Hackademic Bak

overwrite 916

ROY SPENCER ALABAMA

10/21 i am adding academic economists b/c of cash for comments/op-eds

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mma

The Trump administration's “critical review” of climate science is authored by some of Fox News’ favorite climate deniers

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Allison Fisher

Published 08/14/25

On July 23, the Department of Energy released a so-called “critical review” of climate science to serve as a basis for the Environmental Protection Agency to stop regulating climate pollution. The New York Times reported:

> Sea level rise is not accelerating. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be good for plant growth. The computer models used to predict global warming tend to exaggerate future temperature increases.

These arguments, routinely made by people who reject the scientific consensus on climate change, were included in an unusual report released by the Energy Department on Tuesday. The report, which is meant to support the Trump administration’s sweeping efforts to roll back climate regulations, contends that the mainstream scientific view on climate change is too dire and overlooks the positive effects of a warming planet.

The conclusions in the DOE report have been widely criticized by climate scientists. From The Washington Post:

> Scientists argue that the new report, composed in less than two months by five authors known to have skeptical views on climate science, would not pass any peer review process. “If almost any other group of scientists had been chosen, the report would have been dramatically different,” Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M University, said in a statement.

“There is a history of some of the authors of this document cherry-picking dates to show that there is no change, but they’re not providing the evidence to support that,” said Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington.

To author its new report, the Department of Energy tapped climate contrarians, including several who have been on the payroll of the fossil fuel industry and whose discredited and debunked arguments have been promoted by right-wing media to manufacture doubt about the science that compels climate action. In fact, four of the five authors of the report — Judith Curry, John Cristy, Steven Koonin, and Roy Spencer — have appeared on Fox News during key moments to dismiss climate science and deny the link between our warming planet and extreme weather.

## Climate deniers behind the Trump administration’s new climate report have appeared on Fox News to dismiss climate science during key moments

Judith Curry

Judith Curry, former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech, consulted for oil and gas companies during her time in academia. She resigned from Georgia Tech in 2017 citing climate “craziness” and has been called out by other scientists for promoting debunked climate denial arguments.

As climate-fueled Hurricane Idalia barreled toward Florida in August 2023, Curry appeared on Jesse Watters Primetime to argue that scientists have “seriously mischaracterized” the threat of climate change. She claimed that the “dominant factor” in climate change is “far and away” the “natural climate variability” of the Earth. (Earlier that same month, Curry published an op-edin the New York Post, another Murdoch property, where she falsely claimed that the “overwhelming scientific consensus” on climate change is “manufactured” and suggested that scientists are incentivized by “fame and fortune” to push the idea that climate change is caused by human activity.)

John Christy

John Christy is “an atmospheric scientist who doubts the extent to which human activity has caused global warming,” according to The New York Times. (In reality, “more than 99.9% of peer-reviewed scientific papers agree that climate change is mainly caused by humans.”) He has regularly downplayed the link between climate change and extreme weather and has also pushed the false narrative — central to the Trump DOE climate report — that “CO2 is not the problem” because “carbon dioxide makes things grow. The world used to have five times as much carbon dioxide as it does now. Plants love this stuff. It creates more food.”

During a deadly global heat wave in July 2022, Christy appeared on The Ingraham Angle to falsely claim that extreme heat and other disasters are not “increasing in intensity or frequency.” He also repeated the common climate denial argument that “deaths from weather disasters and so on has gone down about 95% in the last hundred years.” But Reuters points out that the decrease in deaths since 1920 is largely due to “better forecasting and preparedness,” even while “the number, intensity, and cost of climatic and meteorological hazards have all increased over the last hundred years.”

Steven Koonin

Physicist Steve Koonin, a former scientist for the oil and gas giant BP who wrote a book chock-full of errors about climate change, appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Fox Business’ Kudlow to downplay the release of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s sixth climate assessment. Koonin stated that “it is kind of absurd to think that another one degree over a century is going to create catastrophe.” But this would put the planet at over 2 degrees Celsius of warming, which climate scientists have long urged policymakers to prevent because it will be catastrophic for large parts of the globe.

Koonin also appeared on the August 10, 2021, edition of Special Report with Bret Baier to dismiss the connection between extreme weather and climate change, claiming that natural disasters were “on the face of it, weather. If they were climate, we would see trends over several decades in those phenomena, and we don't.”

In fact, climate scientists have been able to estimate how much climate change affects any given extreme weather event for years. Notably, researchers found that the heat wave that sent temperatures in the Pacific Northwest into triple digits just two months before the release of the 2021 report would have been “virtually impossible” without global warming.

Roy Spencer

Roy Spencer is a research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, an adviser to the Heartland Institute, and a former visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation who was known as Rush Limbaugh's “official climatologist.” Politico reported that even while he has written that “climate change is big business” driven by a “marching army of climate scientists whose careers now depend on a steady stream of funding from governments” (a frequent claim among climate deniers), Spencer himself “has worked with organizations that have received funding from an interlinked network of fossil fuel companies — a multitrillion-dollar global industry — as well as wealthy foundations with billions of dollars in holdings that support groups opposing climate and energy regulations.”

After Hurricane Irma devastated parts of the U.S. in 2017, Fox & Friends hosted Spencer to undermine the science linking more intense storms to a warming planet. Spencer claimed: “As you go through time, there has been no increase in the number of major land-falling hurricanes in Florida, and there's been no increase in their intensity.” While climate scientists predict that “storm frequency will either decrease or remain unchanged” due to climate change and studies consistently show “no discernible trend in the global number of tropical cyclones,” data has confirmed that warmer temperatures have increased their intensity — including stronger wind speeds and greater precipitation.

## Energy Secretary Chris Wright has appeared on Fox and CNN to defend the report and its authors

On August 5, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins summarized the Trump DOE report’s conclusions “that more carbon dioxide in the air is good for plant growth, that [rising] sea levels are not accelerating,” and asked Secretary of Energy Chris Wright how the authors were selected. Wright responded:

“I've been in the climate debate and discussion for over 20 years, so I know certainly a lot of people in that world and I just made a list of who I think are the true, honest scientists,” Wright responded. “They follow the data and the facts where they lead them. They don't have a political agenda or a desired policy or a desired thing. They're just honest scientists. There's plenty of those. But I made a list of about a dozen of them that I thought were very senior and very well-respected. I called the top five and everyone said yes.”

Collins noted that “some people have criticized the report saying the information was cherry-picked by people who had already predetermined what they wanted to say in this report.” Notably, “some people” includes climate scientists whose work is cited in the report.

Wright also claimed that “the report references the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports over 100 times,” but it is worth noting that the well-known climate contrarians behind the Trump administration’s “critical review” contradict the findings of the hundreds of scientists who spent eight years developing the IPCC report.

On the August 7 edition of Morning with Maria, host Maria Bartiromo asked Wright to respond to The New York Times’ “pushback” from the article headlined “Energy Department attacks climate science in contentious report.”

“What a crazy headline, but I guess that’s par for the course for The New York Times — in fact we are doing the exact opposite,” Wright responded. “We are exposing the American people and the broader scientific community to what is actually in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, not the hyperbolic summaries for policymakers or media headlines that claim all sorts of crazy stuff. This is what we actually know.”

“How often do you hear that the planet is getting greener because there’s more carbon dioxide in the air that contributes to increased crop productivity and greener wilderness?” he continued. “How often do you hear that deaths from extreme weather have been falling like stone for a century? And that insured losses from extreme weather events have been on a multidecadal decline — those are just facts.”

All of these climate denial arguments have been debunked for years. Increasing CO2 is far more harmful to plants and farmers than any short-term benefit. Extreme weather deaths are falling because of better forecasting even while weather events are more intense due to our warming planet. And we are currently facing an insurance crisis because of climate-fueled events making some locations economically unviable and dangerously uninhabitable. But these stark realities were abandoned in the Trump administration’s climate report in favor of debunked arguments that support the fossil fuel industry’s campaign against climate action.

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// liberal media BS

see hackademics

see koch-ademia

see moral panic for kids bird bird vaxx

aha of course goes back to powell memo but right constant cries of victimhood, oppressed by big tech, big gubmint etc etc etc etc

but recall they have to explain why they fail to win the the much vaunted marketplace of idea / polls

sinecure?

11 21 no lnx

'Thought criminals': Aggrieved conservative elites announce new university dedicated to 'truth' — but who’s funding Ii?

David Badash and The New Civil Rights Movement November 08, 2021

Bari Weiss. Andrew Sullivan. Jonathan Rauch. Larry Summers.

Those are some of the more recognizable names a new university launched Monday lists on the front page of its website.

Its founder says some of them have been "treated like thought criminals."

The University of Austin (which sounds remarkably like The University of Texas at Austin, founded in 1883,) in an announcement says it is "dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth." It is not currently accredited and offers no degrees.

But some of the people it is attracting have highly-controversial backgrounds. Indeed, some, like Weiss and Sullivan, seem to thrive on creating controversy.

It's clear, from its founder's message, that this is an enterprise dedicated to protect those who use their huge platforms to decry being "canceled."

"Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences,"Pano Kanelos, the former president of St. John's University and apparently the founder of The University of Austin, writes Monday at Bari Weiss' Substack. "Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology."

Kanelos discusses some of the University's founding faculty – a prerequisite appears to be having been subjected to criticism.

"On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender."

Its FAQ answers the question "Why Austin?" by jokingly replying: "If it's good enough for Elon Musk and Joe Rogan, it's good enough for us."

The big question of course is who is funding this endeavor? The "University" says it will have a physical campus.

That's expensive, as is paying top names.

"We have secured the seed money necessary to launch the university. But we are in the process of securing $250 million, which will enable us to grow into a comprehensive university," it says.

"UATX has requested and is awaiting a tax-exempt determination from the IRS. At present, UATX is fiscally sponsored by Cicero Research, a tax-exempt entity organized under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code."

An online search for "Cicero Research" nets almost nothing, except a one page listing on Cause IQ, a company to help nonprofits grow.

According to that filing for the year ending December 2020, Cicero Research has no full-time employees, no assets, but under "characteristics" is tagged "political advocacy."

Who's actually funding this is currently unknown.

FROM YOUR SITE ARTICLES

The Christian right is behind the GOP's new attack on public education ›

Far-right social conservatives are attacking sex education material ... ›

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Public Choice Libertarian ideology

'Public Choice Economics' in the context of the day, was a catch-phrase meaning "free-markets, less government, reduced regulation" of goods and services. It was the ultra-libertarian economic ideology of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher which was followed (as much as he was capable of understanding it) by President Ronald Reagan in the USA. It's main emphasis was on deregulation of industries -- even those with poisoning and polluting proplems - and in Reagan's case it led to major scandals with the forced retirement of over 20 top staff from the EPA, and the hurried exit ofThorne Auchter as head of the Occupational Safety & Health Administration and his (later) lobbying partner James J Tozzias the administration's "Deregulation Czar" (Office of Information & Regulatory Affairs - OIRA/OMB).

Payment system

The tobacco industry paid no retainer fees to the general Cash-for-Comment network members. However they did retain some of the core network and paid higher fees to a half-dozen of the Society economist recruited as part of the Committee on Taxation & Economic Growth. Network members were employed purely on pay-for-service transactions, and expected to also make some extra cash from the newspapers which accepted their op-eds.

RELATED ENTRIES
Com. on Tax & Economic Growth
Economists' network
Robert Tollison & James Savarese
C4C Network Documents
C4C Network Members

Savarese and Tollison would put out a request to each network member, specifying the subject to be covered and including a few of the key themes to be promoted, together with any essential statistics. The professor-member was then expected to:

write an op-ed piece following the theme and guidelines provided (usually 1000-1500 words), but in layman's language.
send the article to the editor of a local city newspaper (specified by the minders). It was probably assumed that some would be paid a token freelance writer's fee by the newspaper. ($100-$250 at this time)
if the article was published (and many were since they were essentially free) then photocopies of the article were to be sent to two local Representatives or Congressmen (specified by the tobacco staff)
copies of the published piece would then be returned to Savarese for payment.

The professors would then be paid between$600 and $3000 for their efforts by way of the Center for the Study of Public Choice at George Mason University; the amount varied over time.

The articles were commissioned via Savarese's staff, and the draft article was expected to be returned to the Institute for checking. They would make any necessary changes, and pass it through one or more of their major outside law firms for vetting. Sometimes Savarese or his staff might make changes also. Newspapers were designated in each region, so two or more articles didn't conflict.If the article was published (and sometimes even if they weren't) copies were to a designated Representative or Senator, with a note bringing the economist's 'independent opinion' to the Congressman's notice.

They were also paid to write letters-to-the-editor whenever the opportunity arose to promote the cigarette industry's line. For a period in 1987-88 the network was extended to also include Professors of Law and Business.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ogilvy

new

https://www.ecowatch.com/monsanto-glyphosate-studies-2645479132.html

A new investigation revealed that Monsanto funneled money to secretly fund academic studies that warned of catastrophic consequences to farmers if glyphosate was banned in the UK, according to research from the German watchdog LobbyControl, as The Guardian GUK reported.

The two studies in question come from 2010 and 2014, which was before the German chemical and pharmaceutical giant Bayer bought Monsanto in 2018. Upon learning of the secret funding, Bayer said the failure to disclose it violated the company's principles, according to The Guardian.

"This is an unacceptable form of opaque lobbying," said Ulrich Müller at LobbyControl, as The Guardian reported. "Citizens, media and decision-makers should know who pays for studies on subjects of public interest. The studies also used very high figures for the benefits of glyphosate and for possible losses in case of a ban. These extreme figures were then used to spin the debate."

However, the authors of the two studies said that the funding did not influence their findings. The 2010 study, called How Valuable is Glyphosate to UK Agriculture and the Environment? touted glyphosate for "a wide range of benefits to users." It said that glyphosate binds to soil and rarely leaches into groundwater. It does mention that glyphosate is sometimes found in surface water, but far below levels that would register as toxic. It then goes on to discuss how a ban of glyphosate would upend UK farming and gardening.

The 2014 study followed a similar line of reasoning. The study, titled Glyphosate Use on Combinable Crops in Europe: Implications for Agriculture and the Environment, also mentioned that glyphosate is highly water soluble and does not readily leach into soil or water and is found in less than 1 percent of water samples. It then goes on to assess "the value of glyphosate use across wheat, winter barley and oilseed rape in Europe."

And yet, one of the lead researchers Sarah Wynn said the funding did not influence her research. She told The Guardian, "As with other companies in our field, it is entirely normal for external organizations to fund research studies. However, it has always been our core principle that our research is never influenced in any way by those that fund us."

Wynn and her colleagues, unsurprisingly, came down in favor of continued glyphosate use. The research concluded, "the loss of glyphosate would cause very severe impacts on UK agriculture and the environment," as The Guardian reported. In the 2014 study they concluded that Europe would see a 20 percent fall in wheat and rapeseed production if glyphosate were banned.

Other researchers came to a different conclusion, noting that farming practices would change. The Andersons Centre at Oxford Economics challenged the conclusion of the Monsanto-funded studies.

In its report on a glyphosate ban in the UK, it said, "The Andersons Centre believe that this may be rather high given the mitigation efforts and the rotational changes discussed elsewhere. A similar process has been undertaken for all the major crops grown in the UK, using the best available data and knowledge of industry experts."

The 2010 and 2014 studies were instrumental in the lobbying efforts of the National Farmers Union and others to successfully campaign against a European ban of glyphosate in 2017, as The Guardian reported. The new revelations have spurred the National Farmers Union to note the source of the funding on its glyphosate information.

The National Farmers Union was not alone in using the research. Industry lobbyings groups the Glyphosate Task Force (now renamed the Glyphosate Renewal Group), also used the research, as did the Crop Protection Association, according to The Guardian.

EU Approval of Glyphosate Based on Review That Plagiarized ... ›

Monsanto Behind GOP Effort to Defund Cancer Researchers ›

EPA Ignored Scientific Research Showing Monsanto's Glyphosate ... ›

Glyphosate and cancer: The EPA may be wrong about dangers of ... ›

glyphosate monsanto science public health agriculture

new

https://www.alternet.org/2020/02/the-art-of-scientific-deception-former-assistant-secretary-of-labor-explains-how-corporations-use-mercenary-science-to-whitewash-harmful-products-and-drugs/

no lnx

The art of scientific deception: Former Assistant Secretary of Labor explains how corporations use ‘mercenary science’ to whitewash harmful products

Written by Keith A. Spencer / Salon February 2, 2020

One curious difference between humans and corporations is our capacity to harm others and emerge unscathed. If you or I were to poison someone on camera in broad daylight, we would be given a trial and sent to prison in a hurry. But if you or I were a corporation, we could hire consulting firms to produce research papers that claim that the poisoning didn’t happen, and/or question the existence of the poison, or claim that said concoction actually does good rather than harm. If that failed, we could then gum up the legal and political system with lobbyists and lawyers for decades.

In public discourse about our supposed post-truth society, most op-eds fixate on the way that social media can create separate reality bubbles. Few focus on what David Michaels, Obama’s Assistant Secretary of Labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), calls “mercenary science” — science-for-hire, contracted out by chemical and pharmaceutical companies to prove that their harmful products aren’t harmful by giving them the quantitative imprimatur of STEM knowledge. The idea that science and truth could diverge is profoundly troubling for our entire civilization.

While the vast majority of scientists, both employed publicly and privately, are honest and do their work as part of a larger quest for truth, there are a few notable exceptions. Specifically, a few mercenary science consulting firms have been very effective at helping corporations continue selling harmful chemicals and drugs long after they should have stopped.

Michaels, who has a new book on the topic titled “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” has been studying this problem for years, in part by virtue of his 8-year tenure at OSHA. Now a public health professor at George Washington University, Michaels’ book pulls back the curtain on the way that dark money and for-profit science is quite literally killing Americans.

I spoke with Michaels over the phone about the problem of corporate science and his insider’s view; as usual, this interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Salon: To start, what is “mercenary science”? How do you define this?

David Michaels: Mercenary science means [when scientists] produce studies that aren’t designed to better understand the world, or they help make the world a better place — which is why most scientists are in the business of science – but to defend products and to defend corporations. And often to influence regulation or to slow the compensation of victims.

This is the Enron-ization of science. It’s created a fiction in order to promote an actual game, fiction around science. And it is quite mercenary. In fact, this phrase is not one that I invented, but actually is used by these consulting companies whose business model is to provide some using reports and testimonies to corporations, so they can continue to market dangerous products or activities without being hindered by regulation or by compensating the people they’ve hurt.

What would you say is the most shocking, real-life example of something like this — of mercenary science becoming embedded in mainstream discourse?

I think the most famous [example] is in the tobacco industry… who didn’t invent it, but who certainly gained the most from it — and in climate change. There’s actually some overlap between some of the same mercenary scientists in both examples.

But as I write [in my book], this is now become standard operating procedure for virtually every industry, and in many cases, it’s the same so-called scientists who are involved in doing it. Nowadays, the instinct of corporate leaders — CEOs and executives —when there’s an allegation that their product could be causing harm is to say, “How can we show that it isn’t causing harm?” Not, “how can we determine whether or not we cause harm,” and then figure out what to do about it.

Other examples [include] opioids, and essentially how a few pharmaceutical companies misrepresented the studies to make it look like these opioids were not addictive. We have a death toll of tens of thousands a year as a result of that.

So do you think the people who are actually doing this kind of mercenary science, do they —

How they sleep at night?

Yes — and, how do they find these people? My parents were scientists and I hung out around a lot of scientists, and in my experience pretty much all of them were driven by the quest for truth, not money.

I mean, go look back at the 1994 tobacco hearings with Henry Waxman. You had well-educated corporate executives put their right hands in the air, swear that they did not believe that nicotine was addictive. I opened [my book] with a quote from Upton Sinclair, “It’s difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

It’s very clear that your financial relationship with products, with corporations influences how you think about them. The example I like to give, and this is Vioxx. You may remember Vioxx — it was a pain killer, a prescription drug invented by scientists at Merck to be used for arthritis and other sorts of pain, especially for people who couldn’t take aspirin. They, to test effectiveness they did a randomized clinical trial comparing it to Naprosyn, also known as Aleve. And they found it was effective, it was approved by the FDA, it went on the market, immediately became a very widely used, and successful and profitable drug.

Shortly after it came out, scientists independent of Merck looked at the results and found that the patients who were given Vioxx had more than twice the cardiovascular incident rate — including heart attacks — of the people who took comparable drugs like Naproxen (Aleve).

Instead of saying, “well, this is a significant problem,” scientists who were associated with Merck — and these were academic scientists at major academic medical centers — looked at these data, and they said, “No, Vioxx doesn’t increase risk of heart attack and stroke. It prevents it.”

And it’s true, you could look at it that way, but we don’t have a drug that prevents 60% percent of heart attacks — if we did, we’d put it in the water supply. We quickly learned the truth though, because at the same time, Merck started a randomized clinical trial to see if Vioxx prevented colon polyps, and we have no prevention for colon polyps — so [they did] a randomized, double-blind placebo trial, and that trial had to be stopped early because Vioxx was killing people. It more than doubled the risk of cardiovascular events.

In the few short years since Vioxx was on the market, FDA scientists estimated it cost somewhere between 88,000 and 120,000 heart attacks.

Here were very well-known cardiologists who were blinded for the truth by their financial relationship with Merck. And they were scientists who were not even in the business of product defense. So I think what happens is if your business model, if your financial relationships can influence how you look at science, it does.

What that tells me is we desperately need good science, and we desperately need accurate interpretation of scientific results, but they have to be done independently of the corporations that make these products or we won’t have honest results.

That leads to my next question for you. Are there good policy solutions for ending this type of situation?

Well, first of all, I think it’s worth saying [that] President Trump has done us a favor by his conscious destruction of our system of public health protection. We will have to rebuild it when the next administration comes, and given that, I think we can look at some of the problems that are justified — which all predate President Trump — and think about how we can do a better job.

So one example is the first thing clearly is we need a new head of science, and we need to have [rules] that the research on, say, opioids can’t be done by opioid manufacturers. E-cigarettes too — Juul, which is one-third owned by Altria, shouldn’t be overseeing the research on the health effects of e-cigarettes.

Still, we need to know what are the long-term health effects of essentially volatilizing nicotine and a number of different flavors — and perhaps some metal — and putting it deep into your lungs, and then exhaling it. Juul and the other e-cigarette companies should be paying for that research, but it has to be independent of them.

And so, the first thing is we need independent science paid for by the producers.

The other thing, though, is we have to change the presumption of regulation. Right now, for toxic chemicals, our regulatory system is based on the idea that we have to show harm before we protect people.So what you have to do is you’ve got to regulate on the best available evidence, but not wait until you definitively know that the product is harmful.

There’s a lot of discussion now about what are called sometimes “forever” chemicals. The chemicals that are used — the chlorinate chemicals that are used in Teflon, and of lining of fast-food containers [PFAs]. There are 4500 of chemicals in this class so far, I’m sure more will be invented. We have reasonably good human data on the health effects. We have reasonably good data on the health effects amongst in humans for two of those chemicals, and they are very powerful chemicals in terms of causing damage to people’s health.

Now, the Trump administration is moving very slowly, if at all, to regulate those two chemicals, but the way we ought to be addressing it is to regulate the class of chemicals in all 4500 of them, because until we know that any of them are safe, we should presume that they’re dangerous. And this relates to what we call the way that industry has successfully framed the debate around chemicals, and given them the presumption of innocence that we give human beings in the criminal justice system. We presume people are innocent until proven guilty, but chemicals harm people and they don’t deserve that presumption of innocence. If there’s reasonable evidence that they could be dangerous, until we show that they’re safe, we should treat them as dangerous. Chemicals are not worth more than people are.

How do other countries regulate these chemicals? I assume in the EU they have better regulation, right?

Well, Europe actually through it’s the REACH Program, [which stands for] Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and Restriction of Chemicals. It is not perfect, but the basic principle there is [that] producers of these chemicals are required to provide information to the European regulator sbefore they’re allowed to sell these chemicals.

Europe also takes [the] studies on pesticides much more seriously, and they don’t allow a lot of pesticides that we use here to be sold [. . . . ] Certainly some of the chemicals that are banned in Europe, they’re very toxic to humans. We should just ban them here, there’s no reason to be using [these.

Regarding the mercenary scientists, as you call them, I’m curious if it’s possible to quantify exactly how many scientists are in this class. Is it possible to do so, or is there any data about how many scientists have been, I suppose, influenced or become mercenary in this way? Is this a large portion or a tiny portion of scientists?

You know, it’s a relatively small number. There are a few consulting firms that do this, and they obviously are very lucrative operations. When big chemical companies need to defend their products, they usually don’t go to their own scientists who are — in general —I find to be very good, honest scientists with real integrity. But they want someone to write a report that will say exactly what they want, and they want someone to go on to defend them. So they use one of these product defense consultants.

And there are a few dozen of them at these companies or …. maybe perhaps a few hundred. It’s a tiny portion of scientists. But it’s a very lucrative operation.

One thing though, I found very interesting though, is when I went onto Glassdoor — which is the website that collects information about salaries and working conditions for employers — I looked up the comments by the staff who work at some of these product defense firms, and their descriptions of their employer were very telling.

Really?

For example, one employee of a firm called, Cardno ChemRisk,wrote in his comments about working there: “This is a law consulting company, not a science consultant company. Don’t expect to be a quote-unquote, scientist.

Wow.

Or Gradient, which is another one of these big consulting firms, “Some of the principle scientists have questionable ethics (and have been called out for it). Or Exponent, which is probably the biggest of the firms: “Sometimes you will be working for evildoers and trying to make it seem like they did nothing wrong.” These are from the scientists who work at these companies.

As a journalist with a hard science background, often I struggle to communicate past this fairly conspiratorial narrative that I would say a fair number of Americans believe in. Specifically, it’s the idea that it’s almost impossible to trust anything that either the government or a corporation tells you about the safety of something. I see this a lot with discussion of cell phone radiation, and also with vaccines.

I wanted to ask you about this because it’s sort of there’s this issue in that, I guess, it’s real hard to explain to a layperson the differences between, say, a mercenary scientist hired by, say, Merck, and then explain the efficacy of vaccines, which are also made by Merck.

I have a friend who grew up with me, someone I know from childhood, and this is his perspective – he’s an anti-vaccination type, and he always says, “When has the FDA ever been on my side?” Essentially he believes that so many government agencies have been captured by the corporations they’re supposed to regulate.

It’s hard to argue with that point, because there is some truth to that. It just doesn’t apply in the case of vaccines – even though it is applicable with chemicals like PFOAs, and drugs like Vioxx. I’m curious to hear your perspective here.

I wish I more advice on that. The fact [is] that the [regulatory] agencies really have been pushed around, and they haven’t stepped up to the plate [to] provide reasonable protections.

One way you see this right now is with baby powder and other cosmetics that have talc. In fact, talc is often contaminated with asbestos-like stuff, fibers and the like. And at various points in time, government agencies have looked at this issue and considered requiring warnings, and each case they pushed around and manipulated by the industry.

So now, again, the issue has come up — and there’s a government panel which has said essentially, “We have to start treating these fibers that are in talc as asbestos,” because that’s really what they are. But they could’ve done this 30 or 40 years ago, and they could’ve been upfront, saying, “Here’s a risk, this is the way you have to address this.” To come back and do this after the fact, after there’s already been a great deal of controversy, leads to cynicism about the government.

And I think by not having stepped up to the plate earlier on many of these issues, people wonder, “well, is the government in the pocket of industry?” And I wouldn’t say the agencies are always in the pocket of industry, but unfortunately they’re often so bullied and manipulated, and outgunned by industry, that they end up not doing things that are protective, and then that leads to cynicism. I mean, even the biggest of our government agencies doesn’t have anywhere near the legal firepower of a large chemical company.

That’s astonishing.

At OSHA, we often knew we had to settle cases without going to court because we didn’t have the resources to fight the cases against these corporations, even if we thought we felt we were right.

That is shocking. Has OSHA become more neutered under Trump’s administration, in terms of funding and regulatory capability?

Well, OSHA isn’t in the crosshairs [of Trump] like the State Department is. The Trump administration has simply neglected OSHA. It’s really malignant neglect — more than half of the senior positions are empty. I haven’t been replaced.

For a number of years, there was an acting assistant secretary, but because they didn’t actually fill it with a permanent confirmed assistant secretary in that position. There can’t even be an acting assistant secretary anymore because of various laws. The Trump administration has tried to cut the budget several times, but Congress always continued the budget [and] even gave OSHA a small increase. But so many people have left the agency, and it’s become less powerful — but it certainly hasn’t been decimated the same way the EPA has.

So many good people have left and not been replaced. But OSHA is still filled with very dedicated career staff who are doing their best in a difficult situation to make sure American workers are protected.

David Michael’s new book, “The Triumph of Doubt: Dark Money and the Science of Deception,” is out from Oxford University Press on February 3, 2020.

new UC

EPA Science Advisers Push Back on Wheeler, Saying He's Minimizing Their Role

BY: MARIANNE LAVELLE

Under Trump, the EPA administrator — a former coal lobbyist — is also pushing a plan to reduce the use of science in policy making. Read More

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/05062019/epa-wheeler-science-advisory-board-meeting-limiting-scientific-studies-trump-methane-rule

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler vowed on Wednesday to make greater use of the agency's official board of science advisers. But soon after he spoke, some of those advisers and other outside experts protested that the agency was instead limiting their role.

Wheeler took the unusual step of addressing the first meeting in a year of the Science Advisory Board (SAB), a group of advisers established by law who should be holding six to eight meetings annually, according to its charter. The reason he was there, Wheeler said, was to show his commitment to a better process.

"I'm glad to be here to lay out a new direction for how EPA interacts with and uses the SAB," he said. "I will be the first to admit we have not utilized you the way that we should. We can and we will do better."

The Science Advisory Board has become a center of controversy as President Donald Trump's administration has sought to remake the federal agencies. Researchers who receive EPA grant money have been barred from serving on the board, while several industry consultants and contrarian scientists have been brought aboard. Although some holdovers remain from previous administrations, Trump-era appointees now make up a large portion of the 44-member body. Some of them are known for their outlying views beyond the prevailing scientific consensus, or for representing the interests of regulated businesses.

Noting the lengthy vetting process for appointees, Wheeler said, "Why should we have talented public servants go through all of that only to use you sparingly? Today we are beginning the transition to a new process. It's no secret that the process was broken, and was not beneficial to the EPA, the board, or the public we all serve."

But some members of the board parried with Wheeler and other EPA officials at the meeting over exactly what part of the process is broken—the advisory process, or how the Trump administration is proceeding with a deregulatory agenda that gives less weight to some of the science that has guided the agency for years.

One SAB member who is a holdover from before Trump, Steven Hamburg, chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund, asked Wheeler why the Science Advisory Board had not had an opportunity to weigh in on some of the latest science in the agency's repeal of the Obama administration's regulations on control of methane emissions from oil and gas operations. The SAB raised concerns over that proposal when it met a year ago, and it had an opportunity to confer with another group of outside EPA experts, the Clean Air Science Advisory Committee, but Hamburg said their focus was more on technology than science. EDF, an environmental group, has been involved in a number of large scientific studies on the extent of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, released by the oil and gas industry.

Wheeler said that in the future, he hoped to involve the Science Advisory Board earlier in the process—soon after proposals are made public, but he couldn't change what happened in the past.

"The one you cite—I'm sorry, it's too late in the regulatory process," Wheeler said. "I can't go back and reopen some of the regulations we've already done." The agency finished taking public comment on its methane proposallast December, but has not yet finalized a rule.

One public commenter, John Bachmann, a 33-year veteran of the EPA who is now retired, said that under the 1978 law that governs the EPA's use of its science advisory board, the agency is actually required to provide its regulatory proposals and the underlying science to the Science Advisory Board before a proposal is made public. Bachmann now works with the Environmental Protection Network, a group of former agency scientists and other staffers who have been critical of the EPA's moves under the Trump administration.

Wheeler's Controversial 'Secret Science' Plan

But much of the debate at the first day of a two-day meeting centered on a controversial policy proposal that Wheeler said he was committed to finalizing this year even though it had provoked an outcry that left him "a little shocked."

The proposal, called "Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science," would limit the kinds of science the agency can use in its decision-making. The agency received some 600,000 comments on the proposal, including from leading scientific journals, professional organizations and universities. Because many human health studies rely on information gathered under confidentiality agreements, and the raw data has not been made public, the proposal could prevent the agencyfrom using some of the seminal studies underpinning air pollution regulations, for example.

Barbara Morrissey, of Washington State's Department of Health, sitting on the board on an ex officio basis as chair of another advisory group, the Children's Health Protection Advisory Committee, told Wheeler she was concerned about how EPA could meet its legal requirement of using the best available science, if that science can't be replicated in the manner the EPA envisions.

Wheeler said there would be "a safeguard" in the system, giving the EPA Administrator the discretion to include an important study even if it can't be replicated. "I do fundamentally believe that the more information we put out, the more sound our decisions will be and the more easily understood and accepted by the public," Wheeler said.

But one public commenter, Veena Singla, associate director of the reproductive and environmental health program at the University of California, San Francisco, said her concerns about the proposal were not assuaged.

"Having a political appointee deciding what science is in or out of policymaking is not a safeguard, but rather a fundamentally biased process," Singla said.

Before the meeting, the EPA had given the Science Advisory Board a charge to weigh in on two narrow aspects of that rule—how the agency should deal with confidential business information, and how to shield personally identifiable information in the large health studies that in the past have been the basis for much of the agency's decision-making.

SAB 'Should Be Giving an Independent Look'

Allison Cullen, associate dean of the school of public policy and governance at the University of Washington, was one of several board members who objected to the fact that the scope of comments that the EPA sought from the SAB was being limited—in contrast, she said, the public had been asked to comment on the proposed regulation broadly.

"The SAB is an independent body that should be giving an independent look at this, not necessarily responding to what the public comments are," Cullen said.

Hamburg said that the time frame that the SAB had been given to weigh in on the measure was also too compressed for the board to weigh in effectively. "There's a lack of transparency about this 'transparency' proposal," said Hamburg. "It's inconsistent with what the administrator says about wanting to fix a broken system."

New Appointees Side with Wheeler

But several of the board members who were appointed by Wheeler and by his predecessor, former EPA administrator Scott Pruitt, praised the agency for its effort.

New SAB member Robert Phalen, an air pollution researcher at the Irvine campus of the University of California, has long been critical of the air pollution studies that the EPA has relied on, which use raw data not available to the public. "A short cut—if a study cannot be replicated for privacy concerns, probably the alternative is to simply drop that from consideration and rely on the vast amount of other studies. That's just a raw suggestion from an SAB member."

Stanley Young, a statistician who did work for the pharmaceutical industry and others before being appointed to the SAB by Pruitt, said that there should be no privacy concerns in epidemiology studies that track mortality. "Once a person is dead, they are not considered a person," he said. He said he hoped that the agency was prepared for "epidemiological foot dragging and stonewalling" about release of its data.

The SAB will be holding a teleconference with the EPA later this summer to further discuss the transparency rule.

PUBLISHED UNDER:

new

cf behind the bastards

motley fool

mark fusaro

hilary miller

jenifer priestly

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-payday-loans-research-cfpb-20190225-story.html

2/19

Shortly after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau began preparing what would become the first significant federal regulations for the multibillion-dollar payday-lending industry, Hilary Miller went to work.

Miller, an attorney who has worked closely with the industry for more than a decade, contacted a Georgia professor with a proposal: Would she like to test one of the chief criticisms of the industry, that its customers are harmed by repeatedly taking out loans?

Over the next year, Miller worked closely with Jennifer Lewis Priestley, a professor of statistics and data science at Kennesaw State University, suggesting research to cite, the type of data to use and even lecturing her on proofreading. “Punctuation and capitalization are somewhat random,” he said in a February 2014 email responding to a draft of the report. “You might want to have your maiden aunt who went to high school before 1960 read this.”

Priestley’s report ultimately sided with the industry, and according to the emails, Miller discussed the results with a CFPB economist. The report was also hand-delivered to a top bureau official in 2015. It’s unclear how it factored into bureau decisions — including a recent one to ease industry regulations — but it has been repeatedly touted by payday lending supporters.

Its origins shed new light on the extensive battle that payday lenders have waged to influence and undermine federal regulations. But there was probably little doubt about the report’s outcome.

In a December 2013 exchange, Miller told Priestley that he wanted to persuade her to change the way she analyzed data about borrowers’ credit scores. “I am here to serve,” Priestley responded. “I just want to make sure that what I am doing analytically is reflecting your thinking.” Her email ended with a smiley face.

On the front page of the report, Priestley states that Miller’s nonprofit organization, which provided an $30,000 grant, did not exercise any control “over the editorial content of this paper.” However, in an interview, Priestley said that she offered to share authorship of the report with Miller but that he declined.

“Not only is the payday-lending industry choosing professors to write studies on their behalf; in this case they are writing the studies themselves,” said Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability. “I have never seen anything like this.”

The Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit group obtained the emails after a three-year legal fight that reached the Georgia Supreme Court in 2018.

Miller declined to comment for this report.

The exchanges are among hundreds of pages of emails — reviewed by the Washington Post and being publicly disclosed for the first time — that illustrate the industry’s extensive efforts to influence federal rule making. In addition to commissioning studies, payday lenders extensively lobbied lawmakers, sought the support of black clergy members and even changed the location of an annual conference. The Community Financial Services Assn. of America held its 2018 meeting at the Trump National Doral Golf Club near Miami and plans to meet there again this year.

“The venue is popular with our members and it meets our needs,” the financial services group’s chief executive, Dennis Shaul, said in a statement. The group includes some of the industry’s biggest players, such as Advance America and MoneyTree.

Those efforts culminated in a significant recent win for the industry: This month, the CFPB backed down from new sweeping regulations, potentially saving short-term lenders $10 billion through 2020. On paydayloanindustryblog.com, a website run by an industry consultant, the news was welcomed with a GIF of President Trump’s head on the body of a dancing person and the phrase “It’s party time, baby!”

The CFPB says it was not influenced by the industry’s lobbying on the issue. The bureau re-examined all existing evidence, including research supportive and critical of payday lending, and determined the data collectively didn’t support the existing rule, said Marisol Garibay, a CFPB spokeswoman. The bureau did not discuss its proposal to rescind the rule with industry officials before making the announcement, Garibay said.

The bureau’s proposed reversal threatens broad Obama-era regulations, including a requirement that lenders verify borrowers’ incomes and make sure they can afford to repay the loans on time — demands the industry considers potentially disastrous. Headed by Trump appointee Kathy Kraninger, the CFPB now says it wants to drop those requirements, arguing that there wasn’t enough legal basis to justify such tough underwriting standards.

As part of its justification for the change, among other items, the CFPB also cited “two industry-sponsored surveys.” The surveys had limitations, the CFPB said, but showed that consumers understood how long it would take to repay their loans, a concern of many of the industry’s critics.

Democrats and consumer groups have lashed out at the CFPB decision, arguing that payday lenders are being let off the hook after decades of trapping millions of low-income Americans in cycles of debt.

The average payday loan is about $350 and comes with an interest rate above 300%.

Unable to pay off their loans, borrowers take out another loan and then another to keep up with the payments, consumer advocates say. A 2014 CFPB study found that the majority of borrowers renew their loans so many times that they end up paying more in fees than the amount they initially borrowed.

The industry “launched an enormous campaign against making payday-lending rules,” said Richard Cordray, the bureau’s former director, who led the development of the initial regulations. “They pulled out all the stops.”

The bureau did extensive research on the issue, he said, but the industry was “not forthcoming with data,” complicating the process.

Payday lenders say they provide a crucial service to customers ignored by traditional banks. Without these short-term loans, borrowers would go to loan sharks or take other risky or dangerous steps to cover emergency expenses, industry officials argue. Some federal standards are warranted, but the CFPB’s original rules would have put most payday lenders out of business, they say.

The study commissioned by Miller represented a little-known front in the payday lenders’ campaign.

Miller is a prominent industry figure and testified before the Senate in 2006 on behalf of the Community Financial Services Assn., the large industry group. He also served as president of the Payday Loan Bar Assn.

In a 2016 deposition, Miller said he established the Consumer Credit Research Foundation to fund industry research, but he declined to answer questions about where it gets its money. He fought the release of his email exchanges with Priestley because the nonprofit organization would suffer “irreparable injury,” according to his lawsuit.

In an interview, Priestley said she saw the project as an opportunity to have two graduate students do interesting work. Miller provided a “massive” amount of data about payday borrowers, she said. “It allowed them to develop skills related to data cleansing.”

The $30,000 grant went toward covering those students’ expenses and the university’s overhead costs — not to her, she said.

In soliciting Priestley for the work, Miller said in an email that he wanted to produce two “academic quality, peer-reviewable” papers. But from the beginning, he sought to influence the study, sending Priestley dozens of edits and helping craft the report’s language.

Miller, for example, helped steer the research away from industry hot buttons. In a March 2014 email, he asked Priestley not to use the term “cycle of debt,” a phrase employed by consumer advocates to describe borrowers who repeatedly take out new loans to cover the old ones.

“In general, we do not accept the notion that a ‘cycle of debt’ even exists, and I would appreciate it if you would delete all references to this term, unless you are rebutting its existence,” Miller told her in an email.

Priestley did use the term in her report, but only to describe the views of opponents of payday lenders. She also included a footnote saying that the term was selectively applied to short-term loans and not other forms of debt such as credit cards or mortgages. That is an argument often made by payday lenders.

Miller also offered Priestley guidance in anticipating potential critiques of the research. Opponents of payday lenders argue that loan defaults are harmful to borrowers, Miller said in a February 2014 email. “At least one possible counterfactual is that defaults are actually welfare-enhancing because the borrower gets to keep the loan principal and collection efforts are largely ineffective,” the email said.

When her research appeared to veer off topic, Miller redirected her: “As a reminder, we are not interested in predicting defaults [on loans], or in who defaults,” he said in a June 2014 email. “Rather, we are investigating whether the fact of having defaulted makes a difference in a consumer’s welfare after the default. We are making this because the CFPB has asserted that defaults are harmful to consumers.”

Priestley also repeatedly sought Miller’s input and approval, according to the emails. Referring to data on whether the length of a loan can predict whether a borrower would default, Priestley said in a January 2014 email: “If you think that this is a relevant finding, I can include this information in the results section.”

In an interview, Priestley said she relied on Miller’s industry expertise. She had spent more than a decade at various financial companies, including Visa and MasterCard, before becoming an academic but did not have a background in payday lending, Priestley said. While working on the paper with Miller, she was also researching homelessness and how to help doctors better use robots for hysterectomies, she said.

“If you had asked me what a payday loan was, I am not sure I could have explained it, but I do know a lot about math,” Priestley said.

Because she lacked a background in the subject, she said, Miller became an important sounding board. “There were outcomes and analytical results that I didn’t understand,” she said. In those cases, she sought Miller’s help in interpreting the data.

Although she started the research agnostic on the issue, Priestley said, by the end she had formed an opinion. “There is a role for payday loans because you have got people who literally can’t put their hands on $10,” she said.

As the publication of the study neared, Miller congratulated Priestley on her work. Priestley’s study found that payday-loan customers who repeatedly borrow money over a long period “have better financial outcomes” than those who borrow for a shorter time. These borrowers also benefited from living in states where payday lending wasn’t heavily restricted, the report found.

“This is a terrific paper,” he said in an April 2014 email. “When it is done, you are going to be famous and your phone will ring off the hook.” The group was developing a strategy for releasing the report, he said. “We want them to believe that the results are honest, verifiable and, most importantly, correct.”

Priestley said she offered to list Miller as an author on the report and did not find it unusual when he declined. Because Miller is an attorney, not an academic, the credit probably would not have meant much to him, she said. “I didn’t think anything of it,” she said.

The study, hand-delivered to a top CFPB official, according to Miller’s emails, was quoted by several industry supporters in opinion articles critical of the bureau’s rules. In a 2015 opinion piece for the Detroit News titled “Rules threaten payday loans for low-income borrowers,” Jeffrey Joseph, a George Washington University professor, cited the report. In a 2016 reportfor the Competitive Enterprise Institute titled “Ending Payday Lending Would Harm Consumers,” Miller repeatedly referred to Priestley’s report without noting his connection to it.

As they wrapped up the project, Miller offered Priestley a little more advice. The findings would subject her to intense scrutiny from industry opponents, he said in a 2014 email exchange.

“Should I hire a bodyguard?” she responded.

“I think steps less than a bodyguard (such as, for example, a guard dog or barbed wire at your residence) may suffice,” Miller said.

after Kathy Kraninger, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has focused on rolling back regulations on payday lenders and changing rules to allow debt collectors to send an unlimited number of texts and emails to consumers. (Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg)

By Renae Merle

May 7

Christopher Fultz peered at his phone during a break at his job as a paramedic and saw an unusual text displaying his name in all caps.

Click on the link, said the message, which was from a number he didn’t recognize.

Fultz, 36, initially ignored the text but eventually followed the link leading to a website asking for his Social Security number. Fultz said he then realized a debt collector who repeatedly called and left what Fultz considered threatening voice mails had found a new way into his life.

“I was appalled. They can’t send text messages if it’s a debt collector,” said Fultz, of Ohio. “It was just shocking that they would do that. It felt like a scam.” Fultz filed suit and the debt collection company paid him $3,500 as part of a settlement.

For decades, debt collectors have relied on a limited set of communication tools: landlines and the U.S. mail. Now they are finding increasingly personal ways to reach the millions of Americans regulators say have been contacted by debt collectors. Some debt collectors worry that these contacts fall into a legal gray area because the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was written 40 years ago and doesn’t directly address digital communications.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Tuesday proposed rulesthat would give the industry the go-ahead to send consumers unlimited amounts of texts and emails, accelerating a trend the watchdog bureau says could be beneficial for everyone.

[How Trump appointees curbed a consumer protection agency loathed by the GOP]

The proposal is a victory for debt collectors such as San Francisco-based TrueAccord. Instead of making a barrage of phone calls, TrueAccord sends out millions of emails and texts every month. Next, it hopes to contact delinquent consumers through chat programs such as WhatsApp.

“When you have a good online digital presence, you don’t need to make those calls,” said Ohad Samet, the company’s co-founder and chief executive. “The only question here is why hasn’t everyone else moved to digital-first models yet.”

But this digital-first approach has alarmed consumer advocates who worry that the CFPB could give an industry known for high pressure tactics a new way to violate consumers’ privacy. While many Americans understand how to deal with a pesky creditor calling their landline, their texts, emails and social media are new and more personal territory.

“People are able to ignore phone calls, and that is the thing debt collectors don’t like,” said David Phillips, an Illinois attorney who has filed dozens of lawsuits against debt collectors. “It’s as if a debt collector is able to show up at your house and pound on the door. That is the effect of a text message.”

In addition to addressing the use of email and text communications, the bureau also proposed limiting the number times a debt collector could call someone to seven times in a week. After reaching the consumer, the debt collector wouldn’t be allowed to call again for a week. It would also update the disclosures the companies must provide in written communications.

[Democrats assail Trump administration rollbacks at consumer watchdog]

Consumers can still tell debt collectors to stop contacting them in any way, under the law.

The debt collection industry said it appreciates the CFPB proposal, but called the cap on the number of phone calls they can make “arbitrary.” It would “unnecessarily impede communications with consumers,” said a statement from Leah Dempsey, senior counsel for ACA International, a large industry lobbying group.

Consumer groups that had called for the CFPB to limit the industry to three calls a week were unhappy with the proposed rules.

The cap applies to individual debts owed by the consumer, said Linda Jun, senior policy counsel at Americans for Financial Reform. Someone with more than one bill in collections could quickly be inundated, Jun said. “It could add up quickly,” she said.

If the debt collectors emailed or texted too often it would be considered harassment and be illegal, according to the CFPB. But unlike with phone calls, the bureau is not proposing a specific cap on the number of contacts.

The proposal also asks debt collectors whether they anticipate using social media to contact consumers while prohibiting such contact if it could be viewed by a third party. Some debt collectors have already found ways to use social media.

Diandra Rivera of Brooklyn said she stopped posting to Facebook and closed her LinkedIn account after realizing debt collectors had started monitoring the sites. One combed through her LinkedIn page to find a former boss and even family members, who the debt collector then contacted, she said.

Another monitored her Facebook page. During phone calls with the debt collection agency, the representative would mention social outings she had posted on Facebook, Rivera said. The agent questioned why she was behind in repaying her student loan payments if she could afford to go to Applebee’s, Rivera said.

“It was really creepy,” she said.

[How a payday lending industry insider tilted academic research in its favor]

The proposed rules are likely to set up a battle between debt collectors and consumer advocates. The CFPB received about 81,500 complaintsabout debt collectors in 2018, according to a report released in March, making the industry one of the agency’s most common sources of consumer complaints.

Giving debt collectors such wide latitude to expand digital communication is unwarranted, said Christine Hines, legislative director for the National Association of Consumer Advocates.

“With the extreme examples of debt collectors’ harassment and invasion of consumers’ privacy that we’ve seen, it’s always a bad idea to exempt debt collectors from liability or grant them a safe harbor, in any circumstance,” she said. “Seems like an invitation to encourage more abuse not deter it.”

But some industry officials say the move into the digital space could be transformative. Debt collectors are already combing through social media to track consumers’ digital footprints and building models to determine whether they would be more likely to respond to male or female voices.

TrueAccord, launched in 2014, has been attempting to put a friendly face on the debt collection industry and rarely calls consumers, Samet said. The company he co-founded “crunches a lot of data” to build a profile of consumers, based on what kind of products they have purchased and on their previous responses to attempted contacts, he said. Ninety percent of the company’s communication with consumers does not involve a human, he said.

“There is machine learning at play here,” he said.

Samet said he believes consumers appreciate TrueAccord’s approach. Text messages and emails are a “channel you engage with more frequently but if you don’t like my email it’s a swipe of the finger to make me go away. You can set up filters. You can do a lot of things to manage your communications,” he said.

The CFPB has received more than 50 complaints about TrueAccord since 2015, according to the bureau’s database, which doesn’t identify complainants.

“This lady keeps emailing me constantly. She has even went so far as to tell me that she knows I am opening the emails. She is harassing me at this point,” according to acomplaint filed with the CFPBearlier this year. “This is not okay. Please help me.”

In 2017, a consumer told the CFPB that TrueAccord had been too aggressive. “This email was written in such a matter [as] to convince me that they will threaten me both physically and try to ruin my reputation. They stated they would use any means available to collect the money they say is owed,” according to the complaint.

Samet said the complaints are typical of the kind received by other service companies such as Comcast and a “fraction” of what competitors receive. “We never want people to complain,” he said.

To be sure, digital communications from creditors can sometimes be helpful to consumers. Emails and text messages create a footprint that can be used to track down debt collectors hiding behind post-office boxes and shell companies, said Ohio attorney Jonathan L. Hilton, who practices consumer law. In some cases, Hilton said he has subpoenaed Google or cellphone companies to find the names, addresses and even bank account information of debt collectors. “It’s very useful from the investigative side,” he said.

[Senate approves Trump nominee to lead polarizing consumer watchdog agency]

Vicki Chester, a retired nurse’s assistant, said she was being inundated with phone calls from a debt collector about an old $350 debt for months before she relented and made two $60 payments. “The calls were nasty,” said Chester, a client of Hilton’s. “I was tossing and turning every night wondering if I am going to be picked up.”

Finally, she asked the debt collector to send her an email with details about the debt. That is when Chester said she realized she was being hounded about money she didn’t owe. “I realized, this isn’t my debt,” said Chester, who received a $6,000 settlement against the debt collection agency. “They had the wrong Vicki.”

The 1977 Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was written before cellphones became the constant companion of millions of Americans. The law prohibits debt collectors from calling before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. and prohibits harassment. But it did not directly address most forms of digital communication.

The CFPB proposal would change that, which would be a relief for Elle Gusman.

Minnesota-based Direct Recovery Services has experimented with both text messages and emails, said Gusman, who founded the company in 2012. Emails were effective initially but then began getting flagged as spam by Google, especially when sent out in large batches, she said. The company even created a new domain name, but words included in the emails or their attachments -- such as debt, password, account, pay online -- would get flagged, she said.

“It won’t go through,” said Gusman.

Consumers also appeared to like receiving text messages about their delinquent bills, said Gusman. “Millennials just want to go online and pay” their bills, she said. “It would be crazy, within an hour of just sending our messages, we would get 20, 30 payments online.”

Sending the messages was expensive and it was difficult to include all of the required disclosures in a few characters, said Gusman.

One of the people Direct Recovery Services texted was Fultz, the Ohio paramedic, who said he found the messages intrusive.

The company has stopped the practice but Gusman said she is hoping the CFPB proposal will allow the company to try again.

ref

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/02/25/how-payday-lending-industry-insider-tilted-academic-research-its-favor/

How a payday lending industry insider tilted academic research in its favor

A customer leaves a payday loan store in Gaithersburg, Md. The payday-lending industry has lobbied against rules that would require lenders to make sure borrowers can afford the loans they are seeking. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

By Renae Merle February 25

Miller, an attorney who has worked closely with the industry for more than a decade, contacted a Georgia professor with a proposal: Would...

new

https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-secret-science-20190219-story.html

Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced

By SUSANNE RUST

FEB 19, 2019 | 5:00 AM

Scientist says some pollution is good for you — a disputed claim Trump’s EPA has embraced

Water samples are taken for testing from a canal in the Cawelo Water District near Bakersfield in 2015. A researcher who has suggested that exposure to toxic chemicals can be good for humans is helping to shape Environmental Protection Agency policies. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)]

In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people.

“I wanted to check to see if you might have some time in the next couple of days for a quick call to discuss a couple items …,” Woods wrote to Ed Calabrese.

Less than two weeks later, Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.

“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science.

“Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.

It was a glorious moment for Calabrese, who had been snubbed for decades by mainstream public health scientists because of his controversial research and theories.

Massachusetts toxicologist Ed Calabrese

Massachusetts toxicologist Ed Calabrese (University of Massachusetts)]

It also signified the major shift the EPA has taken under the Trump administration. More than any before it, this White House has actively sought out advice from industry lobbyists and the scientists they commission in setting pollution rules.

Denouncing the Obama-era EPA as an agency beholden to environmental extremists, the administration has not only dismissed mainstream science but embraced widely discredited alternatives that critics say are not consistent with the agency’s focus on improving public and environmental health.

Calabrese’s role illustrates a different side of this shift: the potential removal of longstanding public health practices and the incorporation of industry-backed and disputed science into federal environmental policy.

Calabrese spent decades advancing his ideas, facing skepticism and criticism from peers in the toxicology community while winning funding from companies whose bottom lines conformed with his views.

He says most of the pushback he receives comes from left-of-center toxicologists who see him as “the devil incarnate” for accepting industry funding and challenging their ideology. He maintains his science is solid and will be vindicated in time.

“These environmental regulatory people are very closed-minded,” he said. They won’t reconsider their standards, [note trumpian pop psych] and see that some of the agents they call harmful “actually can induce adaptive responses,” Calabrese said.

This view — that pollution and radiation can be beneficial — has many experts worried. The fact that such a position may become EPA policy, they say, portends a future in which corporate desires outweigh public and environmental health.

“Industry has been pushing for this for a long time,” said David Michaels, former assistant secretary of labor for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration who’s a professor of environmental and occupational health at George Washington University. “Not just the chemical industry, but the radiation and tobacco industries too.”

If the EPA ultimately adopts Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste. It could also fundamentally alter the way the government assesses new chemicals and pesticides entering the marketplace.

“This is industry’s holy grail,” said Michaels.

If the EPA ultimately adopts Ed Calabrese’s proposed new regulations, researchers say it could change decades of standards and guidelines on clean air, water and toxic waste, such as those that apply to PBF Energy's Torrance Refining Co.

Can pollution be healthy?

For decades, federal agencies charged with investigating and regulating carcinogens, toxic chemicals and radiation have been guided by the assumption that if a substance is dangerous at some level, it is harmful at any level. The higher the exposure, the more harm done. The lower the dose, the less. And the risk doesn’t entirely disappear until the substance is removed.

This is known as the linear no-threshold model, and industry dislikes it because it generally assumes that there is no level, or threshold, of exposure that can be considered totally safe.

But research done on low exposures to toxins has been less than definitive. Experiments designed to test carcinogens and radiation at low levels often produce conflicting results — with, for example, some studies of a chemical showing harm, other studies showing no effect, and a few suggesting a net benefit. In other cases, there is no information at all to guide regulators.

In the face of such uncertainty, the EPA and other agencies have taken a cautious approach by relying on the linear no-threshold model. Where data are absent or uncertain, they assume some level of risk.

It is an imperfect but protective approach, say many public health specialists. They argue that in a human population that varies widely in age, health and levels of chemical exposures, it is imperative that the agency cast a wide, conservative and protective net.

For decades, national and international scientific bodies have upheld this approach. It has been reviewed and re-reviewed dozens of times, including most recently by the congressionally chartered National Council on Radiation Protection and Measurements, the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and the EPA.

At the same time, industry has funded scientists to conduct and promote research designed to poke holes in the linear no-threshold model.

And that is where Calabrese comes in. He has long argued that regulators “erred on the side of being protective” at the cost of billions of dollars per year to industry.

Calabrese is a proselytizer of hormesis, the idea that dangerous chemicals and radiation are beneficial at low doses. He says they have a stimulating effect.

Polluting industries have promoted hormesis as an alternative to linear no-threshold for decades, but they had gotten little traction until the EPA embraced it last April.

“It’s clearly not mainstream,” said Thomas Burke, professor and director of the Risk Sciences Institute at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Burke and other experts say there are clearly scenarios where toxic chemicals can have beneficial effects in clinical and pharmacological settings, such as in the case of tamoxifen, which at low doses is effective at preventing and treating breast cancer but at higher doses can lead to blood clots, stroke and uterine cancer.

But, they say, what happens in a clinical setting can’t and shouldn’t be immediately applied to a regulatory, public health setting.

In the clinical case, “you have a doctor controlling and administering the medication to an individual,” said David Jacobs, a professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, who has published studies showing hormetic effects in some industrial pollutants. “The doctor can pull the medication at any time.”

“There is no way to control the dose a person gets from an industrial or agricultural chemical,” he said. “It’s not being doled out in pills and monitored by a physician who can lower it if the patient isn’t responding well.”

Therefore, Jacobs said, it would be dangerous to use hormesis as a framework for protecting public and environmental health.

“It really doesn’t pass the sniff test” when applying it to public health, Burke said, while allowing for its place in the forum of ideas. “I always teach my classes that there are other theories. It’s like any part of science, there are different points of view. Whether it’s about climate change or low doses.”

But he also teaches that one needs to know who has skin in the game. And in the case of hormesis, he said, that’s industry.

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C. (Associated Press)]

Big Tobacco embraces disputed research

In the early 1980s, Calabrese was a tenured professor at the University of Massachusetts, stringing together public agency and industry-funded grants to study chemicals in drinking water and the effects of ozone on mice.

His funders included the EPA, the state of Massachusetts, the Hoffman-LaRoche pharmaceutical company and semiconductor giant Digital Corp.

Then in 1985, he reached out to the Council for Tobacco Research, the research arm of the tobacco industry, seeking a grant to examine “a possible inherited and metabolic susceptibility to lung cancer in smokers.” His proposal was declined.

Sheldon Sommers, a physician at New York’s Lenox Hill Hospital and scientific director of the council, wrote in response to the grant application that Calabrese’s proposal “...is a mad hatter’s tea party sort of epidemiologic approach, and a total $2.1 million plus would likely be frittered away in my opinion,” according to documents from the UC San Francisco Truth Tobacco Industry Documents archive.

But by the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.

In a 1994 proposal to R.J. Reynolds, Calabrese offered to investigate a new kind of smokeless cigarette for the company, but also incorporate into his research “the loss of current benefits associated with smoking, such as protection from certain types of cancers and other illnesses…”

It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries.

With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE. Minutes from a 1990 advisory board meeting show the group chose not to use the word “hormesis” in its official name.

According to documents, Calabrese and his funders also held off on pushing a hormesis regulatory agenda until they’d built a sizable base of published scientific research.

Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.

Spokesmen from Exxon Mobil and the Air Force say they no longer fund Calabrese’s work.

Calabrese established his own scientific society, the International Dose Response Society, and his own hormesis journal — now called Dose Response — where he served as editor-in-chief.

He wrote hundreds of articles, in his own journal and in others (including “Should hormesis be the default model in risk assessment?” and “The importance of hormesis to public health”), organized dozens of conferences and delivered scores of talks.

And while his publication portfolio is vast, it is also broad. It includes not just studies of hormesis, but research on soil ingestion, opinion pieces on law and regulatory policy, historical treatise on science, and a few scathing, posthumous rebukes of revered scientists, such as Herman Muller, a Nobel prize-winner and supporter of linear no-threshold.

Calabrese insists his funding does not influence his work.

“My job involves finding financial support to do studies in my field,” said Calabrese. “I seek support from the private and public sectors. The University independently evaluates each of these for compliance with the rules.”

Not all of his money comes from industry or government agencies with extensive toxic waste sites. Between 2000 and 2013, Calabrese received $50,000 from the EPA to hold a conference on soil ingestion, and $50,000 from CalEPA for a reference database he built on cancer publications. He also received a $750,000 joint grant from the EPA and the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s trade group, to study soil ingestion by construction workers.

Yet, despite his prolific career, he has instigated criticism and rebuke from many of his peers for his push on public and environmental health policy. He has been described as a “prominent industry consultant,” having “outlying views,” whose science is “way out there.”

For years he failed to get regulatory agencies to take him seriously.

Then Donald Trump was elected president.

President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt

President Trump and former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt (Associated Press)]

‘We are winning’

On Sept. 5, 2017, nearly nine months after Trump was sworn in as president and seven months after Scott Pruitt was confirmed as head of the EPA, Calabrese wrote an email to Milloy, the former coal lobbyist who is a Fox news commentator. The Los Angeles Times obtained the emails through a public records request to the University of Massachusetts.

“I wanted to connect with you on whether and how it may be possible to get the EPA to consider changing the LNT [linear no-threshold model] to something far better,” Calabrese wrote.

Milloy had served on Trump’s EPA transition team and was still in touch with high-ranking officials in Pruitt’s agency.

A few months later, Calabrese wrote to Milloy again, letting him know that he’d corresponded with Ryan Jackson, Pruitt’s chief of staff, and sensed interest in a move against linear no-threshold.

Not long after Woods, the EPA’s deputy assistant of the Office of Air and Radiation, emailed Calabrese asking if he wanted to talk about “default linear assumptions” and other items.

The two arranged a call, and on April 19, 2018, Woods sent Calabrese draft language for a small section in the EPA’s proposed new ruling on transparency, called “Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science.”

“It is good what you have but you need a little more,” wrote Calabrese, who then suggested a line, which he altered twice, in email exchanges with Woods, before settling on this: “EPA shall also incorporate the concept of model uncertainty when needed as a default to optimize low dose risk estimation based on the major competing models (LNT, Threshold, and Hormesis).”

In other words, if the EPA is uncertain about a particular chemical’s impacts at low doses, it would abandon linear no-threshold as a default, and try other models instead, including hormesis.

On April 25, Milloy sent Calabrese the final wording for the draft proposal, which included Calabrese’s line nearly word for word.

“I am almost passing out with surprise and euphoria… ” Calabrese wrote Milloy after seeing the document.

The rule was posted for comment in the Federal Register on April 30, although a final ruling has not been announced.

John Konkus, an EPA spokesman, said the input and perspective from “the Editor-in-Chief of the journal, Dose Response” was welcomed, and reflected the perspective of “a wide variety of scientific experts” the agency reached out to when drafting the proposal.

Public health specialists outside the agency say that if the final language is adopted, it is likely to tie the EPA up in knots as it tries and then debates all the alternative models. It could also have profound effects on current and future standards for drinking water, air and toxic waste sites.

“EPA tries to be conservative in its setting of risks,” said Jan Beyea, a retired radiation physicist who has worked with the National Academies of Science. “Calabrese and collaborators think that most pollutants are good for you at low doses, so no need to be conservative.”

EPA spokeswoman Molly Block declined to speculate on whether the rule would be passed and how it would affect environmental rules that were set based on the linear no-threshold model.

Industry groups have praised the proposed change.

“We support moving away from over-reliance on the linear no -threshold default,” wrote a spokesman for the American Chemistry Council, the trade group for the chemical industry. It’s a method, he says that “frequently results in inflated health risk estimates and unwarranted, costly risk management decisions.”

Milloy also seemed pleased with the proposed ruling.

“The EPA should be open and transparent about how and what they are basing their decisions on,” he said, “and they should be using the best science available.”

In any case, he said, “we’re winning.”

Susanne Rust

CONTACT

Susanne Rust is an investigative reporter specializing in environmental issues. Before coming to the Los Angeles Times, she was the editor of Columbia University’s Energy & Environmental Reporting Project, where she oversaw several reporting projects, including a series that examined ExxonMobil’s understanding of climate science in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. Rust started her career in 2003 as a science reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is the recipient of numerous journalism awards, and was a John S. Knight fellow at Stanford University in 2009, and the Center for Investigative Reporting’s environment reporter between 2010 and 2014.

The fall of a prominent food and marketing researcher may be a cautionary tale for scientists who are tempted to manipulate data and chase headlines.

Brian Wansink, the head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University, announced last week that he would retire from the university at the end of the academic year. Less than 48 hours earlier, JAMA, a journal published by the American Medical Association, had retracted six of Wansink's studies, after Cornell told the journal's editors that Wansink had not kept the original data and the university could not vouch for the validity of his studies.

In an internal review spurred by a wide range of allegations of research misconduct, a Cornell faculty committee reported a litany of faults with Wansink's work, including "misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship." Cornell apologized for Wansink's "academic misconduct," removed him from his teaching and research posts, and obligated him to spend the remainder of his time there "cooperating with the university in its ongoing review of his prior research."

It was a stunning fall from grace for Wansink, who had become famous for producing pithy, palatable studies that connected people's eating habits with cues from their environment. Among his many well-known findings: People eat more when they're served in large bowls, and when they're watching an action movie, and when they sit close to the buffet at an all-you-can-eat restaurant. His work was cited in national news outlets, including NPR, and he had a hand in developing the new U.S. dietary guidelines in 2010.

The Salt

Why A Journalist Scammed The Media Into Spreading Bad Chocolate Science

Wansink's perch at the top of his field began to wobble in early 2017. That's when Tim van der Zee, a doctoral student in educational psychology at Leiden University in the Netherlands, went public with the results of an investigation that began when he stumbled across a blog post Wansink had written on his personal website the year prior.

The post, since removed from Wansink's site but accessible today as a cached version, was aimed at aspiring academics. The most promising postdoctoral students, Wansink wrote, "unhesitatingly say 'Yes'" to research projects, "even if they are not exactly sure how they'll do it."

But van der Zee was more interested in Wansink's description of the work he was assigning to his postdocs. Those descriptions, van der Zee says, appeared to contain a "strange admission" of "highly questionable research practices."...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/09/26/651849441/cornell-food-researchers-downfall-raises-larger-questions-for-science

https://www.propublica.org/article/kris-kobach-voter-fraud-kansas-trial

In the end, the decision seemed inevitable. After a seven-day trial in Kansas City federal court in March, in which Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach needed to be tutored on basic trial procedure by the judge and was found in contempt for his “willful failure” to obey a ruling, even he knew his chances were slim. Kobach told The Kansas City Star at the time that he expected the judge would rule against him (though he expressed optimism in his chances on appeal).

Sure enough, yesterday federal Judge Julie Robinson overturned the law that Kobach was defending as lead counsel for the state, dealing him an unalloyed defeat. The statute, championed by Kobach and signed into law in 2013, required Kansans to present proof of citizenship in order to register to vote. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, contending that the law violated the National Voter Registration Act (AKA the “motor voter” law), which was designed to make it easy to register.

The trial had a significance that extends far beyond the Jayhawk state. One of the fundamental questions in the debate over alleged voter fraud — whether a substantial number of non-citizens are in fact registering to vote — was one of two issues to be determined in the Kansas proceedings. (The second was whether there was a less burdensome solution than what Kansas had adopted.) That made the trial a telling opportunity to remove the voter fraud claims from the charged, and largely proof-free, realms of political campaigns and cable news shoutfests and examine them under the exacting strictures of the rules of evidence.

That’s precisely what occurred and according to Robinson, an appointee of George W. Bush, the proof that voter fraud is widespread was utterly lacking. As the judge put it, “the court finds no credible evidence that a substantial number of noncitizens registered to vote” even under the previous law, which Kobach had claimed was weak.

Trump’s Voter Fraud Commission Is Gone, But Scrutiny Will Continue

The president dissolved the commission and indicated that the Department of Homeland Security will continue its mission. Experts say DHS won’t achieve the results he wants — and critics won’t back down.

A Short History of the Brief and Bumpy Life of the Voting Fraud Commission

It never made it to its third meeting, but the friction — and the lawsuits — live on.

For Kobach, the trial should’ve been a moment of glory. He’s been arguing for a decade that voter fraud is a national calamity. Much of his career has been built on this issue, along with his fervent opposition to illegal immigration. (His claim is that unlawful immigrants are precisely the ones voting illegally.) Kobach, who also co-chaired the Trump administration’s short-lived commission on voter fraud, is perhaps the individual most identified with the cause of sniffing out and eradicating phony voter registration. He’s got a gilded resume, with degrees from Harvard University, Yale Law School and the University of Oxford, and is seen as both the intellect behind the cause and its prime advocate. Kobach has written voter laws in other jurisdictions and defended them in court. If anybody ever had time to marshal facts and arguments before a trial, it was Kobach.

But things didn’t go well for him in the Kansas City courtroom, as Robinson’s opinion made clear. Kobach’s strongest evidence of non-citizen registration was anemic at best: Over a 20-year period, fewer than 40 non-citizens had attempted to register in one Kansas county that had 130,000 voters. Most of those 40 improper registrations were the result of mistakes or confusion rather than intentional attempts to mislead, and only five of the 40 managed to cast a vote.

One of Kobach’s own experts even rebutted arguments made by both Kobach and President Donald Trump. The expert testified that a handful of improper registrations could not be extrapolated to conclude that 2.8 million fraudulent votes — roughly, the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump in the popular vote tally — had been cast in the 2016 presidential election. Testimony from a second key expert for Kobach also fizzled.

As the judge’s opinion noted, Kobach insisted the meager instances of cheating revealed at trial are just “the tip of the iceberg.” As she explained, “This trial was his opportunity to produce credible evidence of that iceberg, but he failed to do so.” Dismissing the testimony by Kobach’s witnesses as unpersuasive, Robinson drew what she called “the more obvious conclusion that there is no iceberg; only an icicle largely created by confusion and administrative error.”

By the time the trial was over, Kobach, a charismatic 52-year-old whose broad shoulders and imposing height make him resemble an aging quarterback, seemed to have shrunk inside his chair at the defense table.

But despite his defeat, Kobach’s causes — restricting immigration and tightening voting requirements — seem to be enjoying favorable tides elsewhere. Recent press accounts noted Kobach’s role in restoring a question about citizenship, abandoned since 1950, to U.S. Census forms for 2020. And the Supreme Court ruled on June 11 that the state of Ohio can purge voters from its rolls when they fail to vote even a single time and don’t return a mailing verifying their address, a provision that means more voters will need to re-register and prove their eligibility again.

For his own part, Kobach is now a candidate for governor of Kansas, running neck and neck with the incumbent in polls for the Republican primary on Aug. 7.It’s not clear whether the verdict will affect his chances — or whether it will lead him and others to quietly retreat from claims of voter fraud. But the judge’s opinion and expert interviews reveal that Kobach effectively put the concept of mass voter fraud to the test — and the evidence crumbled.

Perhaps it was an omen. Before Kobach could enter the courtroom inside the Robert J. Dole U.S. Courthouse each day, he had to pass through a hallway whose walls featured a celebratory display entitled “Americans by Choice: The Story of Immigration and Citizenship in Kansas.” Photographs of people who’d been sworn in as citizens in that very courthouse were superimposed on the translucent window shades.

Public interest in the trial was high. The seating area quickly filled to capacity on the first day of trial on the frigid morning of March 6. The jury box was opened to spectators; it wouldn’t be needed, as this was a bench trial. Those who couldn’t squeeze in were sent to a lower floor, where a live feed had been prepared in a spillover room.

From the moment the trial opened, Kobach and his co-counsels in the Kansas secretary of state’s office, Sue Becker and Garrett Roe, stumbled over the most basic trial procedures. Their mistakes antagonized the judge. “Evidence 101,” Robinson snapped, only minutes into the day, after Kobach’s team attempted to improperly introduce evidence. “I’m not going to do it.”

Matters didn’t improve for Kobach from there.

Throughout the trial, his team’s repeated mishaps and botched cross examinations cost hours of the court’s time. Robinson was repeatedly forced to step into the role of law professor, guiding Kobach, Becker and Roe through courtroom procedure. “Do you know how to do the next step, if that’s what you’re going to do?” the judge asked Becker at one point, as she helped her through the steps of impeaching a witness. “We’re going to follow the rules of evidence here.”

Becker often seemed nervous. She took her bright red glasses off and on. At times she burst into nervous chuckles after a misstep. She laughed at witnesses, skirmished with the judge and even taunted the lawyers for the ACLU. “I can’t wait to ask my questions on Monday!” she shouted at the end of the first week, jabbing a finger in the direction of Dale Ho, the lead attorney for the plaintiffs. Ho rolled his eyes.

Roe was gentler — deferential, even. He often admitted he didn’t know what step came next, asking the judge for help. “I don’t — I don’t know if this one is objectionable. I hope it’s not,” he offered at one point, as he prepared to ask a question following a torrent of sustained objections. “I’ll let you know,” an attorney for the plaintiffs responded, to a wave of giggles in the courtroom. On the final day of trial, as Becker engaged in yet another dispute with the judge, Roe slapped a binder to his forehead and audibly whispered, “Stop talking. Stop talking.”

Kobach’s cross examinations were smoother and better organized, but he regularly attempted to introduce exhibits — for example, updated state statistics that he had failed to provide the ACLU in advance to vet — that Robinson ruled were inadmissible. As the trial wore on, she became increasingly irritated. She implored Kobach to “please read” the rules on which she based her rulings, saying his team had repeated these errors “ad nauseum.”

Kobach seemed unruffled. Instead of heeding her advice, he’d proffer the evidence for the record, a practice that allows the evidence to be preserved for appeal even if the trial judge refuses to admit it. Over the course of the trial, Kobach and his team would do this nearly a dozen times.

Eventually, Robinson got fed up. She asked Kobach to justify his use of proffers. Kobach, seemingly alarmed, grabbed a copy of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure — to which he had attached a growing number of Post-it notes — and quickly flipped through it, trying to find the relevant rule.

The judge tried to help. “It’s Rule 26, of course, that’s been the basis for my rulings,” she told Kobach. “I think it would be helpful if you would just articulate under what provision of Rule 26 you think this is permissible.” Kobach seemed to play for time, asking clarifying questions rather than articulating a rationale. Finally, the judge offered mercy: a 15-minute break. Kobach’s team rushed from the courtroom.

...

It wasn’t enough to save him. In her opinion, Robinson described “a pattern and practice by Defendant [Kobach] of flaunting disclosure and discovery rules.” As she put it, “it is not clear to the Court whether Defendant repeatedly failed to meet his disclosure obligations intentionally or due to his unfamiliarity with the federal rules.” She ordered Kobach to attend the equivalent of after-school tutoring: six hours of extra legal education on the rules of civil procedure or the rules of evidence (and to present the court with a certificate of completion).

It’s always a bad idea for a lawyer to try the patience of a judge — and that’s doubly true during a bench trial, when the judge will decide not only the law, but also the facts. Kobach repeatedly annoyed Robinson with his procedural mistakes. But that was nothing next to what the judge viewed as Kobach’s intentional bad faith.

This view emerged in writing right after the trial — that’s when Robinson issued her ruling finding Kobach in contempt — but before the verdict. And the conduct that inspired the contempt finding had persisted over several years. Robinson concluded that Kobach had intentionally failed to follow a ruling she issued in 2016 that ordered him to restore the privileges of 17,000 suspended Kansas voters.

In her contempt ruling, the judge cited Kobach’s “history of noncompliance” with the order and characterized his explanations for not abiding by it as “nonsensical” and “disingenuous.” She wrote that she was “troubled” by Kobach’s “failure to take responsibility for violating this Court’s orders, and for failing to ensure compliance over an issue that he explicitly represented to the Court had been accomplished.” Robinson ordered Kobach to pay the ACLU’s legal fees for the contempt proceeding.

That contempt ruling was actually the second time Kobach was singled out for punishment in the case. Before the trial, a federal magistrate judge deputized to oversee the discovery portion of the suit fined him $1,000 for making “patently misleading representations” about a voting fraud document Kobach had prepared for Trump. Kobachpaid the fine with a state credit card.

More than any procedural bumbling, the collapse of Kobach’s case traced back to the disintegration of a single witness.

The witness was Jesse Richman, a political scientist from Old Dominion University, who has written studies on voter fraud. For this trial, Richman was paid $5,000 by the taxpayers of Kansas to measure non-citizen registration in the state. Richman was the man who had to deliver the goods for Kobach.

With his gray-flecked beard and mustache, Richman looked the part of an academic, albeit one who seemed a bit too tall for his suit and who showed his discomfort in a series of awkward, sudden movements on the witness stand. At moments, Richman’s testimony turned combative, devolving into something resembling an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. By the time he left the stand, Richman had testified for more than five punishing hours. He’d bickered with the ACLU’s lawyer, raised his voice as he defended his studies and repeatedly sparred with the judge.

“Wait, wait, wait!” shouted Robinson at one point, silencing a verbal free-for-all that had erupted among Richman, the ACLU’s Ho, and Kobach, who were all speaking at the same time. “Especially you,” she said, turning her stare to Richman. “You are not here to be an advocate. You are not here to trash the plaintiff. And you are not here to argue with me.”

Richman had played a small but significant part in the 2016 presidential campaign. Trump and others had cited his work to claim that illegal votes had robbed Trump of the popular vote. At an October 2016 rally in Wisconsin, the candidate cited Richman’s work to bolster his predictions that the election would be rigged. “You don’t read about this, right?” Trump told the crowd, before reading from an op-ed Richman had written for The Washington Post: “‘We find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in various close elections.’ Okay? All right?”

Richman’s 2014 study of non-citizen registration used data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study — an online survey of more than 32,000 people. Of those, fewer than 40 individuals indicated they were non-citizens registered to vote. Based on that sample, Richman concluded that up to 2.8 million illegal votes had been cast in 2008 by non-citizens. In fact, he put the illegal votes at somewhere between 38,000 and 2.8 million — a preposterously large range — and then Trump and others simply used the highest figure.

Academics pilloried Richman’s conclusions. Two hundred political scientists signed an open letter criticizing the study, saying it should “not be cited or used in any debate over fraudulent voting.” Harvard’s Stephen Ansolabehere, who administered the CCES, published his own peer-reviewed paper lambasting Richman’s work. Indeed, by the time Trump read Richman’s article onstage in 2016, The Washington Post had already appended a note to the op-ed linking to three rebuttals and a peer-reviewed study debunking the research.

None of that discouraged Kobach or Trump from repeating Richman’s conclusions. They then went a few steps further. They took the top end of the range for the 2008 election, assumed that it applied to the 2016 election, too, and further assumed that all of the fraudulent ballots had been cast for Clinton.

Some of those statements found their way into the courtroom, when Ho pressed play on a video shot by The Kansas City Star on Nov. 30, 2016. Kobach had met with Trump 10 days earlier and had brought with him a paper decrying non-citizen registration and voter fraud. Two days later, Trump tweeted that he would have won the popular vote if not for “millions of people who voted illegally.”

...

no lnx

On the courtroom’s televisions, Kobach appeared, saying Trump’s tweet was “absolutely correct.” Without naming Richman, Kobach referred to his study: The number of non-citizens who said they’d voted in 2008 was far larger than the popular vote margin, Kobach said on the video. The same number likely voted again in 2016.

In the courtroom, Ho asked Richman if he believed his research supported such a claim. Richman stammered. He repeatedly looked at Kobach, seemingly searching for a way out. Ho persisted and finally, Richman gave his answer: “I do not believe my study provides strong support for that notion.”

To estimate the number of non-citizens voting in Kansas, Richman had used the same methodology he employed in his much-criticized 2014 study. Using samples as small as a single voter, he’d produced surveys with wildly different estimates of non-citizen registration in the state. The multiple iterations confused everyone in the courtroom.

“For the record, how many different data sources have you provided?” Robinson interjected in the middle of one Richman answer. “You provide a range of, like, zero to 18,000 or more.”

“I sense the frustration,” Richman responded, before offering a winding explanation of the multiple data sources and surveys he’d used to arrive at a half-dozen different estimates. Robinson cut him off. “Maybe we need to stop here,” she said.

“Your honor, let me finish answering your question,” he said.

“No, no. I’m done,” she responded, as he continued to protest. “No. Dr. Richman, I’m done.”

To refute Richman’s numbers, the ACLU called on Harvard’s Ansolabehere, whose data Richman had relied on in the past. Ansolabehere testified that Richman’s sample sizes were so small that it was just as possible that there were no non-citizens registered to vote in Kansas as 18,000. “There’s just a great deal of uncertainty with these estimates,” he said.

Ho asked if it would be accurate to say that Richman’s data “shows a rate of non-citizen registration in Kansas that is not statistically distinct from zero?”

“Correct.”

The judge was harsher than Ansolabehere in her description of Richman’s testimony. In her opinion, Robinson unloaded a fusillade of dismissive adjectives, calling Richman’s conclusions “confusing, inconsistent and methodologically flawed,” and adding that they were “credibly dismantled” by Ansolabehere. She labeled elements of Richman’s testimony “disingenuous” and “misleading,” and stated that she gave his research “no weight” in her decision.

One of the paradoxes of Kobach is that he has become a star in circles that focus on illegal immigration and voting fraud despite poor results in the courtroom. By ProPublica’s count, Kobach chalked up a 2–6 won-lost record in federal cases in which he was played a major role, and which reached a final disposition before the Kansas case.

Those results occurred when Kobach was an attorney for the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform from 2004 to 2011, when he became secretary of state in Kansas. In his FAIR role (in which he continued to moonlight till about 2014), Kobach traveled to places like Fremont, Nebraska, Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmers Branch, Texas, and Valley Park, Missouri, to help local governments write laws that attempted to hamper illegal immigration, and then defend them in court. Kobach won in Nebraska, but lost in Texas and Pennsylvania, and only a watered down version of the law remains in Missouri.

The best-known law that Kobach helped shape before joining the Kansas government in 2011 was Arizona’s “show me your papers” law. That statute allowed police to demand citizenship documents for any reason from anyone they thought might be in the country illegally. After it passed, the state paid Kobach $300 an hour to train law enforcement on how to legally arrest suspected illegal immigrants. The Supreme Court gutted key provisions of the law in 2012.

Kobach also struggled in two forays into political campaigning. In 2004, he lost a race for Congress. He also drew criticism for his stint as an informal adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. Kobach was the man responsible for Romney’s much-maligned proposal that illegal immigrants “self-deport,” one reason Romney attracted little support among Latinos. Romney disavowed Kobach even before the campaign was over, telling media outlets that he was a “supporter,” not an adviser.

Trump’s election meant Kobach’s positions on immigration would be welcome in the White House. Kobach lobbied for, but didn’t receive, an appointment as Secretary of Homeland Security. He was, however, placed in charge of the voter fraud commission, a pet project of Trump’s. Facing a raft of lawsuits and bad publicity, the commission was disbanded little more than six months after it formally launched.

Back at home, Kobach expanded his power as secretary of state. Boasting of his experience as a law professor and scholar, Kobach convinced the state legislature to give him the authority to prosecute election crimes himself, a power wielded by no other secretary of state. In that role, he has obtained nine guilty pleas against individuals for election-related misdemeanors. Only one of those who pleaded guilty, as it happens, was a non-citizen.

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback signs a bill granting prosecuting power to the secretary of state for cases of voter fraud in Topeka, Kansas, on June 8, 2015, as Kris Kobach, back center, looks on. (Chris Neal/The Topeka Capital-Journal via AP)

He also persuaded Kansas’ attorney general to allow Kobach to represent the state in the trial of Kansas’ voting law. Kobach argued it was a bargain. As he told The Wichita Eagle at the time, “The advantage is the state gets an experienced appellate litigator who is a specialist in this field and in constitutional law for the cost the state is already paying, which is my salary.”

Kobach fared no better in the second main area of the Kansas City trial than he had in the first. This part explored whether there is a less burdensome way of identifying non-citizens than forcing everyone to show proof of citizenship upon registration. Judge Robinson would conclude that there were many alternatives that were less intrusive.

In his opening, Ho of the ACLU spotlighted a potentially less intrusive approach. Why not use the Department of Homeland Security’s Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements System list, and compare the names on it to the Kansas voter rolls? That, Ho argued, could efficiently suss out illegal registrations.

Kobach told the judge that simply wasn’t feasible. The list, he explained, doesn’t contain all non-citizens in the country illegally — it contains only non-citizens legally present and those here illegally who register in some way with the federal government. Plus, he told Robinson, in order to really match the SAVE list against a voter roll, both datasets would have to contain alien registration numbers, the identifier given to non-citizens living in the U.S. “Those are things that a voter registration system doesn’t have,” he said. “So, the SAVE system does not work.”

But Kobach had made the opposite argument when he headed the voter fraud commission. There, he’d repeatedly advocated the use of the SAVE database. Appearing on Fox News in May 2017, shortly after the commission was established, Kobach said, “The Department of Homeland Security knows of the millions of aliens who are in the United States legally and that data that’s never been bounced against the state’s voter rolls to see whether these people are registered.” He said the federal databases “can be very valuable.”

A month later, as chief of the voting fraud commission, Kobach took steps to compare state information to the SAVE database. He sent a letter to all 50 secretaries of state requesting their voter rolls. Bipartisan outrage ensued. Democrats feared he would use the rolls to encourage states to purge legitimately registered voters. Republicans labelled the request federal overreach.

At trial, Kobach’s main expert on this point was Hans von Spakovsky, another member of the voter fraud commission. He, too, had been eager in commission meetings to match state voter rolls to the SAVE database.

But like Kobach, von Spakovsky took a different tack at trial. He testified that this database was unusable by elections offices. “In your experience and expertise as an election administrator and one who studies elections,” Kobach asked, “is [the alien registration number] a practical or even possible thing for a state to do in its voter registration database?” Von Spakovsky answered, “No, it is not.”

Von Spakovsky and Kobach have been friends for more than a decade. They worked together at the Department of Justice under George W. Bush. Kobach focused on immigration issues — helping create a database to register visitors to the U.S. from countries associated with terrorism — while von Spakovsky specialized in voting issues; he had opposed the renewal of the Voting Rights Act.

Hans von Spakovsky, a member of the voter fraud commission (Douglas Graham/Roll Call/Getty Images)

Von Spakovsky’s history as a local elections administrator in Fairfax County, Va., qualified him as an expert on voting fraud. Between 2010 and 2012, while serving as vice chairman of the county’s three-member electoral board, he’d examined the voter rolls and found what he said were 300 registered non-citizens. He’d pressed for action against them, but none came. Von Spakovsky later joined the Heritage Foundation, where he remains today, generating research that underpins the arguments of those who claim mass voter fraud.

Like Richman, von Spakovsky seemed nervous on the stand, albeit not combative. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and a severe, immovable expression. Immigration is a not-so-distant feature of his family history: His parents — Russian and German immigrants — met in a refugee camp in American-occupied Germany after World War II before moving to the U.S.

Von Spakovsky had the task of testifying about what was intended to be a key piece of evidence for Kobach’s case: a spreadsheet of 38 non-citizens who had registered to vote, or attempted to register, in a 20-year period in Sedgwick County, Kansas.

But the 38 non-citizens turned out to be something less than an electoral crime wave. For starters, some of the 38 had informed Sedgwick County that they were non-citizens. One woman had sent her registration postcard back to the county with an explanation that it was a “mistake” and that she was not a citizen. Another listed an alien registration number — which tellingly begins with an “A” — instead of a Social Security number on the voter registration form. The county registered her anyway.

When von Spakovsky took the stand, he had to contend with questions that suggested he had cherry-picked his data. (The judge would find he had.) In his expert report, von Spakovsky had referenced a 2005 report by the Government Accountability Office that polled federal courts to see how many non-citizens had been excused from jury duty for being non-citizens — a sign of fraud, because jurors are selected from voter rolls. The GAO report mentioned eight courts. Only one said it had a meaningful number of jury candidates who claimed to be non-citizens: “between 1 and 3 percent” had been dismissed on these grounds. This was the only court von Spakovsky mentioned in his expert report.

His report also cited a 2012 TV news segment from an NBC station in Fort Myers, Fla. Reporters claimed to have discovered more than 100 non-citizens on the local voter roll.

“Now, you know, Mr. von Spakovsky, don’t you, that after this NBC report there was a follow-up by the same NBC station that determined that at least 35 of those 100 individuals had documentation to prove they were, in fact, United States citizens. Correct?” Ho asked. “I am aware of that now, yes,” von Spakovsky replied.

That correction had been online since 2012 and Ho had asked von Spakovsky the same question almost two years before in a deposition before the trial. But von Spakovsky never corrected his expert report.

Under Ho’s questioning, von Spakovsky also acknowledged a false assertion he made in 2011. In a nationally syndicated column for McClatchy, von Spakovsky claimed a tight race in Missouri had been decided by the illegal votes of 50 Somali nationals. A month before the column was published, a Missouri state judge ruled that no such thing had happened.

On the stand, von Spakovsky claimed he had no knowledge of the ruling when he published the piece. He conceded that he never retracted the assertion.

Kobach, who watched the exchange without objection, had repeatedly made the same claim — even after the judge ruled it was false. In 2011, Kobach wrote a series of columns using the example as proof of the need for voter ID, publishing them in outlets ranging from the Topeka Capital-Journal to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. In 2012, he made the claim in an article published in the Syracuse Law Review. In 2013, he wrote an op-ed for the Kansas City Star with the same example: “The election was stolen when Rizzo received about 50 votes illegally cast by citizens of Somalia.” None of those articles have ever been corrected.

Ultimately, Robinson would lacerate von Spakovsky’s testimony, much as she had Richman’s. Von Spakovsky’s statements, the judge wrote, were “premised on several misleading and unsupported examples” and included “false assertions.” As she put it, “His generalized opinions about the rates of noncitizen registration were likewise based on misleading evidence, and largely based on his preconceived beliefs about this issue, which has led to his aggressive public advocacy of stricter proof of citizenship laws.”

There was one other wobbly leg holding up the argument that voter fraud is rampant: the very meaning of the word “fraud.”

Kobach’s case, and the broader claim, rely on an extremely generous definition. Legal definitions of fraud require a person to knowingly be deceptive. But both Kobach and von Spakovsky characterized illegal ballots as “fraud” regardless of the intention of the voter.

Indeed, the nine convictions Kobach has obtained in Kansas are almost entirely made up of individuals who didn’t realize they were doing something wrong. For example, there were older voters who didn’t understand the restrictions and voted in multiple places they owned property. There was also a college student who’d forgotten she’d filled out an absentee ballot in her home state before voting months later in Kansas. (She voted for Trump both times.)

Late in the trial, the ACLU presented Lorraine Minnite, a professor at Rutgers who has written extensively about voter fraud, as a rebuttal witness. Her book, “The Myth of Voter Fraud,” concluded that almost all instances of illegal votes can be chalked up to misunderstandings and administrative error.

Kobach sent his co-counsel, Garrett Roe, to cross-examine her. “It’s your view that what matters is the voter’s knowledge that his or her action is unlawful?” Roe asked. “In a definition of fraud, yes,” said Minnite. Roe pressed her about this for several questions, seemingly surprised that she wouldn’t refer to all illegal voting as fraud.

Minnite stopped him. “The word ‘fraud’ has meaning, and that meaning is that there’s intent behind it. And that’s actually what Kansas laws are with respect to illegal voting,” she said. “You keep saying my definition” she said, putting finger quotes around “my.” “But, you know, it’s not like it’s a freak definition.”

Kobach had explored a similar line of inquiry with von Spakovsky, asking him if the list of 38 non-citizens he’d reviewed could be absolved of “fraud” because they may have lacked intent.

“No,” von Spakovsky replied, “I think any time a non-citizen registers, any time a non-citizen votes, they are — whether intentionally or by accident, I mean — they are defrauding legitimate citizens from a fair election.”

After Kobach concluded his questions, the judge began her own examination of von Spakovsky.

“I think it’s fair to say there’s a pretty good distinction in terms of how the two of you define fraud,” the judge said, explaining that Minnite focused on intent, while she understood von Spakovsky’s definition to include any time someone who wasn’t supposed to vote did so, regardless of reason. “Would that be a fair characterization?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am,” von Spakovsky replied.

The judge asked whether a greater number of legitimate voters would be barred from casting ballots under the law than fraudulent votes prevented. In that scenario, she asked, “Would that not also be defrauding the electoral process?” Von Spakovsky danced around the answer, asserting that one would need to answer that question in the context of the registration requirements, which he deemed reasonable.

The judge cut him off. “Well that doesn’t really answer my question,” she said, saying that she found it contradictory that he wanted to consider context when examining the burden of registration requirements, but not when examining the circumstances in which fraud was committed.

“When you’re talking about … non-citizen voting, you don’t want to consider that in context of whether that person made a mistake, whether a DMV person convinced them they should vote,” she said. Von Spakovsky allowed that not every improper voter should be prosecuted, but insisted that “each ballot they cast takes away the vote of and dilutes the vote of actual citizens who are voting. And that’s —”

The judge interrupted again. “So, the thousands of actual citizens that should be able to vote but who are not because of the system, because of this law, that’s not diluting the vote and that’s not impairing the integrity of the electoral process, I take it?” she said.

Von Spakovsky didn’t engage with the hypothetical. He simply didn’t believe it was happening. “I don’t believe that this requirement prevents individuals who are eligible to register and vote from doing so.” Later, on the stand, he’d tell Ho he couldn’t think of a single law in the country that he felt negatively impacted anyone’s ability to register or vote.

Robinson, in the end, strongly disagreed. As she wrote in her opinion, “the Court finds that the burden imposed on Kansans by this law outweighs the state’s interest in preventing noncitizen voter fraud, keeping accurate voter rolls, and maintaining confidence in elections. The burden is not just on a ‘few voters,’ but on tens of thousands of voters, many of whom were disenfranchised” by Kobach’s law. The law, she concluded, was a bigger problem than the one it set out to solve, acting as a “deterrent to registration and voting for substantially more eligible Kansans than it has prevented ineligible voters from registering to vote.”

ref

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/31/business/scientists-loved-and-loathed-by-syngenta-an-agrochemical-giant.html?_r=0

no links

— The bee findings were not what Syngenta expected to hear.

The pesticide giant had commissioned James Cresswell, an expert in flowers and bees at the University of Exeter in England, to study why many of the world’s bee colonies were dying. Companies like Syngenta have long blamed a tiny bug called a varroa mite, rather than their own pesticides, for the bee decline.

Dr. Cresswell has also been skeptical of concerns raised about those pesticides, and even the extent of bee deaths. But his initial research in 2012 undercut concerns about varroa mites as well. So the company, based in Switzerland, began pressing him to consider new data and a different approach.

Looking back at his interactions with the company, Dr. Cresswell said in a recent interview that “Syngenta clearly has got an agenda.” In an email, he summed up that agenda: “It’s the varroa, stupid.”

For Dr. Cresswell, 54, the foray into corporate-backed research threw him into personal crisis. Some of his colleagues ostracized him. He found his principles tested. Even his wife and children had their doubts.

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“They couldn’t believe I took the money,” he said of his family. “They imagined there was going to be an awful lot of pressure and thought I sold out.”

The corporate use of academia has been documented in fields like soft drinks and pharmaceuticals. But it is rare for an academic to provide an insider’s view of the relationships being forged with corporations, and the expectations that accompany them.

A review of Syngenta’s strategy shows that Dr. Cresswell’s experience fits in with practices used by American competitors like Monsanto and across the agrochemical industry. Scientists deliver outcomes favorable to companies, while university research departments court corporate support. Universities and regulators sacrifice full autonomy by signing confidentiality agreements. And academics sometimes double as paid consultants.

In Britain, Syngenta has built a network of academics and regulators, even recruiting the leading government scientist on the bee issue. In the United States, Syngenta pays academics like James W. Simpkins of West Virginia University, whose work has helped validate the safety of its products. Not only has Dr. Simpkins’s research been funded by Syngenta, he is also a $250-an-hour consultant for the company. And he teamed up with a Syngenta executive in a consulting venture, emails obtained by The New York Times show.

Dr. Simpkins did not comment. A spokesman for West Virginia University said his consulting work “was based on his 42 years of experience with reproductive neuroendocrinology.”

Scientists who cross agrochemical companies can find themselves at odds with the industry for years. One such scientist is Angelika Hilbeck, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. The industry has long since challenged her research, and she has been outspoken in challenging them back.

Going back to the 1990s, her research has found that genetically modified corn — intended to kill bugs that eat the plant — could harm beneficial insects as well. Back then, Syngenta had not yet been formed, but she said one of its predecessor companies, Ciba-Geigy, tried to stifle her research by citing a confidentiality agreement signed by her employer then, a Swiss government research center called Agroscope.

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Confidentiality agreements have become routine. The United States Department of Agriculture turned over 43 confidentiality agreements reached with Syngenta, Bayer and Monsanto since the beginning of 2010 after a Freedom of Information Act request. Agroscope turned over an additional five with Swiss agrochemical companies.

Many of the agreements highlight how regulators are often more like collaborators than watchdogs, exploring joint research and patent deals that they agree to keep secret.

One agreement between the U.S.D.A. and Syngenta, which came with a five-year nondisclosure term, covered things including “research and development activities,” “manufacturing processes” and “financial and marketing information related to crop protection and seed technologies.” In another agreement, a government scientist was barred even from disclosing sensitive information she heard at a symposium run by Monsanto.

The Agriculture Department, in a statement, said that without such agreements and partnerships, “many technological solutions would not make it to the public,” adding that research findings were released “objectively without inappropriate influence from internal or external partners.”

Luke Gibbs, a spokesman for Syngenta, which is now being acquired by the China National Chemical Corporation, said in a statement, “We are proud of the collaborations and partnerships we have built.”

“All researchers we partner with are free to express their views publicly in regard to our products and approaches,” he said. “Syngenta does not pressure academics to draw conclusions and allows unfettered and independent submission of any papers generated from commissioned research.”

A look at the experiences of the three scientists — Dr. Cresswell, Dr. Simpkins and Dr. Hilbeck — reveals the ways agrochemical companies shape scientific thought.

A Reluctant Partner

For James Cresswell, taking money from Syngenta was not an easy decision.

Dr. Cresswell has been a researcher at the University of Exeter, in England’s southwest, for a quarter-century, mostly exploring the esoterica of flower reproduction in papers with titles like “Conifer ovulate cones accumulate pollen principally by simple impaction.” He was not used to making headlines.

But about a half-decade ago, he became interested in the debate over neonicotinoids, a class of pesticide derived from nicotine, and their effects on bee health. Many studies linked the chemicals to a mysterious collapse of bee colonies that was in the news. Other studies, many backed by industry, pointed to the varroa mite, and some saw both factors at play.

Dr. Cresswell’s initial research led him to believe that concerns about the pesticides were overblown. In 2012, Syngenta offered to fund further research.

While many academics resisted efforts by The Times to examine their communications with Syngenta, Dr. Cresswell did not challenge a records request submitted to his university. And he spoke with candor....

NERVOUS BRKDWN?

Today, Dr. Cresswell has returned to less controversial areas of bee research. He says he respects scientists he has met from Syngenta, but views collaboration with industry as a Faustian bargain.

He called Syngenta “a kind of devil.”

“What I didn’t realize is that supping with them would actually have a broader impact on how the world sees me as a scientist,” he said. “That was my misjudgment.”

A Tangled Relationship

If some scientists struggle to reconcile themselves with taking corporate money, others embrace complex business relationships.

James W. Simpkins, a professor at West Virginia University and the director of its Center for Basic and Translational Stroke Research, is one of many outside academics whom Syngenta turns to for research.

He has focused on the Syngenta product atrazine — the second most popular weed killer in America, widely used on lawns and crops — often co-authoring research with Syngenta scientists.

Atrazine, banned in the European Union, has also been controversial in America. Most notably, Syngenta started a campaign to discredit Tyrone B. Hayes, a professor it once funded at the University of California, Berkeley, when Dr. Hayes found that atrazine changes the sex of frogs.

Dr. Simpkins has had a different relationship with the company. In 2003, he appeared before American regulators on Syngenta’s behalf, saying that “we can identify no biologically plausible mechanism by which atrazine leads to an increase in prostate cancer.”

Dr. Simpkins was also lead author of a 2011 study finding no support that atrazine causes breast cancer. And last year, he was part of a small team of Syngenta-backed scientists that fought California’s move to require that atrazine be sold with a warning label. He also recently edited a series of papers on atrazine for Syngenta, garnering praise from a senior researcher at the company,Charles Breckenridge, who wrote in an email that the “papers tell a simple, yet compelling story.”

The depth of the financial intertwining of Dr. Simpkins and Syngenta was laid out in nearly 2,000 pages of email traffic, obtained by The Times after a Freedom of Information Act request. Not only does Dr. Simpkins receive research grants, but the company also pays him $250 an hour as a consultant for his work on expert panels, studies and manuscripts, records show. Syngenta even asked Dr. Simpkins to contribute to Dr. Breckenridge’s annual performance review.

Asking outsiders to contribute to corporate reviews is not unusual. However, Dr. Simpkins is also described in the emails as a partner in a venture set up by Dr. Breckenridge called Quality Scientific Solutions to consult on pesticides and other issues.

West Virginia University’s website says that “research conducted at W.V.U. is data-driven, objective and independent” and “not influenced by any political agenda, business priority” or “funding source.” And John A. Bolt, a university spokesman, said that all of Dr. Simpkins’s Syngenta-related research had been conducted before Dr. Simpkins arrived at West Virginia in 2012.

Photo

Angelika Hilbeck, a researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in a lab at the North-West University in Potchefstroom, South Africa. The agrochemical industry has long challenged her research, and she has been outspoken in fighting back. CreditJoao Silva/The New York Times

But a review of Dr. Simpkins’s published work shows that he wrote favorable atrazine studies with Syngenta scientists in 2014 and 2015, and listed his university affiliation. Mr. Bolt said Dr. Simpkins only “served as an expert adviser” in the studies.

In 2014, Syngenta made a $30,000 donation to the university’s foundation. Mr. Bolt said that the donation was made “in general support of the research activities of Dr. James W. Simpkins.” None of the money, Mr. Bolt said, was “used to support research related to Syngenta.”

Dr. Simpkins’s collaborations with Dr. Breckenridge appear to be expansive. In an email to Dr. Simpkins last year, Dr. Breckenridge sent him a study on the Mediterranean Diet and suggested that they use a multilevel marketing company to help them sell a product of their own.

“If we could come up with a better Snake Oil,” he wrote to Dr. Simpkins, “we would have access to a massive marketing force.”

A Critic and a Target

Some scientists labor outside the industry. It can be a difficult path.

Angelika Hilbeck worked for Agroscope, a Swiss agricultural research center, in the 1990s, when she began to examine genetically modified corn. The corn was engineered to kill insect larvae that fed on it, but Dr. Hilbeck found that it was also toxic to an insect called the lacewing, a useful bug that eats other pests.

Ciba-Geigy, a predecessor of Syngenta, had a confidentiality agreement with Agroscope, and insisted that she keep the research secret, she said. Confidentiality agreements are not unusual for Agroscope. In one such agreement obtained by The Times, the agency agreed to return or destroy corporate documents it received as part of a research project.

Dr. Hilbeck said she refused to back down and eventually published her work. Her contract at Agroscope was not renewed. An Agroscope spokeswoman said the episode took place too long ago to comment on.

Dr. Hilbeck continued as a university researcher and was succeeded at Agroscope by Jörg Romeis, a scientist who had worked at Bayer and has since co-authored research with employees from Syngenta, DuPont and other companies. He has spent much of his career trying to debunk Dr. Hilbeck’s work. He followed her lacewing studies by co-authoring his own, finding that genetically modified crops were not harmful to the lacewing.

Next, after Dr. Hilbeck co-wrote a paper outlining a model for assessing the unintended risks of such crops, Dr. Romeis was lead author of an alternative approach with a Syngenta scientist among his co-authors.

Then, in 2009, Dr. Hilbeck was an author of a paper looking at risks to ladybug larvae from modified crops. Dr. Romeis followed by co-authoring a study that found “no adverse effects” to ladybug larvae. In subsequent publications, he referred to work by Dr. Hilbeck and others as “bad science” and a “myth.”

“They were my little stalkers,” Dr. Hilbeck said. “Whatever I did, they did.”

In an interview, Dr. Romeis, who now leads Agroscope’s biosafety research group, said, “Her work does not affect our mission in any way,” adding that the idea of researching the effects of genetically modified crops was “not patented by her.”

Refereeing a scientific dispute is difficult. But Dr. Romeis and his collaborators do seem preoccupied with Dr. Hilbeck’s work, judging from a review of email traffic between Agroscope and the U.S.D.A. obtained by The Times after a Freedom of Information Act request.

In 2014, as Dr. Romeis was developing a paper assailing Dr. Hilbeck’s work, one U.S.D.A. scientist, Steven E. Naranjo, joked in a message to Dr. Romeis: “Joerg, its generous of you to see that Hilbeck gets published once in a while :)”

Dr. Hilbeck is used to looking over her shoulder. “We shouldn’t be running into all kinds of obstacles and face all this comprehensive mobbing just doing what we’re supposed to do,” she said. “It’s totally corrupted this field.”

HACKademics are sellouts with university affiliations: Entine and John Graham are prototypes, Stare pioneer Harvard

lots are economists like laffer

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pension plan: Graham, Dudley, Bolten,

Hacks are sellout scientists, flacks are freelance PR spinmeisters

There’s nothing new or unusual about corporate and academic collaboration [3]. IBM, for instance [4], has partnered with universities around the country since the 1940s to support computer science education. This relationship is mutually beneficial both for the tech giant and the institutions sponsored. IBM’s grant dollars provide welcome funding for research and equipment for students, all while fostering a new class of computer scientists and engineers.

University-business partnerships, however, require a careful balance. Take the tobacco industry. According to a 2012 study [5] by Harvard professor Allan Brandt, cigarette makers all but invented the concept of industry-academic conflicts of interest. Since the 1950s, cigarette companies have sought to influence the debate about the dangers of smoking to sell more of their products. One tactic used was aligning with university-based science and underwriting millions of dollars [6] for favorable research.

A number of industries have evidently taken a page from the tobacco playbook. Powerful industries from Big Oil to Big Food have been found funneling eye-popping sums of money to university professors in order to fund research and promote their commercial interests. The corporate hijacking [7] of higher education is more complex than it looks. When state universities or land grant colleges see their budgets stretched thin, some faculty may feel pressured to seek or accept much-needed funding in ways that are not transparent to the public.

Nonetheless, academics are counted upon for the integrity of their assertions. Industry funding has been shown [8] to undermine objectivity, and professors violate their responsibilities as impartial experts as well as the public’s trust when they associate with unscrupulous commercial interests.

Here are 13 prominent university professors who appear to have stepped over the line between big business and academia.

1 & 2. Carol O’Neil & Theresa Nicklas.Back in 2011, a number of media outlets breathlessly touted [9] a surprising new study [10] that found children who eat candy weigh less than children who do not. The study’s authors included professors O'Neil of Louisiana State University and Nicklas of Baylor College of Medicine and Victor Fulgoni, a former Kellogg executive and consultant.

Unsurprisingly, an Associated Press investigation [11] by Candice Choi revealed that paper was not only partially sponsored by the National Confectioners Association—which counts such candy giants as Hershey, Wrigley, Mars and Nestle as group members—but that the trade group also made a number of suggestions to the paper. "You'll note I took most but not (all) their comments," Fulgoni wrote in an email to O'Neil in 2010. A similar study on candy and adults also received comments from the candy group.

O'Neil told the AP she did not receive compensation for the work, but in 2011, Nicklas sent Nutrition Impact, Fulgoni’s consulting business, an invoice for $11,500 for three manuscripts, including $2,500 for "candy." The professors also co-authored a paper about the health benefits of chickpeas and hummus funded by Sabra Dipping Co. Even though a disclosure said that Sabra did not provide input, the final paper did include the company’s suggestions, the AP reported.

3. Wei-Hock Soon.The aerospace engineer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics is a noted climate change skeptic [12], who asserts that global warming is caused by the sun, not human activity. Freedom of Information Act documents obtained by Greenpeace [13] showed that Soon accepted more than $1 million over the last decade from fossil fuel titans such as Exxon Mobil, the American Petroleum Institute, the Koch brothers and more.

The New York Times [14] reported that Soon failed to disclose that conflict of interest in his scientific papers at least 11 times [15]. This is also telling: His work is often cited by prominent climate-denying politicians, includingsnowball-wielding [16] Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), the chairman of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works who considers Soon one of his personal heroes [17].

Soon still [18] passionately defends his work and presented his research at a Paris Climate Conference “counter-conference” alongside Heartland Institute, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow and the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Watch the video below:

4. William Happer.In December, a bombshell [19] Greenpeace sting suggested that two academics from prominent universities could be bought by fossil fuel companies. The first was Happer, a Princeton University professor and prominent climate change skeptic [20]. The physicist, who is not a climatologist, was approached by Greenpeace activists posing as consultants of a Beirut-based energy company to author a paper on “the benefits of carbon dioxide from fossil fuels.”

Emails show [21] that Happer wanted $250 an hour for his work and asked that his fee be paid to the climate-doubting group CO2 Coalition, where he’s a board member. Happer also disclosed in the emails that Peabody Energy donated $8,000 to the CO2 Coalition for testimony in a Minnesota hearing on the impacts of carbon dioxide.

The Greenpeace investigation was released hours before Happer testified at Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Tex.) bizarre Senate hearing [22] disputing climate change. Right before his testimony, when a Greenpeace researcher confronted Happer about how much money he received from Peabody, Happer barked, “You son of a bitch, I haven’t taken a dime!”

Happer has not disputed [23] the veracity of the emails but refused to comment about the operation.

Watch here:

. Frank Clemente.The professor emeritus of sociology at Penn State University was the second professor implicated by the Greenpeace operation. This time, Greenpeace activists posed as Indonesian coal mining representatives and approached Clemente to write a report before the Paris Climate talks “to counter damaging research on linking coal to premature deaths,” according to published emails [28]. Clemente, who has previously argued against [29] coal divestment among educational institutions, agreed and requested $15,000 for an 8- to 10-page report and emphasized he would not have to disclose his sponsor.

“There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US,” Clemente wrote in an email. “My research and writing has been supported by government agencies, trade associations, the university and private companies and all has been published under the rubric of me as an independent scholar—which I am.”

In response, Clemente told [30] the Australian Broadcasting Corporation he was an independent consultant and not on the Penn State payroll during the sting. “I fully stand behind every single statement I made,” he said.

6. Bruce Chassy.Like Soon, the University of Illinois professor emeritus has similarly come under fire for his close ties to the controversial agrichemical industry. U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit watchdog group, obtained a jaw-dropping cache of emails through FOIA requests unveiling how Monsanto and its allies not only donated money to professors but also enlisted them to do PR, lobbying and regulatory work for the agrichemical industry.

On September 2015, a stunning exposé from the New York Times [31] on the FOIA emails described how Chassy received money from Monsanto and collaborated with [32] the agrichemical industry’s lobbying of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to reject a proposal that would tighten the regulations on pesticide-resistant seeds.

Monsanto’s Eric Sachs, who leads the company’s scientific outreach, emailed [33] Chassy to set up Academics Review [34], a nonprofit aimed at countering critics of GMOs. “The key” to Academics Review’s success will be “keeping Monsanto in the background so as not to harm the credibility of the information,” Sachs wrote.

This past March, a WBEZ [35] investigation by Monica Eng uncovered that Monsanto gave Chassy more than $57,000 in two years to help promote, defend and deregulate GMOs through the lobbying of federal officials. Monsanto also made $140,000 in “biotech research and outreach” payments through the University of Illinois Foundation between 2006 and June 2012.

Chassy has harshly criticized [36] the U.S. Right to Know campaign.

7. Kevin Folta.The professor and chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida has been labeled a “Monsanto shill” by critics after the FOIA emails indicated frequent collaboration with the world’s largest seed company. The plant scientist was the center of the 2015 New York Times exposé [31] by Eric Lipton, who writes:

Dr. Folta, the emails show, soon became part of an inner circle of industry consultants, lobbyists and executives who devised strategy on how to block state efforts to mandate G.M.O. labeling and, most recently, on how to get Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt any state from taking such a step.

“I’m glad to sign on to whatever you like, or write whatever you like,” Folta wrote [37] in an October 2014 email to a Monsanto executive.

Folta, a Buzzfeed [38] profile noted, corresponded with global public relations firm Ketchum, which represents the powerful Council for Biotechnology Information, to write an Orlando Sentinel op-ed [39], in which he claims "profiting authors, celebrity chefs and eco-terrorists" are attempting "to arrest the pace of scientific progress" in regard to GMOs. (Ketchum has a notorious reputation: Stacy Malkan, the co-director of U.S. Right to Know,notes [40] that the firm "remains a key player in PR efforts to dampen demand for organic foods, spinning messages that tell consumers organics are over-priced and over-hyped... [and] runs the GMO Answers website, funded by Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer and BASF.")

In August 2014, Monsanto gave Folta an unrestricted $25,000 grant through the university’s agricultural biotechnology communication program. The university tried returning the money to Monsanto, but the company refused. Folta, citing personal threats, later decided to donate the money [41] to a campus food bank. Folta wrote in a recent blog post [42] that he is neither pro- nor anti-GMO but has an “overwhelmingly positive” opinion of the technology.

8. David Shaw.According to the New York Times piece, Monsanto provided at least $880,000 in grants to Mississippi State University’s vice president for research and economic development.

The FOIA emails show [43] that Shaw was approached by both Monsanto and Dow Chemical to submit comments to the USDA to approve the former’s Roundup Ready 2 Xtend GMO soybeans and the latter’s Enlist weedkiller. Dow executive Larry Walton sent a June 2015 email [44] to Shaw requesting his support for Enlist. In the message, Walton noted that the Mississippi Agricultural Industry Council, where Walton is president, has provided scholarship funds to Mississippi State students. Shaw agreed to the two requests.

Shaw, Folta and seven other professors were also included in an August 2013 group email [45] from Sachs, the Monsanto outreach executive. Sachs asks the group to lend their academic gravitas on a series of articles touting the benefits of GMOs aimed at the general public. The Monsanto exec even assigned them topics and provided talking points and added that company-hired PR firms would plug the finished articles.

“The key to success is participation by all of you—recognized leaders with the knowledge, reputation and communication experience needed to communicate authoritatively with the target groups,” the email stated.

Shaw and Cornell entomologist and professor Anthony Shelton were tasked with the topic, “sustainable crop systems” and the professors complied. The final co-authored article, “Green Genes: Sustainability Advantages of Herbicide Tolerant and Insect Resistant Crops,” was published [46] by the Genetic Literacy Project, an organization critics [47] have labeled an agrichemical industry front group.

9. Calestous Juma.The Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government professor was also part of the Sachs group email. Juma, who is enthusiastically pro-GMO [48], wrote a December 2014 piece [49] titled, “Global Risks of Rejecting Agricultural Biotechnology,” a topic—and a similar headline—Sachs suggested. The piece was also published by the Genetic Literacy Project.

Citing the FOIA emails, the Boston Globe [50] described how Monsanto connected Juma with a marketing company to promote his paper “as part of Monsanto’s strategy to win over the public and lawmakers.” The international development specialist defended his piece, telling the Boston Globe he was not paid by Monsanto and merely pulled material from his previously published book on the topic.

“It’s not that I was trying to hide anything,” Juma said.

10. James O. Hill.The University of Colorado professor of pediatrics and medicine was the former [51] president of the Global Energy Balance Network, a nonprofit that promoted itself as a obesity research nonprofit. Exposés from the Associated Press [52] and the New York Times [53] in 2015, however, revealed that Coca-Cola was funding research that claims lack of exercise, not sugary soda, is to blame for the global obesity epidemic. According to the Associated Press, since 2010, the beverage giant gave $1 million to the University of Colorado School of Medicine, and since 2010, $550,000 to Hill.

While the group denied its research was influenced by Coke, Hill wrote in an email to a top Coke executive, "I want to help your company avoid the image of being a problem in people's' lives and back to being a company that brings important and fun things to them.” The network disbanded in late 2015, citing [54] “resource limitations.”

11. Steven N. Blair.As the New York Times described in its 2015 report, the University of South Carolina public health professor—“whose research over the past 25 years has formed much of the basis of federal guidelines on physical activity”—was the vice president of the Global Energy Balance Network. The University of South Carolina also received, and kept $500,000 from Coke.

In a video launching the Global Energy Balance Network, Blair said, “Most of the focus in the popular media and in the scientific press is, ‘Oh they’re eating too much, eating too much, eating too much’—blaming fast food, blaming sugary drinks and so on. And there’s really virtually no compelling evidence that that, in fact, is the cause.”

But as AlterNet's Reynard Loki reported [55], the 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans [56], a joint report of the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services found that "sugary beverages are extremely popular, with soda, energy drinks and sports drinks making up the fourth highest source of calories among Americans overall—and the third highest source for children and adolescents up to the age of 18."

vid

12. Gregory A. Hand.The former founding dean and professor of epidemiology at West Virginia University School of Public Health also helped found the Global Energy Balance Network. Hand, along with professors Hill and Blair, announcing the group’s formation in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. According to the New York Times, Coca-Cola gave Hand $806,500 in 2011 for a study and another $507,000 in 2014 to establish the group. Hand’s CV [57] from August 2015 boasts funding from the Coca-Cola Company.

Hand’s colleague, Walter Willett, chair of the Nutrition Department at the Harvard School of Public Health likened the actions of the Global Energy Balance Network to the tobacco industry’s campaign to downplay the health risks of smoking. “You can always buy somebody, it seems,” Willett told the Charleston Gazette-Mail [58]. “And it’s really unfortunate that some members of our academic community essentially go on the payroll of Coca-Cola, either directly or indirectly.”

News emerged this month that Hand has been forced out as dean. He has been demoted to a role “in developing partnerships that enhance the mission and work of health sciences at WVU,” the school is quoted as saying, according to Corporate Crime Reporter [59].

13. Peter Phillips.The University of Saskatchewan public policy professor was also asked by Monsanto's Eric Sachs to throw his weight behind a pro-GMO piece.

The finished piece, “Economic Consequences of Regulations of GM Crops,” closely mirrored the subject matter of “burdensome” regulations that stifle biotechnology, something that Sachs had pitched. The paper was again published [60] on the Genetic Literacy Project website in December and did not disclose Monsanto’s meddling.

According to the Saskatoon StarPhoenix [61], “Phillips said there was no need to declare his connections because he was not paid and Monsanto did not ask him to alter his research.”

However, Gary Ruskin, co-director for U.S Right to Know which accessed the emails, disagrees.

“Monsanto says jump and these scientists said, how high? This is not how publicly funded scientists should behave,” Ruskin told the publication, adding that Americans should trust top university scientists to disclose any conflict of interest.

Lorraine Chow is a freelance writer and reporter based in South Carolina.

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/investigations/13-academics-who-have-become-shills-corporate-giants-food-agrochemical-and-fossil

Links:

[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/lorraine-chow

[2] http://alternet.org

[3] http://stateofinnovation.thomsonreuters.com/corporate-academic-collaborations-promote-funding-and-influence

[4] http://www.skilledup.com/insights/getting-real-in-the-real-world-latest-in-university-business-partnerships

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3490543/

[6] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/health/research/26lung.html?_r=0

[7] http://www.alternet.org/story/155375/how_corporations_like_monsanto_have_hijacked_higher_education

[8] http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0040005

[9] http://www.livescience.com/13518-candy-chocolate-eaters-weigh.html

[10] http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/new-study-shows-children-and-adolescents-who-eat-candy-are-less-overweight-or-obese-124646403.html

[11] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/f9483d554430445fa6566bb0aaa293d1/ap-exclusive-how-candy-makers-shape-nutrition-science

[12] https://www.heartland.org/willie-soon

[13] http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/koch-industries/dr-willie-soon-a-career-fueled-by-big-oil-and-coal/

[14] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/22/us/ties-to-corporate-cash-for-climate-change-researcher-Wei-Hock-Soon.html

[15] https://insideclimatenews.org/news/23022015/guide-willie-soons-climate-research-funded-fossil-fuel-companies

[16] http://time.com/3724969/james-inhofe-snowball-senate/

[17] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/02/23/the-favorite-scientist-of-climate-change-deniers-is-under-fire-for-taking-oil-money/

[18] http://www.desmogblog.com/willie-soon

[19] http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academics-for-hire/

[20] http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323528404578452483656067190

[21] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2642410-Email-Chain-Happer-O-Keefe-and-Donors-Trust.html

[22] http://www.wired.com/2015/12/senate-gopers-ran-a-really-weird-hearing-on-climate-change/

[23] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/08/greenpeace-exposes-sceptics-cast-doubt-climate-science

[24] https://twitter.com/hashtag/COP21?src=hash

[25] https://t.co/xMyxNzdrEZ

[26] https://t.co/eEFDpn2pa5

[27] https://twitter.com/GreenpeaceUK/status/674236745710305280

[28] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2642398-Email-Chain-Frank-Clemente.html

[29] http://www.mcall.com/opinion/mc-fossil-divestment-clemente-con-20150321-story.html

[30] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-09/academic-returns-hits-back-at-greenpeace-claims-he-is-for-hire/7015140

[31] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/us/food-industry-enlisted-academics-in-gmo-lobbying-war-emails-show.html?_r=0

[32] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/05/us/document-chassy.html

[33] http://usrtk.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/Sachs-AR.pdf

[34] http://academicsreview.org

[35] https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/u-of-i-professor-did-not-disclose-gmo-funding/eb99bdd2-683d-4108-9528-de1375c3e9fb

[36] http://academicsreview.org/2015/09/the-usrtk-foia-campaign-against-academics-40-plus-years-of-public-science-research-and-teaching-under-assault/

[37] http://globalnews.ca/news/2414720/documents-reveal-canadian-teenager-the-target-of-gmo-lobby/

[38] https://www.buzzfeed.com/brookeborel/when-scientists-email-monsanto?utm_term=.mnkaEYL4D#.bqDAz7jdZotech-seed-front-burner

[39] http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2014-05-09/news/os-ed-gmos-front-burner-pro-20140508_1_gmo-biotech-seed-front-burner

[40] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-malkan/pr-firm-attacks-organic-food-then-pitches-itself-to-organic-companies_b_9462308.html

[41] http://www.gainesville.com/news/20150828/uf-prof-donates-monsanto-grant-to-food-pantry/1

[42] http://kfolta.blogspot.com/2016/07/im-not-pro-gmo.html

[43] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/09/06/us/document-shaw.html?_r=0

[44] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/2303692-david-shaw-missstateuniverdocs.html#document/p37/a237740

[45] https://www.motherjones.com/files/monsanto-sachs-juma.pdf

[46] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/02/green-genes-sustainability-advantages-of-herbicide-tolerant-and-insect-resistant-crops/

[47] http://www.truthwiki.org/genetic-literacy-project/

[48] https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/06/17/meet_calestous_juma_africas_genetically_modified_crop_optimist.html

[49] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/09/global-risks-of-rejecting-agricultural-biotechnology/

[50] https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2015/10/01/harvard-professor-failed-disclose-monsanto-connection-paper-touting-gmos/lLJipJQmI5WKS6RAgQbnrN/story.html

[51] http://www.denverpost.com/2016/03/23/cu-nutrition-expert-who-took-coca-cola-money-steps-down/

[52] http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ce372c3d89d442a79458e6d32e713865/apnewsbreak-emails-reveal-cokes-role-anti-obesity-group

[53] http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/coca-cola-funds-scientists-who-shift-blame-for-obesity-away-from-bad-diets/?_r=0

[54] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/anti-obesity-group-funded-by-coke-global-energy-balance-network-disbanding/

[55] http://www.alternet.org/food/soda-sales-decline-qa-rebecca-spector-center-food-safety

[56] http://health.gov/dietaryguidelines/dga2010/DietaryGuidelines2010.pdf

[57] https://sole.hsc.wvu.edu/Apps/Directory/CVView.aspx?id=41687

[58] http://www.wvgazettemail.com/article/20150810/DM01/150819949

[59] http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/gregory-hand-forced-out-as-dean-of-west-virginia-school-of-public-health-amid-controversy-over-coca-cola-funding/

[60] https://www.geneticliteracyproject.org/2014/12/11/economic-consequences-of-regulations-of-gm-crops/

[61] http://thestarphoenix.com/news/local-news/group-questions-u-of-s-profs-monsanto-link

[62] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on 13 Academics Who Have Become Shills for Corporate Giants in the Food, Agrochemical and Fossil Fuel Industries

[63] http://www.alternet.org/

[64] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

maybe rep: 2x

http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/the_koch_club/story/Koch_millions_spread_influence_through_nonprofits/

...

The Kochs have been involved in influencing higher education for more than 30 years, beginning with what is now called the Mercatus Center and the Institute for Humane Studies, both based at George Mason University in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. Between 2007 and 2011, the Kochs gave **$30.5 million to 221 universities**through their charitable foundations. More than half of that giving, roughly $16 million, has gone to George Mason University and its foundation. Recently, however, the Koch brothers’ influence has expanded outside Northern Virginia and created potential conflicts of interest for the universities accepting their donations.

The May-June 2012 issue of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors, focused on corporate influence in higher education. Kent Miller and Ray Bellamy wrote about the Koch influence in the Florida State University economics department. The Charles G. Koch Foundation offered to give the university $1.5 million to hire two assistant professors and fund fellowships and undergraduate curriculum on free-enterprise topics. The foundation appointed an advisory board that would award money to faculty and make sure that the work they completed fit with the foundation’s mission. Miller and Bellamy wrote, “In exchange for his ‘gift,’ the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s director, and initiate a student club.”

It’s not just at Florida State, which was a high-profile case, but also at other universities where the Kochs and John Allison, retired chairman and CEO of the financial institution BB&T, have donated money. Allison is on the board of directors at the Mercatus Center, which is funded by the Kochs, and following an intense fight in which the Kochs backed him, is now the president of the Cato Institute. BB&T sponsors chaired professors, typically in economics departments, and the universities where they sponsor a chaired professor often line up with where the Kochs donate.

An Investigative Reporting Workshop analysis found that the Kochs had donated to 10 universities where there were BB&T-chaired professors, including West Virginia University, Clemson University and smaller universities, such as Hampden-Sydney College and Barton College. According to Inside Higher Ed in 2011, Clemson “spent several years cultivating the Charles G. Koch Foundation to support its Clemson Institute for the Study of Capitalism, and has received $1 million thus far.”

At the core of the Kochs’ philosophy are the works of Ayn Rand, the objectivist philosopher and author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” (Rand’s writings are also emblematic of the readings recommended to students by the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University). The new course that the Charles G. Koch Foundation wanted approved at Florida State was called “Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism,” featuring the work of Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding. Through their charitable foundations, the Kochs gave $100,000 to the Ayn Rand Institute from 2009 to 2011.

And in the interest of full disclosure, in the course of this investigation, we discovered that American University, where the Investigative Reporting Workshop is based (within the School of Communication), received $17,500 in two separate grants from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. The university’s Office of Special Programs (OSP) reports that both grants are for a program called “Lectures in Classical Liberalism,” which is under the direction of Tom Merrill and Alan Levine. Both professors are in the School of Public Affairs.

OSP said the following language describes the program that the grants supported:

“We seek to build on and expand the program of lectures in classical liberalism funded by the Koch Foundation to date. At least two of these lectures would be designated “Koch Lectures on Classical Liberalism”; all of the funded lectures, however, will discuss some aspect of classical liberalism whether in its theoretical and historical roots or in its contemporary applications. This series of lectures is primarily designed to encourage our students to have a sustained engagement with the ideas of classical liberalism, and secondarily at presenting an opportunity for classical liberal ideas to be heard in the larger university community and the D.C. policy conversation. To that end, we also require our speakers to meet and take questions from our students in an informal session separate from the public lecture, either in one of our classes or in a breakfast or lunch session during the speaker’s campus visit.”

refd above academe 2012

https://www.aaup.org/article/fine-print-restrictive-grants-and-academic-freedom#.UdARVT7TWqw

Fine Print, Restrictive Grants, and Academic Freedom

The limits to “free” in free-market foundation donations at Florida State University.

By Kent S. Miller and Ray Bellamy

When the representatives of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation came to Tallahassee in 2007 with checkbook in hand, they had every reason to expect a warm reception from Florida State University. Florida, along with much of the nation, was busy transferring money from higher education to prisons, and FSU was hurting.

T. K. Wetherell, FSU’s president at the time, had this to say about the Koch Foundation’s generous proposed donation to the economics department: “In these difficult economic times, it is more important than ever that public universities find ways to partner with the private sector to develop the sorts of programs that our society will need in coming decades.”

Then, as now, the governor’s office, the legislature, and the judicial system in Florida were dominated by strong conservatives who held much in common ideologically with the Koch brothers, longtime libertarians whose fortunes place them among the richest people in America. Moreover, one-fifth of the faculty in FSU’s economics department already identified themselves as free-market, antiregulation economists; several professors had strong national reputations for work in this area. The chair of the department, Bruce Benson, was quite open with the *St. Petersburg Times* about his perspective: “The Kochs find, as I do, that a lot of regulation is actually detrimental and they’re convinced markets work relatively well when left alone. . . . I agree with what they believe, whether they give us money or not.”

There is nothing unique about the Koch brothers’ offer to Florida State. The Koch Foundation has been quietly influencing universities across the country for years; its own list of funded programs for 2011 includes 187 colleges and universities. But much can be learned from events as they have developed in Tallahassee.

The foundation proposed a donation of nearly $6.6 million, with a $1.5 million initial grant to hire staff and fund fellowships and new undergraduate programs. An agreement was reached, and the program got off the ground without much publicity in its first years. By spring 2011, however, some muttering about outside influence on academic matters could be heard on campus and in town. The two of us knew no one in the economics department, but because we have long-term ties with FSU, we decided to take a look at the donor grant agreement and memorandum of understanding between the Charles Koch Foundation, the FSU Foundation, and the FSU economics department.

The provisions called for the appointment of five professors as well as other staff members, the establishment of a Program for the Study of Political Economy and Free Enterprise and a Program for Excellence in Economic Education, and the development of educational programs for undergraduates. The money had strings attached: the major one was the appointment of an advisory board chosen by the Koch Foundation. The board would determine which faculty candidates would qualify to receive funding, review all publicly provided material submitted by applicants for the professorship positions, and review the work of the professors to make sure it complied with the “objectives and purposes” of the foundation. Several clauses made clear that the Koch Foundation could pick up the marbles and go home if dissatisfied.

Before publishing a coauthored op-ed in the Tallahassee Democrat in May 2011, we took our concerns to both the current FSU president, Eric Barron, and the dean of the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy, David Rasmussen. Barron, who hadn’t been president at the time the agreement was signed, said that he had reviewed the documents and didn’t see a problem. Rasmussen told us that the university had not hired anyone who would not have been hired otherwise, that the grant had facilitated the recruitment of two excellent assistant professors and high-quality graduate students, and that it had created new postdoctoral opportunities. He told us, as he subsequently told the St. Petersburg Times, that not taking the money would have been “irresponsible.”

On the face of it, the memorandum of understanding seemed to have the potential to do serious damage to academic freedom and faculty governance. When a reporter for the St. Petersburg Times, Kris Hundley, noticed our article and wrote a news piece, the story went viral, provoking a flood of dueling op-eds, editorials, petitions, and blog posts across the state and the nation. Some of the commentary was reasonably informed; much of it was not. The high visibility of the Koch brothers certainly helped give the story legs.

From the start, there was a misplaced emphasis in the media, with most of the attention going to the hiring of faculty. We thought the long-range damage would more likely come from the impact on the curriculum, with the Koch Foundation effectively having access to thousands of undergraduate students.

Defenders of the grant tended to concentrate on a limited set of arguments: universities can’t function without outside help; all grants come with strings attached; donors have a right to say how their money is spent; conservative ideas don’t get a fair shake because of the number of liberal professors; no one complains about the influence of liberal funders; intellectual diversity is absent in state universities; the attack on the Kochs is politically driven.

We agree that outside funds are necessary and that donors have a right to specify in general the areas of focus for their gifts and to receive an accounting of how their money is spent—but nothing beyond that. All ideas should be welcomed at a university; the politics of the giver should not be a disqualifying factor. That is the essence of academic freedom. We would hope that any grant from any foundation that had the provisions and restrictions of this one would evoke an identical response from us.

The Faculty Senate Weighs In

As the controversy continued to expand into the summer, FSU’s president acted on a suggestion the two of us made at the outset in our editorial and asked the faculty senate to examine the issues surrounding the grant. He requested a quick response, presumably to get the problem behind him before he initiated a $1 billion fundraising drive.

A five-person committee, consisting of former presidents of the faculty senate and a former president of the university, went to work. They reviewed documents and conducted interviews with current and former members of the economics department, university administrators, and other interested people.

The committee’s first finding was that the appointment of faculty had been properly managed but that there were clauses in the agreement that could lead to undue outside influence in the appointment process:

The agreement expressed an inappropriate interest in the selection of the department chair, withholding money unless the current chair was given a raise and continued to serve until the program was implemented.
The terms of the agreement raised concerns about a new undergraduate program, including the selection of a program director to supervise activities and the creation of a new course with prescribed content.
The teaching of large gateway courses that would reach an estimated seven thousand students a year in sections containing up to five hundred students was ceded to a subset of the department.
The implementation of the project was characterized by conflicts of interest and a lack of transparency.

The report concluded with a number of specific recommendations, including ending donor-funded appointments unless modifications are made to the agreement; restructuring the advisory committee; prohibiting future donor agreements that include donor evaluations in the annual evaluation files of faculty; suspending approval of Economics 3131, Market Ethics, until the course’s relationship to the donor agreement is made clear to and the course is reapproved by the university curriculum committee; and reviewing the FSU Foundation’s policies concerning gifts that specify conditions about faculty appointments, faculty evaluation, and the curriculum.

Reactions to the senate report were mixed. Some FSU faculty who spoke to us believe that the committee punted on many of the tougher questions when it elected to focus only on safeguards for future donor grants. A much stronger review of the process might have altered subsequent events.

President Barron seemed pleased by the outcome, telling the media, “We acted with a high level of integrity and followed the normal course of events, in that the faculty picked the faculty they wanted to work with.” He went on to say the agreement “leaves open the possibility” that Koch could have more influence over hiring and course development than was intended.

The Koch Foundation’s director of higher education programs put a good face on the report: “We are pleased that this review of the facts by the faculty committee confirms what FSU administrators have said—that the foundation protected academic integrity and added significant value to FSU.”

As the 2011 fall semester got under way, the story moved out of the spotlight, and there was a return to business as usual. It seemed that many of the major players felt vindicated, and the grant was expected to continue with only cosmetic changes. A new course based on Koch objectives, Market Ethics: The Vices, Virtues, and Values of Capitalism, featuring the work of objectivist Ayn Rand as required by the memorandum of understanding, was to go back through the standard approval procedures. A university committee was charged with developing policies to control future grants. There was a little talk about the need for increased transparency.

At that point we decided to follow up on a faculty senate recommendation that multiple donor agreements involving more than one college at the university be reviewed.

The Demands of BB&T

In attempting to gain a foothold in universities, the Kochs often work in tandem with other groups that share their values. The foundation formed by John Allison, former CEO of the regional financial-services holding company BB&T, is a frequent collaborator with the Kochs, reaching out primarily to economics departments and schools of business. Learning that the BB&T Charitable Foundation had made a grant to FSU in 2008, we asked our university’s foundation for a copy of the agreement. We received a bare-bones, two-page document that announced a $3 million contribution to encourage a thorough discussion of the moral foundations of capitalism. The document contained a reference to an attached letter that detailed the specific conditions of the grant. We requested a copy of this letter and learned it contained the meat of the arrangement.

There was no ambiguity about how the money was to be spent:

The Department of Economics would create a new course, Morals and Ethics in Economic Systems, with Ayn Rand as required reading. The course would be offered by the College of Social Sciences to 108 students each term, and the size of the class would eventually increase to as many as five hundred students. The course was also to be offered online.
The Department of Finance would add additional readings and course content in free markets, selfinterest, and individualism to its current required coursework.
Every undergraduate student in the College of Business and all graduate students in finance and economics would receive a copy of Atlas Shrugged, and discussion groups would explore the book’s themes.
A distinguished speakers series would be created, with presentations focused on the “core values of the free-enterprise system” and the “moral and ethical foundations of capitalism.” The Ayn Rand Institute would be consulted for the list of the recommended speakers.
Two program professorships would be awarded, and they would play key roles in developing and promoting the free-enterprise curriculum in the classroom.
Because of the importance of the program, it would be initially codirected by the heads of the economics and finance departments.
The program would sponsor and support the Students in Free Enterprise club.

Could these provisions be considered intrusive? In exchange for his “gift,” the donor got to assign specific readings, select speakers brought to the campus and instruct them with regard to the focus of their lectures, shape the curriculum with new courses and specify the number of students in the courses, name the program’s directors, and initiate a student club. BB&T also received a disturbing amount of free online advertising through the web pages of FSU’s BB&T Center for Free Enterprise.

We do not know how thoroughly the college has obeyed Allison’s instructions. But if there is any concern about avoiding even the appearance of outside interference in the university, we are in trouble.

The university has never existed as an ivory tower, but the ideals of academic freedom, the search for truth, scientific integrity, open debate, and faculty control of the curriculum are worth defending. The university should be a place where the search for and transfer of knowledge are not shaped by outside money.

The BB&T Foundation and similar donors are right, however, that no one is forced to take their money. Agreement comes only with a willing seller and a willing buyer. Thus, when things go wrong, it is because the university has been complicit with the foundation. We hope that the appropriate bodies at FSU will be paying closer attention in the future.

Lessons from Florida State University

Many of the elements in this sad story are present in similar grants to hundreds of colleges and universities across the country. If FSU, or any other institution, is serious about setting up policies to “avoid anything like this happening in the future,” as President Barron said, certain background features need to be considered.

One problem is that most donor contracts are negotiated by administrators and are brought to the faculty late or not at all. The great majority of the faculty often have no knowledge of the existence of grants like the two discussed here.

Transparency is a stranger in such grant making. In the course of our research we learned that it is not unusual for important provisions not to be put on the record but made abundantly clear to the recipient. The grantor usually includes a provision that gives it the ability to discontinue funding if dissatisfied with a program.

We repeatedly heard from administrators that it is standard practice for gifts to come with strings attached. Aside from the question of whether the conditions should be there in the first place, the issue, of course, is how many strings there are and what kinds of stipulations they present. (The meaning of gift—something passed on without expectation of recompense—has been corrupted.)

The concept of academic freedom is relatively plastic. What the two of us see as intrusive actions are highly acceptable to some. The president of the university and the dean of the college apparently saw no problem with the Koch grant. If somebody wants to give some money to read a book, the dean was quoted as saying, why not? The chair of the economics department announced that he would be happy to teach the writings of Ayn Rand—although he apparently had not considered doing so until the money came along. But guidelines regarding academic freedom are quite specific, and we need to do a better job of educating ourselves about their significance. Otherwise, the university becomes just another corporation subject to the market.

Supporters of the Koch grant make an interesting assessment of students’ ability to think for themselves. They portray students as being brainwashed over the years by liberal professors, but when someone expresses concern about the heavy dosage of ideology that comes to undergraduates as a result of the BB&T grants, the response is, “What? You don’t think students have the ability to sort things out for themselves?”

The Koch brothers, BB&T, and their like-minded partners are not going away. They are organized, committed to their cause, focused on pushing their ideology through the educational system, in the game for the long run, and well funded.

Faculty members need to get involved in the grant-review process from the start by demanding more transparency and refusing to be compliant. The fact that most faculty members are now serving in contingent appointments increases the need to defend academic freedom.

In hard times such as these, when there is too much work and too little time, the faculty must resist the temptation to close the door to the office or lab and say, “It’s probably okay. Besides, I don’t have the time to read the fine print.”

Kent S. Miller is emeritus professor of psychology at Florida State University. His e-mail address is*ksmiller@fsu.edu*.

Ray Bellamy is an orthopedic surgeon in private practice at Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic and director for surgery at the Tallahassee regional campus of the FSU College of Medicine. His e-mail address is ray_bellamy@ yahoo.com.

Tags:

http://energydesk.greenpeace.org/2015/12/08/exposed-academics-for-hire/

sting: GP

A Greenpeace undercover investigation has exposed how fossil fuel companies can secretly pay academics at leading American universities to write research that sows doubt about climate science and promotes the companies’ commercial interests.

Posing as representatives of oil and coal companies, reporters from Greenpeace UK asked academics from Princeton and Penn State to write papers promoting the benefits of CO2 and the use of coal in developing countries.

The professors agreed to write the reports and said they did not need to disclose the source of the funding.

Citing industry-funded documents – including testimony to state hearings and newspaper articles – Professor Frank Clemente of Penn State said: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Leading climate-sceptic academic, Professor William Happer, agreed to write a report for a Middle Eastern oil company on the benefits of CO2 and to allow the firm to keep the source of the funding secret.

Happer is due to appear this afternoon as a star witness in Senate hearings called by Republican Presidential candidate Ted Cruz.

In emails to reporters he also revealed Peabody Energy paid thousands of dollars for him to testify at a separate state hearing, with the money being paid to a climate-sceptic think tank.

Read the emails with Professor Frank Clemente

Read the emails with Professor :{Happer and the Donors Trust:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:

The investigation also found:

US coal giant PeabodyEnergy also paid tens of thousands of dollars to an academic who produced coal-friendly research and provided testimony at state and federal climate hearings, the amount of which was never revealed.
The Donors Trust, an organisation that has been described as the “dark money ATM” of the US conservative movement, confirmed in a taped conversation with an undercover reporter that it could anonymously channel money from a fictional Middle Eastern oil and gas company to US climate sceptic organisations.
Princeton professor William Happer laid out details of an unofficial peer review process run by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a UK climate sceptic think tank, and said he could ask to put an oil-funded report through a similar review process, after admitting that it would struggle to be published in an academic journal.
A recent report by the GWPF that had been through the same unofficial peer review process, was promoted as “thoroughly peer-reviewed” by influential columnist Matt Ridley-:{a senior figure:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in the organisation.

The findings echo the case of Willie Soon, who was the subject of an investigation published in the New York Times earlier this year. The investigation revealed that Soon had accepted donations from fossil fuel companies and anonymous donors in return for producing climate-sceptic scientific papers. He described his studies as “deliverables” and failed to declare who paid for the research.

The revelations also follow a series of reports showing fossil fuel companies burying the truth about climate change, while funding flawed research to cast doubt on the scientific consensus.

Academics for hire

Reporters approached the academics claiming to be representatives of unnamed fossil fuel companies – one, a Middle Eastern oil and gas exploration company, the other a coal mining firm based in Indonesia – looking to commission “independent” research.

“In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.” – Professor Frank Clemente

The individuals approached have previously been linked to fossil fuel companies or climate sceptic organisations that have received fossil fuel funding.

Professor Frank Clemente, a sociologistfrom Penn State university, was asked if he could produce a report “to counter damaging research linking coal to premature deaths (in particular the World Health Organization’s figure that 3.7 million people die per year from fossil fuel pollution)”.

He said that this was within his skill set; that he could be quoted using his university job title; and that it would cost around $15,000 for an 8–10 page paper. He also explained that he charged $6,000 for writing a newspaper op-ed.

When asked whether he would need to declare where the money came from, Professor Clementesaid: “There is no requirement to declare source funding in the US.”

Clemente is a favourite of the coal industry and particularly Peabody Energy, which:{regularly uses his research:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: as evidence of the need for an expansion of coal power in developing countries.

In the exchange Clemente disclosed that for another report on “the Global Value of Coal” he was paid $50,000 by Peabody Energy – the sponsorship was mentioned in the small print of the paper, but the amount has not been disclosed until now.

:{Following the report Clemente produced an:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}::{op-ed:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: arguing against the coal divestment movement in universities, which was picked up by over 50 newspapers across the US. But as Clemente told undercover reporters: “In none of these cases is the sponsor identified. All my work is published as an independent scholar.”

Professor Clemente failed to respond to requests for comment.

Investigators also approached Professor William Happer of Princeton University, who is chairman of the climate sceptic:{George Marshall Institute:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: and a former Director of Energy Research at theUS Department of Energy under the first President Bush where he “supervised all of DOE’s work on climate change”.

Professor Happer, who is a physicist rather than a climatologist, told Greenpeace reporters that he would be willing to produce research promoting the benefits of carbon dioxide for $250 per hour. He asked that the money be paid to climate sceptic campaign group, the CO2 Coalition, of which he is a board member.

Happer described his work on carbon dioxide as a “labor of love”and said that while other pollutants produced by burning fossil fuels are a problem, in his opinion “More CO2 will benefit the world”, adding “The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”

When reporters asked if it would be possible for the fossil fuel client’s role in commissioning the research to remain hidden, in order to give the work more credibility, Happer replied that: “If I write the paper alone, I don’t think there would be any problem stating that ‘the author received no financial compensation for this essay.’”

Happer also disclosed that Peabody Energy paid $8,000 in return for his testimony in a:{ crucialMinnesota state hearing:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: on the impacts of carbon dioxide. This fee was also paid to the CO2 Coalition.

“I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.” – Professor Happer

The academics’ willingness to conceal the source of funding contrasts strongly with the ethics of journals such as Science, which states in its:{submission requirements:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: that research “should be accompanied by clear disclosures from all authors of their affiliations, funding sources, or financial holdings that might raise questions about possible sources of bias”.

Late last month Happer appeared at a:{climate sceptic summit:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: in Texas. There he defended CO2 production saying: “Our breath is not that different from a power plant.” He went on to say, “If plants could vote, they would vote for coal”.

Hiding the money trail

The investigation has also revealed a system by which oil and gas companies can anonymously fund US climate-sceptic scientists and organisations.

When asked to ensure that the commissioning of the report could not be traced back to the Middle East oil and gas company, Professor Happer contacted his fellow CO2 Coalition board member, Bill O’Keefe, explaining: “I am trying get [sic] another mysterious client to donate funds to the CO2 Coalition instead of compensating me for my writing something for them.”

O’Keefe, a former:{Exxon lobbyist:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, suggested channelling it through the Donors Trust, a controversial organisation that has previously been called the“Dark Money ATM” of the US conservative movement.

The organisation has a long history of channelling funding to US climate sceptics, including controversial professor Willie Soon, and some of the most influential organisations in the US conservative movement, including Americans for Prosperity, the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute.

When investigators asked Peter Lipsett of the Donors Trust if the Trust would accept money from an oil and gas company based in the Middle East, he said that, although the Trust would need the cash to come from a US bank account, “we can take it from a foreign body, it’s just we have to be extra cautious with that.”

He added that: “I’ll double check everything and make sure I’m wording things correctly after chatting with our CFO [Chief Financial Officer], but what he’s told me before is that the preference is to have it in US dollars, and the ideal preference is to have it originate from a US source, but the US dollars is the important bit”.

[sound file]

Peter Lipsett is:{director of growth strategies:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}: at the Donors Trust and has worked in a senior position for Charles Koch, and before that Koch Industries for almost a decade. When contacted for on the record comment, Mr Lipsett said:

“We only accept donations in U.S. currency and drawn from U.S. banks. Donors Trust has never accepted secret donations from foreign donors. We have supported over 1,500 organizations representing the arts, medicine and science, public policy, education, religion, and civics. We are no more a “middle man” between donors and their causes than any other community or commercial donor-advised fund sponsoring organization”.

Mr O’Keefe said: “As a matter of personal policy, I do not respond to requests such as yours.”

Peer review

As well as exposing how fossil fuel companies are able to anonymously commission scientific research, Greenpeace can reveal details of a so-called “peer review” process being operated by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), a UK climate sceptic think tank.

Sense About Science, a UK charitable trust, describes peer review as the process by which “scientists submit their research findings to a journal, which sends them out to be assessed for competence, significance and originality, by independent qualified experts who are researching and publishing work in the same field (peers).” The process usually involves varying degrees of anonymity.

“I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.” – Professor Happer

Professor Happer, who sits on the GWPF’s:{Academic Advisory Council:(style="box-sizing:border-box"):}:, was asked by undercover reporters if he could put the industry funded report through the same peer review process as previous GWPF reports they claimed to have been “thoroughly peer reviewed”. Happer explained that this process had consisted of members of the Advisory Council and other selected scientists reviewing the work, rather than presenting it to an academic journal.

He added: “I would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything I write for your client. Unless we decide to submit the piece to a regular journal, with all the complications of delay, possibly quixotic editors and reviewers that is the best we can do, and I think it would be fine to call it a peer review.”

GWPF’s “peer review” process was used for a recent GWPF report on the benefits of carbon dioxide. According to Dr Indur Goklany, the author of the report, he was initially encouraged to write it by the journalist Matt Ridley, who is also a GWPF academic advisor. That report was then promoted by Ridley, who claimed in his Times column that the paper had been“thoroughly peer reviewed”.

Sense About Science, which lists Ridley as a member of its Advisory Council, has warned against such review processes, saying: “sometimes organisations or individuals claim to have put their studies through peer review when, on inspection, they have only shown it to some colleagues. Such claims are usually made in the context of a campaign directed at the public or policy makers, as a way of trying to give scientific credibility to certain claims in the hope that a non-scientific audience will not know the difference.”

The organisation also says that: “reporters or advocates citing these sources as peer reviewed would show themselves to be biased or uninformed”.

Professor Happer claimed that the review of the paper was “more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. But he also told undercover reporters that he believed most members of the Academic Advisory Council had been too busy to comment on the paper:

“I know that the entire scientific advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was asked to submit comments on the first draft. I am also sure that most were too busy to respond,” he said.

Professor Happer also noted that submitting a report on the benefits of carbon dioxide to a peer-reviewed scientific journal would be problematic.

“That might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly [as] your client would also like,” he said.

When asked about the review process behind Dr Goklany’s report, GWPF explained that the report had gone for review to other chosen scientists beyond just those in their Advisory Council and that: “the quality of Dr Goklany’s report is self-evident to any open-minded reader.”

Peabody Energy

The investigation raises further questions for coal giant Peabody Energy, which earlier this year was investigated by**New York attorney general**Eric Schneidermanover accusations that they violated New York laws prohibiting false and misleading conduct, in relation to misleading statements on the risks it could face from tightening climate change laws. Peabody have now agreed to change the way it reports the risks posed to investors by climate change.

Professors Clemente and Happer were both employed by Peabody to provide testimony favourable to the company in state and governmental hearings. The company paid $8,000 for Professor Happer to make the case on the social costs of carbon.

Other prominent climate sceptics who provided testimony in the Minnesota hearing on behalf of Peabodyincluded: Roy Spencer who told Greenpeace he was paid $4,000 by Peabody; Richard Tolwho said he was not paid and Richard Lindzen and Robert Mendelsohn who failed to reply to questions. Tol, Lindzen and Mendelsohn are all members of the GWPF Academic Advisory Council.

Both Penn State and Princeton University declined to comment.

The GWPF said: “Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.

“Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report “commissioned by a fossil fuel company” through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace.

“The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany’s report, and to smear Professor Happer’s reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public’s attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.”

Journalist and GWPF Academic Advisor, Matt Ridley, did not respond to requests for comment.

===

Jane M dark $ bk says 307 college koch $

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2005-14 100M$

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/connor-gibson/to-charles-koch-professor_b_9100904.html

12/15

Charles Koch gave $90 million to influence higher ed in the South

Last month, the provost of Western Carolina University in North Carolina asked the public school's chancellor to approve an academic center funded by the Charles Koch Foundation, a private nonprofit run by the billionaire chairman, CEO, and co-owner of the Koch Industries oil and chemical corporation. The foundation funds academic programs, professorships, scholarships, conferences, lecture series and economics centers, all for the purpose of promoting the free-market agenda embraced by Koch and his brother David.

The chancellor has come out in support, and on Dec. 4 the school's trustees will vote on the fate of the Center for the Study of Free Enterprise, which would launch with $2 million from the Charles Koch Foundation over five years and $1.4 million from the university.

The proposed agreement has come under fire from the school's faculty senate, which voted 21-3 to oppose the center's creation. The group raised concerns about academic freedom, cost, reputation, and the lack of peer review.

"The Charles Koch Foundation has previously set forth explicit expectations in line with their political views in exchange for monetary gifts to universities," the faculty senate said in a statement, "thereby constraining academic freedom by influencing and interfering with the development of new knowledge."

The proposed center at WCU is part of a long campaign by Koch to influence higher education. The Charles Koch Foundation along with three other groups led by Koch gave nearly $108 million to 366 colleges and universities from 2005 to 2014, finds an Institute for Southern Studies investigation, building on research by Greenpeace. The other groups are the Fred and Mary Koch Foundation, the Claude R. Lambe Foundation, and the Charles Koch Institute. (For more about these groups, see "The Koch-led charities funding higher education" at the end of this story.)

Eighty-five percent of the donations — or $91 million — went to 147 Southern colleges and universities.

The bulk of the money given by the four nonprofits — $77.7 million — went to George Mason University, a public school in Fairfax, Virginia. Much of that went to the school's Mercatus Center and Institute for Humane Studies, nonprofits housed at the university that focus on teaching and promoting free-market economics. But even when the GMU donations are excluded from the total giving, Southern schools received 45 percent of the remaining contributions.

Besides GMU, the other schools that received the most money from the Koch foundations are all in the South: Florida State University at $2.3 million, West Virginia University at $1.3 million, Clemson University of South Carolina at $1.3 million, and Troy University of Alabama at $1.1 million.

GMO

http://www.alternet.org/food/monsanto-scandal-biotech-giant-solicited-academics-fight-their-pro-gmo-war

folta update

...Turns out that Monsanto executive solicited pro-GMO articles from university researchers, and passed the “research” off as independent science which the biotech giant then used to prop up its image and further its agenda.

We know this, thanks to thousands of pages of emails obtained by U.S. Right to Know (USRTK) under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). And because a host of news outlets—including the New York Times, the Boston Globe,Bloomberg, the StarPhoenix and others — are now running with the story.

For anyone who has paid attention, this latest scandal should come as no surprise. As Steven Druker writes in his book *Altered Genes, Twisted Truth*, "For more than 30 years, hundreds (if not thousands) of biotech advocates within scientific institutions, government bureaus, and corporate offices throughout the world have systematically compromised science and contorted the facts to foster the growth of genetic engineering, and get the foods it produces, onto our dinner plates.”

Will Druker’s book (published this year), and this new wave of bad press be enough to finally expose Monsanto’s “science” for what it i is — nothing more than an expensive, sustained and highly orchestrated public relations campaign?

The story behind the story

USRTK, a nonprofit funded almost entirely by the Organic Consumers Association, launched an investigation into “the collusion between Big Food, its front groups, and university faculty and staff to deliver industry PR to the public.”

As part of its ongoing investigation, the group filed FOIA requests to obtain the emails and documents from 43 public university faculty and staff. The requested documents included records from scientists, economists, law professors, extension specialists and communicators — all of whom, as the group points out, were conducting work in public institutions, all funded by taxpayers.

On its website, the group says, "We believe the public deserves to know more about the flow of money and level of coordination between public university scientists and other academics, and the agrichemical and food companies whose interests they promote."

And now we do. And we know exactly how the latest plan to deceive, involving a paid PR firm posing as an independent third party, was hatched.

According to Mother Jones, in an August 2013 email to nine prominent academics, Monsanto's strategic engagement lead Eric Sachs broached a plan: that the group would pen "short policy briefs on important topics in the agricultural biotechnology arena," chosen "because of their influence on public policy, GM crop regulation, and consumer acceptance."

Sachs assured the professors that the project would be handled discreetly. "I understand and appreciate that you need me to be completely transparent and I am keenly aware that your independence and reputations must be protected," he wrote. Two outside entities — an industry-funded group called the American Council on Science and Health and a PR outfit called CMA — would "manage the process of producing the policy briefs," "coordinate website posting and promotion," and "merchandize" the briefs by helping turn them into "op-eds, blog postings, speaking engagements, events, webinars, etc." This third-party management is "an important element," the Monsanto exec added, "because Monsanto wants the authors to communicate freely without involvement by Monsanto."

The explanation outlined by Mother Jones followed an articles by mainstream news outlets, including Bloomberg and the New York Times. Here’s a partial roundup of the coverage generated so far by USRTK’s investigation.

New York Times: ‘helped produce important payoffs’

In a September 5 article, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton credited USRTK with obtaining “thousands of pages” of emails, many of which the Times then requested on its own.

After reviewing the documents, and describing some of the email exchanges between Monsanto’s PR firm and academics who were solicited to write articles, Lipton concluded that Monsanto’s strategy was effective:

The efforts have helped produce important payoffs, including the approval by federal regulators of new genetically modified seeds after academic experts intervened with the United States Department of Agriculture on the industry’s behalf, the emails show.

Lipton singled out, among others, Kevin Folta, chairman of the horticultural sciences department at the University of Florida. Monsanto recruited Folta, Lipton wrote, ”to help with ‘biotechnology outreach’ and to travel around the country to defend genetically modified foods.”

Folta, who according to the Times became “part of an inner circle of industry consultants, lobbyists and executives who devised strategy on how to block state efforts to mandate G.M.O. labeling and, most recently, on how to get Congress to pass legislation that would pre-empt any state from taking such a step, received a $25,0000 grant from Monsanto to fund his travel and “outreach.” According to Bloomberg, the University of Florida donated the $25,000 to charity — after the Times story ran.

Despite the grant, and the incriminating emails revealed by the Times, Folta has long denied any “formal connection” to Monsanto. (USRTK provides a listof Folta’s many denials).

The Times also singled out Bruce M. Chassy, a professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, who in 2011 received a grant for an undisclosed amount to support “biotechnology outreach and education activities." Emails obtained by the Times reveal that Chassy and a Monsanto executive talked about efforts to persuade the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to “abandon its proposal to tighten the regulation of pesticides used on insect-resistant seeds."

Bloomberg: ‘How Monsanto mobilized academics’

The headline on an article posted October 2 by Bloomberg said it all: ‘How Monsanto Mobilized Academics to Pen Articles Supporting GMOs.’

Bloomberg reported that the “undisclosed recruitment of scientists from Harvard University, Cornell University and three other schools to write about the benefits of plant biotechnology is drawing fire from opponents.”

The Bloomberg piece focused on how the Genetic Literacy Project, a clearly pro-GMO nonprofit that says its mission is “to disentangle science from ideology,” published articles by the scientists on its website, without disclosing that the articles had been solicited by Monsanto and its PR firm.

Despite its headline, however, the Bloomberg report bends over backwards to present Monsanto and the scientists’ arguments that their articles weren’t influenced by Monsanto’s PR firm, CMA Consulting, even going so far as to infer that there exists a scientific consensus that GMOs are safe with this statement: “The challenge for the pro-GMO lobby is the yawning gulf between scientific consensus and public perception.”

The existence of a scientific consensus on the safety of GMOs is widely disputed by international scientists.

Boston Globe: ‘Harvard Professor failed to disclose’

Taking the local angle approach, a reporter for the Boston Globe focused on a Harvard professor caught up in the scandal.

Reporter Laura Krantz wrote, "A Harvard Kennedy School professor wrote a widely disseminated policy paper last year in support of genetically modified organisms at the behest of seed giant Monsanto, without disclosing his connection, e-mails show."

Professor Calestous Jumanot is author of an article titled “Global Risks of Rejecting Agricultural Biotechnology,” published on the Genetic Literacy website. According to the Globe, in an email to Jumanot, Monsanto’s Eric Sachs, head of regulatory policy and scientific affairs suggested a topic, a summary and a headline. Jumanot chose a different headline, but the gist of the article conformed to the PR firm’s agenda.

As the Globe, the Times and others outlined, the Jumanot was one of nine professors who received emails from Sachs.

...

http://www.alternet.org/food/monsanto-scandal-biotech-giant-solicited-academics-fight-their-pro-gmo-war

Senior academics at an Australian university are asking their bosses to pull the plug on a $4 million taxpayer funded research centre fronted by climate science contrarian Bjorn Lomborg.

The University of Western Australia (UWA) was given $4 million to establish the Australia Consensus Centre — a new arm of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, the US-registered think tank headed by Lomborg.

The cash grant came after more than $400 million was slashed for sciencefunding in the government’s 2014 budget.

Bjorn Lomborg, a favourite among conservatives and climate science deniers for his contrarian views on climate change, has claimed that while global warming is a problem, it should be placed well down a list of global priorities for aid and development spending.

DeSmogBlog investigations have found that Lomborg’s US arm has received funding from foundations with links to the billionaire Koch brothers and to billionaire “vulture capitalist” and major Republican donor Paul Singer.

UWA announced on April 2 that Lomborg would be given an adjunct Professor role at the university, but did not disclose the $4 million of taxpayer funding.

While Lomborg told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he had worked with UWA to prepare a proposal for the government, it has been reported that the idea came from the office of Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who has said that “coal is good for humanity”.

UWA has also said it was approached by the government to house Lomborg’s centre, not the other way around.

Academics from UWA and elsewhere have expressed frustration that the $4 million was handed over without any apparent competitive process being carried out.

The university’s Student Guild launched a “Say NO to Bjørn Lomborg” campaign, saying the decision to offer the money toUWA was “politically motivated, and it is an insult to the staff and students” at the university.

The Copenhagen Consensus Center claims to do cost-benefit analysis of policies to tackle global problems and claims that targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions are too expensive and that climate change won’t begin to have negative impacts on the world’s economy until near the end of this century.

Dr Frank Jotzo, a leading climate economist at the Australian National University in Canberra, claimed in The Guardian that the Copenhagen Consensus Center methodology “has no academic credibility” and pointed to fundamental flaws in the way the CCC assessed the impacts of climate change.

On Friday, staff from across the University of Western Australia’s schools and departments packed out a lecture theatre for a special meeting in an attempt to get some answers from university administrators.

Professor Stuart Bunt, of the School of Anatomy, Physiology and Human Biology, and vice president of the UWA Academic Staff Association, told DeSmogBlog:

Given the strength of feeling, many wanted to know if it was possible to cancel this. The question was rather ducked by the VC, Professor Paul Johnson. Our university prides itself on having high academic standards and selects staff very carefully. Some very young applicants, for example to our own school, have better publication records than Lomborg.

He said during the meeting, some were concerned how much academic freedom the Australia Consensus Centre might be able to have, given the reliance on government funding. “We were not reassured,” he said. “There’s a fear that people won’t be able to work without fear or favour.”

Bunt, who served 12 years on the university’s main decision-making Senate board, said academics were angry there had been a lack of consultation about the centre and Lomborg's appointment. He said it appeared the decision to appoint Lomborg and to establish the centre had been taken within a small group of university executives.

Bunt said he was also concerned that Lomborg’s work had been heavily criticised in the past. He said there appeared not to have been a risk analysis done on the impact that engaging with Lomborg might have on the university’s reputation.

Dr David Glance, the director of the Centre for Software Practice, told DeSmogBlog that some academics wanted to know if it was too late to cancel the centre entirely.

The main focus was staff wanting to know if there was an opportunity to reverse the decision. There was a lot of non-committal answers from Paul Johnson, the Vice Chancellor.

Glance said while the meeting started cordially, “it became less so towards the end” as frustrations began to rise. “People came out more depressed than when they went in,” he added.

DeSmogBlog was told by others in the meeting that academics expressed “shame and embarrassment” at the appointment of Lomborg and were “frustrated that they couldn’t get answers to their questions.”

In a highly critical letter released on the Conservation Bytes blog of Adelaide academic Corey Bradshaw, Professor Sarah Dunlop, Head of the School of Animal Biology at UWA, told university administrators that Lomborg’s academic record did not merit his appointment. The letter said:

Aside from the concerns expressed by others, the School is facing a difficult reputational challenge in terms of attracting high quality staff and students as well as establishing and maintaining national and international collaborations as a consequence of these events. As an example, an international Research Fellow has just informed us that, if Dr Lomborg’s adjunct appointment is confirmed, they will not bring their Fellowship to UWAbut, rather, transfer it to a more reputable University.

Additionally, existing PhD students in the School are concerned that this appointment will tarnish their accomplishments as graduates from this University. In addition, staff in the School have been inundated by correspondence from collaborators and stakeholders concerned about the University’s decision.

Professor Bunt said he was aware that other schools within UWA were considering drafting similar letters critical of the university’s decision.

UWA Adjunct Professor Paul Wills, of the School of Earth and Environment, told Fairfax media the appointment of Lomborg “tarnishes the reputation of the university.”

Dr Frank Jotzo, director of the Centre for Climate Economics and Policy at ANU, told The Guardian:

Within the research community, particularly within the economics community, the Bjorn Lomborg enterprise has no academic credibility. It is seen as an outreach activity that is driven by specific set of objectives in terms of bringing particular messages into the public debate and in some cases making relatively extreme positions seem more acceptable in the public debate.

Jotzo also said he believed the Copenhagen Consensus Centre was guilty of filtering out dissenting voices from its final recommendations.

The CCC has defended its methods, saying that Nobel Laureates and top economists have been engaged in the work.

UWA has said it will look to raise further funds for the Australia Consensus Centre. The CCC has said it would not accept cash from the fossil fuel industry.

http://www.desmog.uk/2015/04/24/academics-want-university-pull-plug-climate-contrarian-bjorn-lomborg-s-4million-consensus-center

AlterNet [1] / By Steven Rosenfeld [2]

Brooklyn College Defends Academic Freedom By Saying No To Koch Millions For Its Business School

June 25, 2014 |

Brooklyn College of the City University of New York has a new academic credential.

Unlike an estimated 150 colleges and universities that have taken $56 million from the billionaire libertarian industrialist Koch brothers since the 1980s—and then integrated their extreme right-wing agenda into business classes while censoring other views—the New York City college keeps rejecting Koch cash, an aggrieved libertarian business school professor complained in a detailed report [3] by InsideHigherEd.com.

The libertarian professor, Mitchell Langbert [4], apparently approached the Charles C. Koch Foundation twice—in June 2013 and again this January—seeking multi-million dollar grants to expand Brooklyn College’s business faculty. Langbert’s effort, however, were apparently rejected by his supervisors, who did not want to pursue the grants.

“The professor said that in the summer of 2013, he was in unofficial but promising talks with representatives from the Koch Foundation about a$4.3 million grant to advance market-based economics at Brooklyn College,” Inside Higher Ed reported [5]. “The grant would have funded the hiring of multiple faculty members and graduate students, and established an honors program and an institute on markets at the college.”

“The professor said that in January, after more months of administrative “dithering,” he tried again to talk to Hopkins about creating an institute for the study of financial regulations on campus—this time funded by a possible $9.7 million grant from the Kochs,” they continued. “He said he was largely ignored, until earlier this month, when the dean told him via email—a copy of which was obtained by Inside Higher Ed—that he would have to “cut bait” on the project to focus on getting the business school accredited.”

Brooklyn College and the Charles G. Koch Foundation would not comment for Inside Higher Ed’s report. Langbert, however, accused business school deans of imposing their politics by not pursuing the Koch cash. “You wouldn’t think the administration would act in a devious way and develop a political stance,” he said.

Langbert’s accusations are completely upside down. But the matter goes beyond a lone professor who often feels like an outsider, as demonstrated on his blog [4] where he takes great offense at anyone who does not share his smarmy views.

The Kochs have been giving millions to academic institutions with a deliberate agenda to promote pro-corporate and anti-government philosophies, and hiding those requirements in their private grant agreements, said filmmaker Robert Greenwald, who just released Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition [6],which discussed the education grants.

“The Koch brothers have a long history of giving grants with strings attached,” he said. “Our research for Koch Brothers Exposed foundnumerous examples of universities that took money with academic requirements. And students and teachers have been resisting, saying that requiring any kind of ideological litmus test runs counter to the very ideals of free and open education and learning.”

Universities taking Koch funds vet whom lectures in business classes, Greenwald said, presenting mostly libertarian viewpoints to the students. Those requirements also include the books and other materials that are used in class, Greenwald said, saying that these materials—often funded with Koch grants—oppose regulation, government and labor.

Brooklyn College is not the only school that has said no to Koch cash. Late last year, 50 educators at The Catholic University of America signed a letter protesting a $1 million donation from the Charles Koch Foundation to help start a business school. They noted the “stark contrast between the Koch brothers’ public policy agenda and our Church’s traditional social justice teachings.”

“Given the troubling track record the foundation has in making gifts to universities that in some cases include unacceptable meddling in academic content and the hiring process of faculty, we urge you to be more transparent about the details of this grant. Charles and David Koch have an ideological agenda when it comes to shaping the national debate over economics and politics that is not simply academic in nature,” their letter said [7].

“The Koch brothers are billionaire industrialists who fund organizations that advance public policies that directly contradict Catholic teaching on a range of moral issues from economic justice to environmental stewardship. As you well know, Catholic social teaching articulates a positive role for government, an indispensable role for unions, just tax policies, and the need for prudent regulation of financial markets in service of the common good. We are concerned that by accepting such a donation you send a confusing message to Catholic students and other faithful Catholics that the Koch brothers’ anti- government, Tea Party ideology has the blessing of a university sanctioned by Catholic bishops.”

The faculty’s letter was followed by an online petition drive that gathered 33,000 signers. In late February, however, the university’s top dean and president wrote [8] an essay for The Wall Street Journal defending the Koch grant, saying that the objections to the Koch via their political work to defund anti-poverty programs and cripple unions was “a rather strong form of guilt by association.”

To its credit, the leaders at Brooklyn College’s business school know better.

See more stories tagged with:

brooklyn college [10],

Insider Higher Ed [11],

Mitchell Langbert [12],

robert greenwald [13],

Koch Brothers Exposed: 2014 Edition [14],

Catholic University of America [15],

academic freedom [16]

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/education/brooklyn-college-defends-academic-freedom-saying-no-koch-millions-its-business-school

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/steven-rosenfeld

[3] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/25/professor-says-brooklyn-college-missed-chance-get-millions-koch-foundation#sthash.zAjOW4H5.W6pO8Rj1.dpbs

[4] http://mitchell-langbert.blogspot.com/

[5] http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/06/25/professor-says-brooklyn-college-missed-chance-get-millions-koch-foundation#ixzz35gobtdyV

[6] http://www.bravenewfilms.org/koch2014

[7] http://www.faithinpubliclife.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/FINAL-CUA-Letter.pdf

[8] http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/news/catholic-university-leaders-reject-criticism-of-koch-grant/

[9] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on Brooklyn College Defends Academic Freedom By Saying No To Koch Millions For Its Business School

[10] http://www.alternet.org/tags/brooklyn-college-0

[11] http://www.alternet.org/tags/insider-higher-ed

[12] http://www.alternet.org/tags/mitchell-langbert

[13] http://www.alternet.org/tags/robert-greenwald

[14] http://www.alternet.org/tags/koch-brothers-exposed-2014-edition

[15] http://www.alternet.org/tags/catholic-university-america

[16] http://www.alternet.org/tags/academic-freedom

[17] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B

The ALEC Board of Scholars includes^[1]:

Kay Coles James - President and Founder of the Gloucester Institute;^[2] and formerly Senior Fellow and Director of "The Citizenship Project" at the Heritage Foundation, Dean of the School of Government at Regent University, Secretary of Health and Human Resources for former Virginia Governor George Allen (where she implemented Virginia's controversial welfare reform initiative), Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management during George W. Bush's administration,^[3] Senior Vice President of the Family Research Council, Associate Director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy and Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services during George H.W. Bush's administration, member of the National Commission on Children during Ronald Reagan's administration, and Boardmember of Focus on the Family^[4]

Arthur B. Laffer - Inventor of the "Laffer Curve," often called "the father of supply-side economics," Co-chair of the Policy Council for the Free Enterprise Fund,^[5] a lobbying organization founded by Stephen Moore and other Club for Growth members;^[6] and formerly member of the Economic Policy Advisory Board during Ronald Reagan's administration and active in his 1980 and 1984 presidential campaigns, and Chief Economist at the Office of Management and Budget during Richard Nixon's administration^[7]

Stephen Moore - Founder of the Club for Growth and member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board^[8] who has been called "a voodoo economist";^[9] and formerly: Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute, senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee under Chairman Dick Armey (TX) and Grover M. Hermann Fellow in Budgetary Affairs at the Heritage Foundation.^[10]

Victor Schwartz - Partner at the Washington D.C. offices of Shook, Hardy & Bacon, LLP -- a law and lobbying firm that has represented big tobacco companies such as Philip Morris (now Altria Group),^[11] big pharmaceutical companies such as Bristol-Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline,^[12] and big technology companies such as Sprint Nextel,^[13] Microsoft^[14] and Sony.^[15] He has been very active in the arena of tort reform and has been called "the undisputed king of tort reform."^[16] and considered one of Washington, D.C.'s 50 top lobbyists;^[17] Formerly a lawyer and lobbyist at Crowell & Moring for 21 years; Director of the Federal Insurance Administration from 1978-1980, and a professor and dean at the University of Cincinnati College of Law.^[18]

Richard Vedder - Economics professor at Ohio University,^[19] and Senior Fellow at The Independent Institute^[20] and theAmerican Enterprise Institute;^[21] and formerly a commentator for the Mackinac Center for Public Policy on such issues as spending on public schools,^[22], for the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution on issues such as immigration and labor, and Board member of the National Taxpayers Union.^[23]

Bob Williams - Founder and Senior Fellow of the Freedom Foundation-- previously known as the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, a libertarian organization whose mission "is to advance individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited, accountable government"--^[24] Board Member of the State Policy Network and a "visiting fellow" at the Mercatus Center; and formerly an auditor for the Pentagon and Post Office, and a five term state legislator in Washington State.^[25]

Scholars' Connections to Charles and David Koch

Kay Coles James previously worked at the Heritage Foundation, which has received funding from the Koch Family Foundations.^[26]

Arthur B. Laffer’s Laffer Center for Global Economic Growth is tied to Koch Industries through its Vice Chairman, Richard Fink, and Executive Director Wayne Gable -- both prominent Koch executives -- and a $100,000 grant from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation in 2009.^[27]

Stephen Moore previously worked at the Cato Institute, which was co-founded by Charles G. Koch^[28] and has been largely funded by the Koch Family Foundations,^[29] and also at the Heritage Foundation, which has been funded byKoch money.^[30]

Bob Williams is a visiting fellow with George Mason University’s Mercatus Center State and Local Policy Project, a Charles Koch-funded project, to the tune of over $9 million since 2002.^[31]