done to save people and our planet from climate catastrophe.

Kelle Louaillier is the president of Corporate Accountability International.

==

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=17-P13-00021&segmentID=1

bonn COP

BRAGG: The champions of this issue were clearly Ecuador, and actually Uganda. Ecuador spoke representing the like-minded developing countries. Uganda spoke representing the least developed countries block. And actually, Senegal spoke representing the African negotiating group. Altogether, those groups represent far more than 70 percent of the world's population. And so, they were the leaders, but they were supported by Cuba. China spoke very, very strongly in support of these limitations, saying that the voices of the vulnerable are often drowned out by the voices of the rich and wealthy corporate interests. And those who were opposed to this were pretty easy to identify. You're looking at the US, Australia, Russia, and to some extent, the European Union, all places where the fossil fuel industry is based and representing countries that have the most at stake economically with the continuation of business as usual when it comes to extracting and burning fossil fuels.

CURWOOD: Jesse, talk to me about how these discussions in some ways parallel what happened at the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control. This is back in 2003. What can we take away from how that treaty successfully put limitations on the tobacco industry's lobbying at those sessions?

...BRAGG: It's a great example and a fantastic precedent to look to when you’re trying to figure out how to address industry influence in any policymaking process. When parties, governments, got together to hash out the framework convention on tobacco control, they quickly realized that one of the primary obstacles to their progress was the tobacco industry. You know, it's very easy to understand why the tobacco industry has no incentive to advance public health policy. Every step forward we take in public health and tobacco control means one less dollar in the pockets of tobacco industry. And so, they brought forward a really bold proposal, it was one line of text initially that just said that parties need to take steps to reduce the influence of the tobacco industry over public health. And since then, the implementation of this treaty has taken off. And that's really the model we need to look at when we're talking about the fossil fuel industry and climate change. We need information from them. They have a role. But we also need to limit their influence and understand that they shouldn't be writing the policy by which they need to abide.

CURWOOD: What corporate associations are exercising the most undue influence on the climate talks in your opinion?

BRAGG: The two organizations that really stood out in terms of influence over these recent talks were the International Chamber of Commerce and the US Chamber of Commerce. The International Chamber of Commerce, their role is really to keep the door open for businesses around the world. They believe, and they're very proud of it, that corporations, including the fossil fuel industry, need to be at the table helping parties write the rules that we're going to implement the Paris Agreement under, and so in that way they take every opportunity to advance and expand the access of the private sector. The US chamber actually held a side event at the UNFCCC talks in which they said that US fossil fuel corporations are going to be central to this process as well. One of their representatives actually then went on to say that the US is going to need to revise down its commitments to the Paris agreement, and more or less said that, people need to get used to that, that that’s the way it was, really towing the line of the Trump administration that these commitments need to be reviewed.

CURWOOD: Now, under the Paris agreement, the fossil fuel industry will be selling their products perhaps as late as 2050. It will take a while to phase out what they do. If they are, in fact, going to be part of the energy mix going forward as they are right now, why shouldn't they have some input into these negotiation processes so that they can deal with their business in an orderly fashion?

BRAGG: I think there's a big difference between having input and being part of a process, and what governments have been saying and what the sort of broad campaign around this is calling for, is to draw that line. When are we gathering input from those industries we're seeking to regulate and when are we actually allowing them to be part of the policymaking process? And so, certainly there's going to be a great need to consult with the industry and gather information from the industry as needed as we’re developing the implementation of this agreement, but the question here is not whether or not we need input. It's whether or not they should have a role in writing the rules, and that's what this discussion was about.

BRAGG: Well, it's a long process. Decisions are made by consensus at the UNFCCC, which means you need more or less the vast majority, if not all governments to agree, and so while that is a great process because it's inclusive, it does mean that things take time. We know the next milestone for this movement is next meeting in Bonn in May next year, so 2018, where parties will refer to submissions that governments and civil society groups have made on this issue and chart a path forward.CURWOOD: When can we expect some sort of formal limitations to be agreed upon in terms of corporate lobbying at the UN climate meetings, if ever?

CURWOOD: Jesse Bragg is the Media Director of Corporate Accountability International.

==

https://www.uschamber.com/above-the-fold/president-obama-keeps-his-promise-electricity-rates-will-skyrocket-because-carbon

ca?

exxon knew:

The investigations leveled against oil companies such as ExxonMobil are nothing short of “un-American,” according to one U.S. Chamber of Commerce official.

“The idea that a group of attorneys general can get together and decide to collaborate and corroborate, to persecute not just a single company now but an industry, because they are ideologically opposed to the product it produces, is un-American,” Karen Harbert, president of Institute for 21st Century Energy, said Wednesday.

“It is a threat to the free enterprise system; it is a threat to the rule of law on which the free enterprise system depends,” Harbert added. “And we’re not going or stand for it.”

Harbert is referencing a September investigation of ExxonMobil conducted by InsideClimate News and others. The investigation concluded Exxon had been allegedly untruthful about the breadth of knowledge it had concerning global warming.

http://dailycaller.com/2016/03/31/us-chamber-of-commerce-official-says-fossil-fuel-witch-hunt-un-american/

==

08.09.16

WHITEHOUSE, SCHATZ CALL OUT EXXONMOBIL FOR CONTINUING TO FUND EFFORT TO BLOCK CLIMATE ACTION

Senators detail Exxon’s continued funding of groups like ALEC, U.S. Chamber of Commerce | Exxon’s lobbying presence on Capitol Hill belies position on carbon fee legislation, Senators write

Washington, DC – Today, U.S. Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Brian Schatz (D-HI) responded to a letter from ExxonMobil Corporation, which the oil giant had sent to both Senators in the wake of their Web of Denial floor action in July.  In its letter, ExxonMobil made the case that it no longer funds groups that deny the science of climate change and that it supports a carbon fee, like Whitehouse and Schatz’s American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act.

Text of the Senators’ response is provided below.  ExxonMobil’s letter can be found here.

August 9, 2016

Rex W. Tillerson

Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

ExxonMobil

5959 Las Colinas Boulevard

Irving, Texas 75039-2298

Dear Mr. Tillerson,

We received nearly identical letters from Theresa Fariello, Vice President of ExxonMobil’s Washington Office, about recent Senate floor statements shining a light on a network of shadowy organizations – a web of denial with the purpose to obstruct action on climate change.  ExxonMobil’s prominent role funding the web for decades has been well documented by The Los Angeles Times, InsideClimate News, and others.  Ms. Fariello’s letter attempts to assure us that ExxonMobil now believes climate change is real, that it’s stopped funding climate deniers, and that it has long supported a revenue-neutral carbon fee.  That does not conform with our information and experience.

In 2015, ExxonMobil funneled millions to groups peddling climate denial.  According to its publicly available 2015 Worldwide Global Giving report, over $1.6 million (20%) of ExxonMobil’s Public Information and Policy Research contributions went to the following organizations discussed during the web of denial floor statements.

American Legislative Exchange Council: $61,500

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research: $325,000

Hoover Institution: $15,000

Hudson Institute: $15,000

Manhattan Institute: $200,000

Mercatus Center: $25,000

U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation: $1,000,000

ALEC’s climate obstructionism is particularly notorious, earning an entire website-- ALECclimatechangedenial.org—to debunk its work.  When an ExxonMobil official serves on ALEC’s Private Enterprise Advisory Council, and your company is a top sponsor of ALEC’s recent annual meeting in Indianapolis, we find Ms. Fariello’s assurances less than assuring.

Regarding ExxonMobil’s alleged seven years of support for a carbon fee, we’ve seen no meaningful evidence of that.  As authors of the bill or as leaders of our party, we would likely be aware of any such effort.  Senators Whitehouse and Schatz’s American Opportunity Carbon Fee Act meets all the relevant criteria mentioned in the letters, yet ExxonMobil has not endorsed the bill or lobbied our colleagues on its behalf.  Moreover, none of the top executives that make up ExxonMobil's management team has expressed interest in meeting with any of us to discuss the Whitehouse-Schatz proposal or any carbon fee legislation.

We find it hard to believe that ExxonMobil’s executives are unaware of the company’s professed support for a carbon fee.  Yet we see no support from the corporation and implacable opposition from your main lobbying groups--the American Petroleum Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the various front groups.  The net lobbying position of ExxonMobil is vehemently against the carbon fee you claim to support.

Fortunately, this double standard is becoming increasingly evident to the public.  We too are put off by this difference between what you say and what we see you do.  But we want to assure you that we are always ready and willing to work with you in good faith on this global threat.  When you are ready to back up your words on climate action with your deeds, we welcome the opportunity to work with you in a sincere and honorable way.

==

polluterwatch:

http://polluterwatch.org/us-chamber-commerce

The United States Chamber of Commerce (USCC) is “the world’s largest business federation,” serving as a large-scale lobbying and litigation group for American businesses. The Chamber, led by CEO Tom Donohue, promotes largely conservative and libertarian values, particularly a free-market ideology.

The USCC website professes to represent “more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions” but upon closer inspection it actually has 300,000 members. The Chamber claims that over 90% of its members are small businesses, although its Board of Directors and national policy efforts show its heavy influence from large-scale corporations, especially since Tom Donohue became president and CEO in 1997. Additionally, only 249 of the 7,000local chambers are members of the USCC, and a third of the Chamber's funding comes from just 19 corporations. Prior to Donohue, the Chamber supported Clinton’s healthcare reform and other projects opposed by the GOP and large corporations. With Donohue in charge, the Chamber rarely strays from the GOP platform and never challenges the policies of its corporate financers.

EVIDENCE:

Stated position on climate change:

The Chamber's position statement on climate change urges continued scientific research on the topic, deferring to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the US Climate Change Science Program. The Chamber warns that US climate policy would be "hugely expensive" but does not defer to scientific institutions or research bodies that have estimated the enormous costs that climate change already imposes on society (estimated at $1.2 trillion per year, worldwide). The Chamber claims that climate model predictions are unreliable, when in fact observations on global climate change have been relatively consistent with what climate scientsts have predicted (if anything, they are often conservative in estimating the degree to which climate change and associated consequences are occurring--seeSkeptical Science). The Chamber calls for "global leadership" on climate change despite its consistent opposition to the Kyoto Protocol, the global treaty initiated in 1997 that was never ratified by the United States.

Position on Energy Sources:

The Chamber’s Institute for 21st Century Energy’s “Where We Stand” page makes energy efficiency and investment in clean energy look like a priority, placed above their calls for expanded nuclear power, “clean coal,” coal-to-liquids fortransportation fuel, and immediate expansion of domestic oil & gas drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf, the Gulf of Mexico, U.S. oil shale and tar sands extraction, and drilling in the Arctic permafrost. The Chamber has prioritized the promotion of shale oil development and the Keystone XL pipeline, creating websites for both issues (more on Keystone XL below).

Obstruction of climate change policies and promotion of fossil fuels:

Several important corporate members, most notably Apple and utility companies Pacific Gas & Electric, PNM Resources and Exelon, left the Chamber because of Donohue’s position on global warming. Nike, Johnson and Johnson, and others have quit their board member positions and threatened to leave completely if Donohue and the Chamber did not own up to the reality of climate change. The Chamber has consistently blocked attempts at regulating greenhouse gasses and has even called for climate science and the EPA to be put "on trial.”

While Tom Donohue and the Chamber publicly expresses a willingness to address climate change, it has opposed all viable efforts to do so. Following an EPA decision to classify carbon dioxide, as a greenhouse gas, as hazardous to human health, the Chamber submitted comments to the agency claiming that planetary warming would “be beneficial to humans.”

A significant portion of the Chamber's Board of Directors represent companies that produce or burn fossil fuels.

The Chamber's director of the Environment, Technology and Regulatory Affairs division, Bill Kovacs, also head of an oil industry front group called the Consumer Energy Alliance, runs "Project No Project," a program that includes attacks environmental regulations, opposition to the oil and gas industry, and renewable energy development.

Exaggeration of Keystone XL pipeline jobs figures:

Along with TransCanada Corporation and the American Petroleum Institute, the US Chamber of Commerce has falsely stated that the Keystone XL pipeline would create 20,000 jobs (each lasting one year)--a stark contrast to the US State Departments estimate of 7,000 and a Cornell study indicating the project would create less than 5,000 jobs for two years, with a total of 50 permanent positions. A Greenpeace complaint filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission revealed that the TransCanada jobs figure promoted by the US Chamber is unsubstantiated, and that TransCanada's job estimate for the US portion of the pipeline was overstated as compared to what they told the Canadian government for the Canadian portion of the pipeline. Chamber CEO Tom Donohue has claimed that the Keystone XL pipeline would create up to 250,000 jobs over its lifespan--an unsubstantiated figure.

Top federal lobbying spender in the United States:

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce spends more money on federal lobbying than any other entity in the country. Since federal lobbying disclosure became mandatory in 1998, the U.S. Chamber has spent just under $1 billion dollars($983.7 million)--more than three times that of the next largest lobbying spender, General Electric.The Chamber has spent over $16.7 million on lobbying in the first quarter of 2013. The Chamber's five-year lobbying expenditures (2008-2012) amount to $596,418,500. Portions of this money have been used to influence specific legislative amendments to the U.S. House American Clean Energy and Security Act, and energy-relation provisions of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act. The Chamber’s Political Action Committee has spent $641,328 on political candidates and committees since the 2008 cycle.

Election spending:

Following the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling, the Chamber used a $75 million budget to help elect notably conservative candidates in 2010. Over 80 corporations outside of U.S. borders contributed to the Chamber before the election, raising ethical concerns about funneling foreign money for domestic electioneering. The Chamber spent $33 million on disclosed electioneering communications designed to support or oppose target candidates in the 2010 election, and $3 million on disclosed electioneering communications in the 2012 election as part of a $36 million election spending push.

The Chamber spent over $4 million on advertisements relating to energy and the environment in 2010.

Promotion of fossil fuels in U.S. Chamber middle school curriculum:

In cooperation with Scholastic, the US Chamber designed a teaching program on US energy sources for schools that presents information selectively in order to favor the importance of fossil fuel energy such as coal.

LINKS AND RESOURCES:

SourceWatch

Open Secrets

ExxonSecrets

DeSmogBlog

US Chamber Watch - Public Citizen

US Chamber of Secrets - 350.org

StopTheChamber

Little Sis - US Chamber of Commerce

Muckety - US Chamber of Commerce relationship map

==

exxon knew 8/1//16

In any case, according to its own figures posted last week, ExxonMobil spent $1.96 million on 16 denier and obstructionist groups last year. Ten of them, including the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Federalist Society and Hoover Institution, were among those listed in the 2007 UCS report.

So what is ExxonMobil getting for its money? Let's take a look at a handful of last year's grantees to find out.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce:

Half of ExxonMobil's 2015 denier donations—$1 million—went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the same amount it gave the Chamber in 2014.

The chamber acknowledges that climate change is happening, but discounts the prevailing scientific consensus that it is largely due to human activity, mainly burning fossil fuels. When pressed about the Chamber's position during a March 2014 Senate hearing, Karen Harbert, head of the Chamber's Institute for 21st Century Energy, replied that there is a "robust debate" over what is causing climate change. "It is caused by a lot of things," she insisted.[tobacco scam]

Harbert's scientifically indefensible comment was not surprising. The Chamber has a long history of disputing climate science and that has alienated some of its members. In 2009, Apple, Exelon, Nike, PNM Resources and PG&E, for example, cancelled their memberships after Chamber Vice President William Kovacs demanded that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) convene a "Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century" on climate science with witnesses, cross-examinations and a judge ruling on the reality of global warming. "It would be evolution versus creationism," Kovacs explained. "It will be climate change science on trial."

Those high-profile defections apparently had little impact on the Chamber's position. In May 2014, just days before the EPA announced its draft Clean Power Plan to reduce power plant carbon pollution, the Chamber released a grossly misleading report attacking the proposed rule. The report, which was also sponsored by the American Petroleum Institute, was denounced not only by the EPA, but also by PolitiFact.com and the Washington Post. Among its many faults, the report wildly inflated the cost of the rule and failed to consider the benefits of cutting carbon emissions.

Last October, the Chamber and 14 other business associations filed a lawsuit against the EPA, arguing that the Clean Power Plan exceeds the agency's authority to regulate the energy sector and the Chamber's priorities for 2016 include opposing EPA efforts to curb carbon emissions as well as the agency's science-based finding that global warming endangers public health and the environment.

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 Fellow Oren 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:

From 2002 through last year, the National Black Chamber of Commerce (NBCC) received $1.1 million from ExxonMobil and the organization's president, Harry C. Alford, is unapologetic about taking fossil fuel industry money. "Of course we do and it is only natural," Alford states on the NBCC website. "The legacy of Blacks in this nation has been tied to the miraculous history of fossil fuel ... [F]ossil fuels have been our economic friend."

Last summer, NBCC published a report that falsely claimed the Clean Power Plan would pose "economic hardship" on poor and minority Americans. A UCS analysis found that the report was based on fraudulent claims from previously published studies, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's anti-Clean Power Plan report from 2014. In fact, unchecked climate change would likely hurt poor and minority communities most.

More recently, Alford wrote an opinion piece attacking the Clean Power Plan for The Hill, a Washington political trade publication. Like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's bogus 2014 report, Alford's June 29 column vastly exaggerated the cost of the proposed rule and did not factor in the billions of dollars in health and economic benefits that would result from cutting carbon pollution.

ExxonMobil's Pretzel Logic

Last fall, UCS and reporters at InsideClimate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Exxon's own scientists had warned the company decades ago about the potential for climate catastrophe. The new revelations also showed that the company responded to that bad news by downplaying climate risks and helping establish the climate science denial network.

A number of journalists did follow-up stories, pressing ExxonMobil officials about the company's longtime support for denier groups. They didn't always get the same answer.

During an interview last September with Richard Keil, ExxonMobil's senior media relations advisor, WNYC's On the Media host Bob Garfield pushed Keil for an explanation. "Please clarify this for me: Are not funding or did not fund them?" Garfield asked. Keil's response was unequivocal. "We are not funding," he said.

When asked the same question by the New York Times in early November, then-Vice President of Public and Government Affairs Kenneth Cohen likewise said no. "We stopped funding them in the middle part of the last decade because a handful of them were making the uncertainty of the science their focal point," he said. "Frankly, we made the call that we needed to back away from supporting the groups that were undercutting the actual risk" of global warming.

Cohen's response wasn't a surprise. He made the same disingenuous claim back in February 2007, a few weeks after UCS disclosed that ExxonMobil had been spending millions of dollars on climate science denier groups. Greenwire, a trade news organization, reported that Cohen said the company "has stopped funding them."

The surprise came on November 9, three days after the New York Times story ran, when PBS NewsHour host Judy Woodruff asked Cohen if ExxonMobil has been funding denier groups. This time he took a different tack.

"Well, the answer is yes," replied Cohen, who retired from the company in January. "And I will let those organizations respond for themselves."

But before anyone declares a victory for corporate transparency, it turns out that Cohen's moment of candor was, well, momentary.

On December 1, a Washington Post story quoted yet another ExxonMobil spokesperson who qualified Cohen's remark. Alan Jeffers, a media relations manager, said the company "rejects the premise" that it has been funding climate science denial.

"We were engaged with funding public policy groups on policy issues, not on science," Jeffers explained. "We made our position known on some climate policies that made us unpopular with environmental activists and they tried to position that as us funding climate denial. And that's just not accurate."

Not accurate? As Jeffers, Keil and their former boss, Cohen, surely know, the think tanks, advocacy groups and associations ExxonMobil has been sponsoring all these years lie about the science to strengthen the argument against doing anything to address climate change. After all, if people believe climate science is a fraud—or at least "far from settled"—they will see no reason to support a carbon tax, cap-and-trade system or any other climate policy. And that line of reasoning, which protects the status quo, seems to suit ExxonMobil just fine.

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists

==

==

http://shutthechamber.org/news/american-rights-work-us-chambers-anti-union-agenda

AMERICAN RIGHTS AT WORK: The US Chamber's Anti-Union Agenda

March 14, 2013

Capital Research Center

Big Business Umbrella Group's Anti-Union Agenda

news photo

(originally published on July 27, 2008)

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most powerful business lobbying organization1, has been campaigning against unions, fair labor practices, increases in the minimum wage, and legal protections for America’s workers for nearly a century.  The Chamber’s anti-union initiatives are just one part of its multi-issue agenda.  Unlike other anti-union organizations, this prominent lobbying force does not hide its alignment with big business.

Headquartered in Washington, DC, the Chamber has an annual budget of $150 million2 and 300 staff members.3  With President Thomas J. Donohue at the helm, annual contributions to the hamber from its largest corporate members rose from $600,000 to $90 million in less than a decade.4  Since he took office in 1997, Donohue has built a more aggressive and politically-powerful Chamber not afraid to take on controversial issues at the request of its large corporate donors and the Bush White House.5  This direction has caused the Business Roundtable and other moderate members of the business community to distance themselves from the organization.6

Even when Donohue first took office Business Week expressed caution at his “frontal assault on unions,” commenting that “Polls show strong public support for giving workers their piece of an expanding economic pie.”7  Although an increasing number of its member organizations pursue cooperative and socially-responsible labor relations, the Chamber continues to advocate against unions, and appears to be ramping up its attack.

The Role of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the Anti-Union Network

Lobbying

In 2004, the Chamber spent $24.5 million lobbying the federal government.8

The Chamber works closely with the Bush administration9 and prominent anti-labor conservatives on Capitol Hill such as Rep. Charlie Norwood (R-GA), head of the House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections.  An anti-workplace safety zealot, Norwood was given the Chamber’s Spirit of Enterprise Award for his pro-Chamber voting record.  Norwood caused controversy this year for his insensitivity during Congressional hearings on the Sago mineworkers tragedy, and for lobbying loudly against renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

The Chamber lobbies to oppose pro-worker legislation, including the Family Time and Workplace Flexibility Act, Fair Minimum Wage Act, and an expansion of the Family and Medical Leave Act.10

Among the Chamber’s legislative priorities is opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act , which would strengthen labor law and provide workers with the right to union representation via the card check process when a majority present signed union authorization cards to their employers.11  On May 4, 2006, the Chamber sent a letter to all Republican members of Congress urging them to support the Secret Ballot Protection Act,12 which would outlaw union recognition through card check.  The Chamber also operates a website urging its members to pressure Congress on the issue.13

Litigation

Its recent litigation efforts include an attempt to strike down a California law prohibiting the use of tax dollars for anti-union activity, and litigation to overturn county “Peace Agreement” ordinances.14

The Chamber recently filed amicus briefs in two significant cases before the National Labor Relations Board to argue for rulings that limit the ability of workers to form unions.  One case could define millions of workers as supervisors, revoking their right to organize, and the other could effectively quash the card check method of organizing.15

The Chamber has also lobbied the Bush administration on nominations to the National Labor Relations Board,16 and succeeded in placing one of their staffers on the Board.  In 2002, President Bush appointed Michael Bartlett, then Director of Labor Law Policy for the Chamber, to sit on the five-member Board in a recess appointment that lasted nearly one year.

Sponsoring propaganda

For decades, labor-community coalitions have joined together to hold corporations accountable for their treatment of employees.  Recently, the Chamber published a briefing book aimed at attacking the motives and methods of these so-called ‘corporate campaigns.’17  The author, Jarol B. Manheim, a George Washington University political scientist, not only villifies corporate campaigns, but finds danger in any critique of the corporate world.  Manheim previously testified about the subject before Rep. Norwood’s House Subcommittee on Workforce Protections in 2002,18 and also serves as a consultant on anti-union matters, having written a confidential “Positioning Memo” to help Verizon in its intense efforts to fight its employees’ union activity.19

The Chamber is reportedly behind the launch of a new, aggressive propaganda campaign against unions by “notorious DC lobbyist” Richard Berman.  In February 2006, with the assistance of Chamber labor lobbyist Randel Johnson,20 Berman created the Center for Union Facts, a new front group responsible for a steady stream of anti-union TV commercials and full-page ads in major daily newspapers.

The Center for Union Facts’ legislative agenda is strikingly similar to the Chamber’s.  Berman has admitted to launching the Center for the purpose of halting workers’ ability to form unions through card check and to support the Chamber-backed Secret Ballot Protection Act sponsored by Charlie Norwood, which would outlaw the currently voluntary card check process.21  Berman also recently divulged to The Wall Street Journal that the Center was formed to “wage a campaign against the Employee Free Choice Act,” bipartisan legislation that would require employers to recognize unions formed by the card check process, which the Chamber also adamantly opposes.22

Berman has utilized Chamber connections for fundraising. Berman told The New York Times that he asked Chamber of Commerce officials at a state conference to recommend that businesses in their states donate to his anti-union campaign.23  Berman has declined to say who has pumped $3 millioninto his group, beyond claiming that funding comes from corporations, foundations, trade associations, and individuals.24  Randel Johnson has repeatedly denied any Chamber funding of the Center, yet admitted “he had served as an adviser to the Center.”25

Berman does have longstanding ties with the Chamber, having served as its labor law director, planning union avoidance strategies for the organization from 1972-74.26

Connections to players in the anti-union movement

A number of key players in the conservative movement have worked for the Chamber, including Grover Norquist, who served as the Chamber’s chief speechwriter in the 1980s.

The Chamber does not pursue its anti-union agenda alone, it coordinates with a number of players in the anti-union movement.  For instance, it participates in Grover Norquist’s Alliance for Worker Freedom “Labor Reform Working Group” meetings.  The agenda of the December 2005 meeting of this group focused on a range of union-related issues, including card check, project labor agreements, and the Department of Labor’s new database on union information.27  Attendees included Richard Berman, along with representatives from the Chamber, the DOL, the anti-union Associated Builders and Contractors, Senator Bill Frist’s office, and Rep. Charlie Norwood’s office.

You'd think a group called the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace (CDW) would be dedicated to promoting the needs and desires of America's workers. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, CDW spreads half-truths and lies about the Employee Free Choice Act to wage an ill-conceived assault on the rights and opportunities of millions of men and women across the country.

Here's the real scoop on the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace...

CDW is a front group for business associations, industry lobbying groups, and right-wing policy centers who are against workers getting a fair shake in this economy. Its financial backers include some of the most virulent anti-worker and anti-union organizations in the country, including:

the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s most powerful business lobbying organization,

the Retail Industry Leaders Association, a group whose biggest member is Wal-Mart, the poster child for low wages,

and the Associated Builders and Contractors, an association of anti-union contractors who fight against workers having unions to improve their wages and safety on the job.

CDW is doing the dirty work for CEOs and corporate special interests. Too ashamed to be fighting publicly against policies that would provide workers with real economic opportunities, these companies instead use their deep pockets and powerful influence to fund CDW’s dishonest PR and lobbying campaign.

The CEOs and multimillion dollar business industry groups backing CDW don’t care about democracy or privacy. They’re distorting the truth because they want to stop workers from having a better standard of living, access to health care, job security, and the rest of the benefits that accompany union membership.  These same groups oppose everything from paid sick days to fair pay and even the hugely popular Family and Medical Leave Act. It's unbelievable that business interests would suddenly care about privacy now, when corporations increasingly monitor employees’ every move – including e-mail, phone calls, personal belongings, and even interactions outside of the workplace.

CDW spreads misinformation.  Contrary to the lies and distortions displayed in CDW’s new TV ad and on its website, the Employee Free Choice Act does not take secret ballots away from workers. The legislation instead offers employees an alternative to the current, broken system that is slanted heavily in favor of management against workers. In fact, the bill would ensure that workers can choose their own union formation process, either through majority sign-up or a National Labor Relations Board election.

CDW’s own data and research is flawed. Instead of using well-respected academic research and public opinion surveys to test the merits and support for the Employee Free Choice Act, CDW released a poll in April 2008 claiming widespread opposition to the bill. However, even the most conservative political scientists and pundits could easily review the poll’s loaded questions and determine that it in no way accurately tested the public’s perceptions on the issue.

American Rights at Work will

continue separating fact from fiction, exposing the deceptive front groups that stand in the way of economic progress for workers in this struggling economy and much-needed labor law reform.

  1. The Center for Public Integrity, Lobby Watch, Top 100 Companies and Organizations.
  1. Jeffrey Birnbaum, “A Quiet Revolution in Business Lobbying: Chamber of Commerce Helps Bush Agenda,” The Washington Post, 5 Feb. 2005: A1.
  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, “About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” accessed 12 June 2006.
  1. Birnbaum A1.
  1. Richard L. Berke, “Clinton Finds a Friendlier Chamber of Commerce,” New York Times, 14 Apr. 1993; Richard Miniter, “Clinton's unlikely boosters – U.S. Chamber of Commerce backs Bill Clinton's economic policies,” Insight on the News, 29 Mar. 1993; Birnbaum A1; P.B. Gray, “Inside the Chamber Under Thomas Donohue, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has become a probusiness powerhouse; Not everyone is celebrating,” CFO Magazine, 1 June 2006.
  1. Gray.
  1. Mary Beth Regan and Amy Borrus, “Lock ‘N Load at the Chamber of Commerce,” Business Week, 8 Sept. 1997.

8.“Washington in Brief: Chamber Spent Record $53 Million in Lobbying,” The Washington Post, 15 Feb. 2005.

  1. Birnbaum A1.
  1. U.S. Senate Office of Public Records, U.S. Lobby Registration & Reporting Disclosure for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (1, 2).
  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, “Union Recognition – Secret Ballot Elections and Card Check Coercion,” accessed 12 June 2006.
  1. Fawn Johnson, “Chamber Urges Republican Lawmakers To Ban 'Card-Check,' Require Elections,” Daily Labor Report, BNA Inc., 8 May 2006.
  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, “Union Recognition – Secret Ballot Elections and Card Check Coercion.”
  1. Peace agreements generally stipulate that government contractors agree to allow unions to organize without running a contentious campaign, and unions agree not to engage in strikes or picketing against these employers. U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, “NCLC list of active cases,” accessed 12 June 2006.
  1. Brief of Amici Curiae the Chamber of Commerce of the United States , the Ohio Hospital Association and the Society for Human Resource Management, Oakwood Healthcare, Inc., Sept. 2003; Brief of Amici Curiae, Chamber of Commerce of the United States of America and the Council on Labor Law Equality in support of Petitioners, Dana Corp. /Metaldyne Corp, July 2004.
  1. U.S. Senate Office of Public Records, U.S. Lobby Registration & Reporting Disclosure Addendum for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
  1. Jarol B. Manheim, “Trends in Union Corporate Campaigns,” U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 2005.
  1. Jarol B. Manheim, Testimony before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, 23 July 2002.
  1. Steven Syre, “Battle Preparations,” The Boston Globe, 5 Aug. 2003.
  1. Steven Greenhouse, “Group Starts Anti-Union Campaign,” The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2006: C1.
  1. Greenhouse C1; Diane Lewis, “Hub radio stations to air anti-union ads,” The Boston Globe, 22 Feb. 2006.
  1. Kris Maher, “Sign of a Possible Power Shift In Congress Have Unions Going All Out to Reach Voters,” The Wall Street Journal, 28 Aug. 2006: A2.
  1. Greenhouse C1.
  1. “Wal-Mart denies it backs anti-union group,” Associated Press, 26 May 2006.
  1. Greenhouse C1.
  1. David Whitford, “Labor's Lost Chance,” The Washington Post, 28 Sept. 1998: C3.
  1. Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, media release 22 June 2006.
  1. Citizens for Responsible Ethics in Washington, media release 22 June 2006.
  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce website, “About the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” accessed 12 June 2006.
  1. Jeffrey Birnbaum, “A Quiet Revolution in Business Lobbying: Chamber of Commerce Helps Bush Agenda,” The Washington Post, 5 Feb. 2005: A1.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/exposing-trumps-trade-appeal-working-class-voters-what-it

Trump is selling himself as the champion of working-class voters. He says Democrats and their presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, are selling them out with trade deals. But Trump is just a fraud.

Unfortunately, President Obama is pushing the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement and Clinton is not confronting him for doing so.

That has to change—fast. Clinton must publicly, directly and loudly challenge President Obama and demand that he withdraw TPP from consideration by Congress.

Trump’s Trade Speech

Trump’s speech on trade and “globalization” issues attempted to frame Clinton and Democrats as being on the side of the “Wall Street” forces that have pushed low-wage policies on working-class Americans. He is using the upcoming and hated TPP being pushed by President Obama as an example of this, saying Clinton is only “pretending” to oppose TPP in order to get votes.

From the speech:

The legacy of Pennsylvania steelworkers lives in the bridges, railways and skyscrapers that make up our great American landscape.

But our workers’ loyalty was repaid with betrayal.

Our politicians have aggressively pursued a policy of globalization—moving our jobs, our wealth and our factories to Mexico and overseas.

Globalization has made the financial elite who donate to politicians very wealthy. But it has left millions of our workers with nothing but poverty and heartache.

[...] The people who rigged the system are supporting Hillary Clinton because they know as long as she is in charge nothing will ever change.

In Trump’s usage, the words “trade” and “globalization” mean one and only one thing: moving American jobs and factories to low-wage countries. This movement of jobs in recent decades, pitting American workers against exploited workers who are paid squat and can’t do anything about it, has been used as one lever to intentionally create unemployment, break the unions and force down wages. (Inflation panic leading to Federal Reserve interest rate increases, deficit scares leading to austerity—especially the refusal to spend on infrastructure—and obstruction leading to minimum wage stagnation are others.)

Trump is appealing to disaffected working class workers who used to vote Democratic, but have seen their jobs shipped out of the country and/or their wages cut or stagnate. These workers see Democrats as complicit in adopting free-trade deindustrialization policies. The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), pushed and signed by President Clinton, has become a catchall symbol of this disaffection with free-trade policies, but Democrats are generally seen as having done little to fight such policies.

President Obama contributed to the problem by campaigning with a promise to renegotiate NAFTA, then reneging on this promise once elected.

Trump also went after the Chamber of Commerce for their TPP support, implying they back Clinton. The New York Times reports:

Pressing his staunch opposition to trade deals, Donald J. Trump escalated his attacks on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on Wednesday, saying it was “totally controlled by the special interest groups.”

“They’re a special interest that wants to have the deals that they want to have,” he told a packed arena at a rally here, to whoops and cheers. “They want to have T.P.P., the Trans-Pacific Partnership, one of the worst deals, and it’ll be the worst deal since NAFTA.”

[...] saying the Chamber was “controlled totally by various groups of people that don’t care about you whatsoever.”

Obama Pushing TPP As Election Nears

==

sen report --> defectors?!

[appendix shows 1/2 co have policies or statements on tob and climate, but many of latter clearly BS ev So co.]

Senators Issue Report on U.S. Chamber of Commerce Lobbying

Whitehouse, Warren, Boxer, Sanders, Brown, Merkley, Blumenthal, Markey investigation finds that Chamber Board do not stand with the Chamber on tobacco, climate lobbying

http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/download/?id=7c225de8-0d47-4c02-bc4e-5a3e932cc9f1&download=1

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Washington, D.C. – Tonight, a group of Senators led by Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and joined by Barbara Boxer (D-CA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Sherrod Brown (D-OH), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), and Edward Markey (D-MA) released findings of an investigation into the lobbying activities of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce—the purported voice of America’s business community and the largest lobbying force in the country.  In their report, the Senators examine whether the Chamber actually represents the views of its Board of Directors and their companies on two major public health issues: tobacco use and climate change.

Through extensive research and correspondence with Board members, the Senators’ investigation reveals a dramatic split between the Chamber’s lobbying positions on tobacco and climate change and the actions and views of its members.  The report shows that not one of the 108 Board members questioned during the course of the investigation openly endorses the Chamber’s lobbying activities on these issues, and that roughly half – if not more – of the companies represented on the Chamber’s Board have adopted anti-tobacco and pro-climate positions that contrast sharply with the Chamber’s activities.  In addition, Board members revealed that they have had no knowledge of or input into the Chamber’s lobbying activities on tobacco or climate issues, betraying a critical lack of transparency in the Chamber’s internal operations.

In a letter accompanying the report to be sent to Board members, the Senators write, “We found a corporate America far more concerned about public health and the environment than the Chamber’s efforts would suggest.  We identified dozens of companies investing heavily to get their employees to stop smoking because they realize a healthy workforce is a productive one.  We identified companies from all corners of the economy working to reduce their carbon footprints and affirmatively supporting the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and its international efforts at the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris.

“Chamber members, many of whom act commendably on their own, undermine their own efforts by affiliating with an organization that actively and aggressively undermines efforts to reduce tobacco use and tries to prevent action to address climate change.  By lending tacit support to an organization that has spearheaded a decades-long effort against policies to address both problems, member companies become de facto promoters of tobacco and adversaries of climate action.”

The report can be accessed HERE.

The cover letter to Chamber Board members accompanying the report is included below.

June 15, 2016

Dear Chamber Board Member,

Last year, following a New York Times investigation into the United States Chamber of Commerce’s efforts to promote tobacco use abroad and to undermine President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, we wrote to you and other members of the Board of Directors asking whether your companies support the Chamber in these endeavors.  Enclosed is a new report summarizing our findings.  The report raises serious questions about the Chamber’s credibility and its actions on tobacco and climate policy, and indicates that the Chamber does not accurately represent the positions, input, and knowledge of its membership.

The Chamber is the largest lobbying organization in the country.  In Washington, when the Chamber speaks, many elected officials listen.  Presumably, your company is a member of the Chamber because it values the influence that the Chamber has with policymakers in Washington and believes the Chamber represents its interests.

When it comes to two of the most significant public health issues of our day—tobacco use and climate change—we found the Chamber’s activities to be starkly out of step with the stated interests or actions of its board member corporations.  Based on the responses to our letters and our own additional research, we found no Chamber Board members willing to wholeheartedly support the Chamber’s efforts on tobacco and climate change.  In fact, our research shows that nearly half of the Chamber’s Board member companies have adopted policies that are inconsistent with the Chamber’s efforts on these issues.

Our methodology was straightforward.  First, we asked the 108 companies with representatives on the Chamber’s Board whether they support the Chamber’s efforts on climate and tobacco.  Then, we augmented the responses we received with research of publicly available information company positions on tobacco and climate change, comparing those with the Chamber’s activities.

We found a corporate America far more concerned about public health and the environment than the Chamber’s efforts would suggest.  We identified dozens of companies investing heavily to get their employees to stop smoking because they realize a healthy workforce is a productive one.  We identified companies from all corners of the economy working to reduce their carbon footprints and affirmatively supporting the Obama Administration’s Clean Power Plan and its international efforts at the COP21 climate negotiations in Paris.

Chamber members, many of whom act commendably on their own, undermine their own efforts by affiliating with an organization that actively and aggressively undermines efforts to reduce tobacco use and tries to prevent action to address climate change.  By lending tacit support to an organization that has spearheaded a decades-long effort against policies to address both problems, member companies become de facto promoters of tobacco and adversaries of climate action.

We were disappointed that so many Board members declined to respond to our letters.  Many who did respond either claimed ignorance of the Chamber’s efforts, or sought to align their membership with other issues on which the Chamber lobbies.   Iconic American companies, such as Apple and CVS, left the Chamber when it became clear that membership was working against their corporate goals.  When these companies promote their environmental and public health initiatives, we can have confidence that they mean what they say.

We hope this report will cause you to take a close look at the Chamber’s positions on tobacco and climate, and at the effects in Congress of your continued affiliation with the Chamber on these issues.  It claims to be a membership-driven, representative organization, but our research suggests it is neither.

Sincerely,

cc: Tom Donahue, President and CEO, U.S. Chamber of Commerce

http://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/release/senators-issue-report-on-us-chamber-of-commerce-lobbying

==

senCoCrept16

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce: Out of Step with the American People and Its Members

The United States Chamber of Commerce is the largest

lobbying organization in the country. OpenSecrets, a

nonprofit, nonpartisan research group that tracks the

effects of money and lobbying, showed that in 2015

alone, the Chamber spent roughly $85 million on

lobbying efforts, more than twice the amount spent by

the second-highest organization (the National Association

of Realtors). 10 During the 2013-2014 election cycle,

the Chamber spent $35 million on political expenditures

(through super PACs, 501(c) organizations, and/

or political party committees) that were “outside” or

independent of candidates’ campaign committees. 11

The Chamber has used its considerable resources to

fight legislation and government action on tobacco

and climate change at home and abroad. A series of

2015 New York Times articles exposed the Chamber’s

aggressive activities helping the tobacco industry to fight

international antismoking laws, regulations, and policies,

12 and described the organization’s systematic efforts to

undermine the Environmental Protection Agency’s work to

address climate change and carbon pollution. 13

...

it represents the “interests of more than three million

businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions” when it

interacts with Congress, 15 its positions and actions

on tobacco and climate do not appear to reflect or

communicate the positions of many of its member

companies. The following analysis shows that

approximately half of the companies on the Chamber’s

Board of Directors have publicly taken positions on

tobacco and climate change that are in conflict with

the Chamber’s actions and positions. This calls into

question the Chamber’s allegedly transparent decisionmaking

process, and suggests that the Chamber does

not accurately represent the positions of its member

companies.

Moreover, the Chamber’s lobbying is at odds with its own

public positions. The organization strongly professes that

it is anti-tobacco, saying that it “is not in the business of

promoting cigarette smoking at home or abroad, period.”

16 It also claims to support the environment, saying that

it “has in its public documents, Hill letters and testimony,

supported efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions

in the atmosphere,” and calling for a “comprehensive

climate change law.” 17 Plainly, there is a broad gap

between the Chamber’s stated policies, its Board

members’ positions, and its actual lobbying activities.

...

When the Chamber weighs in, many in Washington, D.C.,

listen. The Chamber is the largest lobbying organization

in the country and claims to represent the “interests of

more than three million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and

regions” when it interacts with Congress. OpenSecrets, a

nonprofit, nonpartisan research group that tracks the effects

of money and lobbying, showed that in 2015 alone, the

Chamber spent roughly $85 million on lobbying efforts,

more than twice the amount spent by the second-highest

organization (National Association of Realtors). 33 During

the 2013-2014 election cycle, the Chamber spent $35

million on political expenditures (through super PACs,

501(c) organizations, and/or political party committees) that

were “outside” or independent of candidates’ campaign

committees. 34

The Chamber has aggressively lobbied—in the United States

and abroad—in support of tobacco and climate policies that

are directly at odds with science, public health, and public

opinion. In June 2015, The New York Times reported that

“the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its foreign affiliates

have become the hammer for the tobacco industry, engaging

in a worldwide effort to fight antismoking laws of all kinds.”

35 The Chamber’s efforts span the globe, from fighting

tobacco advertising bans in Uruguay to opposing graphic

health warnings on tobacco labels in Burkina Faso. 36 The

Chamber has lobbied to ensure tobacco companies are

able to sue under future intern...TPP]

The Chamber has lobbied to ensure tobacco companies are

able to sue under future international treaties, including the

Trans-Pacific Partnership. 37

The Chamber has attacked U.S. climate policies with similar

zeal. According to The New York Times,

in early 2014, a group of 30 corporate

lawyers, coal lobbyists, and Republican

political strategists gathered at the

Chamber’s headquarters to devise legal

strategies to dismantle the President’s Clean

Power Plan—before President Obama had

even introduced a draft proposal of it. 38

The Chamber has also been vocal about

its opposition to climate action when

testifying before Congress. For instance,

the Chamber has testified in opposition

to the Paris Agreement, 39 despite the fact

that many of its Board member companies

have pledged to support the goals of the

Agreement. 40 Additionally, nearly all of

Chamber campaign contributions—94%—

have reportedly gone to climate change

denier candidates

...

range of certifiation?]

• Ceres Climate Declaration—A voluntary declaration

signed by more than 1,000 companies and individuals,

who acknowledge that “[t]ackling climate change is one

America’s greatest economic opportunities of the 21st

century.” 44

• Ceres Company Network—A voluntary network of

companies that agree to improve their environmental

and social performance; publicly report on their

sustainability strategies; engage with Ceres Coalition

investors, sustainability experts, and other stakeholders;

and continuously improve on their sustainability

performance and disclosure. 45

• National Climate Coalition—A multi-industry coalition

whose members support congressional action to

regulate greenhouse gases, as well as the role of

the Environmental Protection Agency in regulating

greenhouse gases. 46

• Paris Pledge for Action—A voluntary pledge by

businesses, cities, civil society groups, investors,

regions, trade unions and other signatories, which

promise to “ensure that the ambition set out by the

Paris Agreement is met or exceeded to limit global

temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius.” 47

• U.S. Climate Action Partnership—An alliance (now

inactive) of more than 30 companies and organizations

that called upon U.S. government leaders to take

measures to slow, stop, and reverse the growth of

greenhouse gas emissions. 48

• Climate Disclosure Leadership Index (CDLI)—A

global index of corporations and businesses that

have voluntarily disclosed their efforts to manage

greenhouse gas emissions and climate change risks

and opportunities. The CDLI is compiled by the CDP

(formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project). 49

• Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI)—An index

assessing the sustainability practices and performance

of nearly two thousand companies across a variety of

sectors. 50

• Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Climate

Leadership Award—A national award program that

recognizes and incentivizes exemplary corporate,

organizational, and individual leadership in response to

climate change. 51

• EPA SmartWay Excellence Award—An award honoring

SafeWay Transport Partnership company members for

their notable actions to reduce emissions...

Findings

Based on the responses to the Tobacco and Climate Letters

and public positions and policies of Board members, the

report finds that:

• Approximately half of the companies on the U.S.

Chamber of Commerce’s Board of Directors have antitobacco

and/or pro-climate positions.

• None of the respondents to the Tobacco and Climate

Letters expressed explicit support for the Chamber’s

activities, and numerous Chamber Board members

distanced themselves from Chamber activities on

tobacco or climate.

• The Chamber’s decision-making process lacks

transparency, even with respect to its Board members.

A number of Board members were unaware of key

Chamber policymaking and lobbying decisions on

tobacco and climate.

Tobacco Findings

Almost half of the Chamber Board members (49 of 108,

...

Climate Change Findings

Almost half of the Chamber Board members (52 of 108,

48%) have taken public positions supporting efforts to

reduce carbon emissions and address climate change,

including eight of the companies that responded to the

Senate inquiry on Chamber climate policies (see Appendix

V). The remaining Board member companies appear to have

no public position on climate change as a public health or

environmental issue.

These 52 companies that support efforts to address climate

change, have undertaken their own initiatives to reduce

carbon emissions, support the EPA’s work on climate

change, or have publicly committed to support of the Paris

Agreement.

...

VI. Conclusion

The Chamber claims that it “reflects the grassroots views

of the entire business community when the organization

testifies before Congress or regulatory agencies, disseminates

reports or statements to the media, or sends comments

or letters to Capitol Hill and to policymakers.” 87 It states

that “everyone involved in the process must help develop

positions that benefit the entire business community, rather

than any given narrow interest . . . The process must be open

and above board.” 88

But this investigation finds these claims to be plainly

untrue. Despite its claims of a representative policy-making

process, the Chamber does not speak for many of its Board

members on two of the most pressing public health issues

of our time. The discrepancy between how the Chamber

and its Board members act on tobacco and climate is stark.

Bloomberg columnist Barry Ritholtz contends that it is easy

for the Chamber to ignore its numerous member companies

that oppose its stance because one third of its revenue

comes from just 19 companies, many of them in the energy

industry. 89

Indeed, based on the responses of Chamber Board member

companies, the Chamber seems to act at will, without

broadly consulting its leading members about fundamental

policy positions on which it spends millions of dollars in

collected dues.

Some American business icons have demonstrated

leadership by disaffiliating themselves from the Chamber

over fundamental policy disagreements. Apple, Exelon,

and Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), have left the Chamber

over its destructive climate policies. 90 Nike left the Board

for similar reasons, 91 and other members—Intel, Johnson &

Johnson, and Microsoft—publicly disagree with and distance

themselves from the Chamber’s climate position. 92 And CVS

Health withdrew its membership from the Chamber last year

due to the group’s tobacco lobbying. 93

Many Chamber members do good work to address the risks

of tobacco and climate change. But too many of these

members quietly disapprove of the Chamber’s positions

without taking action. As long as these Board members

lend their tacit support to an organization that spearheads

systematic efforts against policies to limit tobacco and

climate change, it is difficult to accept their claims that they

are anti-tobacco or good on climate.

We encourage Chamber Board members to stop looking

the other way where there is disagreement, and defending

their Chamber membership as supporting free speech. This

positioning makes it appear as though they’re trying to have

it both ways and damages their credibility and efforts in

support of positive action. 94 These companies should take

responsibility for the positions and actions of the Chamber,

and use their leverage as an opportunity to shift the tenor of

a powerful lobbying force away from harming public health

and towards positions that help reduce tobacco use and

address the risks of climate change.

==

==

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/15/business/us-chamber-of-commerce-tobacco-climate-change.html

None of the 108 board members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce came forward to explicitly support the lobbying group’s policies on tobacco and climate change, according to a new report from a group of eight Senate Democrats, including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.

The report, which was written by Senator Warren and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, followed on reporting by The New York Times that revealed the chamber’s international campaign against antismoking laws and its efforts to undermine policies aimed at curbing global warming.

“The chamber’s lobbying is at odds with its own public positions,” the report found. It noted that the “organization strongly professes that it is anti-tobacco” and has claimed to support “efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

In a statement, the chamber described the report’s contents as a “partisan line of attack” that was “egregiously false” and recycled “old myths and tired talking points.”

The Times reported that the chamber had focused on antismoking measures advanced by health advocates from Ukraine to Nepal to Australia. The measures targeted by the chamber included restrictions on smoking in public spaces, bans on menthol and slim cigarettes, curbs on tobacco advertising, excise-tax increases and graphic warning labels. Thomas J. Donohue, the head of the chamber, personally lobbied the speaker of the House, the United States trade representative and the Irish prime minister on the tobacco industry’s behalf.

The chamber’s campaign has aroused the ire of the World Health Organization, and it put the four health care companies that serve on the chamber’s board — Anthem, the Health Care Service Corporation, the Steward Health Care System of Boston and the Indiana University Health system — in an awkward position. CVS Health Corporation quit the chamber over the revelations.

Another report from The Times last year focused on the chamber’s efforts to dismantle President Obama’s climate change regulations. The chamber convened regular meetings of corporate lawyers, coal lobbyists and Republican political strategists more than a year before the regulations were introduced.

The report highlights that even though the board is described as “the principal governing and policy-making body of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce,” the members are often left in the dark.

“Approximately half of the companies on the chamber’s board of directors have adopted anti-tobacco and pro-climate positions that contrast sharply with the chamber’s activities,” according to the report. “Not a single board member explicitly supported the chamber’s lobbying efforts,” it said.

Ten companies serving on the board told the Senate inquiry that “they had no knowledge of or input into the chamber’s lobbying activities on tobacco or climate issues.”

The report was also backed by Senators Barbara Boxer of California, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Ed Markey of Massachusetts. It was undertaken to determine whether the chamber’s board actually supported its secretive lobbying activities, and to further publicize the gap between the chamber and its board.

The chamber has found itself in a difficult position. Under the leadership of Mr. Donohue, the chamber has become the country’s largest lobbying organization and a stalwart of the Republican Party that has made keeping control of the Senate a priority. But it has been thrown off its stride by the elevation of Donald Trump, who opposes chamber priorities like the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

In a December interview with Bloomberg, Mr. Donohue said Mr. Trump “won’t be the next president,” adding that he is “entertainment, but he’s not leadership for the American people.” In May, he said, “I hear mostly concern from our members. Who is this guy? What do we know about him? How will he behave?”

==

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/04/us/obama-unveils-plan-to-sharply-limit-greenhouse-gas-emissions.html

In the early months of 2014, a group of about 30 corporate lawyers, coal lobbyists and Republican political strategists began meeting regularly in the headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, often, according to some of the participants, in a conference room overlooking the White House. Their task was to start devising a legal strategy for dismantling the climate change regulations they feared were coming from President Obama.

The group — headed in part by Roger R. Martella Jr., a top environmental official in the George W. Bush administration, and Peter Glaser, a prominent Washington lobbyist — was getting an early start.

By the time Mr. Obama announced the regulations at the White House on Monday, the small group that had begun its work at the Chamber of Commerce had expanded into a vast network of lawyers and lobbyists ranging from state capitols to Capitol Hill, aided by Republican governors and congressional leaders. And their plan was to challenge Mr. Obama at every opportunity and take the fight against what, if enacted, would be one of his signature accomplishments to the Supreme Court.

Within minutes of the announcement, West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, stepped before a bank of cameras for a news conference at the Greenbrier resort in his home state. Flanked by Mike Duncan, the president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, one of the nation’s top coal lobbying groups, and Greg Zoeller, the attorney general of Indiana, Mr. Morrisey announced that a group of at least 15 Republican state attorneys general were preparing to jointly file a legal challenge to Mr. Obama’s proposal.

“The final rule announced Monday blatantly disregards the rule of law and will severely harm West Virginia and the U.S. economy,” Mr. Morrisey said. “This rule represents the most far-reaching energy regulation in this nation’s history, drawn up by radical bureaucrats and based on an obscure, rarely used provision of the Clean Air Act.”

“Our coalition, in short order, will comprise of many states, consumers, mine workers, coal operators, utilities and businesses who are united in opposition to this radical and illegal policy,” he added.

While Mr. Obama had not even put forth a draft proposal of his plans when the group started its work, the president had made plain in several speeches that he intended to act forcefully on climate change — and that he would flex the muscle of his executive authority to do so. “If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said in his 2013 State of the Union address. The lawyers and lobbyists wanted to be ready to fire back hard and fast when he did.

Continue reading the main story

RELATED COVERAGE

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President Obama’s Tough, Achievable Climate Plan AUG. 3, 2015

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Obama’s Flexible Fix to Climate Change AUG. 4, 2015

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Opinion Op-Ed Contributor

Obama Takes a Crucial Step on Climate Change AUG.

In devising its strategy, the group worked closely with the office of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader whose coal-producing home state also stands to suffer under the regulation. While Mr. McConnell opposes the climate change regulations, his advisers knew that he had little chance of enacting legislation to block them in Congress. Instead, Mr. McConnell has taken the unusual step of reaching out directly to governors and attorneys general, urging them to refuse to submit compliance plans for the regulations, and encouraging a state-by-state rejection of the rules.

Mr. Morrisey, whose coal-producing home state is also struggling with the nation’s highest unemployment rate, was chosen as the public face of the suit. But key strategists joining the original planning were Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas, a former attorney general there, and Scott Pruitt, the attorney general of Oklahoma. Both already had experience suing the Obama administration over major Clean Air Act regulations.

An important ally in the effort was the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a conservative advocacy group that pushes policy through state legislatures. Typically, the council’s committees of corporate members will craft a model bill designed to push through policies it supports, such as rolling back environmental regulations.

At a July meeting in San Diego, ALEC’s energy committee — which includes Mr. Duncan, the coal lobbyist who also worked closely with Mr. McConnell on his tactics — enacted a model bill designed to directly support state attorneys general who legally challenge the climate change plan. According to a person present at that July meeting, the bill would allow states to create funds, which could be funded by corporate donations, to support legal challenges to the climate change rules.

While it is not unusual for major corporations to sue the federal government over environmental regulations, people involved in the effort to craft a legal strategy against the climate change rules said the time, labor and coordination of the effort were unusual. That effort reflects the sweeping scope of climate change regulations, which, unless struck down in the Supreme Court, could transform huge sectors of the economy, potentially crippling the coal industry and other industrial sectors whose economic well-being relies on coal.

The Obama administration contends that despite the massive scale of the challenges trained against it, the climate change plan is legally sound. “The final rule is built on a rock-solid legal foundation,” said Thomas Reynolds, a spokesman for the agency.

“E.P.A. is using its clear authority under the Clean Air Act to set emission standards for air pollutants,” he said. “The rule is wholly consistent with the law, and we are confident it will withstand any and all legal challenges.”

But Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who has worked closely with the group, says that the attorneys general will not back down. “This rule was more aggressive than any of us could have imagined,” he said. “There is no lack of state attorneys general who would like to put a bullet in this thing.” The rules, a final, stricter version of a plan that the Environmental Protection Agency announced in 2012 and 2014, assigns each state a target for reducing its carbon pollution from power plants. States will be allowed to create their own plans to meet the requirements and will have to submit initial versions of their plans by 2016 and final versions by 2018.

The most aggressive of the regulations requires that by 2030, the nation’s existing power plants must cut emissions by 32 percent from 2005 levels, which is an increase from the 30 percent target proposed in the draft regulation.

The president on Monday called the new rules a public health imperative and “the single most important step America has ever taken in the fight against global climate change.” He also sought to wrap the policy in the legitimacy of transcendental values, noting that Pope Francis issued an encyclical in June, calling action on the issue a “moral obligation.”

Even as Mr. Obama acknowledged the steep resistance from coal-producing states and industry critics, he said it was up to the United States to adopt tough standards so that other countries like China would feel compelled to take similar steps.

But Mr. McConnell made it clear he would do everything in his power to combat the rules, which he said the president had crafted because he was “tired of having to work with the Congress the people elected.”

“That’s why the administration is now trying to impose these deeply regressive regulations — regulations that may be illegal, that won’t meaningfully impact the global environment, and that are likely to harm middle- and lower-class Americans most — by executive fiat,” Mr. McConnell said. “It represents a triumph of blind ideology over sound policy and honest compassion,” he added.

==

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/05/13110/us-chamber-commerce-local-influence-two-maps

no links, great maps

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Local Influence in Two Maps

Submitted by Calvin Sloan on May 25, 2016 - 9:29am

In March of 2016, the Center for Media and Democracy exposed how a GOP polling firm is working with state chambers of commerce to defeat workplace reforms like increasing the minimum wage and paid sick leave, despite their own polling that shows that large majorities of state chamber members and CEOs are supportive of such measures.

That webinar was hosted by the Council of State Chambers (COSC), a little-known trade association deeply embedded in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce infrastructure that provides ostensibly-autonomous state chambers of commerce with U.S. Chamber policy directives.

Research released by CMD in March further documented how the policy synergy provided by groups like COSC is not the exception to the rule; it is the rule. Countless local chambers and essentially every state chamber have been captured by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s vast network of councils, government affairs conferences, training centers, executive associations, and membership clubs.

So how far does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s policy network extend?

Below is a map of the members of CCC 100, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s invite-only group of chamber executives that gather twice a year in lush resorts to attend U.S. Chamber-led policy trainings:

Since CMD’s source documents on CCC 100 range from 2011 to 2015, and contain only a handful of CCC 100 registration lists, this map is incomplete.

But from what information is available, it is clear that the U.S. Chamber has sought--and most of the time, has been able--to capture the policy direction of local chambers in every major city across the country.

Far too often in 2016 America, the local chamber is not representing local interests.

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Further, many local chambers are now highly partisan and transnationally interested. In soliciting CCC 100 "sponsorship opportunities," the U.S. Chamber advertises "three days of unlimited access to the nation's top chamber presidents and CEOs" to the lobbying departments of mega-corporations like Walmart, FedEx and American Express--corporate interests who prioritize shareholder profits, not community development.

The state chambers are in worse shape. The following map shows COSC state chamber membership:

Apart from Nevada, Utah and Wyoming, every state in the country has a COSC-affiliate.

These institutions are provided with legal and political expertise from the U.S. Chamber on how to operate political PACs and lobby effectively, and are forces to be reckoned with in state capitols.

And U.S. Chamber "expertise" is by no means benign.

The latest COSC conference met in wintry January at the Marco Beach Ocean Resort, where state chamber executives attended a political discussion led by the Koch-founded Freedom Partners organization, and a policy training led by a PR firm "on how best to message a free market approach to climate issues."

The U.S. Chamber may be infamous for being the largest lobbyist in Washington D.C.--but it is evident that the organization’s influence extends far beyond the Beltway.

Read the key documents about CMD's investigation of the state Chambers here.

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http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/04/13098/us-chamber-works-behind-scenes-gut-whistleblower-protections

Efforts to gut the federal False Claims Act backed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce got a hearing on Capitol Hill Thursday. The federal push builds on previous back-door Chamber efforts through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to discourage states from pursuing fraud claims.

The False Claims Act (FCA) allows the government to recover from businesses that defraud government programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and protects whistleblowers who report suspected fraud on government contracts. According to the Department of Justice, cases brought under the FCA resulted in the recovery of $42 billion from 1987-2013, making it an important legal tool for deterring fraud and protecting public funds.

Ensuring that contractors don't defraud the government is clearly in the public interest. Yet for a number of years, the Chamber has been targeting the FCA through its lobbying efforts and its Institute for Legal Reform, which advocates policy changes that would reduce financial penalties on many companies and make it harder for whistleblowers to report alleged misconduct.

Three of the four scheduled speakers at Thursday's hearing on "Oversight of the False Claims Act," held by the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice, called for the FCA to be overhauled; two have clear ties to the U.S. Chamber.

Larry D. Thompson of the University of Georgia School of Law advocated for "greater creativity" in ethics oversight—offering the U.S. Chamber's proposal as an exemplar.

Thompson served as Deputy Attorney General under President George W. Bush and was previously a member of the U.S. Chamber's Board of Directors.

Jonathan Diesenhaus, a lawyer with Hogan Lovells US LLP, claimed that the qui tam statute gives too much power to whistleblowers "with less than honorable intentions." Diesenhaus wrote a report on state qui tam statutes and FCAs for the Chamber's ILR, and presented on potential FCA "reforms" at an Institute for Legal Reform summit in 2013.

U.S. Chamber Blocks State Anti-Fraud Efforts through ALEC

This won't be the first time the U.S. Chamber has gotten seemingly independent sources to mouth its talking points.

The Chamber has also worked through ALEC to pressure state lawmakers against strengthening state-level false claims laws, as shown in documents uncovered by Common Cause and reported on by The New York Times.

In 2012, a U.S. Chamber lawyer was the co-chair of ALEC's Civil Justice Task Force, along with Ohio state legislator Bill Seitz. After consulting with the Chamber's representative about a proposed False Claims Act to protect whistleblowers in Ohio, Seitz told The New York Times, "he learned that the bill, as originally written, would have been 'a trial lawyer’s bonanza.'" Seitz then began drafting an ALEC-friendly model and sent a warning to a fellow state legislator about the push to increase false claims litigation.

"While this is understandable, as states are broke, the considered advice from our friends at ALEC was that such legislation is not well taken and should not be approved," Seitz wrote.

Seitz's efforts on the Chamber's behalf did not go unnoticed. He received the Institute for Legal Reform's "State Legislative Achievement Award" the following year.

4/16

http://www.prwatch.org/news/2016/03/13072/chamber-commerce

no links

New materials provided to the Center for Media and Democracy/PRWatch reveal that a top GOP polling firm instructed state Chamber of Commerce lobbyists how to try to defeat popular measures like increasing the minimum wage, despite polling data from business leaders that shows overwhelming support for such progressive workplace policies.

California just passed a statewide measure to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour over the next few years, as other cities have also embraced this and other key workplace reform measures, such as paid sick days.

Read more from the Washington Post's story by Lydia DiPillis here.

Below are key materials about this, including this short video from the webinar with analysis that CMD has prepared:

Here is the link to that snippet from the webinar.

Here is the poll, marked up by CMD.

Here is a copy of the slideshow, marked up by CMD.

Here is a transcript of the webinar, highlighted by CMD.

Here is the link to the longer version of the webinar.

Here is some information about who spoke during the webinar.

Here is a backgrounder on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the state chambers of commerce.

Here is CMD's press release summarizing key information about the materials.

Here is some analysis of the polling results by CMD.

Here is an interview on NPR's Fresh Air about the materials and the efforts to preempt local efforts to increase the minumum wage, paid sick, family leave, predictive scheduling and other popular measures.

Here is the long version with commentary by CMD:

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ref

Madison, WI--Video footage of a closed-door webinar provided to the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) reveals top GOP pollsters instructing Chamber of Commerce lobbyists to ignore internal survey data showing that Chamber members across the country overwhelmingly support progressive workplace policies including raising the minimum wage, providing paid sick days, and increasing paid family leave. (These and other materials are available here.)

In the video, pollsters with LuntzGlobal, the survey research firm of noted GOP pollster Frank Luntz, coach lobbyists from state and local Chambers on how to thwart the "empathy" that Chamber members feel for their employees in order to advance an anti-worker agenda aligned with the Koch Brothers and other corporate interests.

"This webinar reveals just how deeply corporate interests and their lobbyists are influencing the priorities of state Chambers of Commerce, even when that agenda contradicts the opinions of their local business members," said Lisa Graves, executive director of the Center for Media and Democracy, a national watchdog organization that monitors the hidden influence of corporate interests in politics. "Rather than listening to its members and crafting a policy agenda that reflects their priorities, Chamber lobbyists pick their policy positions behind closed doors and then figure out how to convince their members to fall in line."

"It's a warped, undemocratic process, and the Chambers should be held accountable for their claims to the public, press, and elected officials that businesses oppose raising the minimum wage, paid sick leave, increased family and medical leave and other common sense policies, when in fact substantial majorities of business executives actually support these public policies," she added.

During the hour-long webinar, which was hosted by the Council of State Chambers in February 2016, LuntzGlobal consultants present the results of an internal survey of 1,000 C-suite executives who are either current or prospective Chamber members. The poll finds that – contrary to the Chamber's lobbying agenda – 80 percent of current or prospective Chamber members support raising the minimum wage, 73 percent support paid sick days, 78 percent support predictive scheduling policies, 72 percent support increased maternity leave time, and 82 percent support increased paternity leave time, among other policies.

In the webinar, a LuntzGlobal consultant asks about the poll findings: "So what do these results all have in common? Well quite frankly, they're all empathetic." In response, the consultants advise Council of State Chamber lobbyists on messaging and strategies to help their members get over their empathy and to undermine and change their members' views: "So what we'll try to do is actually give you a few helpful hints on how to actually combat these [workplace reform efforts and their popularity among business leaders] in your states…"

"With their internal polls showing that business owners and executives support raising the minimum wage by an overwhelming 80-to-8 percent, it's unconscionable that the U.S. Chamber and state chambers continue to fight the wage increases that America's workers and our economy need," said Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project.

In state and cities where these policies have been debated, the local Chamber is almost always in the frontlines of the local opposition, working with other local affiliates of the National Restaurant Association, the American Hotel & Lodging Association, and other corporate trade groups to slow or stop the advances of these policies.

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