webodec3ARCHIVEPreview
Open in TheBrain

Arnold, John

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see fdn /ventures KOCH

MERRI OK

sense about science?

pension reform

natl press assoc?

i suspect laura is in charge?

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ventures incubator boy?

https://clearpath.org/about-us/sam-mar/

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tnr

In early February, Axios reported that “Ezra Klein’s Abundance movement is getting some backup” in the form of a new group: Next American Era, headed by former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee head, Illinois congresswoman, and longtime Washington insider Cheri Bustos. Bustos’s group, per the report, would be committed to “‘pro-growth,’ deregulatory policies.” This is hardly surprising; for the past several years Bustos has been a literal corporate lobbyist at the extremely Trump-connected outfit Mercury Partners. Mercury saw its profits more than double in 2025 as it sold access to the Trump throne room.

Over the course of the three years for which we have lobbying disclosures, Bustos branched out from lobbying overwhelmingly on behalf of agriculture firms and municipal governments to work for energy firms and software behemoths, as well. In particular, Bustos registered as a lobbyist for OpenAI and Larry Ellison’s Oracle, two of the most central companies in the bubblish AI industry that is becoming increasingly omnipresent in our politics, economy, and daily lives. The two firms were also the biggest clients in Bustos’s portfolio; Oracle’s 2025 lobbying expenditures totaled over $11 million, while OpenAI’s were just under $3 million. Bustos’s next-largest clients in 2025 were Korea Zinc and battery manufacturer Gotion, both with around $2.5 million in total lobbying.

Facially, it seems odd for someone like Bustos, fresh off a stint of AI lobbying, to launch a centrist 501c(4) and immediately align with the abundance agenda, which generally represents itself as a movement focused on housing and utility transmission permitting. In reality, it’s of a kind with a deep techno-optimist, pro-AI undercurrent that has permeated abundance thought since before Derek Thompson coined the phrase “abundance agenda” in 2022.

In the spring of 2025, Thompson and Klein’s tome, Abundance, launched to a firestorm of discourse, both praise and criticism. Nearly a year later, the blaze has lessened—Trumpian destruction of the economy and democracy tends to take the wind out of the sails of cockeyed optimists, after all—but tensions in what writers on both sides (namely, Jonathan Chait and David Sirota) have called the “Democrats’ Civil War” continue to simmer.

The abundance ecosystem has tried to develop a “grass-tops” movement, which parlays an elite influence campaign into building a mass constituency. Abundance world has certainly been successful at the first part; with hundreds of millions of dollars (this figure is meant literally, not figuratively) flowing into abundance organizations and Klein playing an intellectual power-broker role within Democratic politics—to the point that it raised eyebrows internally at The New York Times, according to reporting from Axios. But with sitting mayors and governors explicitly name-checking the book and its authors, abundance has thoroughly permeated the political class. It has not, however, been as successful at building a broad-base constituency. (It is perhaps difficult to focus on a gauzy future of plenty when fascist shock troops are loose on the streets, acting with impunity.)

Despite Abundance making theNew York Times bestseller list (tech tycoon Reid Hoffman sending copies to everyone he knows probably didn’t hurt), Democratic voters have been notably leery about the abundance framework. Polling has shown that the base is far more interested in tackling corporate greed than it is in municipal red tape, and Klein’s attempts to cast himself as a bipartisan mediator in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination have undermined his status as a leading light on the left.

At the Abundance 2025 conference, prominent abundance think tanker Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute stood up to forcefully decry any allegations that the movement had been organized by elites, claiming that “abundance is not this astroturfed conspiracy. In fact, just the opposite: Abundance is emergent. Abundance is bottom-up.” He followed this declaration with the romantic sentiment that it was not donors who brought this movement together but fate, saying, “We were not herded and orchestrated: We found each other. The people and ideas in this ballroom pull on strands from multiple fields—think tanks, activists, organizers, elected officials, journalists, philanthropists, technologists, and entrepreneurs and investors.”

That is, notably, not what a bottom-up movement is. Grassroots movements are built on a foundation of organizing and mobilizing a mass membership. What Trembath actually described is very clearly a grass-tops strategy. Many people within abundance circles recognize, sometimes even celebrate, this dynamic. It was this very strategy that the Niskanen Center spelled out in its June 2024 manifesto charting how to build a so-called “abundance faction.”

The push for a bipartisan grand coalition, also laid out in Niskanen’s manifesto, has not succeeded either. The right flank of the abundance ecosystem has openly embraced some of the most vile parts of Trumpism. In the lead-up to Abundance 2025, the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Lehman, one of the speakers at the conference, called for “deportation abundance.”

Even Utah Governor Spencer Cox, who headlined alongside Klein and Thompson, and has a long-standing reputation as a (relatively) compassionate moderate who wants us all to “disagree better,” has veered toward rank partisanship and entrenching the power of an ever more authoritarian Republican Party. Cox moved to pack the Utah Supreme Court in order to gerrymander Salt Lake City, in what was an awfully aggressive approach for anyone who isn’t dead set on preserving the MAGA regime. The gerrymander would have only picked up one seat. But Cox has embraced a cosmic view of politics, where Donald Trump’s survival from an assassination attempt in 2024 was “miraculous,” spinning a borderline messianic interpretation of Trump’s candidacy and saying to Trump, “You, and only you, can be [the] kind of leader” it will take to repair the country.

Meanwhile, the Trump officials who were praised by abundance advocates as sage and reasonable, particularly Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, have been anything but. Wright has raised concerns that he is using his post to advance the business interests of the nuclear energy firm Oklo, where he was previously a board member, and is taking point on the American colonial takeover of the Venezuelan oil industry. Burgum is keeping busy cheerleading threats to annex Greenland, ignoring natural disasters in the actual interior, explicitly serving the oil and gas industry, and whitewashing American history by scrubbing any discussion of climate change, colonial violence toward Native Americans, and other stains on our heritage from national parks and monuments. Oh, lest we forget, he also oversaw the removal of the word “transgender” from the Stonewall monument, where his Interior Department recently abortively removed the Pride flag itself.

Curtis Yarvin, whom prominent abundance intellectual Steve Teles links to in this piece as the far-right edge of abundance, is considered central to the “new right,” which James Pogue described as “a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.” Yarvin, an antidemocracy nutball who wants to replace the republican system of government with a dictatorship or monarchy, also believes white people are innately more intelligent than other races, and has minimized slavery.

Despite this movement being studded by such miscreants and autocratic enablers, abundance is poised to exert significant influence in the near term, especially through a donor class that absolutely loves it and inside organizing like Ezra Klein’s appearance at a major Senate Democratic retreat. But if abundance liberals are to avoid missing the moment and find durable standing within center-left politics, they have to confront a glaring contradiction: their relationship to the AI industry.

AI skepticism and populist anger at data centers are surging. But abundance groups are increasingly aligning with deeply unpopular tech-titan pet projects like California Forever, an attempt by Silicon Valley bigwigs to build their own city from scratch between Sacramento and San Francisco. Housing policy group California YIMBY endorsed the plan, which led to California state Senator Christopher Cabaldon expressing confusion at a recent conference. California Forever also sponsored a recent “Festival of Progressive Abundance” in Los Angeles. The Charter Cities Institute, which advocates for the creation of autonomous cities unbound by existing legal code and envisioned as techno-optimist Meccas, sent an open letter to the Trump administration in support of Freedom Cities, alongside researchers at the American Enterprise Institute, or AEI, which is considered an abundance organization in the list maintained by Inclusive Abundance, the ecosystem’s main organizing arm.

On top of AEI, there is a host of other broadly pro-tech libertarian think tanks included in the Inclusive Abundance list, such as the (Koch-aligned) Cato Institute, the Cicero Institute (chaired by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale), primary Charles Koch influence operation Americans for Prosperity, and the Federation for American Innovation. FAI alum Michael Kratsios, now the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology, has been an aggressive AI booster and was central to Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s legislation that attempted to create a mechanism to functionally exempt the AI industry from any and all federal regulation.

Don’t just take it from me that abundance sometimes is awfully close to tech-libertarians; the Cato Institute itself has said so, and it is generally expert at what libertarianism means.

Abundance has been marketed as a movement focused on solving the crisis of housing affordability, but there has always been a distinct techno-optimist bent to the movement that looks favorably on AI and Silicon Valley. In the opening utopian vignette of Abundance, Klein and Thompson identify widely distributed wealth from artificial intelligence as the internal mechanism that enables our supposedly impending sci-fi-flavored future. Klein, in particular, was quite vocal that a major driver of his side of the project was about repairing the frayed relationship between progressives and technology—both the concept itself and the tech industry centered around Silicon Valley.

The Abundance 2025 conference, judging by its schedule, had as much programming around AI as it did around housing (there was more directly focusing on energy policy than either, though energy and AI are deeply interconnected). The author of President Trump’s AI Action Plan, Dean Ball (now at FAI), was a featured speaker at the conference, as was NVIDIA’s director of infrastructure policy and multiple other champions of AI.

Moreover, much, if not most, of the funding flowing into abundance organizing is closely linked to powerful Silicon Valley figures. Following the release of Klein and Thompson’s book, Open Philanthropy (another sponsor of the abundance conferences, since rechristened Coefficient Giving), which was launched by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, unveiled a $120 million fund focused on advancing abundance ideas. Half of the fund—$60 million—came from Stripe’s Patrick Collison. Arnold Ventures is a frequent abundance funder, which launched the Abundance Academic Network and a new abundance-flavored Vox vertical, among others. John Arnold made his fortune in energy trading and more recently joined the board of Meta specifically to serve as an energy adviser for data-center buildout. When welcoming Arnold to the board, Mark Zuckerberg said that, “as we focus on building AGI,” Arnold’s “deep experience” in “energy infrastructure will help us execute our long-term vision.”

Ever wonder why AI advocates downplay the climate implications of natural gas–fueled AI data centers? Consider Renaissance Philanthropy, an early pro-abundance foundation, which was created with money from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt. Schmidt has publicly stated that humans will never manage to control climate change, and that our best bet is to pour near-unlimited resources into developing an AI that can solve the issue for us. And Schmidt’s views are hardly niche within the realm of our would-be AI oligarchs.

In the most on-the-nose example, Abundance 2025 also had two literal trade associations that represent major tech firms among its sponsors: Chamber of Progress and the New American Industrial Alliance. The former of these is funded by literally every prominent AI firm in the game, from Marc Andreessen’s a16z to Amazon, Apple, Google, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Midjourney, and others.

None of this is an aberration: Silicon Valley has been at the forefront of developing abundance thought since its inception. Among the earliest proto-abundance treatises was an essay in The Atlantic co-authored by Patrick Collison and Tyler Cowen that called for the launch of a new science dedicated to studying how to achieve progress, which they creatively dubbed “progress studies.” In the seven years since their essay, progress studies has intermingled with other movements, such as effective altruism and rationalism, mainline Koch-style libertarianism, and supply-side progressivism, with a dash of technofascism comprising what Steve Teles has christened the “Dark Abundance” subfaction. The amalgamation of all these strands led to what we now would call the abundance movement (or ecosystem).

Cowen, in turn, runs key abundance funder Emergent Ventures, which was launched with a grant from Palantir’s Peter Thiel. Patrick Collison has marshaled part of his fortune to organize an annual retreat for abundance diehards in Sevastopol, California, where those invested in the success of the movement can gather, commiserate, and plan future efforts. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose a16z invests heavily in AI, fintech, and crypto, wrote his own call for abundance in 2023, titled “The Techno Optimist Manifesto,” with a whole chapter on “abundance.” Notably, one of Ezra Klein’s early proto-abundance columns built on another viral Andreessen essay.

Now, it should be noted that there are some in the abundance ecosystem who have been critical of AI in recent years. Thompson, while an enthusiastic fan of AI, who has been explicit about wanting to convince skeptics, has written about the technology’s downsides; fledgling abundance magazine The Argument (itself frequently techno-optimist and replete with Silicon Valley funding from Arnold, Collison, Open Philanthropy, and Emergent Ventures) has published several good articles that scrutinize the more boondogglish side of Silicon Valley’s latest obsession.

Even beyond the array of pro-AI interests lining up behind the abundance agenda, though, the AI industry and the data-center construction boom raise what should be uncomfortable questions for abundance advocates.

The movement’s central premise is that we can’t build and that we have created too many veto points that let parochial interests block important construction projects. But the data-center boom clearly shows that we can build. Or at least that mega corporations can when they put their minds to it. Granted, the sets of restrictions that apply to multifamily housing, energy transmission infrastructure, and industrial-scale data centers are all different, but frequently abundance proponents target the exact types of procedural bottlenecks that communities that don’t want data centers are using to block or delay tens of billions of dollars’ worth of them from popping up. In particular, community input meetings, air quality standards, and public interest lawsuits are frequent boogeymen of the abundance framework. But they are now the chief means by which communities are fighting back.

The data-center buildout also creates acute examples of why the types of bottlenecks that abundists decry are both absolutely necessary and, sometimes, still too weak. Examples of massive data-center projects being built against the wishes of their neighbors have become commonplace, to the point that foisting nondisclosure agreements upon elected officials over the details of the terms local government is giving to AI companies to build in their communities for economic development is becoming something of an industry standard.

Abundance tells us that we struggle to build and that procedural measures like public interest lawsuits, zoning restrictions, and community input meetings are blocking essential public goods. But then, at the same time, it has so far offered no comment on the reality that we are building plenty of data centers, often even while overcoming those democratic processes.

In Memphis, when Elon Musk’s xAI started operating without going through the permitting process—potentially illegally—we got a taste of how things work without the “bottlenecks” that figures like Thompson and Klein decry. The data center spewed toxic gas over a community that already bore significant air pollution, and did it without the public even knowing about it; more than a dozen local officials signed NDAs, which led to even some City Council members being completely in the dark about xAI’s operations in the city.

Perhaps Musk’s “Colossus” data center couldn’t have been built or would have taken much longer if it hadn’t pulled the wool over the eyes of residents and their government and had actually followed the law. But the flip side is that the progress that those costs have borne is a chatbot that, while it does sometimes fact-check kooky conspiracy claims, declared itself “MechaHitler,” provided planning assistance for a home invasion, removed clothes from people’s pictures on X without their consent, and generated thousands upon thousands of images of child pornography. Thankfully, the only cost for creating such an innovative piece of technology was an entire community being bombarded with toxic emissions that cause cancer and respiratory disease. Data-center expansion is already causing tens of billions of dollars in additional public health costs annually, disproportionately in poor, minority-majority areas like South Memphis.

Moreover this type of “behind-the-meter” energy supply is extremely common and trending up. More than three-fourths of the on-site power currently being brought online at data centers is natural gas, which, while its fumes are less toxic than coal’s, still emits large amounts of carcinogenic and toxic pollutants. Even worse, many data centers have diesel backup generators, which are far more detrimental to the health of people living nearby, particularly because of higher levels of nitrogen oxide and PM2.5 particles.

Public sentiment is also clearly turning against data centers. While polling indicates that voters are largely agnostic on data-center buildout as a hypothetical, there is a large body of evidence on the underlying elements that shows deep hostility toward the AI industry.

Politico and Public First recently found that 37 percent of respondents supported data centers to 28 percent opposed, with another 28 percent neither supporting or opposing, though with a major split along party lines; Democrats narrowly opposed, 36 percent to 33 (27 percent for neither), while Republicans had fairly strong support, 45 percent to 26 (24 percent for neither). This is similar to what NBC found in the summer of 2025, with 44 percent of respondents thinking AI would improve their family’s future versus 42 percent who thought it would make it worse. News site Heatmap found that only 44 percent of respondents supported a data center being built, even less than other types of energy infrastructure, including gas-fired power plants and nuclear reactors. There is also a substantial polling literature that shows Americans are deeply apprehensive of AI generally, although with very different views along gender lines—men tend to be positive about AI, while women are skeptical.

While apathy may be the prevailing mood nationally, with most voters having heard nothing at all about data-center construction, nearly every state or county-level case study available shows massive backlash brewing. Most tellingly, in the places where people have heard about data centers, they detest them. Virginia Democrats vocally ran against data centers last year and scored impressive wins. The 30th district, which includes data-center capital of the world Loudoun County, saw the incumbent Republican ousted by John McAuliff, who worked overtime to tie his opponent to the data centers. Similarly, 2025 saw two statewide spots on the Georgia Public Service Commission flip to Democrats over anger about data-center-fueled energy price hikes, the first statewide races the party had won in decades. State-level polling has shown antipathy in the ever-crucial swing states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

A growing number of localities have also instituted a pause on new data-center construction, including Prince George’s County in Maryland; St. Charles, Missouri; several Atlanta-area counties; and several counties in Indiana. State-level restrictions and moratoria are being debated across the country, from New York to Georgia to California. Given all of that, it’s hardly surprising that Morning Consult has shown that support for banning data-center construction has been surging; just between October and November 2025, the policy went from down by two points to up by five. It is becoming increasingly clear that this moment calls for campaigning on AI skepticism.

Abundance proponents, however, seem determined to swim against the current of public opinion. For some, as Eric Levitz implies in Vox, it’s a matter of the muddled picture of public opinion we have. For others, though, abandoning data centers would be like surrendering their raison d’être. Particularly for the groups that emerged out of the “progress studies” movement kick-started by Collison and Cowen’s Atlantic essay, part of the point of abundance has always been to foster a sense of techno-optimism.

There is nothing inherent to abundance thought that necessitates AI boosterism. Indeed on a recent podcast, Marshall Kosloff, who emceed Abundance 2025, recalled responding to a question about what the abundance line on AI is: “We want nothing to do with that.” As Austin Ahlman of the Open Markets Institute, one of Kosloff’s guests for the episode, pointed out, such sentiment is “nowhere close to where the status quo is,” where Silicon Valley elites clearly “view this as an easy vehicle for the regulatory structures that they need to very quickly do the AI buildout without any democratic discipline or oversight.”

In fact, in its “Abundance Landscape” report, Inclusive Abundance identifies artificial intelligence as one of the five core policy areas. Notably, transit, one of the most common talking points for abundance punditry, is excluded, though IA said it would include it in its 2026 report. Even outside of AI’s own dedicated policy area, the report also includes AI as one of the “opportunities” for abundance energy policy, saying “AI industry leaders and experts agree that this technology will need a tremendous amount of energy going forward. AI and energy experts must collaborate in order to meet the need for more energy.” A similar argument was made by Trembath in an article with Josh Smith of the Abundance Institute. The Abundance Institute itself has also pushed AI very aggressively, including encouraging the White House to attempt to preempt all state-level regulation via executive order.

In a bit of profound irony, data-center construction has broken free of the choke points decried by abundance to the point that it is now bidding up land value and resulting in further constraints on the supply of housing, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Now the data-center buildout, as well as being deeply unpopular and undermining the intellectual case for abundance, is directly jeopardizing what is supposed to be the movement’s central animating goal.

Elements of abundance raise important questions, particularly about how to build state capacity and the importance of government efficiency to public buy-in for ambitious governance (articulated well in this podcast by Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaking to Derek Thompson). But the framing of these questions is also saddled with an association with the excesses of ambition of Silicon Valley moguls—and their dark, antidemocratic leanings. If it’s hard to get people to say yes to an apartment building in their backyard, it’s doubly so to convince them to site a giant warehouse spewing toxic emissions and spiking their electrical bills in their backyard—especially if the best non-bubblish case for the data center is that it will increase the odds they will be unemployed.

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis

Dylan Gyauch-Lewis is a researcher at the Revolving Door Project.

Read More:

Politics, Abundance, Ai, Data Centers, Economy, Technology, Silicon Valley, Artificial Intelligence

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ref1 am prosp

The Revolving Door Project, aProspect*partner, scrutinizes the executive branch and presidential power. Follow them at therevolvingdoorproject.org.

The past few years have seen a widespread move away from free-market dogma, as policymakers search for new economic perspectives. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 proved to be a crossroads for economic orthodoxy. For the first time in more than a quarter-century, a Democratic administration did not entrust its economic policy exclusively to adherents of Robert Rubin’s philosophy, for whom the solution to any economic issue was usually “Be less of a Democrat.”

Instead, the Biden-Harris administration trusted progressives as a coalition partner, rather than an electoral faction that had to be dealt with, not worked with. The Biden administration attempted true industrial policy for the first time in over a generation, rekindled enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act, and didn’t shy away from stimulating the economy when it was foundering. And while Biden’s term has been a rousing success on most macroeconomic measures—the electoral loss turned in part on global inflation and the rollback of the temporary pandemic safety net—progressives’ increasing power within Democratic politics has caused some moderates to become enraged that they’re now expected to settle for the position of senior partner, and denied near-total control.

Enter the “abundance agenda,” an attempt to generate new messaging for a new political era in which neoliberalism has fallen rapidly out of favor. The term has been floating around for years, but has more recently become a rallying cry for a whole array of deregulatory causes. The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history. The Biden administration has started to usher in a post-neoliberalism, with more heterodox ideas competing for acceptance. Abundance is neoliberalism repackaged for a post-neoliberal world.

*Read more from the Revolving Door Project

What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset. The agenda’s advocates hate residential zoning laws—which, contrary to what they frequently imply, is something they have in common with us and most progressives—but also detest the National Environmental Policy Act, support fracking, oppose tenant protections, and are often deferential to the policy preferences of Big Tech.

While there are efforts to create abundance-oriented factions within both parties—in effect recreating the Republican and Democratic establishments that dominated politics throughout the 1990s and 2000s—the near-term focus is the Democratic Party. And, in their move to stake out partisan influence, abundance is explicitly seeking to weaken progressives. With that in mind, it’s worth understanding who exactly makes up the abundance movement.

The coalition includes many prominent centrist organizations, but also corporate interests and conservatives that MAGA pushed out of power within the Republican Party. Many components of this faction have financial ties to crypto, AI, Big Tech, and oil.

In October 2024, a number of organizations held the Abundance 2024 conference. The event was sponsored by Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together.

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How Vox’s new Silicon Valley-funded ‘Abundance’ vertical aligns with Silicon Valley’s political priorities

How Vox’s new Silicon Valley-funded ‘Abundance’ vertical aligns with Silicon Valley’s political priorities

John Arnold and other AI boosters have plenty of reasons to “streamline” energy capacity—some less noble than others.

byAdam JohnsonDecember 17, 2025

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:{:{earlier this month, Vox announced a new vertical dedicated to “growth” that’s funded entirely by the Arnold Foundation, the influence arm of billionaire former Enron energy trader and founder of energy commodity hedge fund Centaurus Energy John Arnold. Arnold has long-donated to center-liberal causes, some seemingly benign (investigative journalism) and others that are, to say the least, controversial (spy planes in poor majority-Black cities, for example). Arnold’s latest ideological—and economic—agenda is to promote so-called Abundance, a vague political movement currently fashionable among wealthy liberals that’s a constellation of conferences, think tanks, political action group, billionaire donors, and best-selling books by *New York Times* and *Atlantic* authors. }:

Their primary ethos is “growth” through deregulation of industry. Some of the proposals are sensible (obviously not all regulations make sense and regulations can, and often are, manipulated by other capital actors). But this seed of a decent, if entirely banal, idea has predictably morphed into an all-encompassing politics of deregulation and anti-Left populism that dovetails with the political needs of Silicon Valley, and the ultrawealthy in general.}:

Aside from the broader ideological aims it’s worth noting that, in a direct and urgent way, the primary focus on “growth” through rapid and broad deregulation aligns neatly with the most direct and urgent needs of Silicon Valley billionaires—including Arnold, and the company whose board of directors he joined in February 2024, Meta (formerly Facebook). Arnold has discussed publicly how he was brought onto Meta’s board specifically to handle the energy crisis facing AI companies,telling Bloomberg’s David Rubenstein in August of last year:

“I think [Meta was] looking for somebody who had some energy expertise. The amount of infrastructure that’s required to run the data centers for AI is immense, and the industry is under a real challenge. It is putting tremendous challenges upon the utility industry and the electric industry, in general. But the tech platform companies that are involved in AI are really struggling with this, I think, and my background in public policy is an asset to them.”

Translation: companies that have dumped trillions of dollars betting on LLMs understand that their energy demands are far outstripping capacity, and over the next years and decades getting ahead of these demands will be central to their need for infinite growth. Enter: “Abundance” as an ideological and public policy catch-all for these needs.

Vox’s Case for Growthvertical—while also focusing on related topics like housing and transportation projects—very much prioritizes energy and the building up of energy capacity, name checking it three times in their launch announcement. In Case for Growth’s subsequent articles, the role this supposed “cheap, clean energy” would play in allowing us to scale up AI is simply taken for granted, often spoken about in mystical and providential terms. In his article, “Breaking free of zero-sum thinking will make America a wealthier country,” Vox Senior Editorial Director Bryan Walsh made somewhat fantastical claims about “clean energy’s” immediate impact on “growing the pie.” While railing against the supposed myopia of “zero sum” leftists, Walsh insisted that

If you’re convinced the pie is fixed, you’ll resist immigration, block new housing, and treat technological progress as a threat rather than a source of abundance — even when those are exactly the changes that would create more opportunity for everyone.

In a genuinely stagnant, low-growth world, this might be rational. But we are on the cusp of technologies — from AI to cheap clean energy— that could dramatically increase the size of the pie.

This is a fairly lofty assertion. What is its source substantiating this assertion? Walsh links to another Case for Growtharticle entitled “The long, fun list of things we could do with unlimited clean energy” which reads like a press release for Silicon Valley. It never, needless to say, establishes the premise that we are “on the cusp” of “cheap clean energy” with any journalistic rigor. Progress is certainly being made in renewables, but even this has other environmental trade-offs and will certainly not, any time soon, usher in a post-scarcity future. This glossy puffery is not serious reporting on a complex and politically fraught topic. It’s Silicon Valley boosterism posing as policy reporting.

In addition to more overt advocacy for Arnold and Meta’s political interests around energy and AI, Case for Growth has thus far produced more abstract ideological defenses of neoliberalism that align with Arnold’s broader worldview, such as:

The final example is, indeed, fairly on-the-nose ideological propaganda making the traditional neoliberal argument that what’s most important is “growing the pie.” The substance of the articles vary but in general they lament an alleged rise of “populism,” attack the supposedly overly regulatory and zero-sum “Left” and the political forces against “growth”—a rather vague political goal that we are led to believe is, per se, unobjectionable.

Case for Growth is also running outright puffery for the AI industry more broadly. Their podcast, Explain It to Me, published an episode on “How AI could create ‘a world without work’” where they painted a rosy picture of a post-scarcity society where AI does most of our labor. “AI abundance,” host Jonquilyn Hill tells listeners, “essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much wealthier than we can even imagine today.”

In his article defending the AI industry from its doubters, “We’re running out of good ideas. AI might be how we find new ones,” Walsh insists—after box-checking worries around slop—that we should focus on the “pro-social uses of AI that could actually help address major problems.”

“If I wanted to change people’s minds about AI, to give them the good news that this technology would bring,” Walsh says, volunteering to promote the AI industry, “I would start with what it could do for the foundation of human prosperity: scientific research.”

The day before Vox announced their Case for Growth vertical, with an ostensible focus on promoting AI-oriented growth and “cheaper and cleaner energy,” the $1.6 trillion company Arnold is on the board of directors of, Meta, kicked off their PR campaign to frame their AI investments as environmentally sustainable. “Meta is seeing an increase in emissions related to AI and looking towards an array of clean energy and low-carbon solutions to manage AI’s needs and related emissions,” a Dec. 1 press release read.

Arnold, who was a special guest speaker for the top oil and gas industry lobbying group American Exploration & Production Council (AXPC) last year, promotes other neoliberal PR efforts. In 2024 he donated $175,000 to the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), an ostensibly liberal think tank funded by Big Oil, Big Tobacco, Amazon and Walmart, that I profiled in 2023. PPI operates the @CNLiberalism Twitter account (formerly @Ne0liberal) that attempts to make neoliberalism fun, cool, and novel while promoting bog-standard free market and anti-regulatory dogma for zoomers. Arnold has also lavished money on Bari Weiss’ “anti-woke” university, the free market think tank Niskanen Center, the rightwing American Enterprise Institute, and a similar Abundance publication launched earlier this year called The Argument.

This rah-rah posture for wealthy Americans is not new for Vox; it’s baked into their DNA as a media company co-founded by arch free-marketers Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias over 10 years ago. And they have long run sycophantic write-ups for billionaires—Bill Gates, MacKenzie Scott, Dustin Moskovitz, Sam Bankman-Fried(who funded Vox until he didn’t) and, of course, John Arnold. But this latest project is murky with its conflicts of interest, and ought to be more transparent about where Arnold’s and Meta’s financial interests come into direct contact with Vox’s deregulatory ideological output and seemingly benign-sounding “case for growth.” It’s not enough to disclose the funding source (which they, to their credit, do at the end of every article). They need to disclose what direct interests John Arnold and Meta have in promoting “streamlined” regulation and scaling up the electrical grid. It’s not solely about “smart policy” or “lowering costs” for the average person, but very much about promoting an urgent political priority for the industry and person funding the vertical.

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STATS now shares a website with Sense About Science USA, and provides this note about funding:

“STATS.org is run by Sense About Science USA; it is funded grants from the Searle Freedom Trust and a donation from the American Statistical Association. Sense About Science USA is funded by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation and donations from members of the public. Sense About Science USA does not accept industry funding or support. Sense About Science USA is wholly independent of any university, society, or other organization.”

==

fluff interview

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-money-lifelessons-arnold/trading-up-life-lessons-with-philanthropist-john-arnold-idUSKBN1K711I

...A: We started with K-12 education, because that is the root cause of so many problems: unemployment, homelessness, addiction, mental health. We focused on that for a number of years, and then started looking at other areas where flawed policies were leading to bad outcomes – like criminal justice, healthcare and public finance. What does the actual evidence show, about what works and what doesn’t?

==

2018

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/about/houston-gives/article/Houston-s-Laura-and-John-Arnold-use-13395299.php

no lnx art critic

Philanthropists Laura and John Arnold, in the offices of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation on Tuesday, Oct. 9, 2018 in Houston.Photo: Elizabeth Conley, Houston Chronicle / Staff photographer]

Although a birds’-eye view of Houston stretches for miles through the windows of the Laura and John Arnold Foundation’s headquarters in Uptown, visitors needn’t look beyond the serene lobby to be dazzled.

Light sparkles on a large Tara Donovan sculpture and illuminates a pensive self-portrait tapestry by Chuck Close, artworks that appear as purposeful as they are spectacular. Donovan’s cube structure is built from a gazillion small metal pins. Close’s tapestry relies on the warp and weft of thousands of woven threads.

Both pieces could be metaphors about the result of tedious processes, like the work of the Arnold Foundation.

While there is no such thing as an ordinary mega-philanthropist, the Arnolds are young (in their mid-40s), glamorously wonky and unimpressed by the typical rewards of high-dollar giving. They don’t make the rounds of black-tie galas or appear to care about seeing their name on new buildings.

[Texas’ top donors

in 2017

Michael and Susan Dell,

Austin — $1 billion

Charles Butt, San Antonio — $290 million

Laura and John Arnold,

Houston — $285 million

Joseph (Rusty) Walter III and Paula Walter, Houston — $101 million

David Booth, Austin —$50 million

Source: “Philanthropy 50,” the Chronicle of Philanthropy]

They launched the foundation in 2010, about the same time they signed the Giving Pledge initiated by Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, determined to give back most of their fortune to society.

While the Arnolds are not Houston’s wealthiest couple by a good stretch, with a net worth of about $3.3 billion, their giving sets a high bar.The couple and their foundation distributed $287 million in 2017, putting them at No. 8 among the Philanthropy 50, the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s annual list of the nation’s most generous donors; and No. 11 on Forbes’ list of America’s Top 50 Givers. Since establishing the foundation, they have distributed more than $1 billion.

Their multi-faceted, multi-issue foundation employs about 100 super-smart people across three offices (including New York and Washington, D.C.). They hesitate to call it a “do tank,” buzz-speak for an action-oriented think tank. But the foundation is tackling vexing problems in arenas that have not traditionally been influenced by philanthropy.

“There are a lot of ideas floating out there, and our value add is finding the ideas, putting them through a due diligence process and testing them. We help start pilot projects around those ideas; evaluate them; then, if they’re successful, try to incorporate them into policy or practice,” Arnold said. “There’s not a shortage of ideas on how to improve the world; there’s a shortage of implementation of those ideas. That’s really where we come in.”

The Arnolds have helped to initiate and influence major conversations (and some notable progress) in arenas that most recently have included bail reform, alternatives to arrest, pharmaceutical pricing, the integrity of academic research and political gerrymandering.

By necessity, some of the work involves politics and controversy. John Arnold has tweeted that he is “an equal opportunity special interest pot stirrer,” since the far-left press has called him “the next Koch brother” and the far-right has dubbed him “the next George Soros.”

“We view philanthropy as an engine of innovation — the risk capital for policies that could be superior alternatives but that governments aren’t incentivized to try,” Laura Arnold said.

The Arnolds are both proud “products” of public school systems and professional parents. John, the son of a Dallas lawyer who died when he was 18, is a mathematical savant who became a wonderkind natural gas trader at Enron straight out of college, then joined the billionaire ranks when he founded the hedge fund Centaurus Energy, which he closed in 2012. Laura, a Harvard and Yale-educated lawyer who grew up in Puerto Rico and Florida, came to Houston to help launch the exploration company Cobalt International Energy. The couple met on a blind date, and married 12 years ago.

While they have historically been publicity-shy, the Arnolds seemed genuine, warm and welcoming during our meeting in October. Their comments are edited.

What brought you down this path?

Laura: We were at a change in life — in a financial position to determine how we spend our time, with the enormous responsibility of setting an example for our children, and for our families. We don’t believe in dynastic wealth.We started investing in the low-hanging fruit - education reform - KIPP, Teach for America, YES Prep, the charter schools. After a few years it became clear that the inequities in education are really reflective of deep, endemic, systemic failures of broader social systems.

John: When we decided to start giving away more money, one of the first things we did was a broad survey of all the different types of programs in the United States, trying to find the most effective organizations. We learned a couple of things: First, the evidence on what worked was not convincing. Second, most of the programs that are really effective are already at scale. So the probability of finding a new program that’s highly effective and passes a cost-benefit test is remote. We started thinking, okay, this is going to be harder than just writing a few big checks. Focusing on policy seemed like the best way to achieve scalable and sustainable change and improvement in peoples’ lives.

Laura: Philanthropy pales in comparison to government in terms of financial resources on a problem. We spent a lot of time thinking about the role of philanthropy in this eco-system. You’ve got the private sector, the state governments, local governments, the federal government, universities.

You are so results-driven. Which of your projects to date do you consider most successful?

Laura: It’s a very hard question to answer. Policy change has such a long trajectory. And we focus on deliberately very hard issues, where there’s very little to no evidence base; where there are significant vested interests who have dominated the conversation; where you really have to engage in mind-set change and in data calibration; where you at least have to think, what are we even talking about? What do we know, what don’t we know?

We have had significant successes - pension reform being one of them. In criminal justice, risk assessments being another. But I wouldn’t necessarily call those the most successful things we’ve done; because in every area we focus on, there is huge potential for change. They’re just at different stages of development of the problem.

John: If you give a dollar to a new building, you can point to the brick and say, my dollar did this. You have that tangible outcome. In policy, you don’t know — did my dollar help create the change? In a number of areas where we work, we are considered the thought leader or have been a primary driver.

How is the foundation structured?

Laura: It is a C3 family foundation. We don’t distinguish in our giving between a C3, a C4, a PAC or whatever.If we have an issue, we want to work on that issue. Obviously, we stay within the lanes of compliance and organizational form. Most of the people in this office focus on the ‘do tank’ piece - the research, the policy recommendations, the data. Our C4 takes policy ideas and initiatives and implements them at a state or federal level, via advocacy. That’s where you would find more political work such as a ballot initiative or a specific legislative proposal. We’re also relatively active just in traditional political giving.

So “the work” involves everything. Generating an idea in and of itself is never enough; it will just sit on a shelf. You have to somehow mobilize support so an idea becomes reality. Sometimes that requires a law; sometimes that requires a ballot initiative; sometimes that requires discussions with government officials. All of that we do, through the right vehicles.

As co-chairs of the foundation, how do you divide your responsibilities?

John: Naturally some division happens, but we’re both deeply involved in all the areas we work in.

Laura: We’re together all day long, which is actually very sweet.

You have a huge, impressive staff.

Laura: We’ve been blessed and honored to have a team of true superstars. People are just blown away not only by their intellectual power but also by their humanity. These are people who truly could be doing anything, and they have chosen to devote their lives to changing the country. It’s this really incredible moment for philanthropy, and for us, and for our communities; that these people have honored us with their careers. We just try to get out of their way and not cause too much trouble so they can do what they do best.

How did your previous careers inform what you do now?

John: There’s a lot of similarities between investing and philanthropy. In both you’re putting money into a project, hoping for results. The diligence and thought process is very similar.

Laura: Although philanthropy’s much harder, because you’re not making widgets. With an investment, there’s only one outcome you care about, right? In philanthropy, you could be measuring the wrong thing, and it’s hard to measure. There could be ancillary consequences. It’s very hard to gauge at any point whether you’re succeeding. One of the many reasons John was successful at energy trading was that whatever the market was doing, even in the face of contrary arguments, if he believed something, he had faith in himself — at the same time being open to redirecting if he viewed the evidence as sufficiently strong. You have to have this force of conviction… because the milestones get fuzzy.

Are your kids engaged in philanthropy yet?

Laura: They are 10, 9 and 7. If you ask our kids what we do, they’re just now starting to understand what it means. We take them to the Food Bank and do things all parents should do. But I wouldn’t want them to do only charity work. We have to find ways of showing kids that we’re all part of this world together. The kids are a work in progress.

The art you display is amazing. What are we looking at here in John’s office?

John: A Baroque painting by Checo del Caravaggio of the Penitent Magdalene, another Baroque piece by a Flemish artist of a troubled man trying to get cured by the bishop, and then a couple of African sculptures. We collect a mish-mash from African tribal works to some Old Masters. Most of the work is modern.

That sounds like a de Menil mix.

Laura: I’ve really come to empathize with the de Menils’ approach, because as a collector you fall in love with pieces, you make mistakes, you evolve, you mature. The collection reflects all of that.

John: We were running out of wall space at the house, so we started bringing some of the nice pieces to the office.

Laura: It is great to live with art. We spend so much time here; if you don’t bring them where you live, you don’t see them as much as you’d like.

==

https://ntknetwork.com/who-are-john-and-laura-arnold-the-liberal-billionaires-youve-never-heard-of/

pounder definers

hit job on arnolds

early everyone involved in politics has heard of Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Michael Bloomberg – liberal billionaires who actively fund the far-left liberal machine.

And yet even the most astute political observer likely hasn’t heard of Laura and John Arnold, the latest liberal super-donors to come on the scene. Unlike Steyers, Soros, and Bloomberg, the Arnolds aren’t crisscrossing the country on an impeachment tour; they haven’t donated to multiple generations of liberal Democrats; and neither has served as mayor of the country’s most populous city.

Instead, John Arnold made his millions first as an energy trader for Enron, the company best known for “one of the most scandalous corporate bankruptcies in American history,” then as a hedge fund manager based in Houston. He retired at the ripe old age of 38.

Now he and his wife are quietly building an empire of non-profits and super PACs with increasingly political agendas. They’ve hired a former Democrat ad-maker and Obama staffer to help run Patients for Affordable Drugs, which has an affiliated super PAC and independent expenditure arm. That organization’s super PAC, Patients for Affordable Drugs Action, has thus far only used its funds to attack Republicans, according to available FEC data.

But that’s not all. Both Laura and John Arnold have given maxed-out donations of $5,400 to Sens. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND) this year; they each donated $23,900 to the Democratic National Committee and $28,500 to the Obama victory fund in 2008; and they’ve donated millions to groups like Planned Parenthood. Arnold also routinely criticizes President Trump on Twitter:

[twt]

@JohnArnoldFndtn

Trump announced presidency bid 17 months ago & I still have virtually no idea his position on any issue besides TPP. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/22/us/politics/donald-trump-visit.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share …

3:51 PM - Nov 22, 2016

President-elect Donald J. Trump met with journalists from the newsroom and opinion staff at The New York Times on Tuesday.

Trump, in Interview, Moderates Views but Defies Conventions

In a discussion at The New York Times, the president-elect was less adamant on prosecuting Hillary Clinton, the use of waterboarding and climate change.

nytimes.com

See John Arnold's other Tweets]

Outside of just financial donations to liberal candidates and causes, the Arnolds have also swooped into states to boost efforts that dictate winners and losers in the market. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Arnolds spent $500,000 to establish a soda tax in Philadelphia.

Like their liberal ally Michael Bloomberg, the Arnolds donated $20 million to research anti-Second Amendment initiatives and are hoping to raise an additional $30 million for the effort.

The Arnolds have also set their sights on redistricting, with heavy 2018 investments in states like Utah and Michigan. In these states, the Arnold’s “Action Now Initiative” is funding efforts to create commissions that would redraw political districting maps and force legislatures to vote on the maps it creates.

And just the other day, John Arnold tweeted that the $32.6-trillion price tag associated with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Medicare For All proposal is “wildly misleading.” Of course, even if the study were $10 trillion off, that would still exceed the current U.S. debt.

Despite keeping a largely low profile up until now, the Arnolds seem to be ramping up their political activity and spending of late. With less than 100 days until the 2018 midterm elections, keep an eye out for even more donations and public support from this up-and-coming liberal power couple in the days and months ahead.

==

bs ref redistrict label but not

Tho mich actually is, tho not flattering to gop in trelated topics

https://ntknetwork.com/laura-john-arnold-tied-bipartisan-super-pac-has-only-attacked-republicans/

A super PAC claiming the mantle of bipartisanship appears to only be spending money against Republicans, according to a recent Federal Election Commission disclosure filed Sunday.

Patients for Affordable Drugs Action spent $1.475 million in Q2 on a television ad buy attacking U.S. Senate candidate and Republican Bob Hugin of New Jersey. The money was paid to GMMB, a Democrat ad agency with close ties to President Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and liberal groups like the League of Conservation Voters and Planned Parenthood.

To make matters swampier, the founder of Patients for Affordable Drugs Action, David Mitchell, was formerly a founding partner at GMMB.

Meanwhile,all of the super PAC’s money came from the Action Now Initiative, a 501(c)(4) founded by Laura and John Arnold, billionaires who live in Houston.

The Arnolds’ decision to go after Hugin could undercut the squeaky-clean image they’ve tried to cultivate in the press. Hugin is challenging Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), an ethics-plagued Democrat who spent most of 2017 facing corruption charges for allegedly performing “official acts” on a Florida doctor’s behalf in exchange for money and gifts. The trial ended late last year when the jury remained deadlocked.

According to a recent NBC News report, Patients for Affordable Drugs claim they “support candidates from both sides of the aisle,” citing an April press release from the group’s independent expenditure arm, Patients for Affordable Drugs NOW, in support of a West Virginia Republican, David McKinley.

Still, the Arnolds’ super PAC has only spent money attacking Republicans thus far. It bears watching whether John Arnold, a hedge fund manager, and his wife Laura, continue their close association with Democrats and their policies.

==

ref 2

...Redistricting: $616,169

The group Voters Not Politicians has been fighting in court to get a proposal to re-draw political districts on the ballot. The fate of the ballot proposal is now in the hands of the Michigan Supreme Court.

If approved by voters, the ballot initiative would create an independent commission to determine Michigan's political districts.

Voters Not Politicians has $616,169 on hand with three months to go to the election. In the second quarter of the year, the group raised $701,018 and spent $373,122.

Its biggest expense, unsurprisingly, was on legal fees: $123,619 from April to July.

Its biggest donor during that time was Action Now Initiative, a Texas advocacy group started by billionaires John and Laura Arnold. After Action Now Initiative's $250,000 donation, the second-largest donation was $100,000 from the Michigan UAW Community Action Program Council.

The opposition group to the redistricting proposal, Citizens Protecting Michigan's Constitution, has $75,959 in the bank after raising $20,000 and spending $99,759  in the past three months.

More: Fate of independent redistricting ballot proposal in hands of Michigan Supreme Court

More: Emails show Republicans engaged in political gerrymandering, lawsuit claims

...

==

new investigation by Bloomberg Businessweek has revealed police in Baltimore have been secretly testing an aerial surveillance system that records the movements and actions of Baltimore residents in real time from a low-flying plane. The technology has been adapted from the U.S. military’s surveillance programs aimed at detecting roadside bombs in Iraq. The plane is equipped with multiple cameras that can record 30-square-mile swaths of the city at a time. The plane is the creation of the private company Persistent Surveillance Systems. The project is bankrolled by John Arnold, a former Enron trader and hedge funder. The plane has been circling above Baltimore since January, without the public ever being notified.

---

ref looks legit

Gun Violence Research Gets $50 Million Boost From Private Funders

In one swoop, a new $50 million initiative to boost funding for gun violence research is poised to eclipse the federal government’s meager efforts to understand the epidemic. Experts in the field say the fund, created by the Laura and John Arnold Foundation, could advance understanding of the causes and effects of gun violence and inform public policy.

The private push, if fully funded, would more than double what the United States  government spent on gun violence research over a recent 10-year period, according a 2017 academic paper that sought to calculate the yawning shortfall in federal studies of an issue that is among the country’s leading causes of injury and death.

Related Story

ROUNDS
Gun Violence Researchers to Congress on CDC: Show Us the Money!

The new reality for federal gun violence research is the same as the old one: Congress hasn't stepped up to pay for it.

BY ALEX YABLON

The investment came together quickly, considering its size. Jeremy Travis, the foundation’s vice president of criminal justice, said he and his colleagues were motivated by the Parkland, Florida, school shooting.

“The question we were wrestling with is, what can this foundation do to address the issues of gun violence given the newly energized conversation about how awful this problem is?” Travis said. “We support research. Federal research has been basically missing. The evidence base for good policy is basically missing.”

The Arnold Foundation has contributed $20 million and is looking to raise an additional $30 million to run a grant project that it is calling the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research. An advisory board, which has not yet been selected, will evaluate proposals from researchers and dispense the funds over the next five years. The RAND Corporation, a nonpartisan public policy institute, will oversee day-to-day operations.

“It can only be good news,” said Deborah Azrael, associate director of the Harvard Youth Violence Prevention Center. “Anybody who’s doing this work knows there’s been so little money available.”

Congress has long declined to fund gun violence research. Since 1996, the Dickey Amendment, a Republican-sponsored rider to the bill that provided funding for the Centers for Disease Control, has stipulated that the federal health research organization may not use money “to advocate or promote gun control.” Public health researchers believe the amendment does not impose an outright ban, but parsing its language is moot: the CDC almost never awards grants on the subject and Congress hasn’t appropriated any funds for the agency to study it.

“It’s very clear that the federal government has not stepped up to support the research that’s commensurate with the scale of the problem,” said Travis. “Compare this public health emergency to any other public health emergency facing the country, say HIV/AIDS, or traffic deaths, or cancer, or the opioid epidemic. The CDC budget for this is zero.”

Travis said the fund’s agenda will be informed by conclusions reached by the National Academy of Sciences after President Barak Obama asked that body to identify research priorities following the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012. In its findings, the National Academy  focused on five areas for deeper inquiry: characteristics of gun violence; risk factors that increase the likelihood of shootings; prevention; safety technology, and the influence of media.

Azrael already has ideas for projects the Arnold Foundation money could support. They include improving the quality of data on gun violence, which could be useful to academics years after the $50 million has been spent. Or sponsoring years-long studies of social groups affected by gun violence. Or clinical trials evaluating the effectiveness of violence reduction programs.

“Those eat up money quickly,” she said.

truthabout www

As an executive at Enron, John Arnold walked away with an $8 million bonus at the same time that the company’s collapse decimated the retirement savings of rank and file employees. Meanwhile, the New York Times reported that Enron’s collapse sank $1.5 billion in public pension assets, negavitvely impacting the retirements of teachers, firefighters, and countless other public employees.

After his tenure at Enron, John Arnold amassed a fortune as a hedge fund manager on Wall Street, becoming the nation’s second youngest billionaire. Today, Arnold is leveraging his fortune to bend public policy to his will.  According to his own disclosures, he has spent up to $50 million on a nationwide campaign to gut public pension benefits. He has financed every facet of anti-pension movement, including tainted research, political advocacy organizations, ballot initiatives, journalism, and the campaign coffers of anti-pension politicians.

The Truth About John Arnold is a project sponsored by the National Public Pension Coalition and Californians for Retirement Security. It is a roadmap that shows just how far one billionaire has gone to decimate retirement security for millions of public servants all over the country. Arnold spends through a number of channels, including his private foundation and political P

---

alternet

2) Billionaire John D. Arnold’s attack on public-employee pensions. Have you heard that the biggest problem facing our states, counties and cities is the bloated, lavish, insane level of money that goes to public-employee pensions? Of course you have, and that's partly thanks to billionaire John Arnold. Arnold got his start at Enron trading natural gas derivatives. After Enron he used his Enron money to form an energy-trading hedge fund. Now he is using his fortune to fund various philanthropic causes, including helping to keep Head Start running [9] when Republicans recently shut down the government. Unfortunately he has also dedicated part of his fortune to gutting public-employee pensions.

In a September report for the Institute for America’s Future, the Plot Against Pensions [10] (which has excerpts posted on Salon), [11]David Sirota showed how the Pew Charitable Trusts was working in partnership with (and funded by) Arnold. The findings in Sirota’s report include:

Then last week, in The Wolf of Sesame Street: Revealing the secret corruption inside PBS’s news division [12] at PandoDaily, Sirota revealed how PBS’ WNEThad solicited Arnold to fund a two-year series of “news” shows named “The Pension Peril” that would promote cutting the pensions of public employees. In this story, Sirota wrote:

“In recent years, Arnold has been using massive contributions to politicians [13], Super PACs [14], ballot initiative efforts [15], think tanks [16] and local front groups [13] to finance a nationwide political campaign aimed at slashing public employees’ retirement benefits. His foundation which backs his effortsemploys top Republican political operatives [17], including [18] the former chief of staff [19] to GOP House Majority Leader Dick Armey (TX). According to its own promotional materials, the Arnold Foundation is pushing [20]lawmakers in states across the country “to stop promising a (retirement) benefit” to public employees.”

WNET severed the relationship. According to the New York Times [21], "WNET, the New York City public television broadcaster, said on Friday that it would return a $3.5 million grant it received to sponsor an ambitious project on public pensions in the face of charges that it solicited inappropriate underwriting for the series.”

To its credit the Times’ story gave full credit to Sirota’s reporting,

"Earlier, after a critical report [12] on Wednesday by David Sirota on the website PandoDaily, WNET officials said they were comfortable with the foundation’s funding. Mr. Sirota sharply criticized WNET for accepting the Arnold Foundation money because John Arnold, a former hedge fund manager, has financially backed efforts to persuade municipalities to cut public employee pension benefits."

Note that Arnold allies are pushing [22] a ballot initiative in California to gut public-employee pensions.

P.S. A while back I also took a look at the campaign to turn the public against public employees. In Discover The Network Out To Crush Our Public Workers [23] I looked at some of the names behind the network of “institutes” and “policy centers” and what I called “cookie-cutter think tanks” that were issuing “reports” that basically claimed that the world would end if we didn’t “reform” (gut) the pensions and other compensation of public employees and stop them from being allowed to organize unions. Tracing through the directors of the various “institutes” and “pulling the threads” of partner organizations they listed, I found that many or most of the strings lead back to Wall Street. I wrote then:

“These corporate/conservative organizations are very good at manipulating the media and public opinion — it is their purpose. Their “experts” are well paid and always available to talk to reporters, appear on TV and radio shows and write articles and opinion pieces for newspapers, blogs and for their network of similar organizations. Their “reports’ and “studies” reach the conclusions that fit the strategy, and are crafted to sound just right. And there are so many of them! The result is development of “conventional wisdom” about what is going on in our society. This is why that conventional wisdom more and more reflects the corporate/conservative line.”

Of course, getting these things enacted often runs up against a troublesome problem: democracy. There are still places where voters have enough of a say to block some of the things the billionaires are demanding. But never fear, there are a few billionaires working on fixing that pesky democracy problem, too.

---

bs http://www.arnoldfoundation.org/

==

wiki

John Douglas Arnold (born 1974) is an American billionaire and former hedge fund manager who specialized innatural gas trading. His firm, Centaurus Advisors, LLC, was a Houston-based hedge fund that specialized in trading energy products.[2][3] Arnold announced his retirement from running the hedge fund on May 2, 2012.[4][5][6][7][8]

Contents

Early life

Arnold was raised in a middle-class family in Dallas, Texas, the younger of two sons. He has one older brother, Matthew, who also traded at Enron.[4] His father was a lawyer and his mother worked as an accountant at Arnold's Centaurus.[4][9] His father died when Arnold was 17.[4][9] In 1995, he graduated fromVanderbilt University with a degree in mathematics and economics.[9] He is a Lambda Chi Alpha.[10]

Career

Enron

After college, he began his career at Enron as an oil analyst but was soon promoted to assistant trader.[9] In 1996, he moved over to the Natural Gas Desk upon the departure of Jeff Bussan[citation ^needed] and started trading natural gas derivatives.[9] Using their new Internet-based trading network,EnronOnline,[citation ^needed] he is credited with making three quarters of a billion dollars for Enron in 2001 and was rewarded with an $8 million bonus.[9][11] One of his former colleagues dubbed him "king of natural gas."[12][13][14]

Centaurus

When Enron collapsed in 2002, he founded Centaurus with his previous year's bonus. His company now has as much as $3 billion in assets under management.[15] His employees include several big name energy traders including former Enron CEO Greg Whalley,[11] as well as Bill Perkins, Mike Maggi, and Conrad Goerl, previously of MotherRock.[16]

According to Arnold, "After Enron collapsed, there was a general revaluation of credit risk among energy companies. The better credits were less willing to take on the lesser credits as counter parties. So the lesser credits found themselves with fewer counter parties willing to trade with them, even though they still needed to hedge the pricing risks in their business. Hedge funds previously had not been involved in the over-the-counter market, except for the very largest, because the other participants were reluctant to grant credit to that type of entity."[17]

During the collapse of Amaranth Advisors, Centaurus is widely credited as being one of the major players on the other side of their position, and returning as much as 150% in 2005.[18]

At a recent energy conference, Arnold stated that he looks "to place bets on a market that he determines is 'biased'... we ask ourselves can we identify what is forcing a market to price a product at an unfair value, and then, what will push it back to fair value." Arnold also referred to the speculative trading that was taking place on the unregulated over-the-counter Intercontinental Exchange (ICE) and NYMEX's Clearport Trading: "Trading never went away... what has changed is the non-commercial type of interest... because of this there has never been as much investor interest as there is today."[19][20]

During August 2008, Centaurus acquired around 10% of the shares of National Coal Corporation (NCOC).[21]

Arnold gave a public speech to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), in which he opposed limits on financially settled trading positions but supported limits in the physical energy futures as they near expiration. Arnold said, "I try to buy things whenever they're trading below what [our] analysis shows to be fair value and sell things whenever our analysis shows that the forward curve is higher than our analysis of fair value." ^[22][23][24]

Philanthropy

"In 2010, the Arnolds signed the Giving Pledge, a commitment taken by the world’s wealthiest individuals and families to give away half of their wealth to philanthropy or charitable causes."[25] In 2011, Arnold donated over $100 million to different causes[26][27] including the Laura and John Arnold Foundationwhich they founded. In 2012 they gave away or pledged $423 million.[28]

The Laura and John Foundation claims to focus on three main areas: Criminal Justice, Education, and Public Accountability. On June 26, 2012, the Foundation launched the ERIN Project a powerful tool to help analyze the national K-12 education landscape[29] and on August 15, 2012, the Foundation launched theGiving Library to offer philanthropists an innovative way to enhance their strategic giving.[30] On July 1st, 2013, the New Jersey's Attorney General Anne Milgram and the foundation launched a data driven risk management electronic system to assist employees of the Criminal Justice department in their decision making.[31]

During the United States federal government shutdown of 2013, the foundation "would be donating emergency funds to the Head Start program so that some 7,000 kids from low-income families could continue to receive educational services."[25][32][33] The programs were at risk because their Federal grants were up for renewal after October 1.[25] If the full year's Head Start funding is restored when the shutdown is rescinded, the National Head Start Association expects to reimburse the Arnolds' donation.[25] But even with the Arnolds' donation, an additional 11,000 children remain at risk of losing their early education access because of the shutdown.[25]

Arnold has funded various politically-oriented 501(c)4 organizations, including Engage Rhode Island.[34] Many of the these organizations advocate pension fund reform, encourage state and local governments to reduce benefits to workers and to invest assets in riskier investments such as hedge funds.[35] Some have criticized his efforts, saying that hedge fund managers, such as himself, collect generous sums in fees for managing the funds, while the workers are left with reduced pensions.[36][37][38]

Personal life

Arnold is married to Laura Elena Muñoz.[39] Muñoz is an attorney in Houston, Texas and a former oil company executive. She is a graduate of Harvard College,Yale Law School and has a Master of Philosophy degree in European Studies from the University of Cambridge.[39] They have three children.[40]

References....

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http://pando.com/2014/02/13/how-pbs-is-becoming-the-plutocratic-broadcasting-service/

Just a few hours after anti-pension billionaire John Arnoldresponded to Pando’s exclusive story about media corruption, public broadcasting officials have now issued their own response – and like Arnold, they are stonewalling. Meanwhile, new questions are being raised about the larger pattern this scandal seems to embody.

Taking the “public” out of PBS

In its response to proof that they violated PBS’s own rules about conflicts of interest, WNET officials said only that “we are scrupulous about our editorial objectivity.” For its part, afterReuters’ Felix Salmon said Pando’s report “looks very bad for PBS (and) it’s also bad for Arnold,”  the Laura and John Arnold Foundation issued a second statement, this one claiming “we have nothing to hide” about the PBS arrangement. Yet, tellingly, the Arnold Foundation – like PBS – still refuses to release the full contract between itself and WNET.

WNET officials also once again refused to address questions about why they did not explicitly disclose Arnold’s funding of the pension programming. Pando previously reported that PBS only mentioned Arnold in a long list of funders at the beginning of a few PBS shows, but did not mention that Arnold was explicitly funding PBS’s pension series. In its new response, WNET pointed to just three generalized mentions as alleged proof that it disclosed their Arnold relationship. However, those officials had no comment about why they did not explicitly disclose to viewers the direct funding of the pension programming. They also did not address why they omitted any reference of Arnold in its promotional materials announcing the series.

PBS rules prohibit corporate, political or ideological interests from financing programming that directly involves those interests’ agendas. According to PBS’s website, the rules do this to prevent the entire frame of said programming from “pre-ordaining” conclusions and systemically skewing coverage in an ideological direction.

The “Pension Peril” series, funded by the anti-pension billionaire John Arnold, is a good example of how such skewing works to bias news coverage and suppress contextualizing facts. The individual public television journalists in the series may not knowingly be toeing Arnold’s ideological line when they conduct their “Pension Peril” reporting (indeed, Pando never suggested they were). However, as Pando noted in its original report, the core assumptions baked into the series as a whole - namely, that pensions are singularly creatingperiland driving state and local budget crises – are highly ideological and are not substantiated by empirical data.

Those “Pension Peril” assumptions, which often end up protecting corporate subsidies and downplaying the idea of tax increases on the rich, have been reflected in PBS’s pension coverage. Those assumptions also not-so-coincidentally happen to be the very ones being promoted by the Arnold Foundation in state legislatures across the country. Indeed, despite corporate subsidies dwarfing pension shortfalls, the foundation insists in its pension material that the primary “way to create a sound, sustainable and fair retirement savings program is to stop promising a (retirement) benefit” to police officers, firefighters, teachers and other public employees.

In its statement, WNET officials did not attempt to explain how their solicitation of Arnold for the “Pension Peril” series funding complies with PBS’s own rules.

Putting the “plutocratic” into PBS

Revelations of a billionaire anti-pension activist being permitted to stealthily finance anti-pension content on the public airwaves evokes memories from a decade ago. That’s when the modern campaign to privatize – and plutocratize – public broadcasting first began.

Back in 2005, that campaign involved the scandal-plagued Bush-installed chairman of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting launching a secret probe of PBS programs that evaluated how loyally those shows supported the Bush administration’s agenda. Some of those shows were subsequently cancelled, and as the watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) documents, PBS’s news coverage is shifting to the right. Meanwhile, in a report about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, FAIR documents:

In the midst of all of the attention to the CPB’s fight against liberal bias, the agency quietly announced a round of grantees for its “America at a Crossroads” project (6/27/05). Among the projects receiving CPB support are The Case for War, a film about neoconservative Richard Perle made by Perle’s longtime friend Brian Lapping; The Sound of the Guns, a film about former CIA director William Colby made by Colby’s son; Soldiers of the Future, which “will tell the story of Donald Rumsfeld’s recent efforts to transform America’s military”; Warriors, in which American Enterprise editor Karl Zinsmeister argues that the U.S. military “attracts a cross-section of citizens motivated by idealism and patriotism”; and Studying Hatred, a film by David Horowitz co-author Peter Collier.

FAIR notes that “a rival to Fox News Channel could be launched with the list of conservatives who have hosted or produced shows on public television” in recent years. According to the group, those include John McLaughlin, Peggy Noonan, Ben Wattenberg, Laura Ingraham and Larry Elder, Tony Brown, William Bennett, Milton Friedman, Fred Barnes and Tony Snow. Additionally, notes the group,  “Corporate and investment-oriented shows such as Wall Street Week, Adam Smith’s Money World, The Nightly Business Report and CEO Exchange have long been a staple of PBS programming.”

As Pando previously noted, PBS now airs programs like the “Free Markets Series”promoting right-wing voices and financed by a foundation funded by a billionaire Wall Street investor and run by a financier of right-wing political causes. According to American University, it is also scheduled to this year distribute “an extended slate of documentaries” from a right-wing Koch funded front group run by corporate and financial executives and staffed by a panoply of right-wing media voices. One of the programs is about “the evils of the welfare system.”

A call for enforcement of PBS’s own rules

In response to Pando’s exclusive report on the Arnold-PBS connection, FAIR and others are calling for action to enforce the rules the public broadcasting system tells Congress it is following.

“Those who created the PBS system were explicit about one thing: Commercial conflicts of interest – from sponsors to corporate owners – affect the kind of journalism that a media outlet can produce,” said FAIR’s Peter Hart. “PBS sets a high bar for themselves; if we want independent, aggressive public broadcasting, then we must hold them to their own standards – especially when they fail to follow their own rules.”

University of Illinois professor Robert McChesney, who studies the tensions between money, politics and media, says one of the core problems is declining taxpayer funding for public broadcasting.

“Because the United States, unlike all other major democracies, fails to provide anywhere near sufficient funding for its public broadcasting system, the system relies upon foundations, corporations and wealthy individuals to bankroll much of the programming, including the news,” he said. “These private funders have their own agendas, and their involvement is always a tension for maintaining the integrity of the journalism.”

McChesney, a founder of the watchdog group Free Press, cited the Arnold-PBS relationship as proof that ideology is also at work in public television’s editorial decisions.

“Let some billionaire bankroll a ‘news’ series about the dangers of pensions for working-class people for the economy, and PBS faces no great criticism from Capitol Hill, where such views are regarded by the millionaires who dominate Congress as perfectly logical,” he said. “Let, say, Bruce Springsteen, offer the same amount of money to bankroll a series on how socialism might be a smart response to the economic crisis, and he probably won’t get his telephone call returned by his PBS contact.”

Wick Rowland, the former president and CEO of Colorado Public Television, predicts this trend will continue until legislators commit to much stronger financing of public broadcasting.

“There is going to be all kinds of mischief like this when we are telling the system we aren’t going to give it enough resources,” says Rowland, who was the longtime dean of the University of Colorado school of journalism.

He adds that there seems to be a bipartisan consensus to underfund public broadcasting not just because of the expense (which is comparatively tiny), but also because lawmakers fear the implications of a robust public media.

“There is a concern (among policymakers) that if public media becomes too strong and central as it is in other countries, then it becomes a dangerous force to them,” he said. “A strong public media would allow for some of the journalism and other work that public service broadcasting is supposed to do. But that kind of journalism disturbs the apple cart.”

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John D. Arnold - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Arnold

John Douglas Arnold (born 1974) is an American billionaire, former hedge fund manager, and ... The Laura and John Arnold Foundation was a private foundation founded by Arnold and his wife Laura. The organization was founded in 2008, ...

Net worth**‎: ‎$ 3.3 billion (February 9, 2018)

Born‎: ‎John Douglas Arnold; 1974 (age 44–45); ...

Children‎: ‎3

Alma mater‎: ‎Vanderbilt University

Early life · ‎Career · ‎Centaurus · ‎Philanthropy

John Arnold: The Most Hated Man in Pensionland - Governing

https://www.governing.com/topics/mgmt/gov-john-arnold-pensions.html

1.

The billionaire philanthropist has vowed to secure retirement for public employees. ... the Laura and John Arnold Foundation has supported a range of initiatives, ...

Houston's John and Laura Arnold Change Tacks on Philanthropy ...

https://www.barrons.com/.../houstons-john-and-laura-arnold-change-tacks-on-philanthro...

Feb 1, 2019 - Earlier this week, John and Laura Arnold, billionaires in Houston, Texas, announced they were shifting from a foundation model to a limited ...

Laura and John Arnold | Arnold Ventures

https://www.arnoldventures.org/people/laura-arnold-john-arnold/

1.

Laura and John established the Laura and John Arnold Foundation in 2010. They believe ... is Wasted on Bad Studies. These Billionaires Want to Change That.

John Arnold - Forbes

https://www.forbes.com/profile/john-arnold/

2.

John Arnold on Forbes. ... network LinkedIn and as a venture capital investor, but the billionaire is also putting money into social causes he's passionate about.

Houston's Laura and John Arnold use philanthropy to help balance ...

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/.../Houston-s-Laura-and-John-Arnold-use-133952...

1.

Nov 16, 2018 - Laura and John Arnold launched their foundation in 2010, about the time ... then joined the billionaire ranks when he founded the hedge fund ...

Trading up: Life lessons with philanthropist John Arnold - Reuters

https://www.reuters.com/...arnold/trading-up-life-lessons-with-philanthropist-john-arn...

1.

Jul 17, 2018 - Laura and John Arnold Foundation/Handout via REUTERS ... Some billionaires are household names, but others like John Arnold are virtual ...

Laura and John Arnold form Arnold Ventures - Houston Business ...

https://www.bizjournals.com/.../houston-billionaire-couplelaura-and-john-arnold.html

1.

Jan 28, 2019 - Houston billionaire couple Laura and John Arnold form new philanthropic ... Laura and John Arnold, one of Houston's wealthiest couples, have ...

Who Are John and Laura Arnold? The Liberal Billionaires You've ...

https://ntknetwork.com/who-are-john-and-laura-arnold-the-liberal-billionaires-youve-...

1.

Aug 6, 2018 - And yet even the most astute political observer likely hasn't heard of Laura and John Arnold, the latest liberal super-donors to come on the ...

The Truth About John Arnold

https://www.truthaboutjohnarnold.com/

1.

The Truth About John Arnold is a project sponsored by the National Public ... Security to show just how far one billionaire has gone to decimate retirement ... the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (John Arnold made a fortune at Enron), the ...

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