Google 1

===

see google 2 9/16

==

2 faced denier

=https://www.propublica.org/article/google-has-quietly-dropped-ban-on-personally-identifiable-web-tracking<p style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: sans-serif; font-size: medium; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px;">

Since Republicans have spent so long telling their constituents that climate change is not a serious threat, they are in no position to do anything about it in government.

This leaves the Democrats with the responsibility to pass as much legislation to lessen the impact of climate change and deal with its consequences. Since Republicans insist on vetoing nearly all legislation concerning the threat, it is likely that if Hillary Clinton is elected, she will have to follow Obama's footsteps and implement policy through executive actions.

Conservative media and politicians may not be the only reasons why Americans are so divided about the climate: Corporate groups are also hedging their bets and throwing investment behind both sides, an investigation by <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-climate-donations-idUSKCN11C0ED" target="_blank" style=" text-decoration: none;">Reuters</a> found.

Some of the country's most vocal corporate supporters of Obama's environmental programs have been found to be funding some of the most ardent anti-climate change politicians in Washington. Among these companies are PepsiCo, Dupont and Google, Reuters said on Tuesday.

Though companies often split their campaign donations to both parties, arguing for both sides of a particular issue may be a problem, the head of the Investor Responsibility Research Center Institute Jon Kukomnik told Reuters.

"There really needs to be a process that looks at these issues … at C-suite and board levels on a periodic basis," he said.

Of the 35 biggest U.S. companies which signed on to Obama's American Business Act on Climate Change Pledge last year, 25 of these companies are supporting <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/182-total-number-of-climate-deniers-in-congress-1882189472.html" style=" text-decoration: none;">Congressional climate deniers</a> by helping to fund their campaigns.

These climate deniers include North Dakota Republican Congressman Kevin Cramer, who once argued the Earth was getting cooler and not warmer, and Oklahoma Republican <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/sen-inhofe-response-on-climate-change-1955857094.html" style=" text-decoration: none;">Sen. Jim Inhofe</a>, who once held up a snowball in the Senate to prove that global warming is not occurring.

Other companies which signed the environmental pact and then gave political donations to climate deniers are Mondelez, Google, AT&T, Verizon and GE.

Only GE responded to Reuters' requests for comment, saying it supports "elected officials based on a wide range of issues." The company insists it has been "outspoken about the need to address climate change."

Sen. Inhofe said businesses might have signed the environmental pact because it appeared politically expedient to do so at that moment.

"These are competitive companies, and the board might have said, 'Look, right now it might be a popular thing to join this, and there's no downside since we're not really committing to anything,'" he said.

However, investors may want companies to be more committed to environmental sustainability, Lauren Compere of Boston Common Asset Management said.

"No company wants to be perceived as espousing progressive climate policies on the one hand, while funding climate deniers on the other," she said.

http://www.ecowatch.com/companies-drive-climate-denial-1998224867.html

</div>

==

4/16

Google -- one of California’s most influential companies that people like me and you use everyday -- still plans to sponsor a Trump-led Republican National Convention and help provide a platform for his brand of hate and violence.

Under pressure from activists, Coca-Cola recently took the bold step to cease its support of a Trump Convention.(1) And Courage Campaign has joined our allies at ColorOfChange, Ultraviolet, CREDO, Bend the Arc, and more to turn up the heat on Google and other corporate sponsors, urging them to follow Coke’s lead

===

hired to trash google

http://www.slate.com/blogs/scocca/2011/05/12/burson_marsteller_has_another_image_problem.html

BURSON-MARSTELLER HAS ANOTHER IMAGE PROBLEM

Slate

SCOCCA

A BLOG ABOUT POLITICS, SPORTS, MEDIA, STUFFMAY 12 2011 4:32 PM

Burson-Marsteller Has Another Image Problem

By Tom Scocca

Oh, look: the globe-bestriding publicity firm Burson-Marsteller has yet another project for yet another client. The Daily Beast reported :

Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The stories of Google's privacy invasion, the Daily Beast wrote, were being pushed on behalf of Facebook. Maybe that led to yesterday's scary-sounding—but confusing—

Gawker post

about a "creepy" and "pretty evil" effort by Google to compete with Facebook by "quietly mining your Gmail contacts database." (Gawker cited a Business Insider story

about Google's quest for a "social graph" of its own.)

Quietly! The Google Social Circle does sound pretty invasive, at first. But unlike the dread Google Buzz—or Facebook's entire turn-a-private-network-into-an-opt-out-data-mine business plan—it doesn't really seem to know anything about you unless you've created a Google Profile and agreed to let Google examine your various social accounts. (And why would you do that? Have you learned nothing from the Facebook experience? Unclick every checkbox

in sight.)

The Daily Beast:

Burson, in its pitch to journalists, claimed Social Circle was "designed to scrape private data and build deeply personal dossiers on millions of users—in a direct and flagrant violation of [Google's] agreement with the FTC."

Also from Burson: "The American people must be made aware of the now immediate intrusions into their deeply personal lives Google is cataloging and broadcasting every minute of every day—without their permission."

Yes, the American people must be made aware of Google's alleged intrusions into their personal lives because Facebook wants to keep the lucrative privacy-violation market to itself.

Is that the story that Mark Zuckerberg was paying Burson-Marsteller to promote? Because that's the story Facebook has ended up buying: the story that Facebook is the sort of deceitful scumbag hypocrite company that would hire Burson for its dirty work.

What's the advantage to hiring Burson anymore? The CEO, Mark Penn, is "best known as the chief strategist in Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign," the Daily Beast wrote. Here's a little refresher on how that went, as

reported by Time magazine

:

As aides looked over the campaign calendar, chief strategist Mark Penn confidently predicted that an early win in California would put her over the top because she would pick up all the state's 370 delegates. It sounded smart, but as every high school civics student now knows, Penn was wrong: Democrats, unlike the Republicans, apportion their delegates according to vote totals, rather than allowing any state to award them winner-take-all. Sitting nearby, veteran Democratic insider Harold M. Ickes, who had helped write those rules, was horrified — and let Penn know it. "How can it possibly be," Ickes asked, "that the much vaunted chief strategist doesn't understand proportional allocation?"

In the end, though, it wasn't Penn's incompetence that got him demoted by the campaign—it was his toxic and unethical

entanglement with Burson clients, including "drug companies, a tuna industry group, a tobacco firm and the controversial military contractor Blackwater USA," and finally the government of Colombia, which had hired Burson to push a free-trade deal that Hillary Clinton opposed.

So Facebook was willing to hire a company whose CEO is identified with hilariously bungling tactical failure. And it was willing to join a list of clients and causes that has included, through the decades, Blackwater, the Union Carbide mass methyl isocyanate-gas* poisoning in Bhopal, the murderous Argentine junta, and Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Those last two, a Burson spokesperson has pointed out, predate Mark Penn's time (as does Bhopal), so it is inaccurate and unfair to—

Oh, wait: Foxconn, the Chinese tech supply company where the

workers were killing themselves

last year. Another Burson client.

How will Facebook scrub the stink off itself now? How will Burson-Marsteller, for that matter, get people to stop thinking of poison, corruption, failure, and death when its name comes up? If only there were some sort of company out there that knew how to fix a damaged reputation.

[* Correction: This sentence originally misidentified the toxic gas involved as chlorine.]

Tom Scocca is the managing editor of Deadspin and the author of Beijing Welcomes You: Unveiling the Capital City of the Future.

==

new grn? hq

http://www.globalpossibilities.org/googles-splashy-campus-plan-aims-to-rewrite-the-office-park-book/

==

<a href="http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447">http://www.newsweek.com/assange-google-not-what-it-seems-279447</a>

==

“Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg in Washington, DC,” The Washington Post

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/865?t=6&akid=564.100725.TmnakI" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/865?t=7&akid=564.100725.TmnakI</a>

“Despite split from group, Google’s links to climate change denial run deep,” SF Gate, 9-26-2014

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/866?t=8&akid=564.100725.TmnakI" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/866?t=9&akid=564.100725.TmnakI</a>

“Disrupt Denial: How Big Business Is Funding Climate Change Denial,” Forecast the Facts

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/848?t=10&akid=564.100725.TmnakI" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/848?t=11&akid=564.100725.TmnakI</a>

===

<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/22/3570463/google-says-alec-lies-about-climate-change/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/22/3570463/google-says-alec-lies-about-climate-change/</a>

Google’s controversial decision to fund the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was a “mistake,” company chairman Eric Schmidt admitted on Monday, saying the group is spreading lies about global warming and “making the world a much worse place.”

<p style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0.4em 0px; border: 0px; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.6em; vertical-align: baseline; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">In an interview on NPR’s <a href="http://thedianerehmshow.org/audio-player?nid=19936%3Cbr%20/%3E" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Diane Rehm</a> show, Schmidt said the free-market lobbying group’s <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/01/31/three-states-pushing-alec-bill-climate-change-denial-schools" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">anti-climate</a> and <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2014/08/24/us_think_tank_alec_fights_environmental_legislation.html" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">anti-clean energy</a> positions are harmful to future generations, and a bad investment idea for the company.

“Everyone understands climate change is occurring and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and our grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” Schmidt said. “And so we should not be aligned with such people — they’re just, they’re just literally lying.”

Schmidt did not say that Google had officially cut ties with the group, but did say that the “consensus within the company was that [the investment] was some sort of mistake and so we’re trying to not do that in the future.”

Google’s press office has not yet returned ThinkProgress’ request for comment on the matter.

Environmentalists have long been <a href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/google_stop_funding_alec/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">asking</a> Google to cut ties with ALEC, a free-market lobbying group that has worked to <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/12/05/3022271/alec-solar-clean-energy-freeriders/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">kill</a> renewable energy programs and teach <a href="http://www.desmogblog.com/2013/01/31/three-states-pushing-alec-bill-climate-change-denial-schools" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">climate denial</a> in schools.

The fact that Google is affiliated with the group has been confusing to many, considering its <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/25/3464213/google-solar-competition/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">large investments</a> in clean energy. The company has invested more than $1 billion into wind and solar projects that in total generate more than <a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2014/01/15/google-make-15th-renewable-energy-investment-texas/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">2 gigawatts</a> of power, and has set a <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/27/3206691/google-swedish-wind-energy-investment/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">goal</a> to eventually power its data centers with 100 percent renewable energy. With purchased offsets, Google claims its carbon footprint is <a href="https://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">zero</a>.

Cutting ties with ALEC will not get Google off the hook for funding climate deniers, though. According to <a href="http://forecastthefacts.org/press/releases/2014/9/22/statement-campaign-director-brant-olson-google-dro/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">Forecast the Facts</a>, the company has contributed $699,000 to candidates for political office who deny the science of human-caused climate change.

<h5 style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 10px 0px 0px; padding: 2px 8px; border: 0px; font-size: 0.8em; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-top-left-radius: 6px; border-top-right-radius: 6px; border-bottom-right-radius: 6px; border-bottom-left-radius: 6px; text-transform: uppercase; width: auto; float: left; background: rgb(0, 153, 0);">UPDATE</h5>

Google has reportedly <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-22/google-quits-alec-says-link-with-climate-skeptics-wrong.html" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">confirmed</a> to Bloomberg News that it will end its membership with ALEC at the end of the year. Also in a statement to Bloomberg, ALEC’s public affairs direction said Google’s decision was “a result of public pressure from left-leaning individuals and organizations who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial.”

</div>

==

bloom

<h1 style=" margin: 0px 0px 12px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2em; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; background: no-repeat rgb(255, 255, 255);">Google Quits ALEC, Says Link With Climate Skeptics Wrong</h1>

<div id="story_meta" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; position: relative; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 14px; background: no-repeat rgb(255, 255, 255);"><cite class="byline" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 11px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(111, 111, 111); display: block; font-style: normal; line-height: 1.3em; width: 350px; background: transparent;">By Jim Snyder and Brian Womack - Sep 23, 2014</cite></div>

<p style=" margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><a topic_url="http://topics.bloomberg.com/google-inc/" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/GOOG:US" density="full" title="Get Quote" ticker="GOOG:US" class="web_ticker" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Google Inc. (GOOG)</a> Chairman <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/eric-schmidt/" density="sparse" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Eric Schmidt</a> said the world’s biggest Internet search company made a mistake in funding a political group that opposes U.S. action on climate change.

Schmidt said Google paid the American Legislative Exchange Council as part of a lobbying campaign on an unrelated issue. Without elaborating on Google’s relationship with the group, Schmidt said facts about global warming aren’t in dispute.

“The people who oppose it are really hurting our children and grandchildren and making the world a much worse place,” Schmidt said on NPR’s “Diane Rehm Show” yesterday. “We should not be aligned with such people. They are just literally lying.”

<blockquote class="decoration" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; quotes: none; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Full Coverage: <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-22/global-warming-is-here-live-coverage-of-climate-week-2014.html" density="optional" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Climate Week 2014</a></blockquote>

The <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/mountain-view/" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Mountain View</a>, California-based company and others are under mounting pressure from organizations that back government policies to combat climate change to abandon the Council, which says it supports free-market policies, because of its approach to environmental issues.

<a topic_url="http://topics.bloomberg.com/microsoft-corp/" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/MSFT:US" density="sparse" title="Get Quote" ticker="MSFT:US" class="web_ticker" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)</a> has withdrawn from ALEC, saying affiliating with group “which is actively fighting policies that promote renewable energy was incongruous,” according to a report in Bloomberg BNA last month.

<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/climate-change/" class="quicktake" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">A Global Push to Save the Planet</a>

ALEC develops model legislation for state legislatures. It was behind <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/florida/" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Florida</a>’s so-called Stand-Your-Ground law that drew scrutiny after Trayvon Martin was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer who later was acquitted of murder. It has also pushed to repeal state mandates for renewable energy use.

<h2 style=" margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; font-weight: normal; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: no-repeat;">‘Public Pressure’</h2>

“It is unfortunate to learn Google has ended its membership in the American Legislative Exchange Council as a result of public pressure from left-leaning individuals and organizations who intentionally confuse free market policy perspectives for climate change denial,” Lisa Nelson, ALEC’s chief executive officer, said in a statement.

Bill Meierling, the ALEC senior director of public affairs, said Google joined ALEC in August 2011 and was active in a communications and technology task force the group created to discuss broadband, privacy and e-commerce issues. The company paid ALEC about $10,000 a year.

Meierling disputed Schmidt’s suggestion that the group denies human activity is a cause of climate change. But he said ALEC has “significant concerns” rules proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon dioxide emissions from power plants would hurt the economy.

Related:

<li style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background: no-repeat transparent;"><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-23/obama-joins-climate-summit-that-doesn-t-force-remedies.html" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Obama Joins Climate Summit That Doesn’t Force Remedies</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background: no-repeat transparent;"><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-22/climate-denial-to-cost-u-s-billions-of-dollars-new-omb-director-says.html" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Climate Denial to Cost U.S. Billions Of Dollars</a></li>

<li style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; background: no-repeat transparent;"><a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-09-23/brazil-minister-time-to-cut-the-crap-in-climate-talks.html" density="full" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 14px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">Brazil Minister: Time to 'Cut the Crap' in Climate Talks</a></li>

</ul>

<p style=" margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.6em; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: transparent; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">To contact the reporters on this story: Jim Snyder in Washington at <a href="mailto:jsnyder24@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail" density="mailto" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">jsnyder24@bloomberg.net</a>; Brian Womack in <a href="http://topics.bloomberg.com/san-francisco/" density="sparse" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">San Francisco</a> at<a href="mailto:bwomack1@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail" density="mailto" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">bwomack1@bloomberg.net</a>

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at <a href="mailto:jmorgan97@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail" density="mailto" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">jmorgan97@bloomberg.net</a>; Pui-Wing Tam at <a href="mailto:ptam13@bloomberg.net" title="Send E-mail" density="mailto" style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; font-size: 15px; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); text-decoration: none; background: no-repeat transparent;">ptam13@bloomberg.net</a> Pui-Wing Tam, Steve Geimann

</div>

==

<a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://link.huffingtonpost.com/4cb49b68b61807701fa21cad1te9e.snn/VBDEqUmOzqyo1lY-B41e3" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(45, 45, 45); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">Google Helps Convert Old Oil Field Into Solar Power Plant</a>

<table><tbody><tr style=" line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; display: table-row; vertical-align: inherit;"><td style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px 5px 0px 0px; vertical-align: top; border: none; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; display: table-cell; border-spacing: 2px;"> </td><td style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: top; border: none; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; display: table-cell; border-spacing: 2px;"> </td><td style=" margin: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px; vertical-align: middle; border: none; line-height: 1.2em; outline: none; display: table-cell; border-spacing: 2px;"><a rel="nofollow" target="_blank" href="http://link.huffingtonpost.com/4cb49b68b61807701fa21cad1te9e.snn/VBDEqUmOzqyo1lY-C5f19" style=" text-decoration: none; color: rgb(114, 114, 114); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">Continue reading</a></td></tr></tbody></table>

==

http://fortune.com/2012/07/12/googles-zero-carbon-quest/

fast car chargers

==

6/26/ conf protesters tossed; sec guard 15$/hr, treated as kids they say

announced lousy on minority hiring 5/14, others eg yahoo have followed with similar stats

===

cei chides:

<div class="taxonomy-term publication-type" style=" font-weight: 200; font-style: normal; color: rgb(136, 136, 136); text-transform: uppercase;">CITATIONS</div>

<h3 class="title node-title" style=" font-size: 1em; margin: 0px; font-weight: 600; font-style: normal;"><a href="http://cei.org/citations/google-honors-radical-environmentalist-rachel-carson-her-birthday" style=" color: rgb(102, 153, 0); text-decoration: none;">Google Honors Radical Environmentalist Rachel Carson on Her Birthday</a></h3>

<div class="authors" style=" display: inline;"><a href="http://cei.org/expert/john-berlau" style=" color: rgb(102, 153, 0); text-decoration: none;">John Berlau</a></div>

</li>

</ul>

===

<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/30/3442311/self-driving-sprawl/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/05/30/3442311/self-driving-sprawl/</a>

===

climate map

<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/climate-change-john-podesta_n_4996488.html?ir=Green">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/19/climate-change-john-podesta_n_4996488.html?ir=Green</a>

==

nice noises <a href="http://grist.org/list/the-guy-behind-google-glass-and-self-driving-cars-wants-to-take-on-agriculture-and-energy-next/">http://grist.org/list/the-guy-behind-google-glass-and-self-driving-cars-wants-to-take-on-agriculture-and-energy-next/</a>

=

Google Promotes Failed Coal Lobby Work to Stop EPA Mercury and Toxic Air Regulations

By: Kevin Grandia Wednesday June 5, 2013 9:56 am

Neither a clever motto nor a boxing bear kept Google from aiding Big Coal.

Google, the search giant with the famous motto: “Don’t be evil,” is boasting about its involvement in a 2012 coal industry lobbying effort to block the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) ability to protect the public from dangerous and potentially lethal coal plant emissions, according to a recently discovered Google case study.

In February 2012, long time coal industry supporter, Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) introduced a Congressional Review Act resolution proposing the elimination of the EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) for power plants. The emissions from coal-fired power plants are the largest human-caused sources of the neurotoxin mercury, arsenic, cyanide, and a range of other dangerous pollutants, according to the EPA. Inhofe’s proposal was ultimately voted down in the Senate by a vote of 53 to 46.

Legislative and policy experts close to the issue said that if Inhofe’s proposal had been passed, it would have removed vitally important public health protections more than two decades in the making that every year prevent up to:

11,000 premature deaths;

nearly 5,000 heart attacks;

130,000 asthma attacks;

5,700 hospital and emergency room visits; and

540,000 days when people miss work and school

The EPA regulations, approved under President Obama, are designed to reduce emissions of mercury and other pollution up to 90 percent by requiring plant owners to install pollution control mechanisms. Energy companies oppose the regulations for being too costly. The lobbying campaign was initiated by the American Coalition for Clean Coal electricity (ACCCE), whose membership includes electric utilities such as Southern Company and American Electric Power, two of largest air-borne mercury polluters in the country.

A Google promotional document, Four Screens to Victory [PDF], describes Google’s involvement in the 2012 election cycle, and specifically highlights its role in garnering support for Inhofe’s proposal to abolish the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards:

“In the spring of 2012, the U.S. Senate was considering legislation critical to the clean coal industry. As the industry’s voice in Washington, the American Coalition for Clean Coal electricity (ACCCe) sought ways to mobilize grassroots supporters of the legislation across the country to make their voices heard in the nation’s capital. The bill that the Senate would vote on was not on newspaper front pages or leading nightly newscasts, s ACCCE needed to find creative ways to identify citizens who backed its position – and then needed a mechanism to connect those people with their U.S. Senators.”

A web version of Four Screens to Victory can be found on Google.com, however the mercury campaign case study is not included in that version.

The document describes how Google and New Media Strategies - since renamed MXM Social - worked together on the implementation of ACCCE’s lobbying plan:

“Social media marketing firm New Media Strategies (NMS) [now MXM] and Google implemented a groundbreaking click-to-call mobile advertising campaign on ACCCE’s behalf, connecting constituents with their U.S. Senators to support an amendment to stop regulation harmful to the clean coal industry. ACCCE’s campaign, which generated 3,000 phone calls to Senators over about two weeks, is the first time an issue advocacy organization has used mobile click-to-call advertising on Google to connect constituents to Senate offices at this scale.”

An inquiry to MXM confirms as much. In response to my questions, Ross Parman, MXM’s manager of insights and public affairs said,

The amendment supported by the click-to-call campaign was actually a resolution of disapproval under the Congressional Review Act. CRAs are a gambit that rarely succeed – I believe it has only worked once – and in this case came up short, 46-53. Our goal was to move key Senate targets, and that was highly successful. The majority of our targeted senators voted in favor of the CRA.”

The campaign garnered several PR awards for having effectively fused search, social media and Google’s “click-to-call technology” into what its participants are now heralding as ”the next progression in technology in the lobbying business.”

In response to our inquires, a source at Google told me that the company maintains a neutral stance when it comes to who uses their various platforms and for what purpose, especially on politically charged issues like US environmental policy. With the scale of clients and users Google needs to deal with, their politically neutral stance is understandable, and Google does have strict standards around using their platform for things clearly inappropriate to promote (i.e.. illegal drugs, sexual services, hate literature etc.).

However, in the case of ACCCE, MXM and their efforts to stop the regulation of deadly chemicals in our air, Google has shown no qualms for having engaged in the implementation of the campaign. Maybe it was too focused on the medium, and not enough on the message.

==

Organizations that received “substantial” funding from Google for the first time over the past year include Grover Norquist's Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union (best known for its CPAC conference), and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation that led the charge to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act: Heritage Action.

In 2013, Google also funded the corporate lobby group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, although that group is not listed as receiving “substantial” funding in the list published by Google.

U.S. corporations are not required to publicly disclose their funding of political advocacy groups, and very few do so, but since at least 2010 Google has chosen to voluntarily release <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">some limited details</a> about grants it makes to U.S. non-profits. The published list from Google is not comprehensive, including only those groups that “receive the most substantial contributions from Google’s U.S. Federal Public Policy and Government Affairs team.”

What Google considers “substantial” is not explained -- no dollar amounts are given -- but the language suggests significant investments from Google and, with a stock value of $330 billion, Google has considerably deep pockets.

Google has a distinctively progressive image, but in March 2012 it hired former Republican member of the House of Representatives, Susan Molinari as its Vice President of Public Policy and Government Relations. According to the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/03/business/susan-molinari-adds-to-googles-political-firepower.html?pagewanted=1" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">New York Times</a>, Molinari is being “paid handsomely to broaden the tech giant’s support beyond Silicon Valley Democrats and to lavish money and attention on selected Republicans.”

<h2 style=" border: 0px; margin: 1em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25;">New "Substantial" Right-Wing Google Grants in Past Year</h2>

CMD examined the <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">information released by Google</a> for the years 2010 to 2013. The voluntary disclosures indicate that the following groups are either new grantees of Google since September 2012, or have been listed as having received a “substantial” Google grant for the first time:

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">American Conservative Union</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Americans for Tax Reform</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">CATO Institute</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Federalist Society</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">George Mason University Law School Law and Economics Center</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Heritage Action</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Mercatus Center</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">National Taxpayers Union</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">R Street Institute</li>

<li style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Texas Public Policy Foundation</li>

</ul>

Detailed information on each of these groups can be found at CMD’s <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Sourcewatch</a> website.

<h2 style=" border: 0px; margin: 1em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25;">Google Funding for Anti-Government Groups</h2>

<div>

Heritage Action, the tea-party styled political advocacy arm of the Heritage Foundation, is perhaps the most surprising recipient of Google’s largesse.

More than any other group working to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Heritage Action <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12274/field-guide-koch-o%E2%80%99-nuts-behind-near-government-default" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">pushed for a sustained government shutdown</a> in the fall of 2013, taking the country to the brink of a potentially catastrophic debt default.

Laying the ground for that strategy, Heritage Action <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12274/field-guide-koch-o%E2%80%99-nuts-behind-near-government-default" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">held</a> a nine-city “Defund Obamacare Town Hall Tour” in August 2013, providing a platform for Texas Senator Ted Cruz to address crowds of cheering tea party supporters.

For Cruz, increasingly spoken of as a 2016 Presidential candidate, the government shutdown helped raise his profile and build his supporter -- and donor -- base.

</div>

Notably, Heritage Action <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12274/field-guide-koch-o%E2%80%99-nuts-behind-near-government-default" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">received $500,000</a> from the Koch-funded and Koch-operative staffed Freedom Partners in 2012. It is not yet known how much Heritage Action received in 2013 from sources other than Google.

Perhaps surprisingly, Google has a history of supporting Cruz. Via its Political Action Committee – Google Inc. Net PAC – the PAC provided the “Ted Cruz for Senate” campaign with a $10,000 contribution in 2012. Additionally, despite being five years out from the freshman Senator's next election, Google's PAC has already made a $2,500 contribution to the Cruz reelection campaign for 2018, the largest amount that the PAC has given so far to any Senate candidate running that election year according to <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/doc/NETPAC-Contributions-to-US-Federal-Candidates.pdf" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">disclosures made by Google</a>.

Americans for Tax Reform (ATR), the anti-government group run by Republican operative Grover Norquist, was another new recipient of funding from Google in 2013. ATR is <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Americans_for_Tax_Reform" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">best known</a> for its “Taxpayer Protection Pledge,” and for its fundamentalist attacks on any Republican who might dare to vote for any increase in taxes. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, ATR received <a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/news/2013/11/atrs-tax-forms-raise-questions-about-use-of-crossroads-grant-social-welfare-purpose.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">85% of its funding in 2012</a> ($26.4 million) from the ultra-partisan Karl Rove-run Crossroads GPS, another dark money group.

ATR President Grover Norquist infamously said that he wants to shrink government <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Grover_Norquist" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">"down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."</a> Google’s position on the relative size of government versus bathtubs is not known, but according to a <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-avoiding-taxes-with-stateless-income.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Bloomberg analysis</a> of Google’s U.S. corporate filings, it avoids approximately $2 billion dollars globally in tax payments each year through the use of creative tax shelters.

<a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-05-22/google-joins-apple-avoiding-taxes-with-stateless-income.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Bloomberg reported</a> in May 2013 that in France alone Google is in the midst of a dispute over more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes that have been alleged. An August 2013 report by U.S. PIRG – “<a href="http://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/Offshore_Shell_Games_USPIRG.pdf" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Offshore Shell Games</a>” -- found that Google is now holding more than $33 billion dollars offshore, avoiding taxes on these earnings in the United States.

National Taxpayers Union, headed by former eleven-year American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) Executive Director Duane Parde, has a similar anti-tax, anti-government agenda, and it also <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">received funding from Google</a> in 2013.

<h2 style=" border: 0px; margin: 1em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25;">Google Sponsor Event Honoring Justice Thomas</h2>

Google also recently <a href="http://www.commonblog.com/2013/11/15/justice-thomas-crosses-the-line-again/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">sponsored a gala fundraiser</a> in Washington DC for the Federalist Society, a network of right-wing judges and lawyers that includes Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Justice Thomas was the guest of honor at that event, for which Google was listed as a top-tier “gold” sponsor. Google <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">names the Federalist Society </a>on its list of groups receiving its most substantial grants in 2013.

The company is also funding state special interest group operations. The Center for Media and Democracy, which publishes PRWatch, recently posted a <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12302/reports-expose-extreme-pressure-groups-masquerading-think-tanks" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">major national report</a> on the State Policy Network (SPN), a network of right-wing think tanks, with at least one organization in every state in the country. SPN groups typically promote a pro-corporate agenda, often at the expense of the interests of ordinary working people.

The Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), which is part of SPN, also received money from Google in 2013. As Progress Now's state affiliate and CMD have <a href="http://stinktanks.org/texas/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">documented</a>, the legislative agenda promoted by TPPF includes opposing renewable energy, blocking access to affordable healthcare, and opposing state minimum wage laws.

Google, which did not respond to a request for comment, may argue that it simply funds groups on both sides of the political spectrum, providing other grants to organizations that advocate on behalf of values more closely associated with the corporation’s progressive image. Since Google does not release details of all its grantees and the dollar amounts, it is hard to judge this, although <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">they do disclose</a> providing funding to some progressive groups including the American Constitution Society, People for the American Way and the NAACP.

Although Google has funded both "conservative" and "progressive" groups, it does not disclose the relative proportions given to each, beyond the superficial symmetry, and the degree to which the groups tilt to the right or left in their agendas.

However, as noted by CMD's Executive Director, Lisa Graves, "there really aren't two proportionate sides to the facts about the climate changes that are underway, as to whether working people should be paid a living wage, and whether corporations should have to pay taxes just like working people do. By funding extreme groups on the right under the guise of a false equivalency, Google is enabling groups that seek to undermine government."

<h2 style=" border: 0px; margin: 1em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.25;">Google Membership in ALEC, Funding of CEI</h2>

Since CMD launched <a href="http://www.alecexposed.org/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">ALECexposed.org</a> in 2011, revealing the complete agenda of that corporate front group that was secretly voted on by corporate lobbyists and state legislators behind closed doors, corporations have been<a href="http://sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Corporations_that_Have_Cut_Ties_to_ALEC" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">running to escape</a> association with the group. At least 50 corporations are known to have dropped funding since 2011, including Walmart, Coca Cola and Pepsi. Google – along with Facebook and Yelp – is bucking that trend having quietly joined in 2013. Google does not list ALEC as being a recipient of one of its largest grants, instead it<a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">separately names </a>ALEC as an organization to which it has become a member.

There are many good reasons for brand conscious corporations to stay away from ALEC. For example, its <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/07/12181/after-zimmerman-let%E2%80%99s-end-stand-your-ground" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">legacy of Stand Your Ground</a> gun laws and bills to make <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12270/officials-arizona-and-kansas-rig-ballots-implement-alec-voter-suppression-scheme" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">harder for Americans to vote</a>, its work to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/08/08/state-renewable-energy-laws-turn-out-to-be-really-hard-to-repeal/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">repeal renewable energy laws</a> and the ability of the <a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/10/12273/supreme-court-rule-greenhouse-gas-regulation" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">EPA to regulate greenhouse gases</a>, and its efforts to privatize almost everything, are just a few of its extreme measures.

ALEC is a corporate funded lobby group, and the businesses that fund ALEC do so hoping to move a legislative agenda. An <a href="http://www.commonblog.com/2012/04/23/alec-is-running-a-tax-scam/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">ALEC publicatio</a>n sent to corporate members in 1995, celebrated its legislative agenda to members as a “good investment”, stating clearly “nowhere else can you get a return that high.” As CMD's Lisa Graves has said, "It's a pay-to-play operation."

Google joined ALEC just this year, and stepped up funding to groups such as ATR, Federalist Society and Heritage Action in 2013, but under the radar it has been funding a handful of other right-wing groups for several years. In 2013 Google provided a reported <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/20/anatomy-of-a-washington-dinner-who-funds-the-competitive-enterprise-institute/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">$50,000 sponsorship check</a> to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), another group trying to thwart efforts to address climate change, but it has previously funded “<a href="http://www.google.com/policyfellowship/hosts.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Google Policy Fellows</a>” at CEI for several years, and has listed the organization as one that it has supported financially on its “<a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">transparency</a>” pages for at least three years.

Google <a href="http://www.google.com/policyfellowship/hosts.html" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">states that its fellows</a> “work closely with CEI scholars to research and promote innovative, pro-consumer solutions to the public policy challenges of the information age.” Whatever projects Google fellows end up working on at CEI, the Google brand is now tied to an organization that has a reputation strongly connected to the denial of climate change.

"Political spending for corporations is purely transactional. It is all about getting policies that maximize profitability," Bob McChesney told CMD. “So even ostensibly hip companies like Google invariably spend lavishly to support groups and politicians that pursue decidedly anti-democratic policy outcomes. It is why sane democracies strictly regulate or even prohibit such spending, regarding it accurately as a cancer for democratic governance." Professor McChesney co-founded the media reform group Free Press in 2002, and this year authored How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy.

The policies advocated by some of the Google’s grantees are in stark contrast with the progressive image that Google has worked to promote. It has <a href="http://www.google.com/green/energy/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">publicly committed to invest</a> more than $1 billion dollars in renewable energy projects, reduce the use of cars by its employees, power its offices with renewables and otherwise green its buildings. The contrast between these promises, and Google’s funding of groups that deny or challenge the reality of climate change – groups motivated by funding received from fossil fuel companies – has led several organizations to launch campaigns calling for Google to stop funding climate change deniers. Forecast the Facts has a “Hey Google! Don't Fund ALEC's Evil!” petition, and Sum of Us has a petition calling on Google to “never fund climate change deniers again."

<a href="http://alecexposed.org/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">ALEC</a> is holding its next conference in Washington DC from December 4th through the 6th. A Google lobbyist will likely be there, celebrating ALEC’s 40th anniversary alongside legislators and other lobbyists.  CMD will report on the events of the conference through the week at <a href="http://prwatch.org/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">PRWatch.org</a>. To sign CMD's petition to Google CEO Larry Page, calling for him to publicly quit ALEC, <a href="http://org.salsalabs.com/o/632/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=14651#" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">click here</a>.

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<li class="field-item even" style=" font-size: 0.92em; border: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; display: inline-block; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px !important;"><a href="http://www.prwatch.org/topics/alec-exposed" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 119, 187) !important; text-decoration: none;">ALEC Exposed</a></li>

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<li class="field-item even" style=" font-size: 0.92em; border: 0px; padding: 0px; list-style: none; display: inline-block; margin: 0px 5px 0px 0px !important;"><a href="http://www.prwatch.org/topics/politics/right-wing" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; color: rgb(51, 119, 187) !important; text-decoration: none;">Right Wing</a></li>

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<li><a href="http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12319/google-funding-grover-norquist-heritage-action-alec-and-more">http://www.prwatch.org/news/2013/11/12319/google-funding-grover-norquist-heritage-action-alec-and-more</a></li>

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==

This year, Google has supported infamous climate denier Jim Inhofe, raised funds for the anti-science group Competitive Enterprise Institute, and quietly joined the corporate-funded lobbying group, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). That's right, Google is a member of ALEC. What happened to “Don’t be evil?”

Now it’s getting worse: at ALEC’s national summit in Washington, DC on December 4th, keynote speakers such as Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) will be able to broadcast their radical climate change conspiracy theories to a cheering crowd of Republican legislators. You may hear something like this from Cruz:

"Now EPA has adopted greenhouse gas regulations on the basis of scientific assumptions that have been totally undermined by the latest science—and those regulations are going to have a devastating impact on many American families and businesses if we don’t roll them back."...

ALEC DC Summit Speakers Lineup: Top Republican 2016 Presidential Contenders, Climate Conspiracy Theorists, Hill Heat, 11-20-2013

<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/524?t=5&akid=278.100725.0P4na" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/524?t=6&akid=278.100725.0P4na_</a>

Time to Repeal ALEC/NRA Stand Your Ground Laws, PR Watch, 7-15-2013

<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/522?t=7&akid=278.100725.0P4na" style=" color: rgb(0, 51, 153); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/522?t=8&akid=278.100725.0P4na_</a>

ALEC Forges New Bills for its Polluting Company Members, Greenpeace, 11-05-2013

<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/523?t=9&akid=278.100725.0P4na" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/523?t=10&akid=278.100725.0P4na_</a>

Corporations that Have Cut Ties to ALEC, Source Watch

<a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/526?t=11&akid=278.100725.0P4na" style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); line-height: 1.2em; outline: none;">http://act.forecastthefacts.org/go/526?t=12&akid=278.100725.0P4na_</a>

Google <a href="http://www.google.com/green/energy/investments/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">confirmed</a> on Friday that it is investing $80 million in six new solar facilities under construction in California and Arizona. The plants, expected to come online early in the new year, are just the latest addition to Google’s renewable portfolio. The internet giant has already poured well over $1 billion into similar projects, including: wind farms in the Mojave Desert, North Dakota, and Oregon; a German solar facility; and a transmission line for wind farms off the mid-Atlantic Coast. Google also has contracts for 570 megawatts of renewable energy to power its massive data centers.

The news from Google comes on the heels of an <a href="http://newsroom.fb.com/News/760/Bringing-New-Wind-to-Iowa" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">announcement</a> by Facebook this week that its Altoona, Iowa data center, currently under construction, will run solely on wind power when it comes online in 2015. A nearby wind farm in Wellsburg, Iowa will supply the clean power for the Altoona site, which will be Facebook’s second data center to run totally on renewable energy, following the first in Lulea, Sweden. Facebook has a goal of using 25 percent renewable energy to power all of its data centers by 2015.

But while the two companies are touting renewables as though they’re forward-looking groups, there’s more to the story. Both have been in the news recently for their decisions to support climate-denying politicians and organizations.

In July, Google <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/01/2395221/googles-scientists-say-stop-funding-climate-deniers/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);">hosted a fundraiser lunch</a> at its Washington office for Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe. Inhofe is one of the most notorious climate deniers in Congress, repeatedly calling climate change “a hoax.” He was heavily involved in spreading the “Climategate” narrative, and recommended the criminal investigation of 17 of the world’s top climatologists based on hacked emails. While denying the mainstream science of climate change, he has also stated that it would actually be beneficial for the environment and the economy.

Just weeks before Google’s $250-$2,500 plate lunch for Inhofe, it was revealed that the internet company<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/05/2257691/is-google-funding-climate-science-denial-jim-inhofe-fundraiser-planned-for-july-11/" style=" box-sizing: border-box; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(51, 51, 51);"> had donated $50,000</a> at a fundraising dinner for the ultra-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). While most of the other donors came from the energy sector and conservative foundations, many associated with the Koch brothers, Facebook also chipped in $25,000. Google was still the biggest single donor. CEI ran ad campaign promoting carbon dioxide emissions: “They call it pollution. We call it life.”

Google and Facebook are also under fire for their ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a free-market lobbying group, which has recently been devoted to dismantling state renewable energy and climate laws. While dozens of major companies such as Amazon, Sallie Mae, Kraft and Pepsi have cut ties with the organization, citing the group’s position on voter ID laws and Stand Your Ground, Google and Facebook, along with Yelp and Microsoft, are all serving on an ALEC technology task force.

===

<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-johnson/why-is-google-helping-the-kochs_b_4228480.html?utm_hp_ref=green">http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brad-johnson/why-is-google-helping-the-kochs_b_4228480.html?utm_hp_ref=green</a>

<span style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: inline !important; float: none;">Several organizations supported by Internet giant Google are calling on Congress to let the wind production tax credit to expire. A full-page advertisement from the Koch brothers' organization Americans for Prosperity <a href="http://americanenergyalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/WindPTC_letter.pdf" target="_hplink" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px; outline: 0px; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">states</a><span style=" color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: inline !important; float: none;"> that the "undersigned organizations and the millions of Americans we represent<span style=" font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); display: inline !important; float: none;"> stand opposed to extending the production tax credit (PTC)" because the "wind industry has very little to show after 20 years of preferential tax treatment."

"Americans deserve energy solutions that can make it on their own in the marketplace -- not ones that need to be propped up by government indefinitely," the letter concludes.

Signatories of the letter who are Google-supported organizations, according to <a href="http://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency.html" target="_hplink" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">Google's public policy transparency page</a>, include:

<li class="first" style=" list-style: disc inside; margin: 0px 0px 4px 35px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px !important;">American Conservative Union</li>

<li style=" list-style: disc inside; margin: 0px 0px 4px 35px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px !important;">Competitive Enterprise Institute</li>

<li class="last" style=" list-style: disc inside; margin: 0px 0px 4px 35px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 5px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px !important;">R Street Institute</li>

</ul>

<p style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 15px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px; font-family: Georgia, Century, Times, serif; font-size: 15px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: 21px; orphans: auto; text-align: left; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: auto; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Google's public policy division, which chose to support the above groups, is run by former Republican Congresswoman <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/05/2257691/is-google-funding-climate-science-denial-jim-inhofe-fundraiser-planned-for-july-11/" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">Susan Molinari</a>.

In addition to Americans for Prosperity, other signatories notorious for promoting climate-change denial and attacks on climate scientists include the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), Cornwall Alliance, Freedom Works, Independent Women's Forum, Club for Growth, and the American Energy Alliance.

The listed organizations are not the only Google-supported opponents of wind power. This year, Google <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/google-doing-evil-with-al_b_4079436.html" target="_hplink" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">joined</a> the <a href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/google_stop_funding_alec/" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">American Legislative Exchange Council</a> (ALEC), whose energy agenda is driven by Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies. ALEC's vigorous campaign against state-level renewable energy standards led to the <a href="http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059975552" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">resignation</a> of the American Wind Energy Association and the Solar Energy Industries Association, who had been members in ALEC until this year.

Google is a major beneficiary of the wind PTC, as the company has the stated goal of "<a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2013/09/another-windy-day-in-texas-new-power.html" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">100 percent renewable energy</a>" power for its operations, which include energy-intensive data centers across the nation. Google currently is the sole customer of the entire output of three different wind farms -- NextEra's 114-megawatt Story County II wind farm in Iowa, NextEra's 100.8MW Minco II wind farm in Oklahoma, and Chermac Energy's planned 239.2 MW Happy Hereford wind farm in Amarillo, Tex. Breaking Energy's Glenn Schleede has estimated that Google will receive a <a href="http://breakingenergy.com/2013/10/25/opinion-google-buys-wind-energy-cost-to-taxpayers-could-top-350-mm/" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">$370 to $417 million</a> benefit from the PTC over ten years if it is continued.

If the PTC expires, Google shareholders will suffer, as will the nation's growing wind industry. The effort to meet the challenge of eliminating greenhouse pollution will be stalled, as the fossil-fuel industry enjoys the benefits of not having to pay for the costs of its civilization-threatening pollution -- with Google's help. Climate accountability group, Forecast the Facts, has called on Google to end its support for politicians and groups that reject the threat of climate change and oppose clean-energy policy. Their petition to Google can be found <a href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/google_stop_funding_alec/" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: none; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">here</a>.

Google has not responded to requests for comment.

Follow Brad Johnson on Twitter: <a href="http://www.twitter.com/climatebrad" style=" list-style: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; text-decoration: underline; overflow: visible; color: rgb(57, 152, 0); text-indent: 0px !important; outline: 0px;">www.twitter.com/climatebrad</a>

http://www.alternet.org/print/civil-liberties/nsa-action-writers-house-raided-based-innocent-google-search

usic writer Michele Catalano wrote Thursday [3] about a personal experience that may show, to bizarre but chilling effect, the government’s online surveillance in action. Catalano writes that her home was visited and searched by members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force —  a fact she attributes to having searched online for pressure cookers, while her husband searched for backpacks.

Of course, there is no way to verify why Catalano’s home was selected for a raid — national security agencies are hardly free with such information. But based on questions posed by the government agents to her husband (she was not home at the time ), Catalano pieced together that a “confluence” of Internet searches — activity we now know to be tracked and hoarded on databases by the NSA — brought a SWAT team to her door. She had searched for pressure cookers, her husband had searched for back packs. Following the Boston bombings, otherwise innocuous activity took on a suspicious air to the algorithms daily sifting our almost every online move on behalf of the government.

“Little did we know our seemingly innocent, if curious to a fault, Googling of certain things was creating a perfect storm of terrorism profiling. Because somewhere out there, someone was watching. Someone whose job it is to piece together the things people do on the internet raised the red flag when they saw our search history,” wrote Catalano.

Indeed, Wednesday’s revelation’s based on documents leaked by NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden showed how national security analysts regularly use keyword searches to sift and create profiles of interest out of the vast, unwieldy amount of data collected daily on almost every phone and online interaction within and going out of the U.S.

Catalano’s story, as she frames it, appears to illustrate how Internet activity both banal and curious can add up to the seemingly criminal according to government algorithims. Her story too appears to highlight — through the lens of the personal — how very much our online selves are surveilled. Interestingly, Catalalono writes that the agents who raided her house said that that carry out such raids regularly:

They mentioned that they do this about 100 times a week. And that 99 of those visits turn out to be nothing. I don’t know what happens on the other 1 percent of visits and I’m not sure I want to know what my neighbors are up to.

Catalano adds:

   Mostly I felt a great sense of anxiety. This is where we are at. Where you have no expectation of privacy. Where trying to learn how to cook some lentils could possibly land you on a watch list. Where you have to watch every little thing you do because someone else is watching every little thing you do.

===

<div>google ads 7/21/13</div>

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</div></li>

<h3 style=" font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.mfpp.org/climatechange" id="van7" wrc_done="true" style=" color: rgb(37, 24, 181); cursor: pointer;">Global Climate Change‎</a> </h3>

Five ways to prepare for global

climate change.‎

<div>

</div>

</div></li>

<h3 style=" font-size: medium; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> <a href="http://www.ciwf.org.uk/" id="van8" wrc_done="true" style=" color: rgb(37, 24, 181); cursor: pointer;">Causes of Climate Change?‎</a> </h3>

Factory farming contributes

to the climate change challenge‎

<div>

</div>

</div></li>

</ol>

</div>

</li>

</ol>

</div>

<a href="http://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-grad-student-scooped-the-ftc-and-what-it-means-for-your-online-privac">http://www.propublica.org/article/how-a-grad-student-scooped-the-ftc-and-what-it-means-for-your-online-privac</a>

===

Google’s climate scientists are not happy with the company’s political support for climate science denying Senator James Inhofe (R-OK).

In 2011, the search giant <a href="http://blog.google.org/2011/02/making-sense-of-science-introducing.html">launched</a> the Google Science Communication Fellows effort, “to help foster a more open, transparent and accessible <a href="http://www.google.com/edu/science/fellows.html">scientific dialogue</a>.” 21 scientists were part of group that included climate scientists such as Julia Cole, Frank Davis, Andrew Dessler, and Eugene Cordero.

The dialogue took an unexpected turn on Thursday, when 17 of those fellows wrote a letter to Chairman Eric Schmidt and CEO Larry Page, saying that though Google is a business and has to work with both parties to serve its interests, “there are times where companies like Google must display moral leadership and carefully evaluate their political bedfellows.”

They conclude: “Google’s support of Senator James Inhofe’s re-election campaign is one of those moments.”

Google announced a July 11, 2013, fundraiser for Senator Inhofe at their Washington DC office, which prompted <a href="http://action.sumofus.org/a/google-climate-deniers/2/2/">over</a> <a href="http://org.credoaction.com/petitions/hey-google-don-t-fund-evil/">150,000</a> <a href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/google_stop_funding_inhofe">people</a> to sign petitions telling Google: “Don’t Fund Evil” — a play on the company’s “Don’t Be Evil” motto.

Several of the world’s top climate scientists have already <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/24/2339781/climate-scientists-fight-back-googles-support-for-inhofe-increases-risk-to-all-society/">let Google know</a> that political action like that “is a rejection of principles of good corporate citizenship and increases risk to all society.”

The fundraiser went ahead as planned, with a Google spokesperson saying, that “while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.” Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently said during a <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/6/6/4403422/eric-schmidt-says-the-internet-can-solve-climate-change-fact-problem">speech</a> at a company summit: “You can lie about the effects of climate change, but eventually you’ll be seen as a liar.”

Inhofe usually receives strong political support from oil and gas — aside from presidential candidates, he has received the<a href="http://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary.php?ind=E01&recipdetail=S&sortorder=A&cycle=All"> fourth-most</a> amount of contributions among senators from the oil and gas sector over his career.

More from the scientists’ letter itself:

Google has earned its reputation as one of America’s most innovative and forward-thinking companies, and has shown climate leadership by improving its own environmental performance and investing in clean energy technologies. That’s why it was deeply troubling for us, as Google Science Communication Fellows, to learn about Google’s July 11, 2013 fundraiser supporting Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe’s 2014 re-election campaign.

Among his most notorious statements, Senator Inhofe has outrageously claimed that climate change is “a hoax on the American people” and, in the absence of a shred of factual evidence, accused climate scientists of being “criminals.” …

Given Google’s commitment to educating the public about climate change, why would the company align its political efforts with Inhofe? In responding to criticism, a Google spokesperson acknowledged “while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.”

But Inhofe’s assault on the scientific community is not a difference in climate policy; it’s a strategy designed to promote dysfunction and paralysis; to destroy the reputation of scientists and the legitimacy of their institutions; and to undermine our ability to find common ground.

Such a strategy conflicts with the data-driven, problem solving culture that has enabled Google’s business success and is arguably contrary to its corporate philosophy of “Don’t Be Evil.” …

Google’s recent support for Senator Inhofe forces us to question the company’s commitment to science communication and to addressing climate change.

</blockquote>

On Thursday night, the climate group Forecast The Facts will be <a href="http://forecastthefacts.org/press/releases/2013/7/31/climate-activists-crash-google-moto-x-launch-party/">crashing</a> the launch party for Google’s new smartphone, the Moto X. In the meantime, Google has an awkward letter in its inbox from its own climate scientists.

<ul>

<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/climate-change/">Climate Change</a></li>

<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/climate-change-deniers/">Climate Change Deniers</a></li>

<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/google/">Google</a></li>

<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/james-inhofe/">James Inhofe</a></li>

<li><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/tag/science/">Science</a></li>

</ul>

</div>

===

<a href="http://grist.org/business-technology/google-hosts-fundraiser-for-climate-denying-sen-jim-inhofe/">http://grist.org/business-technology/google-hosts-fundraiser-for-climate-denying-sen-jim-inhofe/</a>

<h1 class="headline" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 0.4em; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 1.5em; font-weight: normal; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1.2em; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Google hosts fundraiser for climate-denying Sen. Jim Inhofe</h1>

<p class="byline" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 0.8em; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(34, 34, 34); line-height: 21.600000381469727px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By <a href="http://grist.org/author/suzanne-goldenberg/" title="Posts by Suzanne Goldenberg" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none;">Suzanne Goldenberg</a>

Google, which prides itself on building a “better web that is better for the environment,” is hosting a fundraiser for the most notorious <a title="More from guardian.co.uk on Climate change" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/climate-change" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">climate change</a> denier in Congress, it has emerged.

The lunch, at the company’s Washington, D.C., office, will benefit the Oklahoma Republican Jim Inhofe, who has made a career of dismissing climate change as a “hoax” on the Senate floor.

Proceeds of <a title="" href="http://politicalpartytime.org/party/34741/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">the July 11 lunch</a>, priced at $250 to $2,500, will also go to the national Republican Senatorial Committee.

It’s the second show of support from Google for the anti-climate cause in recent weeks.

Last month, the <a title="" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/20/anatomy-of-a-washington-dinner-who-funds-the-competitive-enterprise-institute/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">Washington Post reported</a> that the internet company had donated $50,000 for a fundraising dinner for the ultra-conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute — topping the contributions even of the Koch oil billionaires.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute has launched multiple lawsuits aimed at trying to discredit the science behind climate change — accusing scientists of fraud. None has so far succeeded.

The CEI also specializes in filing open-records requests, demanding universities turn over email correspondence of climate scientists with journalists.

Facebook also contributed $25,000 to the CEI dinner last month.

Google’s show of support for the leading climate contrarian in Congress was criticized by climate activists on Tuesday. “Google’s motto is ‘Don’t Be Evil’, but it is supporting one of the worst deniers of climate science in the world,” <a title="" href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/07/05/2257691/is-google-funding-climate-science-denial-jim-inhofe-fundraiser-planned-for-july-11/" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">said the Climate Progress website</a>, which first reported on the story.

Inhofe has spent more than a decade challenging the science behind climate change, and trying to stop Congress from acting on climate change. He has repeatedly dismissed climate change as a “hoax” or “hysteria,” and cited the benefits of global warming for the economy and the environment.

The campaign group Forecast the Facts <a title="" href="http://act.forecastthefacts.org/sign/google_stop_funding_inhofe" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">launched a petition</a> calling for Google Chief Executive Officer Larry Page to cancel the fundraiser.

Google has been a corporate leader in fighting climate change. The company claims on its <a title="" href="http://www.google.com/green" style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(157, 157, 157); text-decoration: none; max-width: 100%;">Google Green website</a> to be creating “a better web that is better for the environment” by investing $1 billion in renewable energy and making considerable savings in electricity use at its data centers.

Google initially refused to comment on the record about its support for Inhofe.

However, a company spokesperson noted that Google maintained data centers in Oklahoma. The spokesperson then sent an email saying:

We regularly host fundraisers for candidates, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn’t mean we endorse all of their positions. And while we disagree on climate change policy, we share an interest with Senator Inhofe in the employees and data center we have in Oklahoma.

</blockquote>

<p style=" border: 0px; margin: 0px 0px 1.4em; padding: 0px; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', Times, serif; font-size: 15.199999809265137px; vertical-align: baseline; max-width: 100%; color: rgb(42, 42, 42); line-height: 22.799999237060547px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Google’s website notes the company has invested $700 million in two data centers in Oklahoma. The state is a leading oil and gas producer — and Inhofe has been a strong promoter of the industry. However, Google has contracted to power its data centers through wind energy.

“They can probably rightfully claim that the facility is powered 100 percent by wind,” said Gary Cook, technology campaigner for Greenpeace, which tracks greenhouse gas emissions from the IT sector. He added: “But even so, Jim Inhofe is the biggest obstacle to climate change action in the Senate, so what are they doing raising money for him?”

===

I asked Sassoon, fresh off his Pulitzer win, what he thought of the news of Koch Industries potentially bidding on the Tribune Company newspapers. "We reported on the Kochs' involvement in the tar sands, and they played hardball to try to shut us up," he wrote in an email."They pressured Reuters to drop us as a content partner, and ran ads on Google andFacebook calling me liar…. What we've experienced of them firsthand makes me think they would not be trustworthy stewards of the honorable traditions of journalism."

===

US COC

The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2013/06/20/anatomy-of-a-washington-dinner-who-funds-the-competitive-enterprise-institute/" target="_hplink">reports</a> something I never would have thought in a million years. Google is supporting one of the worst climate-denier organizations in the world: the so-called Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI).

Is this the same Google that touts how "green" it is, how much it is lowering its carbon footprint? The same Google that formed a "Climate Savers Computing Initiative" in 2007 and has won awards from the EPA and Greenpeace, which are proudly displayed on their "Google Green" <a href="http://www.google.com/green/energy/" target="_hplink">website</a>?

Is this the same Google whose products I absolutely love and use constantly throughout the day, inspiring within me a fierce brand loyalty?

My beloved Google, say it ain't so!

Ms. Eilperin notes that while CEI does not disclose donors to the organization's regular budget, they do for sponsors of their annual dinner:

<blockquote>The lineup of sponsors both confirms certain stereotypes about the right-leaning think tank and challenges others. The energy sector donated $110,000 to the event, the same amount given by conservative foundations (three of which are associated with the billionaires Charles and David Koch). But the biggest single donor is Google, which gave $50,000, and Facebook kicked in $25,000.</blockquote>

Let me make sure you caught this: "the biggest single donor is Google ..."

(And Facebook is a donor, too! A fight for another day.)

Here's what the CEI's website <a href="http://cei.org/ceidinner" target="_hplink">says</a> about its Google-charged bash:

<blockquote>The annual CEI Dinner and Reception brings together an audience of policy professionals, distinguished scholars, congressional staff, and CEI supporters to celebrate another year of CEI's effective advocacy for freedom. It is often cited as one of the most enjoyable DC events of the year. We hope you can join us.</blockquote>

Yuk.

Some years back I was with CEI's founder Fred Smith at a private conference. A likeable guy personally. But CEI's behavior is anything but likeable. Here's but one small example.

I recently attended a debate on a carbon tax in Washington, D.C. between political conservatives in front of an audience of political conservatives. My friend Bob Inglis, a proud Republican and former Congressman from South Carolina, was on a team arguing in favor of a revenue-neutral carbon tax swap in lieu of EPA regulations, allowing the marketplace to determine how best to overcome climate change. Several years ago Bob lost his primary in part because of his courageous stand on climate change.

So what did CEI do? They actually made up buttons with "70/29" on them -- or by how much Bob lost his primary -- and put them on the seats in the auditorium. If this is how they treat their "friends," you can imagine what they do to their adversaries. (You'll be happy to know that even though CEI tried to pack the house, and even though the audience was primarily political conservatives, their side still lost the debate, according to a vote by the audience itself. I found this to be a real sign of hope!)

CEI's webpage about the dinner trumpets in a big gaudy graphic that it was "SOLD OUT."

Or is that a reference to my beloved Google?

Hmmm... What else don't we know here? Has Google given more money to climate-denier CEI? What about to other climate-denier groups? We've found smoke, but is there fire?

To restore its good name, Google should:

<ul>

<li class="first">come clean about any other donations it has made to CEI or any other climate-denier groups;</li>

</li>

<li>pledge to never fund climate deniers again;</li>

</li>

<li class="last">inspired by Zaccheus' example (Luke 19:8), donate 4 times as much as it has given to climate deniers to Bob Inglis' <a href="http://energyandenterprise.com/" target="_hplink">Energy & Enterprise Initiative</a>.</li>

</li>

</ul>

Then I can go back to searching on Google and using my Google Mail with a clean conscience.

The Rev. Jim Ball is author of Global Warming and the Risen LORD.

http://waywire.us5.list-manage.com/track/click?u=2e0f33b298ce6803d2b6066df&id=621d4df728&e=3b673fcd1f  own airport

===

<h1 class="title">Google is Investing in the Next Hot Spot for Renewable Energy: South Africa</h1>

<div class="field-label">Source: </div>

<div class="field-item odd">(Quartz)</div>

</div>

There's a place where a developer can propose, finance and build a big solar power project in a matter of months. That place is not California, Germany or China. It's South Africa. And the country's embrace of renewable energy has attracted investors like Google, which today said it is helping finance a 96 megawatt (MW) photovoltaic power plant in the Northern Cape province.</div>

</div>

===

google ad:

<h2 style=" font-size: 13px; font-weight: normal; margin: 0 -35px 0 0; padding: 4px 4px 4px 0;">Ad related to shareholder revolt csr climate corporate responsibility<a class="gl wtall" id="wtata" data-wta-ved="0CCkQJzgK" data-apm-ved="0CCsQKTgK" data-width="230"> </a></h2>

<h3 style=" margin-bottom: 0;"><a href="http://www.chevron.com/" id="vpa1">Corporate Responsibility - Chevron.com‎</a></h3>

<div class="kv kva"><cite>www.chevron.com/</cite></div>

Learn about Chevron's Dedication to Local Communities & the Environment‎</div>

===

<h3><a id="vpa1" href="http://www.judicialhellholes.org/SourceWatch">SourceWatch Exposed - Proprietary Court Documents Posted</a></h3>

<div>

<div class="kv kva"><cite>www.judicialhellholes.org/SourceWatch</cite></div>

</div>

Learn About Atrazine Case Here.   <a href="http://www.judicialhellholes.org/2012/01/31/sourcewatch-exposedwebsite-backed-by-organic-food-industry-scrambles-to-take-down-court-documents-after-being-caught-in-the-act/?gclid=CK7Vtf756LYCFUWo4AodNFUAVg">http://www.judicialhellholes.org/2012/01/31/sourcewatch-exposedwebsite-backed-by-organic-food-industry-scrambles-to-take-down-court-documents-after-being-caught-in-the-act/?gclid=CK7Vtf756LYCFUWo4AodNFUAVg</a>

===

<h4 class="meta">04:45 PM - November 9, 2011</h4>

<h3 class="title">The Kochs and Keystone XL</h3>

InsideClimate fails to make its case about brothers’ interest in the pipeline—but it should keep trying

By <a href="http://www.cjr.org/author/curtis-brainard-1/">Curtis Brainard</a>

<li><a href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cjr.org%2Fthe_observatory%2Fthe_kochs_and_keystone_xl.php" class="facebook" title="Submit this article to Facebook">Facebook</a></li>

<li><a href="http://twitter.com/share?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.cjr.org%2Fthe_observatory%2Fthe_kochs_and_keystone_xl.php&text=CJR%20The%20Kochs%20and%20Keystone%20XL&via=cjr" class="twitter" title="Submit this article to Twitter">Twitter</a></li>

<li><a target="_blank" class="email">Email</a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.cjr.org/the_observatory/the_kochs_and_keystone_xl.php?page=all&print=true" target="_blank" class="print">Print</a></li>

</div>

</li>

</ul>

Koch Industries, a giant oil and energy conglomerate, has InsideClimate News, a four-year-old online news startup, in its crosshairs.

In October, the company launched an online ad campaign via Google, Facebook, and its KochFacts.com website (which rebuts coverage it finds unsatisfactory) claiming that InsideClimate “misleads readers and asserts outright falsehoods” about Koch’s interest in the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline would transport crude oil from the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, to Gulf Coast refineries in the US, and has drawn vigorous opposition from environmentalists. Koch’s ads feature a jaundiced image InsideClimate’s founder and publisher, David Sassoon, calling him the “activist/owner” of the site. Sassoon calls the ads “media intimidation.”

=

Welcome to the (Don’t Be) Evil Empire

Google Eats the World

By <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/rebeccasolnit" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">Rebecca Solnit</a>

Finally, journalists have started criticizing in earnest the leviathans of Silicon Valley, notably Google, now the world’s third-largest company in market value. The new round of discussion began even before the revelations that the tech giants were routinely sharing our data with the National Security Agency, or maybe <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/technology/silicon-valley-and-spy-agency-bound-by-strengthening-web.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">merging</a>with it. Simultaneously another set of journalists, apparently unaware that the weather has changed, is still sneering at San Francisco, my hometown, for not lying down and loving Silicon Valley’s looming presence.

The criticism of Silicon Valley is long overdue and some of the critiques are both thoughtful and scathing. The New Yorker, for example, has explored how <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/04/silicon-valley-start-ups-and-the-end-of-stanford.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">start-ups</a>are undermining the purpose of education at Stanford University, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/05/27/130527fa_fact_packer" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">addressed</a> the Valley’s messianic delusions and political meddling, and <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/05/apple-tax-hearings-tim-cook-public-outrage.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">considered</a> Apple’s<a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/leesheppard/2013/05/28/how-does-apple-avoid-taxes/" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">massive tax avoidance</a>.

The New York Times recently published an opinion piece that startled me, especially when I checked the byline. WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, the fugitive in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/opinion/sunday/the-banality-of-googles-dont-be-evil.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">focused on</a> The New Digital Age, a book by top Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen that to him exemplifies the melding of the technology corporation and the state.  It is, he claimed, a startlingly clear and provocative blueprint for technocratic imperialism, from two of our leading “witch doctors who construct a new idiom for United States global power in the twenty-first century.”  He added, “This idiom reflects the ever closer union between the State Department and Silicon Valley.”

What do the U.S. government and Silicon Valley <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175713/tomgram%3A_engelhardt%2C_you_are_our_secret/" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">already have</a> in common? Above all, they want to remain opaque while making the rest of us entirely transparent through the capture of our data. What is arising is simply a new form of government, involving vast entities with the reach and power of government and little accountability to anyone.

</blockquote>

Google, the company with the motto “Don’t be evil,” is rapidly becoming an empire. Not an empire of territory, as was Rome or the Soviet Union, but an empire controlling our access to data and our data itself. Antitrust lawsuits proliferating around the company demonstrate its quest for monopoly control over information in the information age. Its search engine has become indispensable for most of us, and as Google critic and media professor Siva Vaidhyanathan puts it in his 2012 book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0520258827/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">The Googlization of Everything</a>, “[W]e now allow Google to determine what is important, relevant, and true on the Web and in the world. We trust and believe that Google acts in our best interest. But we have surrendered control over the values, methods, and processes that make sense of our information ecosystem.” And that’s just the search engine.

About three-quarters of a billion people use Gmail, which conveniently gives Google access to the content of their communications (scanned in such a way that they can target ads at you). Google tried and failed to claim proprietary control of digital versions of every book ever published; librarians and publishers fought back on that one. As theNew York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/05/technology/google-and-publishers-settle-over-digital-books.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">reported</a> last fall, Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild, summed the situation up this way: “Google continues to profit from its use of millions of copyright-protected books without regard to authors’ rights, and our class-action lawsuit on behalf of U.S. authors continues.”

The nonprofit Consumer Watchdog <a href="http://www.consumerwatchdog.org/resources/cltrdojwaze061213.pdf" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">wrote</a> to the attorney general on June 12th urging him “to block Google’s just announced $1 billion acquisition of Waze, developers of a mobile mapping application, on antitrust grounds... Google already dominates the online mapping business with Google Maps. The Internet giant was able to muscle its way to dominance by unfairly favoring its own service ahead of such competitors as Mapquest in its online search results. Now with the proposed Waze acquisition, the Internet giant would remove the most viable competitor to Google Maps in the mobile space. Moreover it will allow Google access to even more data about online activity in a way that will increase its dominant position on the Internet.”

The company seems to be cornering the online mapping business, seems in fact to be cornering so many things that eventually they may have us cornered.

In Europe, there’s an antitrust lawsuit over Google’s Android phone apps.  In many ways, you can map Google’s rise by the litter of antitrust lawsuits it crushed en route. By the way, Google bought Motorola. You know it owns YouTube, right? That makes Google possessor of the second and third most visited Websites on earth. (Facebook is first, and two more of the top six are also in Silicon Valley.)

Imagine that it’s 1913 and the post office, the phone company, the public library, printing houses, the U.S. Geological Survey mapping operations, movie houses, and all atlases are largely controlled by a secretive corporation unaccountable to the public. Jump a century and see that in the online world that’s more or less where we are. A New York venture capitalist <a href="http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2013/05/running-the-table.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">wrote</a> that Google is trying to take over “the entire fucking Internet” and asked the question of the day: “Who will stop Google?”

The Tipping Point

We ask that question all the time in San Francisco, because here Google isn’t just on our computers, it’s on our streets. I wrote earlier this year about “<a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n03/rebecca-solnit/diary" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">the Google bus</a>” -- the armadas of private Wi-Fi-equipped luxury buses that run through our streets and use our <a href="http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2013/03/14/those-infuriating-private-buses" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">public bus stops</a>, often blocking city buses and public transit passengers while they load or unload the employees taking the long ride down the peninsula to their corporation of choice. Google, Apple, Facebook, and Genentech run some of the bigger fleets, and those mostly unmarked white buses have become a symbol of the transformation of the city.

Carl Nolte, the old native son who writes a column for the (dying) San Francisco Chronicle, <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/nativeson/article/Nothing-will-ever-be-the-same-in-SF-4603169.php" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">said</a> this month of the future inhabitants of 22,000 high-priced apartments under construction, “These new apartment dwellers will all be new San Franciscans, with different values. In a couple of years we'll think of the progressive politicians, circa 2012, as quaint antiques, like the old waterfront Commies your grandfather used to worry about. This is already a high-tech city, an expensive city, a city where middle-class families can't afford to live. It is a city where the African American population has dropped precipitously, where the Latino Mission District is gentrifying more every day. You think it's expensive here now? Just you wait. These are the good old days, but it won't last. We are at a tipping point.”

Mr. Nolte, you can tell, doesn’t particularly like this. A guy named Ilan Greenberg at the New Republic popped up to tell us that we must like it -- or face his ridicule. He <a href="http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112886/san-franciscos-gentrification-problem-isnt-gentrification" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">writes</a>, “Ironically, the anti-gentrifiers themselves undermine San Francisco’s liberal ethos. Opposed to newcomers? Wary of people whose values you don't understand? Critical of young people for not living up to an older generation’s ideals? It all sounds very reactionary and close-minded.” The problem is that we<a href="http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/14/america-s-new-oligarchs-fwd-us-and-silicon-valley-s-shady-1-percenters.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">understand Silicon Valley’s values</a> all too well, and a lot of us don’t like them.

Adding newcomers might not be so bad if it didn’t mean subtracting a lot of those of us who are already here. By us I mean everyone who doesn’t work for a gigantic technology corporation or one of the smaller companies hoping to become a global monolith. Greenberg (who is, incidentally, writing for a publication quietly bought up by a Facebook billionaire) sneers at us for defending middle-class people, but “middle class” is just a word for those of us who get paid decently for our work. People at various income levels in a diversity of fields here in San Francisco are being replaced by those who work in one field and get paid extremely well.  Small, alternative, and nonprofit institutions are also struggling and going down. It’s like watching a meadow being plowed under for, say, Monsanto genetically modified soybeans.

Speaking of meadows, one of Silicon Valley’s billionaires, Napster founder and Spotify billionaire Sean Parker, just threw himself a $10 million wedding on environmentally sensitive land in Big Sur. In the course of <a href="http://www.scpr.org/blogs/environment/2013/06/05/13898/elves-wouldn-t-have-done-this-the-coastal-commissi/" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">building</a> a massive fantasy set for the event, “including grading, change in use from campground to private event, construction of multiple structures including a gateway and arch, an artificial pond, a stone bridge, multiple event platforms with elevated floors, rock walls, artificially created ruins of cottages and castle walls,” he reportedly did <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Sean-Parker-buys-a-slide-from-Coastal-Commission-4580753.php" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">significant environmental damage</a> and violated regulations.

Apparently paying $2.5 million in fines after the fact didn’t bother him. Napster and Spotify are, incidentally, online technologies that have reduced musicians’ profits from their recordings to almost nothing. There are tremendously wealthy musicians, of course, but a lot of them are at best, yes, middle class. Thanks to Parker, maybe a little less so.

Teachers, civil servants, bus drivers, librarians, firefighters -- consider them representatives of the middle class under siege, as well as the people who keep a city viable and diverse. Friends of mine -- a painter, a poet, a filmmaker, a photographer, all of whom have contributed to San Francisco’s culture -- have been evicted so that more affluent people may replace them. There’s a widespread tendency to think that defending culture means defending privileged white people, but that assumes that people of color and poor people aren’t artists. Here, they are.

Everyone here understands that if a musician -- hip-hop or symphony -- can’t afford a home, neither can a janitor and her family. And competition for those apartments is fierce, so fierce that these days no one I know can find a rental on the open market. I couldn’t when I moved in 2011; neither could a physician friend earlier this year. The tech kids come in and offer a year in cash up front or raise the asking price or both, and the housing supply continues to wither, while rents skyrocket. So while Greenberg might like you to think that we’re selfishly not offering a seat at the table, it’s more like old people and working families and people whose careers were shaped by idealism are objecting to being thrown under the, well, bus.

Like Gandhi, Only With Guns

Enough minions of Silicon Valley’s mighty corporations could arrive to create a monoculture.  In some parts of town, it already is the dominant culture. A guy who made a fortune in the dot-com boom and moved to the Mission District (the partly Latino, formerly blue-collar eye of the housing hurricane) got locals’ attention recently with a blog post titled “<a href="http://christacy.blogspot.com/2013/06/dont-be-fucking-douchebag-part-one.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">Douchebags Like You are Ruining San Francisco</a>.” In it, he described the churlish and sometimes predatory behavior of the very young and very wealthy toward the elderly, the poor, and the nonwhite.

He <a href="http://christacy.blogspot.com/2013/06/dont-be-fucking-douchebag-part-three.html" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">wrote</a>, “You’re on MUNI [the city bus system] and watch a 20-something guy reluctantly give up his seat to an elderly woman and then say loudly to his friends, ‘I don’t know why old people ride MUNI. If I were old I’d just take Uber.’” Yeah, I had to look it up, too: Uber.com, a limousine taxi service you access via a smartphone app. A friend of mine overheard a young techie in line to buy coffee say to someone on his phone that he was working on an app that would be “like Food Not Bombs, to distribute food, only for profit.” Saying you're going to be like a group dedicated to free food, only for profit, is about as deranged as saying you're going to be like Gandhi, only with guns.

“An influx of techies will mean more patrons for the arts,” <a href="http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-world-capital-first-it-needs-to-get-over-itself/" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">trilled</a> an article at the Silicon Valley news site Pando, but as of yet those notable patrons have not made an appearance. As a local alternative weekly <a href="http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-bacon-wrapped-economy/Content?oid=3494301&showFullText=true" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">reported</a>, “The tech world in general is notoriously uncharitable: According to the Chronicle of Philanthropy, only four of 2011's 50 most generous U.S. donors worked in tech, despite the fact that 13 of Forbes 50 Richest Americans in 2012 had made some or all of their fortunes in tech.” Medici in their machinations, they are not Medici-style patrons. There is no noticeable trickle-down in the Bay Area, no significant benevolence toward the needy or good causes or culture from the new tech fortunes.

Instead, we get <a href="http://uptownalmanac.com/2013/02/did-mark-zuckerberg-pay-10-million-move-mission" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">San Francisco newcomer</a>, Facebook CEO, and billionaire Mark Zuckerberg pursuing his own interest with ruthless disregard for life on Earth. This year, Zuckerberg formed a politically active nonprofit, FWD.us, that sought to influence the immigration debate to make it easier for Silicon Valley corporations to import tech workers. There has been no ideology involved, only expediency, in how FWD.us pursued its ends. It decided to put its massive financial clout to work giving politicians whatever they wanted in hopes that this would lead to an advantageous quid pro quo arrangement. Toward that end, the group began<a href="http://www.beyondchron.org/articles/Mark_Zuckerberg_s_Fwd_us_Fail_No_Surprise_11359.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">running ads</a> in favor of the <a href="http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175648/michael_klare_keystone_xl_pipeline" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">Keystone XL pipeline</a> (that will bring particularly carbon-dirty tar sands from Canada to the U.S. Gulf Coast) to support a Republican senator and other ads in favor of drilling in Alaska’s pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to support an Alaskan Democrat.

The takeaway message seemed to be that nothing is off limits in pursuing self-interest, and that the actual meaning and consequences of these climate-impacting projects was not of concern at least to that 29-year-old who's also the 25th richest person in the United States. (To give credit where it’s due: Silicon Valley billionaire Elon Musk, Paypal cofounder and electric car mogul, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/10/net-us-usa-immigration-technology-idUSBRE94910K20130510" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">quit</a> FWD.us.) Zuckerberg and his Valley associates were pushing things they didn’t care about and demonstrating that they didn’t care about much except what makes their corporations run and their profits rise. Here, where the Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and many are environmentally minded, this didn’t go over well. Protests ensued at Facebook headquarters and on Facebook itself.

Rising hostility to the tech surge in San Francisco is met with fury and bewilderment by many Silicon Valley employees. They tend to sound like Bush-era strategists dumbfounded that the Iraqis didn’t welcome their invasion with flowers.

Here’s something else you should know about Silicon Valley: <a href="http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/06/silicon-valley-race-gender-problem-income-inequality" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">according to</a> Mother Jones, 89% of the founding teams of these companies are all male; 82% are all white (the other 18% Asian/Pacific Islander); and women there make 49 cents to the male dollar. Silicon Valley female powerhouses like Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg get a lot of attention because they’re unusual, black swans in a lake full of white swans. As Catherine Bracy, on whose research Mother Jones based its charts, <a href="http://cbracy.tumblr.com/" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">put it</a>, “The current research I’ve seen shows that wealth creation from the tech industry is extremely unequally distributed, and current venture capital is going overwhelmingly to a small, homogeneous elite.” That’s what’s encroaching on San Francisco.

That <a href="http://pandodaily.com/2012/12/01/san-francisco-can-become-a-world-capital-first-it-needs-to-get-over-itself/" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">Pando article</a> chastises us this way: “San Francisco can become a world capital.  First it needs to get over itself.” But maybe we don’t want to be a world capital or more like New York and Tokyo. The logic of more-is-better seems unassailable to San Francisco’s detractors, but inside their more is a lot of less: less diversity, less affordability, less culture, less continuity, less community, less equitable distribution of wealth. What’s called wealth in these calculations is for the few; for the many, it’s impoverishment.

The Armada of the .0001%

If Google represents the global menace of Silicon Valley, and Zuckerberg represents its amorality, then Oracle CEO Larry Ellison might best represent its crassness. The fifth richest man in the world, he spent hundreds of millions of dollars to <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-05/how-larry-ellison-is-destroying-the-america-s-cup.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">win</a> the America's Cup yacht race a few years back. The winner gets to choose the next venue for the race and the type of boat to be used. So for this summer’s races, Ellison chose San Francisco Bay and a giant catamaran that appears to be exceptionally unstable. Last month, an Olympic-medal-winning sailor<a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/sports/sports_nut/2013/05/andrew_simpson_dead_did_the_british_sailor_drown_because_the_america_s_cup.html" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">drowned</a> when a boat he was training on capsized in San Francisco Bay, pinning him under its sail.

Part of Ellison’s strategy for winning again evidently involves making the boats so expensive that almost no one can compete. A race that once had seven to 15 competitors now has four, and one may drop out. Business Insider <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-has-screwed-up-americas-cup-2013-6" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">headlined</a> a piece, “Larry Ellison Has Completely Screwed Up The America's Cup.” It went on to say, “Each team, with the exception of New Zealand's, is backed by an individual billionaire, and each has spent between $65 million and $100 million so far.” In typical Silicon Valley-fashion, Ellison also figured out how to <a href="http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2012/02/27/dramatic-change-americas-cup-deal" target="blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">stick</a> San Francisco for a significant part of the tab and in the process even caused the<a href="http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/americas-cup-will-force-evictions-of-waterfront-businesses/Content?oid=2167899" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">eviction</a> of a few dozen small businesses, though in the end the city did not give him a valuable stretch of waterfront he wanted.

Here’s what San Francisco is now: a front row seat on the most powerful corporations on Earth and the people who run them. So we know what you may not yet: they are not your friends and their vision is not your vision, but your data is their data, and your communications are in their hands, and they seem to be rising to become an arm of or a part-owner of the government or a law unto themselves, and no one has yet figured out what we can do about it.

Rebecca Solnit is just winding up several months as a research fellow at Stanford Libraries and Stanford's Bill Lane Center for the American West. Her work there will lead to a book about California history, but her new book, out this month, is <a href="http://www.amazon.com/dp/0670025968/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20" target="_blank" style=" color: rgb(155, 57, 33); text-decoration: none;">The Faraway Nearby</a>.

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