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brian MTA says in process 9 23

ON MTA WWW ENDORSE 1/24

SEE RESISTANCE SEE CORRUPT 3

SEE CAMPAIGN FINANCE

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FOXIC 2019 DENIAL JRNL FAIL

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PUB CIT REPT SEE CAMP FIN

Corporate Supremacist Super PACs

Cryptocurrency corporations drove the surge in 2024 corporate election spending, ultimately putting more than $170 million toward intervening in congressional races across the country and accounting for more than a third of the total sum of corporate money spent during that cycle.

Most of the 2026 surge also is attributable to the crypto sector, along with other sectors following crypto’s 2024 playbook of channeling millions into super PACs. These super PACs prioritize the interests of their business backers over either major political party or any candidate. Following the crypto playbook, they are set up to engage in both Democratic and Republican primaries and to support or attack candidates of either major party in the general election. This relatively new crop of corporate supremacist super PACs makes their prioritization of corporate self-interest explicit:

Together, the crypto, AI, Big Tech, and online betting corporations have spent $294 million – 57% of the total 2026 midterm spending by corporations so far. Most of their spending (60%) has backed these corporate supremacist super PACs (see Table 1).

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Table 2: Top 10 Corporate Super PAC Contributors from Crypto, Big Tech, AI, and Online Betting Sectors
CorporationTotal 2026 ContributionsRecipientsPolitical LeanAmount
Andreessen Horowitz$51.65 millionLeading the FutureCorporate$50 million
Congressional Leadership FundRepublican$1.65 million
Ripple Labs$49.6 millionFairshake and affiliatesCorporate$48.5 million
Commonwealth Prosperity FundRepublican$1 million
Congressional Leadership FundRepublican$100,000
Foris Dax (Crypto.com)$38.6 millionMAGA Inc.Republican$35 million
Keep America Great PAC, Inc.Republican$2.4 million
Senate Leadership Fund PACRepublican$740,000
Wisconsin Working PACUnknown$513,000
Coinbase$35.2 millionFairshakeCorporate$33 million
Senate Leadership Fund PACRepublican$500,000
Senate Majority ProjectDemocratic$500,000
Congressional Leadership FundRepublican$500,000
House Majority ProjectDemocratic$500,000
Bold AmericaDemocratic$50,000
Rolling Sea Action FundDemocratic$25,000
Winklevoss Capital Fund LLC and Gemini Trust Company$25.7 millionDigital Freedom FundRepublican$21.3 million
MAGA Inc.Republican$4.4 million
FanDuel$21.5 millionWin for AmericaCorporate$19.5 million
Senate Leadership Fund PACRepublican$500,000
Senate Majority ProjectDemocratic$500,000
Congressional Leadership FundRepublican$500,000
House Majority ProjectDemocratic$500,000
Black Bear PAC, Inc.Republican$25,000
DK Crown Holdings Inc. (DraftKings)$20 millionWin for AmericaCorporate$19.5 million
Senate Leadership Fund PACRepublican$500,000
Cantor Fitzgerald$10 millionFellowship PACRepublican$10 million
Blockchain.com, Inc.$5 millionMAGA Inc.Republican$5 million
Tools for Humanity Corporation$5 millionMAGA Inc.Republican$5 million
TOTAL$262 million----$262 million

Source: Public Citizen analysis of FEC data through the first quarter of 2026

SEDER CAMP FIN KILLED?

7 26 Corporate PACs Splurge; Virginia’s Data Center Revolt w/ Robert Weissman, Brennan Gilmore | MR Live

PRES CAP Neera Tanden - Wikipedia

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35 minutes, 46 seconds

We are back and we are joined now by Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, uh here to discuss their

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new report entitled Corporate Supremacist Super PACs Drive $500 million midterm spending surge. Robert,

Big Oil Takeover 'Now Complete,' Watchdog Warns as ...}:

Common Dreams

https://www.commondreams.org › News › big-oil](https://www.commondreams.org/news/big-oil-takeover-now-complete-watchdog-warns-as-exxon-lawyer-joins-trump-doj)

1 day ago — Robert Levy, who worked at Exxon for 17 years, announced in a recent LinkedIn post that he is departing the company, whose profits surged ...Read more

big Oil Takeover ‘Now Complete,’ Watchdog Warns as Exxon Lawyer Joins Trump DOJ

“The Justice Department that should be fighting to protect clean air and water and avert catastrophic climate change will now work on behalf of polluters to advance the poisoning of people and the planet.”

Jake Johnson

Jul 07, 2026

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The executive counsel at the fossil fuel behemoth ExxonMobil is leaving his role to join the Trump Justice Department’s newly renamed Energy and Natural Resources Division, a move one watchdog organization said shows that “Big Oil’s capture of the US government is now complete.”

Robert Levy, who worked at Exxon for 17 years, announced in a recent LinkedIn post that he is departing the company, whose profits surged amid the Trump administration’s illegal war on Iran. Levy will reportedly serve as senior counsel at the DOJ’s Energy and Natural Resources Division, which the Trump Justice Department renamed last month from the Environment and Natural Resources Division.

Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, said in a statement Monday that “the new so-called Energy and Natural Resources Division at the Justice Department explicitly aims to abuse emergency powers to drive oil and gas production, override state environmental enforcement, and generally serve at the beck and call of Big Oil.”

“Nothing could make that more clear than the naming of Robert Levy, ExxonMobil’s former executive counsel, a position that had him leading the company’s legal strategy on advocacy and civil justice, to run the division,” said Weissman. “The Justice Department that should be fighting to protect clean air and water and avert catastrophic climate change will now work on behalf of polluters to advance the poisoning of people and the planet.”

US President Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 on delivering massive, climate-destroying wins for the oil and gas industry, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars to support the president’s White House bid and the campaigns of his Republican allies.

Fossil fuel giants have received a significant return on their investment. As Owen Bacskai of the Brennan Center for Justice noted, Trump’s “signature legislative package—which one executive deemed ‘positive for us across all of our top priorities’—gives oil and gas firms $18 billion in tax incentives while rolling back incentives for clean energy alternatives.”

Trump has also “placed fossil fuel allies in charge of the agencies that oversee the industry and fast-tracked drilling projects on public lands,” Bacskai wrote. “In just his first 100 days back in office, Trump took at least 145 actions to undo environmental rules—more than he reversed during his entire first term as president. Before Trump even reentered the White House, the industry was reportedly pre-drafting executive orders for him to issue.”

Perhaps the biggest gift to Big Oil was the Environmental Protection Agency’s decision earlier this year to repeal the “endangerment finding” underpinning climate regulations.

Critics expect more of the same industry-friendly actions from the Trump DOJ’s Energy and Natural Resources Division, which last week touted its role in defending “Trump’s executive orders on unleashing American energy, reinvigorating the clean coal industry, and declaring an energy emergency.”

“The Justice Department that should be fighting to protect clean air and water and avert catastrophic climate change will now work on behalf of polluters to advance the poisoning of people and the planet,” said Weissman of Public Citizen.

Last year, Public Citizen and the Revolving Door Project released an analysis showing that the Trump administration has installed dozens of former fossil fuel industry employees, executives, and lawyers across the federal government, positioning Big Oil allies to advance “the massive expansion of polluting energy, the destruction of public lands, and the sabotage and suppression of renewable energy.”

“This is nothing short of a Texas oil industry takeover of the US government at the expense of consumers, the climate, public health, and public lands and waters,” Alan Zibel, a research director at Public Citizen, said at the time of the report’s release. “To execute his extreme, reckless, backward-looking fossil fuel agenda, Trump has stocked his administration with fossil fuel staffers and ideologues.”

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Trump’s MAGA Inc. SuperPAC Donor List is Littered with Corporate and Billionaire Influence Buyers  - Public Citizen

August 4, 2025

Trump’s MAGA Inc. SuperPAC Donor List is Littered with Corporate and Billionaire Influence Buyers

WASHINGTON D.C. — President Trump’s MAGA Inc. SuperPAC received $1 million or more from 58 donors since January, according to the SuperPAC’s most recent campaign finance disclosure filed last week.

The million-dollar donor list includes numerous corporate and billionaire donors with interests in influencing the Trump administration, including two crypto companies that were facing SEC investigations that have since been dropped and a seller of “skin substitute” products that benefited from the delay of a Biden-era Medicare rule to limit spending on their products.

“The real question this mega-donor list raises is not ‘how much,’ but ‘who from?’” said Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen. “By taking contributions from wealthy individuals and industries who want something from government, Trump’s SuperPAC has used pay-to-play to raise big money from special interests like a legalized shakedown.”

Public Citizen analyzed the new MAGA Inc. SuperPAC filing with the Federal Election Commission, covering the period of January 1 – June 30, 2025, and found the following:

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Oxfam America is joining with partners including MoveOn, the ACLU, Public Citizen, Indivisible,

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In what Public Citizen called "the greatest corruption in presidential history," US President Donald Trump and his family added $5 billion in cash to their fortunes this Labor Day as his new cryptocurrency was opened to the public market.

The currency, known as WLFI, is owned by World Liberty Financial, a company founded by the president's sons, Donald Trump, Jr., and Eric Trump. A Trump business entity owns 60% of the company and is entitled to 75% of the revenue from coin sales.

As the Wall Street Journal reported Monday:

The trading debut was most likely the biggest financial success for the president's family since the inauguration...WLFI is likely now the Trumps' most valuable asset, exceeding their decades-old property portfolio. While the president's family has continued to pursue property deals around the world since taking office, the fast-moving crypto business has had the biggest early impact.

Crypto is now the dominant source of Trump's wealth. As an investigation by the anti-corruption group Accountable.US found last month, "President Trump's net worth could roughly be $15.9 billion, with about $11.6 billion in uncounted crypto assets," meaning that the digital currencies now make up 73% of his total net worth.

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In addition to the tokens owned by World Liberty Financial, it found that two Trump-affiliated companies owned 80% of the $TRUMP meme coin as of May and had collected over $324 million in fees since Trump took office in January.

Meanwhile, Trump Media, which owns his online platform Truth Social, bought $2 billion worth of Bitcoin in July and reserved another $300 million in Bitcoin options.

As America's self-proclaimed "first crypto president," Trump has sought to curb regulations against the volatile financial assets.

In July, Trump signed the GENIUS Act, which purports to establish the US's first regulatory framework for crypto. However, critics noted that the law designated so-called "stablecoins," of which Trump owns many, as "commodities" rather than "securities," allowing them to face much looser oversight.

Though the bill passed with support from over 100 Democrats, Rep. Maxine Waters (Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, warned that the bill "legitimizes Trump actively building the most corrupt self-dealing crypto environment this country has ever seen."

Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) described Trump's latest $5 billion windfall as "blatantly corrupt and a brazen abuse of power."

"The current occupant of the White House," she said, "is putting personal profit above the people, using his power to illegally line the pockets of his family and billionaire friends while hanging everyday families out to dry by ripping away their healthcare, food assistance, raising the cost of consumer goods, gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and more."

While cryptocurrency is often billed as an asset available to everyone that levels the playing field of the finance world, in practice, its ownership is largely concentrated among the wealthiest Americans. According to a Harris poll published in April, nearly half of all crypto owners have a yearly income of over $150,000, putting them in the wealthiest 10% of the country.

"Your family gets higher energy prices and cuts to healthcare. [Trump's] family gets billions," said Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. "Corruption, plain and simple."

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash), a strong advocate for crypto regulation, said that such blatant profiting from the presidency makes Trump "easily the most corrupt president in our country's history," and emphasized that "Republicans in Congress are not lifting a single finger to exercise basic oversight."

According to data from OpenSecrets, just three crypto industry-backed political action committees (PACs) poured over $133 million into the 2024 election. Though they spent the majority of that money supporting Republicans, nearly 40% of it went to Democrats.

But although all this money helped to buy what Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong called "America's most pro-crypto Congress ever," according to Reuters, just 3% of legislators in the US House of Representatives and Senate own these assets themselves, including Sens. Dave McCormick (R-Pa.) and Tim Sheehy (R-Mon.), as well as Reps. Nick Begich (R-Ark.) and Mike Collins (R-Ga.).

But Trump's profiteering far exceeds the crypto holdings of every congressperson put together.

"We have only seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the damage that this corruption will inflict on the American people," said Bartlett Naylor, a financial reform advocate with Public Citizen. "The impact of attempts by the Trump family and others to buy and sell politics and politicians will continue to ricochet."

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Donald Trump is constitutionally prohibited from being elected to a third term in office, but that's not stopping his super political action committee from raising eye-popping sums of money.

A report from the Brennan Center for Justice released on Tuesday found that MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump's political campaigns, raised an "unprecedented" sum of $200 million between last November's presidential election and the end of June 2025. This massive war chest is more than six times the amount that former President Joe Biden's super PAC raised between the November 2020 election and the end of June 2021.

The Brennan Center also said that MAGA Inc. has become "almost exclusively a game for the richest of the rich," with 96% of the money it's received over the last seven-plus months coming "from donors who gave more than $1 million each." This massive fundraising haul raises serious questions about where this money is going, presuming that Trump isn't going to try to run for an unconstitutional third term.

The biggest donors to the super PAC have been entities that might benefit from regulatory or policy changes that the government could enact: Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, donated $25 million; investor Jeffrey Yass, whose company Susquehanna International Group owns a large stake in the parent company of Chinese social media app TikTok, donated $16 million; and Foris Dax Inc., the firm behind Crypto.com, donated $10 million.

Advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday took a look at the donations pouring into MAGA Inc. and found that cryptocurrency companies, executives, and investors had forked over a total of $41.7 million to the PAC, while fossil fuel companies and executives had shelled out $26.8 million.

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Jon Golinger, democracy advocate for Public Citizen, said that the massive sums being given to the PAC should raise real questions about corruption.

"The real question this mega-donor list raises is not 'how much,' but 'who from?'" he said. "By taking contributions from wealthy individuals and industries who want something from government, Trump's super PAC has used pay-to-play to raise big money from special interests like a legalized shakedown."

The Brennan Center similarly raised corruption concerns and said the super PAC's dealings were yet another example of how the{U.S. Supreme Court's 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission to scrap all limits on campaign donations from corporations and outsized interest groups had damaged the integrity of American politics.}:

"The degree to which wealthy donors appear to be using super PAC contributions to curry favor with the Trump administration once again illustrates how wrong the Supreme Court was... when it predicted that the 'independence' of groups like super PACs would prevent them from becoming vehicles for real or perceived corruption," the Brennan Center wrote.

A report from Politico last week suggested that the MAGA Inc. war chest could give Trump unprecedented power for an incumbent president to influence the 2026 midterm elections.

"Having millions of dollars at Trump's disposal—an unheard of amount for a sitting president who cannot run again—could allow him to become one of the biggest single players in next year's midterms, alongside long-standing GOP stalwarts like the Congressional Leadership Fund and Senate Leadership Fund," explained Politico. "Trump could boost his preferred candidates in GOP primaries, or flood the zone in competitive general election races in an effort to help Republicans keep control of Congress."

Trump has not yet ruled out running for a third term in office even though the United States Constitution's 22nd Amendment explicitly states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."

NOW READ:The one big reason why most Republicans are acting irrationally — without consequences

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AN 525 qatar lux jet trump keep after; trump will visit none of std 3 mil ally on trip

Trump—no stranger to allegations of blatant corruption—faced an onslaught of criticism on Sunday in response to ABC Newsreporting that his administration is preparing to accept "what may be the most valuable gift ever extended to the United States from a foreign government."

Ahead of Trump's trip to Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, sources told ABC that the administration "is preparing to accept a super luxury Boeing 747-8 jumbo jet from the royal family of Qatar—a gift that is to be available for use by... Trump as the new Air Force One until shortly before he leaves office, at which time ownership of the plane will be transferred to the Trump presidential library foundation."

The unnamed sources also explained that "lawyers for the White House counsel's office and the Department of Justice drafted an analysis for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth concluding that is legal for the Department of Defense to accept the aircraft as a gift and later turn it over to the Trump library, and that it does not violate laws against bribery or the Constitution's prohibition (the emoluments clause) of any U.S. government official accepting gifts 'from any king, prince, or foreign state.'"

"Even in a presidency defined by grift, this move is shocking. It makes clear that U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is up for sale."

ABC's revelations about the $400 million "flying palace" follow The Wall Street Journalreporting earlier this month that "the U.S. government has commissioned L3Harris to overhaul a Boeing 747 formerly used by the Qatari government... into a presidential jet."

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The White House, Boeing, and L3Harris declined to comment on the Journal's report. Similarly, on Sunday, the White House, Justice Department, and a spokesperson for the Qatari Embassy did not respond to ABC's inquiries.

However, as The Associated Pressreported Sunday:

Hours after the news, Ali Al-Ansari, Qatar's media attaché, in a statement said, "Reports that a jet is being gifted by Qatar to the United States government during the upcoming visit of President Trump are inaccurate.""The possible transfer of an aircraft for temporary use as Air Force One is currently under consideration between Qatar's Ministry of Defense and the U.S. Department of Defense," the statement said. "But the matter remains under review by the respective legal departments, and no decision has been made."

Amid the uncertainty, a range of people across the internet blasted the supposed plan, slamming it as "indefensible," "incredibly illegal," and "comically corrupt." Some critics pointed out that the reporting comes after the Trump Organization, the Saudi partner DarGlobal, and a company owned by the Qatari government last month reached a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar.

Journalist Mike Rothschild said that "this is spectacularly corrupt, a level of greed and depravity that is breathtaking, even for Trump. Air Force One—the people's plane—is going to be a flying palace donated by Qatar. No American should accept this."

Some critics highlighted security concerns. One legal expert declared, "An emolument and security risk all wrapped up in one!"

Robert Weissman, co-president of the watchdog group Public Citizen, said in a statement that "Trump's plan to accept a luxury plane from Qatar is blatantly unconstitutional, a textbook violation of the emoluments clause. The concern with foreign gifts is that they can sway a president's policy and predilections—and there's little doubt that Qatar wants to gift Trump a 'palace in the sky' for exactly that reason."

Weissman continued:

"The legal counsel who advised that this gift is OK because Trump will take personal control of it (through his library) only after leaving office should resign immediately, in shame and disgrace. The situation is no different than if the Qataris gave $400 million in cash to Trump and told him to keep it under his bed until 2029, when he could spend it freely. Except possibly it's worse, because he will use the plane in the interim, at great cost to the U.S. taxpayer, who will have to upgrade it.Even in a presidency defined by grift, this move is shocking. It makes clear that U.S. foreign policy under Donald Trump is up for sale. The juxtaposition with cancelled foreign aid grants and programs for poor and vulnerable people—cancellations that will cost millions of lives unless reversed—could not be starker or more morally grotesque.

"Is taking a gift from a foreign government this big a bribe or bad judgment? Or just Trump?" Congressman Mark Pocan (D-Wis.) asked on social media. "Wish the MAGA movement cared about ethics in their president."

Congressman Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.) said: "The level of corruption from President Trump and his White House is unlike anything we have ever seen in American history. It is appalling and criminal. Openly taking bribes."

Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Greg Casar (D-Texas) noted that the reporting comes amid issues at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

"While ordinary Americans' flights are grounded because of problems at the FAA, Trump is taking a $400 million bribe in the form of a 'palace in the sky' from a foreign government," Casar said. "Over and over: He gets paid. Everyone else gets screwed."

NOW READ:This is the only way to defeat the morbidly rich

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Defenders of climate and the rule of law blasted the Trump administration on Friday for using what one consumer campaigner called a "phony" emergency to wage lawfare agaist states trying to hold Big Oil financially accountable for the planetary crisis.

On Thursday, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed complaints against New York and Vermont over their climate superfund laws, which empower states to seek financial compensation from fossil fuel companies to help cover the costs of climate mitigation. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of human-caused global heating.

Separately, the DOJ also sued Hawaii and Michigan "to prevent each state from suing fossil fuel companies in state court to seek damages for alleged climate change harms."

"The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing."

Hours later, Hawaii became the 10th state to sue Big Oil for lying about the climate damage caused by fossil fuels. The Aloha State's lawsuit targets ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, BP, and other corporations for their "decadeslong campaign of deception to discredit the scientific consensus on climate change" and sow public doubt about the existence and main cause of the crisis.

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"The federal lawsuit filed by the Justice Department attempts to block Hawaii from holding the fossil fuel industry responsible for deceptive conduct that caused climate change damage," Hawaii Attorney General Anne E. Lopez said. "The use of the United States Department of Justice to fight on behalf of the fossil fuel industry is deeply disturbing and is a direct attack on Hawaii's rights as a sovereign state."

The DOJ on Thursday cited President Donald Trump's April 8 executive order, " Protecting American Energy From State Overreach," which affirms the president's commitment "to unleashing American energy, especially through the removal of all illegitimate impediments to the identification, development, siting, production, investment in, or use of domestic energy resources—particularly oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, geothermal, biofuel, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources."

Trump also signed a day-one edict declaring a "national energy emergency" in service of his campaign pledge to "drill, baby, drill" for climate-heating fossil fuels. The "emergency" has been invoked to fast-track fossil fuel permits, including for extraction projects on public lands.

Acting Assistant Attorney General Adam Gustafson of the DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division said in a statement Thursday, "When states seek to regulate energy beyond their constitutional or statutory authority, they harm the country's ability to produce energy and they aid our adversaries."

"The department's filings seek to protect Americans from unlawful state overreach that would threaten energy independence critical to the well-being and security of all Americans," Gustafson added.

Robert Weissman, co-president of the consumer advocacy watchdog Public Citizen, on Friday accused the Trump administration of "using a phony energy emergency declaration to illegally attack state climate and clean energy laws."

"There is no energy emergency, and Trump's stated reasoning for it is as much a scam as every other pathetic con and hustle this president attempts," Weissman continued. "Fake constitutional claims based on a fake emergency cannot and will not displace sensible and long overdue state efforts to hold dirty energy corporations accountable."

"These corporations have imposed massive costs on society through their deceptive denial of the realities of climate change, and through rushing us toward climate catastrophe," he added. "It's good policy, common sense, and completely within state authority, for states to hold these corporations accountable."

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Big news in one of the six lawsuits Public Citizen has filed so far against the Trump regime.

We’re so busy suing Trump that we haven’t even had time to tell you much about this particular case.

Here are the basics:

On Monday, we asked the judge to issue a temporary restraining order against what “DOGE” is attempting at the Department of Education.

Then — just yesterday afternoon — the judge issued an order restricting “DOGE” access at the Department of Education at least until February 17 while our lawsuit goes forward.

We will be back in court this Friday to make the case that “DOGE” should be locked out of the Department of Education permanently.

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the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will be kept out of the Department of Education’s systems until Feb. 17, in an agreement reached in a lawsuit brought by the University of California student government.

In a filing Tuesday, the student government and Education Department came to an agreement to keep all DOGE personnel out of the databases in order to obtain an extended briefing and hearing schedule.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, an Obama-era appointee, approved the agreement between the two sides and the first hearing will be on Friday.

The students, represented by Public Citizen, a left-leaning consumer advocacy group, sued the federal agency Friday, arguing that allowing DOGE employees into the department’s database would violate federal privacy law and the Internal Revenue Code.

The Department of Education has sensitive information on millions of Americans and students.

“Defendants’ action granting DOGE-affiliated individuals continuous and ongoing access to that information for an unspecified period of time means that millions of Americans from all walks of life have no assurance that their sensitive information — and that of their parents and/or spouses — will receive the protection that federal law affords,” the lawsuit states.

Trump stopping Penny production; Obama supported initiative. Coin org fights Back

“And because Defendants’ actions and decisions are shrouded in secrecy, individuals do not have even basic information about what personal or financial information Defendants are sharing with outside parties or how their information is being used,” it continues.

By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates

The Hill has reached out to the Department of Education for comment.

The first target since DOGE gained access seems to be the Institute of Education Sciences, which has canceled 169 government contracts. DOGE also posted on social platform X that the Department of Education canceled “89 contracts worth $881mm” and “29 DEI training grants totaling $101mm,” referring to diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

Similar deals to keep some DOGE employees out of agencies for a limited time have occurred in other lawsuits against federal departments such as the Treasury Department.

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the progressive advocacy group Public Citizen on Tuesday launched a new project aimed at tracking the incoming Trump administration's approach to corporate crime, an effort the watchdog said is particularly urgent given that many of the companies currently under federal investigation have connections to the president-elect.

Public Citizen found that of 192 individual corporations currently facing federal probes or cases, a third "have known ties with the Trump administration."

"They or their executives have either contributed to his inauguration, or Trump has nominated their former employees, investors, and lobbyists," the group noted.

Public Citizen said its new Corporate Enforcement Tracker will serve as "a resource for watchdogging ongoing federal investigations and cases against alleged corporate wrongdoing that are at risk of being dropped, weakened, or otherwise modified by the incoming Trump administration."

Corporate prosecutions plummeted to a 25-year low during Trump's first term, and Public Citizen's Rick Claypool—who is heading the new project—predicted that "it's likely Trump's second term will see a similar or worse dropoff in enforcement.

"Corporate crime enforcement fell during Trump's first term," Claypool noted, "even as his administration pursued 'tough' policies against immigrants, protestors, and low-level offenders."

"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)."

Four of the companies listed on Public Citizen's tracker—Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and X—are helmed by billionaire Elon Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's presidential campaign and is set to co-lead a new advisory commission tasked with identifying spending and regulations to eliminate.

Tesla is facing investigations by the Justice Department, Securities and Exchange Commission, Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and other agencies—probes that could be shut down by the incoming administration, which is set to be packed with lobbyists and billionaires.

Reutersreported last week that "Musk's potential to have extraordinary clout with the new administration raises questions about the fate of federal investigations and regulatory actions affecting his business empire, of which at least 20 are ongoing, according to three sources familiar with SpaceX and Tesla operations and the companies' interaction with the U.S. government, as well as five current and former officials who have direct knowledge of individual probes into Musk's companies."

"The inquiries include examinations of the alleged securities violations; questions over the safety of Tesla's Autopilot and Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems; potential animal-welfare violations in Neuralink's brain-chip experiments; and alleged pollution, hiring-discrimination, and licensing problems at SpaceX," the outlet noted.

Public Citizen also highlighted 16 companies that have donated to Trump's inaugural fund as they face federal investigations or enforcement actions: Amazon, Apple, AT&T, Bank of America, Coinbase, Ford, Goldman Sachs, Kraken, Meta, OpenAI, Pfizer, Ripple, Robinhood, Stanley Black & Decker, Toyota, and Uber.

"The five corporations with the most federal investigations or cases against them are Tesla (7), Amazon (6), Pfizer (5), Wells Fargo (4), and SpaceX (4)," the group said in a statement.

Concerns about the fate of investigations into major U.S. companies were amplified by Trump's choice to lead the Justice Department. Public Citizen noted Tuesday that Amazon and Republic Services, two lobbying clients previously represented by Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi, are among the corporations currently facing federal cases or investigations.

In a separate report published Wednesday, Public Citizen said that Bondi's record as a lobbyist raises "serious questions about potential conflicts of interest" and provides "sufficient grounds for senators to deny her confirmation."

"We depend on the DOJ to vigorously enforce our laws, hold corporate wrongdoers accountable, and protect the rule of law," said Public Citizen co-president Lisa Gilbert. "Pam Bondi is simply inappropriate for this post."

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...She recently spoke to defense attorneys in states from Oregon to Texas who are considering pursuing climate homicide lawsuits, an experience that she says highlighted the difference in how scientists and lawyers think about uncertainty. Researchers like her see calculating uncertainty as a sign of a study’s strengths, whereas lawyers see it as liability.

To avoid this conflict, Otto encouraged the prosecutors to think about qualitative statements that can be made with very high levels of certainty, like the fact that major oil companies’ emissions knowingly and definitively made heatwaves worse, rather than focusing on specific numbers, such as the exact degree of change compared to historical temperatures.

But attribution science hasn’t yet had its day in court, says Delta Merner, the lead scientist for climate litigation at the Union of Concerned Scientists, who develops scientific evidence to support legal cases. Courtrooms often lag behind science: It took many years to bring DNA evidence into criminal cases, for example.

“The scientific community needs to be thinking about the needs of the litigation community,” Merner says, “asking relevant questions in time to be meaningful for court cases.”

Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence has been gathering to support these types of legal arguments. In 2017, Merner’s colleagues used attribution analysis to find that 90 companies contributed to over half of all global temperature rise. More than half of these emissions were produced after 1986, they write, “the period in which the climate risks of fossil fuel combustion were well established.”

Merner herself published a paper last year finding the emissions from a similar list of fossil fuel companies were responsible for more than a third of the total area burned by forest fires in North America. “Just to give you an idea, that’s roughly equivalent to the size of the state of Maine,” she says — forest that otherwise might not have burned.

Now, groups like Bloom are hoping to use this kind of research to demonstrate how oil and gas companies like TotalEnergies are directly responsible for deaths of people like Elisa’s mother.

“This causal link could end up being a proof for the judges of the link between activities of fossil fuel companies, and impacts of climate change,” Goux says.

Collecting The Evidence

Watching it rain during Rhode Island’s winters when it used to snow depressed Aaron Regunberg, but it wasn’t until he decided to have a kid that he felt the creeping changes around him with a new urgency. What would winters be like for his son, when he reached adulthood?

These kinds of questions prompted Regunberg, as senior climate policy counsel at the non-profit think tank Public Citizen, to try to lay the groundwork for potential U.S. climate homicide cases.

The first challenge, he says, is establishing the causal chain between a fossil fuel company’s conduct and climate-related deaths. To do so, you have to show beyond a reasonable doubt that a company’s emissions contributed to climate change, which caused a climate-related disaster, which led to someone’s death.

“We should be thinking of those harms not just as tragedies, but as crimes,” he says.

“We should be thinking of those harms not just as tragedies, but as crimes.”

In the United States, the law considers some killings worse than others, separated in degree from negligence to extreme indifference to human life. The least serious homicide charge Public Citizen believes that fossil fuel companies can be tried for is negligent homicide, meaning that the company caused deaths through their careless behavior. The most would be second-degree murder, which implies acting with indifference to human life.

In addition to how recklessly someone acts, their intent also matters, a legal concept sometimes called mens rea.You don’t necessarily have to intend to kill someone to be charged. If “you basically knew if you do this thing, people are probably going to die, and you did it anyway,” Regunberg says, that’s a crime.

It’s surprisingly easy to show that oil companies knew that their behavior was harmful — decades earlier than they admitted to the public. All the way back in 1965, the American Petroleum Institute found that fossil fuels were causing rising amounts of carbon dioxide.

“The substance of the report is that there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequences of pollution, but time is running out,” the institute’s President, Frank Ikard, wrote then. “Carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas at such a rate that by the year 2000, the heat balance will be so modified as possibly to cause marked changes in climate beyond local or even national efforts.”

The consequences were well understood within the industry. Last year, researchers at Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research found that forty years ago, ExxonMobil also knew the repercussions of their business with shocking precision. In the 1980s, company scientists projected fossil fuel burning would cause around 0.2 degrees Celsius of global warming per decade.

“We find that most of their projections accurately forecast warming consistent with subsequent observations,” the researchers concluded in their 2023 report....

:

ymail 10 24

On July 1, the Supreme Court issued a profoundly misguided ruling that gives U.S. presidents sweeping power to break the law — even knowingly and intentionally — with no criminal repercussions.

Because the court’s decision in Donald Trump’s immunity case is based on the U.S. Constitution, a constitutional amendment is the only surefire way to overturn it.

And overturn it we must.

No president should have anything close to the kind of immunity the Supreme Court has conferred on the office. Not Donald Trump. Not Joe Biden. Not Kamala Harris. Not anyone who holds the office. Not ever.

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ymail

pub cit 10 24

Earlier this week, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to two scientists — John J. Hopfield and Geoffrey E. Hinton — for research on computers that led to current AI technology like ChatGPT.

Hinton is often referred to as the “godfather” of artificial intelligence.

He is also outspoken about the serious risks AI poses to humanity — even leaving a high-profile role at Google so he could openly discuss his concerns.

Here’s some of what Hinton has said about the dangers of artificial intelligence:

There is no one more qualified to testify about the ways artificial intelligence could be misused or get out of control. And of course Hinton is hardly the only expert warning about the threat of artificial intelligence — many of the world’s leading AI technologists are expressing concern.

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===

AN 11 24

COMM DR

Government watchdogs on Wednesday said they are "not going anywhere" and will continue pushing for U.S. President-elect Donald Trump to face accountability for his 34 felony counts and other alleged crimes, even as the Republican and his allies threatened the special counsel who has been prosecuting him.

"Trump will still be sentenced for the 34 felony counts on which he has been convicted, and other pending legal proceedings must

also move forward," saidRobert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, co-presidents of consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, which spent Trump's first term exposing corruption and unethical profiteering in his administration.

The group pledged to "mobilize Americans to resist Trump's agenda of cruelty and corruption" as it was reported that Special Counsel Jack Smith, who was appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Trump's alleged mishandling of classified documents and his role in the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, was in talks with the DOJ to wind down the federal prosecutions.

Under DOJ policy, a sitting president cannot face prosecution while in office.

Smith filed charges against Trump over the allegations, but the cases were thrown into uncertainty by the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in July that held presidents have legal immunity for "official acts" while in office.

In legal filings that were unsealed last month, Smith argued Trump should not be entitled to immunity from prosecution because he "resorted to crimes" when he attempted to overturn the 2020 election results.

Trump said in recent weeks that he would fire Smith "within two seconds" if he won the presidency.

His allies, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), have also demanded an end to what they call "lawfare" against Trump, with Scalise sayingWednesday that the election results proved American voters want federal and state officials in to "immediately terminate the politically motivated prosecutions of President Donald Trump."

Graham wrote on the social media platform X on Wednesday, addressing Smith and his team, that "it is time to look forward to a new chapter in your legal careers as these politically motivated charges against President Trump hit a wall."

Trump was convicted of 34 state felony counts in New York for falsifying business records related to a hush-money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels. He is currently scheduled to be sentenced on November 26, but his lawyers are likely to ask for an indefinite delay. There's also state case in Georgia stemming from Trump's attempts to reverse his 2020 loss.

The work of ensuring Trump is "not about the law," said Weissman and Gilbert, "will continue in earnest [and] will be more important in 2025 than ever before."

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) said Trump's victory "is making the urgency of accountability and checks on the presidency clearer than ever before."

"We're going to keep standing up against corruption and authoritarianism," said CREW, "as we have been for years."

Public Citizen was among more than 200 groups that announced a virtual eventcalled "Making Meaning of the Moment," planned for November 7 at 8:00 pm. More than 20,000 people had registered as of Wednesday evening.

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email 9 24

But a newcomer is putting those veterans to shame when it comes to the obscene amounts of money Corporate America spends corrupting our elections.

All of this, of course, was set off by the Supreme Court’s infamously anti-democratic Citizens United ruling back in 2010.

Public Citizen called for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United within moments of the decision being handed down. We’ve also consistently fought for disclosure of the secret spending that was unleashed by the ruling. And we’ve been a leader in the fight against corporate money in politics ever since.

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Project Censored

08.02.24 - 1:00pm

Scorched States, Where Heat Kills Workers / Media and Immigration Narratives

first half of the show, cohost Eleanor Goldfield speaks with Juley Fulcher — attorney and worker health and safety advocate for Public Citizen’s Congress watch division — about her recent report, Scorched States, an expose of the inadequate or wholly lacking protections for workers facing extreme heat in the age of climate chaos. Juley describes the legislative morass standing in the way of workers’ rights and how states like Florida and Texas have actually made it illegal to protect workers.

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11 23

brian says public citizen has signed on a MTA supporter

jonah?

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greg c says pc supports diff amend (john f) 3 23

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ymail 12 23

We get so much hate mail at Public Citizen.

It seems to be getting worse — perhaps not surprisingly given the increasingly violent rhetoric coming from Donald Trump and his adherents.

Here are just a few examples:

That’s all in addition to anti-Semitic remarks directed at me personally, like “Should have guessed you’re a f---ing Jew.” robt weissman prez

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ymail 1123

Public Citizen has been attacked by a far-right entity associated with Mark Meadows, Donald Trump’s former chief of staff and one of the MAGA operatives charged in Georgia for conspiring to carry out Trump’s attempted coup.

Please stick with me for more about this attack.

Here’s where Mark Meadows comes in.

Meadows — amidst being one of Donald Trump’s chief lackeys and sorting through legal difficulties arising from the plot to overthrow the 2020 election — has found time to be part of a far-right outfit that has sponsored an array of reactionary enterprises in Washington, D.C.

One of those extremist entities is the American Accountability Foundation (AAF), which claims to be “the one new conservative organization the Left fears most.”

To give you a taste of how the AAF spends its time, after President Joe Biden nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the group loudly repeated a Republican lie that she had called the judicial system “unfair” to sexual predators.

The Meadows-backed AAF also went after Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin — who had been nominated for a position within the Federal Reserve, and who has the temerity to think that fossil fuel companies have something to do with climate change — for missing a paperwork deadline when they were reeling from their son’s suicide just two weeks earlier.

And now the Mark Meadows-backed American Accountability Foundation has attacked Public Citizen through the Corporate Reform Coalition that we lead.

The Meadows-linked AAF issued a 79-page screed that denounces the Public Citizen-led Corporate Reform Coalition as a “motley crew” that is “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives.”

Of course, Public Citizen is not intimidated by — or afraid of a fight with — Donald Trump, MAGA zealots like Mark Meadows, or obscurely named right-wing front groups.

==

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SFOF Exposed

cmd armiak

In recent years, the State Financial Officers Foundation (SFOF), a group of Republican state treasurers and auditors committed to promoting “free-market, pro-growth policies,” has been weaponized by right-wing operatives and organizations to amplify a manufactured crisis around environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs that work to address the climate emergency and promote a fairer and more just society. SFOF Exposed provides an easily accessible resource for journalists, researchers, and citizen activists to identify the financial officers, operatives, groups, and funders involved in the politicized effort.

Contributors to this project include: David Armiak, Liisa Silander, Edgar Valles, Juliana Broad, Connor Gibson, Ansev Demirhan, Evan Vorpahl, and Arn Pearson.

This project was made possible with a grant from the Sunrise Project.

american-accountability-foundation

CMD

The American Accountability Foundation (AAF) is a nonprofit launched by the far-right Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI), which refers to itself as a “government oversight and research organization” that uses “aggressive research and investigations to advance conservative messaging, rapid response, and Congressional investigations.”

However, much of AAF’s work is actually focused on discounting and discrediting President Biden and his executive nominees through opposition research and negative, often factually inaccurate narratives. The organization uses the X handle @ExposingBiden to push its point of view. During the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson, for instance, AAF “put forward [the narrative] that she had supported lighter sentences for people who had been involved with child pornography,” according to journalist Maggie Severns.

AAF has released a number of reports to assist right-wing attacks on “woke capitalism” and ESG investing. In July 2023, it published Naming and Shaming: The ESG Movement’s Efforts to Defund Trade Associations and Put the Advocacy Community Out of Business. The report argues that ESG-related shareholder resolutions at public companies are actually “ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups,” specifically through defunding corporate lobbying.

In July 2023, AAF also produced Proxy Wars: Glass Lewis,a report claiming that the proxy advisory company Glass Lewis has an “overwhelmingly liberal” bias that has fueled the “implementation of ESG policies at major corporations.”

In April 2023, AAF published what it calls an investigative report titled None of It Is Our Money: An Introduction to the Leftist Activists and Liberal DC Insiders at BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street Using Your Money to Advance Their Political Agenda.The report has been publicized by other anti-ESG groups such as the Independent Women’s Forum.

DocumentCloud

Page: 7 THE ESG MOVEMENT ORGANIZATIONS BEHIND NAMING AND SHAMING POLICIES

While any shareholder who meets the requirements can submit a shareholder resolution, there are three groups that have an outsized influence on pushing and organizing lobbying, election spending, and values congruence resolutions – the Corporate Reform Coalition, the Proxy Preview triad, and the Center for Political Accountability. Each of these groups are each ideologically motivated to suppress the speech of conservatives and business groups.

CORPORATE REFORM COALITION The Corporate Reform Coalition is a loosely organized group of 85 investors, non- profits, unions, and academics that support forcing companies to disclose lobbying, trade association, and political spending. The group is not itself an independent entity, but rather housed within the liberal non-profit group, Public Citizen. Public Citizen was founded by Ralph Nader in 1971...

Page: 10 To put it plainly – Proxy Preview makes no effort to hide the fact that they are an arm of the ESG Movement and the organized Left. As You Sow As You Sow is first among equals in the Proxy Preview triad. As You Sow is also a particularly radical organization that filed 106 shareholder resolutions during the 2023 proxy season. As You Sow: • Supports resolutions to “adopt a policy/report on linking executive compensation to ESG metrics.” • Supports resolutions to “adopt a policy to establish net-zero GHG reduction targets.” • Supports resolutions to “report on direct and indirect lobbying included payments, memberships in tax-exempt organization that write legislation, and management decision-making process.” • Scores companies on a racial justice scorecard “to hold corporations accountable for implementing policies and practices aligned with their corporate statements — or lack thereof — on racial justice.” • Engages companies “on the egregious income disparity related to CEO pay that has polarized the US economy and created wage injustice.” Since 2020, As You Sow has received $1.7 million from George Soros’ Open Society Foundations:8

tides....

AAF’s anti-ESG research support was also cited in the March 2023 Consumers’ Research report titled Defeating the ESG Attack on the American Free Enterprise System.

In February 2023, AAF joined other major anti-ESG groups in signing a group letter calling on U.S. senators to “stop Biden’s ideological embezzling of Americans’ retirement accounts.” The following month, it signed onto an Advancing American Freedom letter thanking senators who opposed President Biden’s “woke 401(k)” rule.

AAF is led by Tom Jones, a former legislative director for Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) and was head of opposition research for Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s 2016 presidential campaign. According to the Wall Street Journal, AAF has received funding from Leonard Leo’s Marble Freedom Trust, but the Center for Media and Democracy has not been able to document this.

Operatives

Top Funders

Core Financials

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8 23

new guy? brian was referred to him

brian c spoke to? Jonah Minkoff-Zern is co-director of Public Citizen’s Democracy Campaign, where he works to build a national movement for our democracy by building grassroots support nationwide to get money out of politics and ensure all voters have access to the ballot. He has mobilized people to push for a constitutional amendment to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, helped win voting rights and other election reforms in New York state and coordinated national support for the Second Chances Florida ballot initiative, which restored the eligibility to vote to Floridians with felony convictions.

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Minkoff-Zern is a longtime organizer who has co-founded numerous organizations including Education Not Incarceration, which conducted grassroots organizing nationally to prevent students from being pushed out of the education system and into the prison system, and Student Alliance to Reform Corporations, a national student organization that played an important role in organizing people to protest the World Trade Organization in Seattle. He completed law school at Golden Gate School of Law in San Francisco.

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Freechild co-leads Public Citizen’s work building a broad movement to get money out of politics and ensure that everyone’s vote counts. She also leads Public Citizen’s advocacy work on election security and holding voting system vendors accountable for ensuring machines are safe from hackers. She co-founded the Secure Our Vote coalition, which works on the state and local level to encourage election officials to secure the vote and allow for recovery should a computer error or hack occur.

Freechild also works to overturn the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, which opened the floodgates to corporate spending in elections. She led Public Citizen’s successful campaigns in Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, Delaware and Washington states formally calling for a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United. She also led Public Citizen’s outreach effort to build a broad consensus among nonprofits and membership organizations that a constitutional amendment is the necessary remedy for unbridled spending in elections. With local partners, she led the 2018 passage of the D.C. Fair Elections Act, the District of Columbia’s first small-donor matching campaign finance program.

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primary 7/18 noam cites

some bad code

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jajan  2023

Public Citizen Applauds Reintroduction of Democracy for All Amendment

WASHINGTON, D.C. – U.S. Reps. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), Dean Phillips (D-Minn.), Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), and Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) today reintroduced the Democracy for All Amendment, which would overturn Citizens United vs. FEC. Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, issued the following response:

“Public Citizen applauds the introduction of the desperately needed Democracy for All constitutional amendment by Reps. Adam Schiff, Dean Phillips, Pramila Jayapal and Jim McGovern. The amendment would overturn Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo and restore the right of We the People to impose reasonable limits on campaign spending.

“There is a direct line from the U.S. Supreme Court’s horrific Citizens United decision to the rise of fascistic movements threatening the very existence of our democracy.

“In entrenching the ‘right’ of corporations and the super-rich to spend whatever they choose to influence election outcomes, Citizens United transformed our campaign finance system from flawed to frightful.

“Citizens United has entrenched an American oligarchy. As one shocking measure of this oligarchic control: The top 100 donors are responsible for two-thirds of all Super PAC contributions. Just 100 people!

“The tiny number of individuals – overwhelmingly white men – and corporations that dominate election spending exert an outsized and undemocratic effect on who runs for office, how candidates campaign, what policies are debated, who wins, and what are considered the boundaries of legitimate policy debate.

“It is this system that explains, as much as any other factor, why Americans are denied the policies they overwhelmingly favor: lowering drug prices, raising the minimum wage, protecting clean water, breaking up the Big Banks, making corporations and the rich pay their fair share of taxes, mitigating climate chaos, expanding Medicare, and much more.

“The reality and perception of super rich and corporate control of our politics – as well as the failure of the government to address the felt needs of people across the nation – fuels despair and alienation. It creates ripe conditions for conspiracists and demagogues to offer false solutions and appeal to people’s worst instincts. It has fueled the fascistic movements that pose a clear and present danger to our democratic future.

“We can’t go on like this – and there’s no reason we should. Citizens United is unmoored from the constitution and basic notions of democracy accountability. It’s time for it to be overturned by the Democracy for All amendment.

“The public is demanding action. Four in five Americans oppose Citizens United.Twenty-two states and more than 800 cities and towns have passed resolutions or ballot initiatives calling for a constitutional amendment, and millions have signed petitions calling for an amendment.”

democracy for all amendment

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brian c 1/27 no response to me?

i'm happy to do it, but thought you might like 1st swing

great article in alternet,

https://www.alternet.org/2022/01/billionaires-2656489510/

thought we should ask his org to endorse MTA, plus you could ask for pointers on how to get Public Citizen on board since he ran its Congress Watch for 10 years.

https://www.movetoamend.org/endorsement-form

Frank Clemente · info@americansfortaxfairness.org

fclemente@americansfortaxfairness.org  (202) 587-1616

Executive Director at Americans For Tax Fairness, @4taxfairness and @ATFaction

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FOXIC 2019

https://www.citizen.org/article/foxic-fox-news-networks-dangerous-climate-denial-2019/

really good sum analysis:

belated  post 2x?

Foxic:

in 2018,myriad extreme weather events wreaked havoc across the globe. Dire, authoritative reports were released, confirming unequivocally that the climate crisis is happening, that it’s driven by the burning of fossil fuels and that it requires immediate and bold action.

The first half of 2019 has already delivered more of the same undeniable climate chaos.

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But dangerous climate denial still persists in our political institutions, funded by Big Polluters and fed to large parts of the populace by right-wing media, further contributing to ongoing and deadly inaction.

In the face of a crisis that threatens our very existence, the most watched cable news network in the country — the Fox News Network — is still promoting climate misinformation and deploying tactics to distract from the urgency of the climate crisis, ensuring that its viewers’ understanding of the issue is based on deliberately distorted facts and distractions.

The millions of Americans who tune into Fox News are regularly bombarded with messages intended to undermine climate science, cast climate advocates as hysterical and frame climate policy as dangerous and un-American.

A review of Fox News programs for the first half of 2019 reveals that the network continues to give ample airtime to long debunked climate myths and fringe deniers.  Among Fox’s roster of contributors on climate issues, not one is a climate scientist, and none has appeared on any other major network to talk about climate during the period reviewed.

Methodology

For this analysis, we searched Fox News Network television transcripts from the first six months of 2019 that mentions of “climate change” or “global warming.”

...

Key Findings

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Denial Is Alive and Deadly on Fox News

With 391 mentions of climate change or global warming on programs airing from January to June, Fox News Network is far from silent on climate. 

In fact, Fox News three most-viewed programs are discussing climate more than their liberal counterparts at MSNBC. From January through June 2019, “Hannity,” “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” and “The Ingraham Angle” collectively mentioned climate change or global warming in 86 different segments. During the same period, “The Rachel Maddow Show,” “The Final Word with Lawrence O’Donnell,” and “All In With Chris Hayes” ran a combined 61 segments discussing the climate crisis.

Overall, the right-wing network ran 247 segments. The vast majority — 212 or 86% — were dismissive of the climate crisis, cast its consequences in doubt or employed fear mongering when discussing climate solutions. A mere 35 segments were neutral on the issue or represented straight reporting on the climate crisis or solutions absent editorializing.  

Two programs, “Special Report With Bret Baier” and “Fox News @ Night,” accounted for 71% of segments that were neutral when mentioning climate change or global warming.

Fox Whistles: Top Three Messages Used by Fox News to Undermine Climate Action

A common tactic Fox News uses to undermine climate science, action and advocacy is to frame the climate crisis as a political construct. In these cases, the host or guest assigns values to climate that are misaligned with the network’s largest demographic — those who identify as conservative and Republican. These commentators rarely, if ever, address the body of scientific evidence or climate events directly, but rather project the issue through a political lens. Viewers are left to form opinions about the issues in the absence of facts and evidence. 

In the past six months, the following three messages have been invoked repeatedly, in some form, across the majority of Fox News programs, but were highly concentrated in the network’s most popular opinion programs. They are intended to elicit a negative response to the climate crisis and those who advocate the changes needed to address it.

Message 1: Climate Change Is a Vehicle for the Democrats’ Radical Big-Government Agenda

Seventy-two segments discussing the climate crisis (34%) suggested that responding to climate change, especially through policies like a Green New Deal, will result in government control over our lives.

“Hannity” had the most segments featuring this message with 18, or 56% of total segments, followed by “Tucker Carlson Tonight” with 13 (32%) and “The Five” with 12 (41%).

Message 2: Responding to the Climate Crisis would Kill Our Economy and Send Us Back to the Stone Age

Closely associated with the “Big Government” message and often used in the same breath is the suggestion that climate action would mean extreme individual sacrifice and the demise of prosperity. Fifty-five segments (26%) equate climate action, including the transition to a clean-energy economy, with economic collapse.

“Hannity” leads again, using this message 11 times (in 34% of segments on climate), followed by “The Five” using the message 10 times (34% of climate segments). “Fox News @ Night” uses the message six times (26% of climate segments). 

Message 3: Concern About the Climate Crisis Is Liberal Hysteria

Rounding out the top three messages is one intended to undermine the urgency of the climate crisis by painting climate advocates or climate scientists as “alarmists”, “hysterical”, “chicken littles” and a “doomsday climate cult.” These labels not only deepen the political divide; they send a clear message to viewers to interpret the latest science on climate as exaggerated and to view scientists and advocates with distrust. Twenty-six segments, or 12% of discussions on the climate crisis used this form of name calling or used the terms “hysteria” or “alarmism” when referring to climate science.

“Hannity” used these labels eight times or during 25% of segments on climate. “Tucker Carlson Tonight” used them six times or during 15% of segments and “Fox News @ Night” used them five times or during 22% of segments.

Fox Fallacies and Tricks

In addition to these partisan signals, Fox News Network employed a number of other false arguments and tricks to keep climate denial and doubt alive during an era when climate catastrophe is becoming increasingly apparent to Americans.

Ad Hominem Attacks 

In the past six months, those who advocate climate action have been subjected to personal attack by Fox News hosts.

U.S. Rep.  Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has served as a regular punching bag for Fox News hosts and their guests. In one exchange between Sean Hannity and former Democratic National Committee Chair Donna Brazile, she jabs the network for its obsession with AOC, joking that programs have mentioned ”AOC well over 3,000 times.” For Ocasio-Cortez’s acknowledgment of the climate crisis and  support for the Green New Deal, Fox News has accused her of “capitalizing on a fear” and “pushing doom and gloom day and night.” She’s been called a “radical nut job”, “Scary-o-Cortez” and “dumb and totally ignorant of everything.”

While Ocasio-Cortez is by far the most vilified and attacked climate advocate, she is not the only one. Another example is provided by science communicator Bill Nye. After appearing on John Oliver’s HBO program, “Last Week Tonight,” Nye was Hannity’s “Villain of the Day.” A guest on “The Ingraham Angle” suggested that calling Bill Nye a scientist was akin to referring to “George Clooney as a doctor or Harrison Ford as an archaeologist.” Tucker Carlson suggested that Nye’s appearance was just a stunt to get his own Netflix series.

Red Herring 

A favorite distraction tactic used by Fox News hosts is to pivot any discussion about warming to the “hypocrisy” of “elites” and “liberals” who advocate climate solutions. The argument is that, if climate change is an existential crisis, then climate advocates would reduce their own carbon footprints to zero. But because climate champions like U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) fly on private jets and Ocasio-Cortez uses Uber instead of public transportation, the crisis must not be real or very urgent.

The hypocrisy argument takes many forms, but on at least 11 occasions in the past six months, Fox News hosts have referenced the use of air travel to discredit those concerned about climate or to question the reality of human-induced warming, like this example from Tucker Carlson on January 14:

Elites love to impose gas taxes on everyone else while flying private to conferences in Switzerland, where they worry about melting ice caps. That’s obviously a scam. Let’s just be honest about it.

Whether or not driving or using other forms of private transportation is hypocrisy is not the point.  In reality, while individual action on climate is important, it is wholly inadequate for addressing the scale of the climate crisis. The crisis requires, above all, systemic policy responses that can be implemented only by governments. 

Slippery Slope 

Another oft-repeated argument directed at climate scientists is that “they have been wrong before, so they must be wrong now.” The most common version of this argument is the myth that climate scientists predicted in the 1970s that there would be a dramatic period of global cooling. As Sean Hannity said in a typical segment, “Look at that, the big freeze, the next Ice Age is coming.” That’s what they told us in the ’70s. That then evolved into, uh-oh, the world has a fever, as Al Gore said and scaring people.” The reality is that a small pocket of scientists suggested the Earth could enter a new ice age in the next few centuries. At the time, 62% of climate scientists predicted warming. Forty years of observation and analysis have brought that number up to 97% of climate scientists agreeing that human beings are causing global warming. 

In the past six months, Fox News has not once referenced the scientific consensus around the climate crisis. According to recent polling, one in four Americans (25%) think there is a lot of disagreement among scientists about whether or not global warming is happening, and a mere 17% understand that there is a scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is happening. This lack of public understanding cannot be pinned solely on Fox News, but the media plays a role in public perception and understanding of issues. And no other major media outlet is pushing out climate doubt, to so many viewers, as often as Fox News.  

Cherry-picking

Frequently during the first half of 2019, Fox News hosts latched on to singular comments by Democratic politicians and what they deemed to be extreme responses to the climate crisis. These topics were brought up and mocked repeatedly in an attempt to deny the climate crisis, discredit policymakers and vilify climate policy.

The most common use of this tactic is the repetitive mention and mocking of Rep.  Ocasio-Cortez’s claim that “the world is going to end in 12 years if we do not address climate change” (a claim she later deemed “dry humor + sarcasm”). The comment was made in reference to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, which asserts that global temperature warming will likely reach 1.5°C by the year 2030. 

Fox News hosts referenced Ocasio-Cortez’s world-ending comment 56 times in the first six months of 2019. Out of 56 references, the IPCC report was mentioned only five times. On only two occasions did the network discuss the staggering conclusions of the report that informed Ocasio-Cortez’s remarks. A premade video segment from correspondent Peter Doocy identified that the report “doesn’t call for the end of the world in 12 years, but rather irreversible damage to the planet in a decade if emissions aren’t quickly curbed” and was aired on two seperate programs immediately following Ocasio-Cortez’s comment. 

The video clip of Ocasio-Cortez’s claim was played eight times during the remainder of January and continued to be replayed 12 more times, with the last showing on June 4. 

Sixteen references to the world ending in 12 years did not reference Ocasio-Cortez. These mentions were used to mock advocates of climate policy, deny the climate crisis and criticize Democrats’ attempts to enact climate policy.

Fox News Climate “CON”tributors

Assisting Fox News Network in climate denial and misinformation is a roster of long discredited climate contrarians whose views are solicited only by Fox News.  None of the following men have appeared on other major television news networks to speak on matters related to climate.

When discussing climate change in the first half of 2019, the Fox News Network repeatedly featured and legitimized contributors whose climate views contradict the consensus of the climate science community. Many of these contributors have ties to the fossil fuel industry and have been criticized for spreading misinformation about climate change. Notably, none are climate scientists. The following contributors each appeared on the Fox News Network to discuss climate change at least twice in the first six months of 2019.

Joe Bastardi is a meteorologist and a climate skeptic. He is currently the chief forecaster for WeatherBell Analytics LLC. He also works as a senior advisor at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute (formerly known as American Tradition Institute), a group denounced by the American Association for the Advancement of Science for contributing to an “environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas.” Bastardi insists that carbon dioxide is not a major player in determining global temperatures: “I believe the sun, ocean cycles and stochastic events play a much more significant role.” He has been a contributor on Fox News Network for more than a decade. 

In March, while appearing on “Hannity,” he suggested that human activity is not  “controlling the climate,” which is effectively contrary to the conclusion of nearly 200 worldwide scientific organizations and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Justin Haskins is an editorial director and a research fellow at the Exxon Mobil and Koch Foundation-funded Heartland Institute. With a background in communication and political science, Haskins is largely involved in publications and productions by Heartland. In 2017, he published a piece detailing six reasons he was a climate skeptic and was criticized for the falsehoods they presented. 

In April 2019, Haskins told a Fox Business reporter that he saw “no evidence that modest warming is creating any sort of a [sic] environmental crisis.”

Chris Horner is a senior legal fellow for theEnergy and Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal). Horner formerly served as a senior fellow for Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), one of Washington, D.C.’s top conservative think tanks. CEI has received at least $2.1 million from fossil fuel giant Exxon Mobil. Bankruptcy filings for Alpha Natural Resources in 2015 exposed Horner’s deep financial ties to the coal industry and work he has done on behalf of big polluters. 

In March, he went on “Hannity” to revive the debunked argument, intended to discredit climate scientists, that the same scientific community that is predicting warming predicted global cooling in the 1970s.

Rush Limbaugh is a conservative political commentator and host of the radio talk show “The Rush Limbaugh Show.” He does frequent segments on his radio show pushing his conspiracy theory that climate change is the creation of agenda-driven scientists who develop computer models that exaggerate scientific findings in efforts to prove climate change. He has proclaimed himself as “an expert in debunking this whole leftist political argument in man-made climate change.” 

In February, he appeared on “Fox News Sunday” again asserting that climate change is a hoax. “Climate change is nothing but a bunch of computer models that attempt to tell us what’s going to happen in 50 years or 30,” Limbaugh stated. “Notice the predictions are never for next year or the next ten years. They’re always for way, way, way, way out there, when none of us are going to be around or alive to know whether or not they were true.” 

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Bjorn Lomborg is a political scientist, author, and the founder and president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center. Lomborg has published three books that downplay the risk of climate change, despite having no background in climate science. Lomborg has frequently asserted that the risks of climate change are not great enough to justify large-scale policies to reduce carbon emissions, instead arguing that “drastic carbon cuts would be the poorest way to respond to global warming.” Claims made by Lomborg in his books have been frequently criticized. His first book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” drew criticism for failing to “meet basic standards of credible scientific analysis” and his second book, “Cool It,” for being “riddled with small inaccuracies” and “displaying a pervasive bias in its coverage and evaluations of climate issues.” Lomberg has ties to both the Heartland Institute and CEI and received an award from CEI in 2003.  

In April, Lomborg appeared on Tucker Carlson’s show and stated, “They’re telling us global warming is a problem. But it’s also a moderate one…”

Steve Milloy is the founder and publisher of junkscience.com and self-described as exposing “faulty scientific data and analysis used to advance special interests and hidden agendas.” In addition to spreading doubt about the science of the climate crisis, he is a senior policy fellow at the Energy & Environment Legal Institute and former director of internal policy and strategy at Murray Energy, the largest privately held coal producer in the U.S., and the co-founder of “Burn More Coal.” Milloy has financial ties to the tobacco, chemical and oil and gas industries, having gotten his start as a denialist for the tobacco and chemical industries in the 1990s. In 1998, he helped write the American Petroleum Institute’s strategy to challenge climate science. Milloy previously served as an adjunct scholar at both the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) and currently serves as a policy advisor to the Heartland Institute. 

In February 2019, Milloy appeared on “Special Report with Bret Baier” and claimed that climate change was just the Democrats’ pretext for advancing radical political agendas. “We always knew climate was a stalking horse for socialism, communism, totalitarianism, whatever you want to call it,” Milloy said.

Patrick Moore is a nuclear energy advocate and the founder of Greenspirit Strategies, a PR company that works “with many leading organizations in forestry, biotechnology, aquaculture and plastics, developing solutions in the areas of natural resources, biodiversity, energy and climate change.” Moore self-identifies as a founding member of Greenpeace, but the organization has denied this claim, stating that Moore “often misrepresents himself in the media as an environmental ‘expert’ or even an ‘environmentalist,’ while offering anti-environmental opinions on a wide range of issues and taking a distinctly anti-environmental stance.” Greenpeace also  identified him as “a paid spokesman for a variety of polluting industries for more than 30 years.” Moore denies the role of carbon dioxide in climate change and has previously encouraged the celebration of carbon, stating, “carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is the stuff of life, the currency of life, indeed the backbone of life on Earth.” 

While a guest on “Fox News @ Night” in March, Moore claimed a lack of evidence that carbon dioxide in contributing to climate change, stating “the climate crisis is not just fake news, it’s fake science.”

Marc Morano is the front man of the anti-climate-science websiteClimateDepot.com and author of “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change.” Morano has no scientific training nor educational background in climatology. The website is a fabrication of the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative and anti-regulation think-tank based in Washington, D.C., where Morano works as thecommunications director. CFACT receives funding from the Koch Brothers, ExxonMobil and Chevron, and gets hundreds of thousands of dollars from foundations associated with dirty energy tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife. Morano was in Rolling Stone’sarticle, “The Climate Killers,” listed as one of “17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.” 

In May he appeared on “Special Report With Bret Baier” attempting to discredit the United Nations’ climate reports, claiming their sole interests reside in politics and not science. He called the U.N. “a self-interested lobbying organization.” 

Mark Steyn is a Canadian author and columnist of SteynOnline.com. Steyn attended the King Edward’s School in Birmingham, U.K., leaving in 1978 when he was 18 years old. Steyn is often a featured speaker at climate denial conferences hosted by groups such as the CO2 Coalition, The New Criterion and the Heartland Institute. These events, with titles such as The Climate Surprise: Why CO2 Is Good for the Earth and the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change, are funded by Exxon Mobil, DonorsTrust and the Koch Brothers. He is infamously known for attacking Michael Mann’s “Hockey Stick” graph, which predicted a sharp rise in global temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere increased. He went on to call Mann “the Jerry Sandusky of climate science” and claim he “has molested and tortured data in the service of politicized science that could have dire economic consequences for the nation and the planet.” 

While a guest on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” on April 22, Steyn deflected the climate crisis while claiming Democrats merely use it as a platform to appeal to voters. “Climate change is essentially a boutique issue, it’s almost like an accessory for Western liberal politicians to flaunt how much they care while actually doing nothing about the people and the jurisdictions for which they’re actually responsible.”

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Daniel Turner is the founder and executive director of Power the Future, an energy advocacy organization that supports the fossil fuel industry. Despite its focus on energy, the nonprofit has no official stance on climate change. However, Turner previously told climate change campaigners in a blog post that if they “are so anti-energy, don’t use it.” Turner is an alumnus of the Charles Koch Institute and previously worked for the Koch-tied non-profit, Generation Opportunity. After earning a degree in Philosophy, he went on to specialize in communications and public affairs. He is also an affiliate of the Heartland Institute. 

During a June appearance on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” Turner criticized Democratic Presidential Candidate Joe Biden’s announced climate plan which aims to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, calling it “nonsensical.” He went on to claim that “every proposal that involves climate change, usually enriches their donors and their donor base, or it takes away individual rights and individual liberty.”

Conclusion

This year we experienced the hottest June ever recorded. In India, deadly temperatures reached and stayed above 120 degrees for days. France experienced its most brutally hot day in recorded history, at nearly 115 degrees.  

The rapid overheating of our planet from the burning of fossil fuels is a clear and present threat. There is no debate that the climate crisis is now.

One should be hard pressed, in this era of climate catastrophe, to find climate denial in legitimate media sources. In fact, the presence of regular deniers and dissemination of misinformation about the climate crisis should disqualify a news outlet as a fair and balanced source of information – and most importantly, should not be trusted. 

The Fox News Network and its hosts, with few exceptions, are peddling climate denial to millions of Americans on a regular basis.

This review began with the hypothesis that Fox News Network might be using newer, more nuanced and sophisticated forms of climate denial to keep audiences doubting the reality playing out before their eyes. This hypothesis was wrong. This review shows that Fox News’ denial handbook has not been updated. The misinformation the network is pushing out and the deniers it gives a platform to are long debunked and well exposed. The tactics they use, from naming calling to mockery, are transparent and inflammatory.   

More than that, denial, like our rapidly warming climate, is becoming increasingly dangerous. By keeping doubt alive and deniers in business, Fox New Network is contributing to U.S. climate inaction.

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e&e:

Committee to study Big Oil emissions pledges

By Nick Sobczyk | 02/07/2022 06:36 AM EST

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.).

House Oversight and Reform Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.). Francis Chung/E&E News

The House Oversight and Reform Committee tomorrow will examine fossil fuel industry emissions pledges after delaying a planned hearing with board members from major oil companies.

Climate scientist Michael Mann will testify alongside Tracey Lewis, policy counsel for Public Citizen, and Mark van Baal, founder of Follow This, a climate-focused activist investor group.

The panel initially wanted to hold a hearing this week with members of the boards of directors from Exxon Mobil Corp., BP PLC, Shell PLC and Chevron Corp. as part of a larger investigation of Big Oil’s climate lobbying tactics and efforts to cast doubt on climate science.

Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) and Environment Subcommittee Chair Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who are leading the probe, had invited Alexander Karsner and Susan Avery of Exxon, Melody Meyer of BP, Enrique Hernandez of Chevron, and Jane Holl Lute of Shell.

Maloney said they refused to participate tomorrow, but the companies and board members chalked it up to scheduling conflicts, with most saying they are willing to proceed with the hearing on a separate date (E&E Daily, Feb. 4).

The committee announced last week it would reschedule the board members’ testimony to March 8. Maloney said it would be their “last chance to cooperate.”

The committee’s investigation has been in the works for months, highlighted in October with a high-profile hearing featuring top executives from Exxon, BP, Shell, Chevron, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Petroleum Institute (Energywire, Oct. 29, 2021).

Democrats are looking to press the board members, who are all involved in their respective companies’ sustainability efforts, on how they are pushing on climate from the inside and whether they agree with statements made by top executives during the October hearing.

But instead, the committee said tomorrow’s witnesses will offer opinions on the four companies’ emissions pledges and whether they are sufficient to curb climate change.

All have promised to go net zero by 2050 but with differing scale and varying levels of tangible action.

Some have made commitments to reduce “scope 3” emissions, which come from the downstream burning of their products as opposed to their direct operations. BP has also planned a 40 percent oil and gas production cut and big investments in renewable energy (Energywire, Aug. 5, 2020).

Exxon, meanwhile, announced a 2050 net-zero pledge in January of this year but was criticized by environmentalists for not including downstream emissions and lagging behind other oil and gas companies on clean energy (Greenwire, Jan. 18).

Maloney said tomorrow’s witnesses would “tell us exactly what these companies need to do to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.”

Republicans are likely to come to the industry’s defense. During the October hearing, GOP lawmakers largely discussed inflation and high gas prices and encouraged company executives to increase oil and gas production.

Schedule: The hearing is Tuesday, Feb. 8, at 10 a.m. via webcast.

Witnesses:

Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science, Pennsylvania State University.

Mark van Baal, founder, Follow This.

Tracey Lewis, policy counsel, Public Citizen.

Others TBA.

House Oversight Subcommittee on the Environment has held hearings on the role of major oil companies in funding and disseminating misinformation about the climate crisis. Board members of Shell, Chevron, BP and ExxonMobil refused congressional requests that they testify at Tuesday’s hearing. Instead, lawmakers heard from climate scientists and experts on Big Oil’s public relations efforts. This is Tracey Lewis of the group Public Citizen.

Tracey Lewis: “At least 45 years ago, oil industry scientists privately warned their own company executives that their products would spell doom for the planet. … Yet, instead of taking action, the fossil fuel industry has used its political power and public messaging capabilities to undercut climate policymaking and climate action, misleading the public about its products, and therefore causing well-documented harms.”

https://oversight.house.gov/sites/democrats.oversight.house.gov/files/migrated/arkushtestimony.pdf

congress watch fmr head frank clementa tax fairness

any kirkland clients?

[<...The president may have insisted his administration was “tough on crime,” but it was clear to anyone paying attention that when it came to prosecuting the powerful, Trump’s DOJ was willing to look the other way.](https://www.citizen.org/article/biden-doj-ditches-trump-coup-accomplices-polluter-protections...

Biden%20DOJ%20ditches%20Trump%20coup%20accomplice’s%20polluter%20protection...By%20Rick%20Claypoo...Despite%20the%20“law%20and%20order”%20rhetoric,%20Trump’s%20Justice%20Department%20made%20leniency%20with%20corporate%20lawbreakers%20a%20policy%20priority%20–%20even%20as%20it%20ramped%20up%20prosecutions%20of%20immigrants%20and%20low-level%20offenders.)

Corporate enforcement fell by at least 90% at the DOJ and EPA, according to Public Citizen research, and the administration oversaw a 70% decrease in Clean Water Act prosecutions and a 50% decrease in Clean Air Act prosecutions.

The Biden administration’s speedy withdrawal of some of the Trump’s DOJ’s worst polluter protection policies is a sign things may be about to change.

The urgency was merited. Trump’s Justice Department appointees were still trying to lock in the policies that resulted in record-low polluter prosecutions in the final weeks of his administration.

Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark, until recently the leader of the DOJ’s civil and environmental divisions, dropped an “Enforcement Principles and Priorities” memo less than a week before Biden’s inauguration.

An explosive New York Times report reveals that Clark conspired with President Trump in his attempt to overturn the election. Clark’s qualifications for running the Trump’s DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resource Division include experience defending BP from lawsuits stemming from the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill disaster and representing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in lawsuits against regulating carbon emissions.

Under Trump, criminal referrals from the Environmental Protection Agency and the DOJ’s environmental prosecutions plummeted to their lowest levels in decades. Clark’s last-minute memo attempts to lock in this trend.

The memo mostly describes how the DOJ’s environmental division is applying government-wide policies that have led to the precipitous decline in corporate prosecutions across the board. In 2018, federal prosecutions of corporations fell to just 99, the lowest number since the U.S. Sentencing Commission started tracking the data in 1996. The decline is partly explained by prosecutors’ increasing practice of resolving investigations into corporate criminals – including serious repeat offenders – with leniency agreements (deferred and non-prosecution agreements) that protect corporate defendants from prosecution.

Some of the more notorious recipients of the DOJ’s leniency agreements are egregious violators whose crimes result in mass deaths, such as Massey Energy, whose safety violations resulted in an explosion that killed 29 workers in its Upper Big Branch Mine,General Motors, whose defective ignition switches and subsequent coverup of the flaw caused or contributed to the deaths of 124 people, and Boeing, whose 737 Max defects caused the crashes Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, killing 346. The Justice Department’s refusal to prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes is an ongoing insult and injustice to the victims of corporate crime and their families.

Perhaps the most shocking part of Clark’s memo is its instruction to prosecutors to apply a heightened “mens rea” (or “guilty mind”) standard to environmental crimes. The memo tells prosecutors, “those offenses that do not involve intentional, knowing, or willful wrongdoing may be more appropriate for administrative enforcement or compliance assistance than for judicial enforcement.” Clark is saying that environmental cases that do not include a willful intent to break the law generally should not be criminally prosecuted.

Changing mens rea standards to make it harder to prosecute corporate criminals has long been a priority for the infamous billionaire brothers Charles and David Koch (the latter of which died in 2019). The Kochs became interested in the issue following the 2001 conviction of Koch Petroleum Group for Clean Air Act violations and false statements and unsuccessfully sought to change the standard through legislation.

The problem is, corporations accused of environmental crimes can often claim they did not intend to break the law, and executives who should be responsible for knowing what the business they oversee are up toinstead delegate signing off on activities to managers further down on the corporate hierarchy. If they use the structure of the corporation to shield headquarters from knowing what subsidiaries are up to, they can always just say, “Oops, sorry!”For obvious reasons, this enables, rather than deters, corporate crime. This is why applying a heightened mens rea standard to regulatory crimes significantly undermines corporate crime enforcement.

It also means, despite the “ignorance of the law is no defense” adage, that corporations and executives can protect themselves from prosecution by claiming the wrongdoing they are accused of committing occurred without knowledge that it was illegal.Allowing this ignorance defense – a defense not available to ordinary defendants – gives executives the incentive to learn as little as possible about their legal obligations, including the ways that they are required to protect public health and the environment from the harmful effects of pollution.

As it is, corporations can be structured so that risky activities are concentrated in subsidiaries in order to protect the parent corporation from liability for wrongdoing. As a result, the Justice Department often brings the most serious criminal charges against corporate subsidiaries because parent companies are unaware of what is happening within their subsidiaries. Clark would make it even more difficult to prosecute parent companies by requiring them to know both what is happening in their subsidiaries and that the underlying conduct was illegal,instructing prosecutors to “pay due respect the corporate form, and of distinctions between separate entities held by a larger corporation,” which, Clark notes, are purposely designed to “allow investors and owners to limit their liability.”

Giving corporations an incentive to weaken internal oversight so that they can remain intentionally ignorant of how parts of the business may be breaking rules that protect the environment and the public is the exact opposite of what the U.S. government’s top law enforcement agency should be doing.

Thankfully, Clark and Trump’s last-minute gift to corporate polluters was short lived. The Trump policies at the DOJ’s Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD) that the Biden memo withdraws include:

This policy change is a necessary and vital first step forward, but not sufficient on its own. Biden’s DOJ should replace the Trump-era policies with new ones that reflect the administration’s stated goal of holding polluters accountable.

The real test will be whether we see eventual prosecutions of corporate criminals and executives that break the law by poisoning Americans’ air, water, and environment. Strong enforcement not only will hold wrongdoers accountable, it will deter lawbreaking in the first place, protecting Americans and our planet.

https://www.alternet.org/2021/02/big-pharma/

'Outrageous': Big Pharma using loophole to get taxpayers to fund billions in fines for fueling opioid crisis

Four pharmaceutical corporations that agreed to pay a combined $26 billion to settle lawsuits resulting from a deadly opioid crisis they helped create reportedly plan to recoup a portion of those costs by deducting roughly $4.6 billion of the payouts from their taxes—sparking intense condemnation.

Big Pharma is attempting to make the public cover some of the fines related to lawsuits filed by dozens of state and local governments highlighting the culpability of opioid manufacturers and distributors in the deaths of an estimated 70,000 people per year.

As Public Citizen president Robert Weissman put it in a statement released Friday, "The drug companies are settling with taxpayers (local government entities) and then demanding that taxpayers pay part of the cost (via a federal tax subsidy)."....

democracy.

It’s as simple as that.

If we continue to let Walmart, Pfizer, Jeff Bezos and Sheldon Adelson have the run of the place, they will.

That’s why President-Elect Biden must urge Congress to pass the For the People Act (H.R. 1) as a first priority in his administration.

Urge Biden to insist Democracy is a Day One issue.

The For the People Act is the most transformative pro-democracy legislation since the passage of the Voting Rights Act.

Overwhelming majorities of the American people favor far-reaching measures to expand Social Security, raise the minimum wage, slash drug prices, make health care a right, address the climate crisis, break up Big Banks, control Big Tech and much more.

But we don’t get the policies we want because our democracy is broken.

The For the People Act would give us small donor-driven, publicly funded elections; automatic voter registration; an end to gerrymandering; and much more.

https://www.citizen.org/news/44-trump-administration-officials-have-close-ties-to-the-koch-brothers-public-citizen-finds/

NOVEMBER 30, 2017

44 Trump Administration Officials Have Close Ties to the Koch Brothers, Public Citizen Finds

New Report Details How Allies and Former Employees of Republican Megadonors Are Influencing Trump Administration Policy

WASHINGTON, D.C. – Despite a rocky relationship during the 2016 presidential campaign between Donald Trump and the Koch brothers, the two Republican megadonors have infiltrated the Trump administration, with 44 Koch allies staffing the White House and other agencies, a Public Citizen report (PDF) finds.

More than one year after Trump’s election, political operatives and policy experts who have worked at numerous Koch-funded organizations have fanned out through the Trump administration. They are taking jobs influencing policies about taxes, the environment, energy, education and health care – in service of the hard-right anti-government agenda espoused by right-wing organizations created by the Kochs.

Public Citizen’s review of the Koch brothers’ connections to the Trump administration and policy agenda in Washington, D.C., finds that:

• 44 Trump administration officials have close ties to the Koch brothers and their political groups, particularly Vice President Mike Pence, White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House Budget Director Mick Mulvaney.

• Of the Koch allies who are working in the administration, most are in the White House, with 21 officials working there or nominated for White House jobs.

• Koch allies also are staffing jobs at the EPA, the Interior Department, the Energy Department and the Treasury Department. The positions they are advocating overlap with the Kochs’ economic interests in weakening regulatory enforcement, lowering corporate taxes, loosening environmental regulations and opening up public land to oil and gas extraction.

• The Kochs already have achieved the majority of goals contained in “Roadmap to Repeal” – a policy document published in January 2017 by Freedom Partners, a Koch group.

“Donald Trump is turning the Koch brothers’ corporate extremist fantasies into reality,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. “Climate change denialism, enabling corporate wrongdoing, removing regulatory restraints are, literally, straight out of the Kochs’ playbook, and leading Koch operatives say the pending tax cuts for corporations and the superrich are the ‘most significant’ effort they have ever undertaken.”

“Our government should work for the people, rather than the interests of two of the wealthiest people in America,” said Alan Zibel, research director of Public Citizen’s Corporate Presidency Project and the report’s author. “Over several decades, the Kochs have built an elaborate structure of organizations, academic centers and donors to advance an anti-government agenda that most Americans do not support.”

Public Citizen’s analysis includes officials who have worked at Koch-created groups such as Americans for Prosperity, Freedom Partners, Libre Initiative, Concerned Veterans for America and Generation Opportunity. The analysis includes lawyers and lobbyists who have represented Koch businesses or political groups. It also includes individuals who worked at think tanks, advocacy groups and academic centers with Koch funding and close Koch ties.

[vid]

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https://www.ecowatch.com/trump-safety-environmental-rollbacks-2647588050.html

in the nearly six months since President Donald Trump declared a public health emergency over the coronavirus pandemic, he has rolled back at least 30 public protections, while proposing changes to at least 20 others, according to a report published Thursday by Public Citizen's Coalition on Sensible Safeguards.

The report—Pandemic Rollbacks: Slashing Safeguards During the Coronavirus—tracks dozens of regulatory rollbacks enacted or proposed by the Trump administration since March.

120

In its latest move to put profits over people, President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to make it easier for corporations to hide from accountability.

Let’s make sure corporations can’t hide.

Every year, investors use shareholder proposals to sound the alarm on emerging issues that not only impact the corporations they own, but also affect how companies interact with our communities and the planet.

Now, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to make it more difficult for shareholders to bring these critical proposals up for a vote.

This rollback will crush accountability. Tell the SEC to make sure shareholders are heard – submit your comment here.

Years before Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft killed hundreds of people, the company’s shareholders filed proposals raising concerns about the company’s influence over regulators.

Under the new rules, those shareholders’ efforts to hold Boeing’s management accountable would have been blocked.

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120

In its latest move to put profits over people, President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to make it easier for corporations to hide from accountability.

Let’s make sure corporations can’t hide.

Every year, investors use shareholder proposals to sound the alarm on emerging issues that not only impact the corporations they own, but also affect how companies interact with our communities and the planet.

Now, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is trying to make it more difficult for shareholders to bring these critical proposals up for a vote.

This rollback will crush accountability. Tell the SEC to make sure shareholders are heard – submit your comment here.

Years before Boeing’s 737 MAX aircraft killed hundreds of people, the company’s shareholders filed proposals raising concerns about the company’s influence over regulators.

Under the new rules, those shareholders’ efforts to hold Boeing’s management accountable would have been blocked.

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public cit

We are going to win a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

We took a major step toward that goal today, as New Hampshire became the 20th state to support a constitutional amendment to overturn the 2010 decision and restore our democracy.

Now we have to build on that victory and force Congress to vote on an amendment.

Tell your member of Congress: Co-sponsor H.J.Res. 2, the Democracy for All Amendment.

==

https://www.alternet.org/poverty-criminalized-wealth-immunized-report-shows-corporate-crime-enforcement-has-plummeted-under

In  addition to padding the bottom lines of America's largest corporations by cutting their taxes and eliminating scores of longstanding regulations, President Donald Trump is also protecting major companies' profits by refusing to punish them for ripping off consumers and trampling federal rules that safeguard the planet.

That is the central conclusion of a new Public Citizen analysis out Wednesday, which finds that corporate America has largely been exempt from Trump's so-called "law-and-order" agenda. Titled *Corporate Impunity* (pdf), the report shows that enforcement actions carried out by major government agencies declined drastically during Trump's first year in the White House.

"When it comes to large corporations, the supposedly 'tough-on-crime' Trump administration is undertaking an epic retreat from law enforcement—slashing fines, declining to bring cases against corporate wrongdoers, and cutting enforcement programs," Public Citizen president Robert Weissman said in a statement on Wednesday.

"The message to big business couldn't be more clear," Weissman added. "Feel free to run roughshod over rules that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, as well as ensure the safety of the cars we drive and protect us against bank rip-offs and consumer fraud."

According to Public Citizen, the largest drop in enforcement actions came at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which is currently headed by former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler after previous agency chief Scott Pruitt resigned amid an ever-growing mountain of scandals.

The consumer group's new analysis shows that EPA penalties against corporate criminals has dropped a staggering 94 percent since Trump took office last year.

The decline in penalties leveled by other White House agencies has been similarly striking.

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rob weisman public cit sez more imp ghg than cpp!

5/18

public cit

vote no on the House version of Senate Bill 2155.

U.S. House of Representatives votes on the Bank Lobbyist Act — a major rollback of the Wall Street reforms enacted after the 2008 financial crash.

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EMBRACING TRUMPISM

In the era of Trump, the Koch machine, including ALEC, has fully embraced Trumpism. Shortly after the November 2016 election, ALEC’s Executive Director Lisa Nelson told funders and members that she was thrilled to report that the Trump administration “does have the potential to be an ALEC administration. It is full of the people and ideas we’ve advanced since 1973…Now is our time. And ALEC is ready.” Since then over40 Koch political operatives have signed on to work for the the Trump White House and administration, according to a recent report by Public Citizen.

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GW pgm ~ trump epa gut

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2/18

Our lawsuit forced the administration to back down and reveal the names of visitors to White House agencies.

The White House was trying to conceal this information to keep the public in the dark about the corporate takeover of our government.

As long as the Trump administration continues breaking the law, we’ll continue taking it to court.

Just yesterday, we sued the administration for trying to end funding for teen pregnancy prevention programs that are successful and have bipartisan support.

Not only are these actions dangerous, they’re illegal — which is not at all unusual for this lawless administration.

That’s why we’re also suing it to:

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Except you may not know it from consuming our mainstream media, which according to a new report, did an appalling job last year in linking climate change to climate disasters. According to the report called ‘Carbon Omission,’ “The proportion of pieces that mentioned climate change in climate-relevant contexts was decidedly low.”

Download the report ‘Carbon Omission,’ “The proportion of pieces that mentioned climate change in climate-relevant contexts was decidedly low.”, HERE.

https://www.citizen.org/sites/default/files/public-citizen-carbon-omission-media-report-january-2018.pdf

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trump ticktock:

http://www.citizen.org/trump

https://www.democracynow.org/2017/2/20/for_profit_president_a_look_at

A day-by-day review of the Trump administration’s first month shows that virtually every day has been marked by a new, extraordinary grant of power to corporate interests 

:{

}:

http://www.citizen.org/pressroom/pressroomredirect.cfm?ID=10176

==

915

Here’s the situation:

This could be a tipping point in the fight to prevent billionaires and Big Business from taking over our elections.

==

6/15 update?

We’ve been ordered to proceed with the case in a state court located in the same small Ohio town where the company suing us is headquartered.

To refresh your memory:

Last summer, a powerful coal company called Murray Energy sued us after we ran radio ads pointing out its opposition to new worker safety and clean air protections.

We’ve tried to have the suit dismissed or at least heard in a neutrally located federal court.

But instead, we will be required to spend time and resources responding to demands from Murray Energy for documents and depositions.

And Public Citizen staff will have to divert attention away from the vital work they do every day to protect consumers and safeguard democracy.

==

claim attack in page rank, did not see but search phrase led to

http://truthfromthetap.com/get-the-full-story/

includes tool kit

THE TRUTH ABOUT PRIVATE

WATER IN FELTON, CALIFORNIA

In 2002, American Water purchased the Felton water system. Later the same year,

American Water asked the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) for approval

to raise water rates in Felton, citing an urgent need for infrastructure repairs and a

lack of any increase between 1998 and 2002.1

The 44 percent rate increase, approved

by the state CPUC,2

spurred public concern, and a local grassroots organization

formed in an attempt to bring the water system under public control. After six years

of American Water operations, the system was brought under government control

via eminent domain in 2008, with Felton citizens passing an $11 million bond to

finance the purchase.

ACTIVIST FICTION

Critics like Food & Water Watch (FWW) call Felton a “great victory” and cite it as an example of “why local-control

movements should not become discouraged when water corporations refuse to negotiate a public purchase.”3

Specifically, FWW claims residents have more control over their water rates and service.4 FWW and other critics have

repeated false claims about Felton in at least six reports or case studies since 2009...

http://truthfromthetap.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/TruthFromTheTap_CaseStudy_Felton_031315.pdf

Domain Name: TRUTHFROMTHETAP.COM

Registrar: GODADDY.COM, LLC

Sponsoring Registrar IANA ID: 146

Whois Server: whois.godaddy.com

Referral URL: http://registrar.godaddy.com

Name Server: NS29.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Name Server: NS30.DOMAINCONTROL.COM

Status: clientDeleteProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientDeleteProhibited

Status: clientRenewProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientRenewProhibited

Status: clientTransferProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientTransferProhibited

Status: clientUpdateProhibited http://www.icann.org/epp#clientUpdateProhibited

Updated Date: 29-dec-2014

Creation Date: 29-dec-2014

Expiration Date: 29-dec-2016

http://www.fixtheuschamber.org/tracking-the-chamber/well-get-rid-you-donohues-mob-boss-language-scares-frosh

==

Last August, a large coal company called Murray Energy filed a baseless lawsuit against us after we ran radio ads pointing out its opposition to new worker safety and clean air protections.

But in December, a local court in Ohio — in the small town where Murray Energy is headquartered — denied our motion to dismiss the suit.

We’ve asked a federal court to reconsider the denial because the judge committed errors of law and failed to address key arguments.

Meanwhile, Murray Energy is trying to send the case back to state court.

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Public_Citizen

Public Citizen is a nongovernmental organization founded in 1971 by Ralph Nader and currently run by its president Robert Weissman ^[1]. It fights "for openness and democratic accountability in government, for the right of consumers to seek redress in the courts; for clean, safe and sustainable energy sources; for social and economic justice in trade policies; for strong health, safety and environmental protections; and for safe, effective and affordable prescription drugs and health care," its website states. ^[2]^

In January, 2010, Public Citizen co-launched Free Speech for People.org which is, according to its website, "a campaign sponsored by Voter Action (voteraction.org), Public Citizen (citizen.org), theCenter for Corporate Policy (corporatepolicy.org) and American Independent Business Alliance (amiba.net) to restore the First Amendment's free speech guarantees for the people, and to preserve and promote democracy and self-government." It was launched in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court decision of January 20, 2010, overturning most restrictions on corporate and labor union funding in U.S. election.

Contents [hide]

Public Citizen Oppose Kerry-Lieberman Climate Bill

On May 17, 2010 an alliance of 15 social justice, environmental and community organizations joined together to stop the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act from passing. The coalition, called Climate Reality Check, believed Congress needed to head back to the drawing board and start over. The coalition included the Center for Biological Diversity, Public Citizen, among others. Tyson Slocum of Public Citizen stated, "It's not accurate to call this a climate bill. This is nuclear energy- promoting, oil drilling-championing, coal mining-boosting legislation with a weak carbon pricing mechanism thrown in."

Grassroots members of the Sierra Club also opposed the initial bill, stating that the national organization's position was nuanced and too supportive of the legislation.[3]

Divisions

Contact information

1600 20th St. NW

Washington, DC. 20009

Phone: (202) 588-1000

Web: http://www.citizen.org/

Public Citizen has two offices in Washington, DC and state offices in Texas and California.

References

  1. ↑ Bio of Robert Weissman from Public Citizen
  2. ↑ Public Citizen, About page, accessed July 2007.
  3. ↑ "Not All Environmentalists Pleased with Climate Legislation" Joshua Frank, Truthout, June 20, 2010.
  4. ↑ About page, accessed July 2007.

Reports

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