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POLITICO

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Over on the other side of the nerd kingdom’s ideological spectrum, meanwhile, Teixeira’s workplace unhappiness was music to the ears of Robert Doar, AEI’s president. The think tank, which wielded unprecedented influence during the George W. Bush years, became known as a safe space for anti-Trump conservatives, which presented something of a branding problem at a moment when lockstep support for the former president remains the dominant GOP mode.

One fix: Bring in a bunch of fellows who have fallen afoul of institutional shibboleths elsewhere, hires that enable AEI to make a virtue of its heterodoxy while also tweaking the (often liberal) institutions where the newcomers had previously worked — something likely to please donors.

Recent additions include former Princeton classics professor Joshua Katz, who was stripped of tenure and fired this year for a long-ago sexual relationship with an undergrad, something he contends is actually about him being a conservative who slammed anti-racist campus protests; Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News analyst who infuriated Trump by calling Arizona for Joe Biden and subsequently lost his job; Thomas Chatterton Williams, the cultural critic who drafted the controversial 2020 “Harper’s Letter” criticizing purported hostility to free speech on the left; and Klon Kitchen, a former Heritage Foundation fellow who published a sharp criticism of his former employer over its stance on Ukraine. They’ve also lured a couple veterans of the historically liberal Brookings Institution.

Recent additions to AEI include the former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen, Chris Stirewalt, the Fox News analyst who infuriated Trump by calling Arizona for Joe Biden and former FCC chair Ajit Pai. | AP Images

“I like taking chances,” Doar tells me. “I like people to have the resources to do it. I want interesting stuff produced by scholars. ... One difference between us and Heritage, and everybody knows this, is that our scholars come here and do their own work and are allowed to be free and completely independent of what I want, of what the institution wants, broadly speaking. We don’t have one voice. That makes us different.” (Doar hastens to note that the 32 recent additions include Trump veterans, too, like former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and former FCC chair Ajit Pai.)

The island-of-misfit-toys schtick is also not an entirely new look. Going back to the likes of Jeane Kirkpatrick, AEI has long had a constituency of academics who didn’t quite fit in on campuses; it also had fellows, like Norm Ornstein, who didn’t fit the conservative mold.

Will the hires affix a new identity on a place still often associated with the Reagan and Bush years? One veteran of conservative think tanks tells me he’s dubious: “AEI has already alienated the people who stand in the mainstream of the Republican Party by being the home of the Never Trumpers. This is doubling down.” While pulling together dissidents against ideological orthodoxy may be splashy, “it’ll work a lot less well if Republicans get the White House” and insiders want a team that has the administration on speed-dial. (For its part, AEI says its scholars have testified 45 times before the current Congress, more than any other think tank.)

But Yuval Levin, who runs the AEI Social, Cultural and Constitutional Studies shop where Teixeira and many of the other unlikely newbies have landed, says thinking of think-tank work as simply a collection of policy papers ignores how profoundly unusual the current moment is in America.

“This is a time for basic questions to be on the table,” Levin says. “It’s not a time for intense confidence in the answers we’ve had. And so it’s a moment for AEI. This is a place that’s always been more open to internal debate and real scholarly independence. That’s not always a strength. There are times when it keeps you out of the arena some. But right now, it’s a great thing.”

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

Elliott Negin and Independent Media Institute October 26, 2021

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce

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

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

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

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

The American Enterprise Institute

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

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

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

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

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

George Washington University's Regulatory Studies Center...

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/how-americas-wealthiest-are-profiting-in-the-time-of-the-pandemic/

American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) Michael Strain wrote an op-ed in the New York Times recently explaining how “The American Dream Is Alive and Well,” and that in his opinion this nation has, “bigger issues than inequality.” Strain’s piece is part of the paper’s new pandemic-era series called “The America We Need” and engages in a set of impressive mental gymnastics to conclude that it ought to be of no concern that the rich are getting richer and that it would be better to focus instead on, “the relatively slow rate of productivity growth,” or “the long-term decline in male employment.”

Michael Strain is incredulous over our fixation on the concentration of wealth at the top, asking, “Do Americans really care as much about inequality as the attention by media and liberal politicians suggest?” He adds, “Given that income inequality has been stagnant or declining over the most recent decade, the timing… is odd” for a conversation “about whether inequality suggests that capitalism itself is broken.” However, inequality continues to steadily rise—a fact it seems the pro-free-market American Enterprise Institute is hoping we ignore.

In his op-ed, Strain chants a mantra that he and other proponents of capitalism want to realize through sheer repetition: “Capitalism isn’t broken. The game isn’t rigged. Hard work does pay off.” Most insultingly, he maintains that: “American workers are resilient and are accustomed to facing—and overcoming—economic challenges.” In other words, because American workers are used to being screwed over by the economy and most have seemingly managed to survive it, they will continue to do so in the face of ever-increasing hardship.

Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) during a Senate hearing on May 19 questioned Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, asking, “How many workers will die if we send people back to work without the protections they need, Mr. Secretary? How many workers should give their lives to increase our [gross domestic product] by half a percent?” Mnuchin responded, “I think your characterization is unfair,” but the Trump administration he attempted to defend has in fact forced people back to work, namely in the meatpacking industry. President Donald Trump invoked theDefense Production Act—not to direct the commercial production of much-needed medical and protective equipment, but rather to provide cover to the meat industry as it seeks to force workers back into a dangerous environment.

Thousands of workers have become infected in recent months. But if meatpacking workers contract the disease and die, it is their fault as per Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, who recently claimed that it was the “home and social” conditions in the lives of meatpacking plant workers that were responsible for their COVID-19 diagnoses.He even went as far as suggesting more law enforcement surveillance of those communities where meatpacking workers live in order to police social distancing.

Making clear just how little Republicans in particular care about workers, Trump has opposed extending unemployment insurance for laid-off workers. His Labor Department has encouraged companies to snitch on workers so that their unemployment benefits are cut off if they are too fearful of returning to work. And, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to protect corporations from liability in coronavirus-related lawsuits by workers.

Republicans have also refused to take up any more stimulus bills even as more than 38 million Americans have lost jobs in just nine weeks. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, showing just how blind he is to the pain of workers, said, “I don’t see the need right now.” Senator McConnell echoed this, saying, “I don’t think we have yet felt the urgency of acting immediately. That time could… [come], but I don’t think it has yet.” Time and again conservative politicians, in shilling for the rich, have indicated that American workers, rather than being essential, are simply expendable. This is their version of a class war.

The White House’s latest idea for helping workers is to cut corporate taxes in half as a way to incentivize overseas jobs to return to the U.S. Larry Kudlow, the White House’s top economic adviser, touted a payroll tax cut as a way to put more money into Americans’ pockets. He failed to mention that cutting payroll taxes meant a cut in payroll-tax-funded programs like Medicare and Social Security—programs many Americans rely on that the class warriors have wanted to cut for years.

Amazingly, the stock market appears to not care that there is record unemployment as week after week even with skyrocketing unemployment, the Dow Jones and Nasdaq indices remain buoyed. Indeed, the indicators that are announced with much fanfare every day on the popular radio program Marketplace have never had a real bearing on the well-being of American workers, no matter how much enthusiasm host Kai Ryssdal musters during his announcements. To his credit, he has admitted as much, explaining that the “wealthiest 10 percent of American households own 84 percent of all stocks.”

Before the pandemic, Trump bet his reelection on a low unemployment rate and the buoyancy of the stock market. Now, with official unemployment figures so incongruent with the stock market’s growth, he has a harder time making a claim of widespread economic prosperity. In fact, there was no prosperity even before the pandemic. The official unemployment rate was low, but that did not indicate how many people had quit looking for work or how poor quality those jobs were. The pandemic has exposed the fact that Trump’s claims of financial triumph were always more of a mirage than a miracle.

As the anguish of millions of American workers remains irrelevant to the corporate profiteers and their political benefactors, we are expected to rejoice in the fact that JeffBezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, could become the world’s first trillionaire in a few years. It would be convenient for Michael Strain and the American Enterprise Institute if we are convinced to ignore such obscenity and focus instead on workers remaining “resilient” as the rich wage their class war.

The only rational response to the absurd state of the U.S. economy is to insist that billionaires (and especially trillionaires) are simply not allowed to exist. After the first $100 million, there is no need to continue to amass any more wealth. Congress could easily enact laws to tax billionaires heavily enough that they remained more than comfortable for the rest of their lives while funding necessary services that huge numbers of Americans could benefit from: paid sick leave, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and so much more. There is no justification for individuals to hoard so much wealth compared to the rest of us. But they will never give up that wealth voluntarily. They will instead fight tooth and nail, lie and cheat, to preserve and expand their inconceivable riches. Against such a class war there is only one option.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/03/16/climate-science-deniers-downplayed-covid-19-cato-acsh-aei

Meet the Climate Science Deniers Who Downplayed COVID-19 Risks

By Sharon Kelly • Monday, March 16, 2020 - 15:25

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On January 30, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared that the outbreak of novel coronavirus 2019, which causes the disease COVID-19, was officially a “public health emergency of international concern.” At the time, there were cases confirmed in 19 countries and deaths in China had reached 170.

The very next day, the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) published an article titled, “Coronavirus in the U.S.: How Bad Will It Be?”

“Is coronavirus worse than the flu?” it began. “No, not even close.”

“It already has spread from person-to-person in the U.S., but it probably won't go far,” ACSH added. “And the American healthcare system is excellent at dealing with this sort of problem.”

ACSH is one of several organizations promoting climate science denial that are now spreading misinformation on the coronavirus, with potentially deadly consequences.

American Council on Science and Health?

The ACSH presents itself to the public as a proponent of “peer-reviewed mainstream science,” in the words of the organization’s mission. Their experts have frequently been quoted in mainstream newspapers and magazines, and they pen columns criticizing journalists who write critically about companies like Monsanto. The group has received funding from oil giants including ExxonMobil, as well as from the agribusiness, chemical and tobacco industries to name a few.

When it comes to climate change, ACSH has published a steady stream of articles downplaying climate science and criticizing efforts to slow carbon emissions — even in the face of a mountain of peer-reviewed research on the climate crisis.

ACSH slammed the medical journal The Lancet as “an ideologically driven outlet with a very clear political agenda where being sensationalist and culturally woke trumps evidence and reasonability” (after the Lancet published an article titled “The carbon footprint”). The purported “pro-science” advocacy group has labeledGreta Thunberg’s activism “doomsday prophesying.” It has (falsely) suggested that climate change is less of a concern because “more people die in winter than in summer” (they don’t).

And that’s all just in the past nine months. The ACSH’s stance against climate action dates back to at least 1997.

When it comes to coronavirus, now a global pandemic, ACSH’s authors rushed to judgment. They assured readers that there was little to worry about, and put some of the same faulty thinking that underlies their stance on climate change on display.

ACSH isn’t alone. Other organizations that have also engaged in climate science denial made similar missteps on COVID-19, including prominent organizations that fanned the flames of conspiracy theories or confidently promoted complacency when circumstances required rapid action.

To be clear: No one should be faulted for failing to foresee precisely how severe of a problem COVID-19 would prove to be. None of us has a crystal ball and few, if any, expected this situation to unfold in this particular way.

But these organizations published positions that not only wound up being laden with false reassurances, but they did so based on claims that they made confidently at the time that now appear to have been false or misleading.

Defending Conspiracy Theorists

Take for example, the American Enterprise Institute’s (AEI) publications on COVID-19.

AEI fanned the flames of a conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 was developed for biological warfare.

AEI resident scholar Michael Rubin published a piece titled, “Was coronavirus a bioweapon? We don’t know, but history shows we can’t trust China.”

The article defended Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas for his Fox News interview circulating the theory.

Roger Bate, an AEI visiting scholar, also penned a January 29 piece headlined, “The media is driving the overreaction to the coronavirus.”

The piece argues against action on COVID-19, without citing any evidence about the virus itself, but instead based on characterizations and generalizations. “I’ve seen several news reports essentially implying that, even if quarantining travelers or imposing travel bans to China are overreactions to the risk of the coronavirus, this is ok because it’s better to be safe than sorry,” he wrote. “Companies are so fearful of negative press that they seem to base much of their own rhetoric on what the media and liberal elites demand. While some of this is arguably harmless — note much of the hot air at Davos about climate change — when it becomes corporate policy and is echoed by government policy, it then has real consequences.”

“A contagion will happen at some point, and it’s important we recognize it and react,” he added.

“Unless the coronavirus mutates into something far more dangerous,” he concluded, “this isn’t it.”

To be sure, there was not a visible consensus on those views within AEI. That same day, another AEI fellow published an article calling the coronavirus a “big economic deal,” citing its impact on China’s economy. And a three-paragraph AEI post later labeled claims that COVID-19 is a bioweapon “fake news.”

Those other pieces, however, do not undo any impacts from AEI publishing claims that proved to be baseless.

Reading Comprehension

Other times, articles downplaying the risks from COVID-19, penned by organizations that have adopted climate-science denying stances, present arguments laced with logical fallacies.

In some cases, it’s not clear whether the authors understood the comments they were critiquing.

Take, for instance, the Cato Institute’s March 4, 2020 column on “COVID-19 Deaths and Incredible WHO Estimates.” That piece attacks a statement by the WHO’s director general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, who was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “Globally, about 3.4 percent of reported COVID-?19 cases have died.”

Cato’s column labeled that statistic “sensationalist nonsense.” The number doesn’t take into account the fact that mild cases are more likely to go unreported, Cato’s Alan Reynolds wrote.

That, of course, is exactly why Dr. Adhanom included the word “reported” in his description of the statistic. There’s no ball being hidden here. And in case readers missed that word and its importance, The Times’ report included an explanation of that precise context. (“But the figure came loaded with caveats,” The Times wrote. “Experts, including those at the WHO, say that when more is known about the epidemic, the death rate will be considerably lower.”)

One day later, President Trump took a similar tack to Cato’s, calling the 3.4 precent statistic “really a false number.”

“Now, this is just a hunch, but based on a lot of conversations with a lot of people that do this,” Trump added.

It’s not clear where exactly Trump picked up his impression — but then of course, Trump has his own well-known stance on climate science.

'Not Even Close'

The author of the ACSH piece claiming that coronavirus is “not even close” to as bad as the flu was Dr. Alex Berezow — a PhD in microbiology, according to his bio, not a medical doctor. Berezow has been interviewed about coronavirus precautions by the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Insider, and Yahoo News....

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/12/betsy-devos-foundation-funds-right-wing-propaganda-operation-tax-filing/

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Betsy DeVos’ foundation funds right-wing ‘propaganda operation’: tax filing

Written by Igor Derysh / Salon December 19, 2019

The family foundation of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her billionaire husband, Dick, gave more than $1 million to purportedly “independent” right-wing groups that have helped boost her assault on public education, according to a recent tax filing obtained by the government watchdog group Allied Progress and shared with Salon.

The 2018 filing shows that the couple put $5 million into the Dick and Betsy DeVos Family Foundation while doling out more than $11.6 million in contributions and pledges. As in previous years, much of the funding went to Christian charities and local initiatives in and around Grand Rapids, Michigan, and the couple’s home. But more than $1 million went to supposedly independent right-wing think tanks and groups like the American Enterprise Institute and the National Review Institute, which have heaped praise on Secretary DeVos and helped promote her agenda.

“Secretary DeVos is effectively funding an outside propaganda operation to help her bash teachers’ unions and promote private voucher schemes that undermine public education,” said Jeremy Funk, communications director for Allied Progress, a nonpartisan watchdog organization.

The DeVos Foundation contributed $500,000 to the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) for public policy research last year and pledged another $250,000 in future payments to the organization, according to the filing.

AEI, whose board includes Dick DeVos, is a libertarian think tank that maintains a “close relationship with incoming Republican administrations,” according to The Guardian, and assists them with “staff and readymade policies.

AEI officials have repeatedly publicly praised DeVos and her policies.

Frederick Hess, AEI’s director of education policy studies, recently backed DeVos’ push to gut the Borrower Defense Rule, which allows defrauded students to seek debt relief. Hess praised DeVos’ proposal to base debt forgiveness on student income as “clearly better for colleges, taxpayers, and students” in a National Review op-ed. A judge later blocked the initiative, although DeVos is now implementing new rules that again seek to restrict the amount of debt that can be forgiven to students defrauded by for-profit colleges.

AEI senior fellow Peter Wallison also praised DeVos’ controversial changes to Title IX, which made it harder to report sexual abuse on campus, in an op-ed last year. Wallison wrote that DeVos’ rule change puts “sexual harassment rules back into compliance with the Constitution and laws” and “should be an example for other administrative agencies.”

The DeVos Foundation also donated $10,000 to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), a group whose top officials have publicly backed DeVos’ proposal to require colleges to allow cross-examination of sexual assault and harassment accusers that advocates say would discourage victims from coming forward.

FIRE later promoted DeVos’ comments at the Independent Women’s Forum earlier this year, where she criticized Title IX.

“FIRE has long expressed sentiments much like that of Secretary DeVos” on Title IX, the group said, and its leadership was “heartened by the positions signaled in Secretary DeVos’ speech.”

The DeVos Foundation also made a $350,000 contribution to the Mackinac Center, according to the filing.

The Mackinac Center is a longtime opponent of teacher unions that urged teachers to opt out of their unions after the Supreme Court ruled that non-union workers cannot be forced to pay fees to public-sector unions.

Secretary DeVos herself attended Supreme Court arguments in the case. DeVos is a longtime supporter of “efforts to reduce the power of public-sector unions”and previously made a $125,000 donation to a Michigan group that opposed collective-bargaining rights, according to The Washington Post. Employees at the Department of Education employees have also accused DeVos of “gutting a long-standing labor agreement” and enforcing a new deal that was “roundly rejected” by their union, according to the Post.

The DeVos Foundation also contributed $100,000 to the National Review Institute,whose board of trustees includes Dick DeVos, according to the filing.

After receiving the donation in 2018, the National Review Institute hosted Secretary DeVos at its 2019 Ideas Summit in March, where she vowed to make school choice a “top priority.”

That same month, The National Review praised DeVos’ school choice plan and her Education Freedom Scholarship program, a tax-deductible private scholarship program similar to school vouchers that critics say will reduce tax revenue that could otherwise pay teacher salaries. The National Review hailed it as a “bold” plan and a “huge step in the right direction.”

The DeVos Foundation also contributed $10,000 to the Institute for Justice, according to the filing, a group that funds a “variety” of lawsuits defending school vouchers and tax credit programs supported by DeVos, according to The Times.

Prior to the contribution, DeVos met with the group’s top officials so they could “suggest a few areas where the department could facilitate school-choice efforts and offer the [secretary] help in those areas,” The Times reported.

Earlier this year, the Education Department hosted a blog post by the Institute for Justice’s Tim Keller in which he promoted school choice efforts.

The foundation’s 2017 filings showed similar contributions that included nearly $3.2 million to conservative nonprofits that favor school choice and promote other right-wing policies.

Along with giving or pledging $1 million to AEI in 2017, the DeVos Foundation also contributed or pledged $1 million to the Alliance for School Choice, which Secretary DeVos previously chairedbefore joining the Trump administration. DeVos also chaired the American Federation for Children, which controls the Alliance for School Choice. The federation has continued to lobby the Education Department even after DeVos took over.

Along with contributing to right-wing organizations that promote education policy, the DeVos Foundation has also contributed to numerous advocacy groups that oppose abortion and deny climate change.

The DeVos Foundation and the Education Department did not immediately return a request for comment. Dick DeVos told MLive in 2017 that the majority of their donations are not political.

“These are not political organizations that are advocating or advancing any political agenda. They are trying to serve people,” he said.

Mark Brewer, the former longtime chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, dismissed the other contributions as “nothing more than a smokescreen to divert attention away from the disclosures of the political contributions.”

Lonnie Scott, the head of progressive advocacy group Progress Michigan, told NPR that the family foundation’s contributions are an example of how conservatives wield their charitable foundations’ checkbooks for political power.

“I think what we see overall is really the purchasing of political power that crosses the spectrum of political and foundation giving,” he said. “The right is very quick to use foundation funding in a way that the left does not in supporting specific policies.”

See the DeVos Family Foundation’s full 990 tax filing below:

DeVos Foundation 990 2018 by Igor Derysh on Scribd

Igor Derysh is a New York-based political writer whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Herald and Baltimore Sun.

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Inside Purdue Pharma’s media playbook: How it planted the opioid ‘anti-story’

Written by David Armstrong / ProPublica November 21, 2019

In 2004, Purdue Pharma was facing a threat to sales of its blockbuster opioid painkiller OxyContin, which were approaching $2 billion a year. With abuse of the drug on the rise, prosecutors were bringing criminal charges against some doctors for prescribing massive amounts of OxyContin.

That October, an essay ran across the top of The New York Times’ health section under the headline “Doctors Behind Bars: Treating Pain is Now Risky Business.” Its author, Sally Satel, a psychiatrist, argued that law enforcement was overzealous, and that some patients needed large doses of opioids to relieve pain. She described an unnamed colleague who had run a pain service at a university medical center and had a patient who could only get out of bed by taking “staggering” levels of oxycodone, the active ingredient in OxyContin. She also cited a study published in a medical journal showing that OxyContin is rarely the only drug found in autopsies of oxycodone-related deaths.

“When you scratch the surface of someone who is addicted to painkillers, you usually find a seasoned drug abuser with a previous habit involving pills, alcohol, heroin or cocaine,” Satel wrote. “Contrary to media portrayals, the typical OxyContin addict does not start out as a pain patient who fell unwittingly into a drug habit.”

The Times identified Satel as “a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and an unpaid advisory board member for the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration.” But readers weren’t told about her involvement, and the American Enterprise Institute’s, with Purdue.

Among the connections revealed by emails and documents obtained by ProPublica: Purdue donated $50,000 annually to the institute, which is commonly known as AEI, from 2003 through this year, plus contributions for special events, for a total of more than $800,000.The unnamed doctor in Satel’s article was an employee of Purdue, according to an unpublished draft of the story. The study Satel cited was funded by Purdue and written by Purdue employees and consultants. And, a month before the piece was published, Satel sent a draft to Burt Rosen, Purdue’s Washington lobbyist and vice president of federal policy and legislative affairs, asking him if it “seems imbalanced.”

On the day of publication, Jason Bertsch, AEI’s vice president of development, alerted Rosen to “Sally’s very good piece.”

“Great piece,” Rosen responded.

Purdue’s hidden relationships with Satel and AEI illustrate how the company and its public relations consultants aggressively countered criticism that its prized painkiller helped cause the opioid epidemic. Since 1999, more than 200,000 people have died from overdoses related to prescription opioids. For almost two decades, and continuing as recently as a piece published last year in Slate, Satel has pushed back against restrictions on opioid prescribing in more than a dozen articles and radio and television appearances, without disclosing any connections to Purdue, according to a ProPublica review. Over the same period, Purdue was represented by Dezenhall Resources, a PR firm known for its pugnacious defense of beleaguered corporations. Purdue was paying Dezenhall this summer, and still owes it money, according to bankruptcy filings.

Purdue funded think tanks tapped by the media for expert commentary, facilitated publication of sympathetic articles in leading outlets where its role wasn’t disclosed, and deterred or challenged negative coverage, according to the documents and emails. Its efforts to influence public perception of the opioid crisis provide an inside look at how corporations blunt criticism of alleged wrongdoing. Purdue’s tactics are reminiscent of the oil and gas industry, which has been accused of promoting misleading science that downplays its impact on climate change, and of big tobacco, which sought to undermine evidence that nicotine is addictive and secondhand smoke is dangerous.

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Media spinning was just one prong of Purdue’s strategy to fend off limits on opioid prescribing. It contested hundreds of lawsuits, winning dismissals or settling the cases with a provision that documents remain secret. The company paid leading doctors in the pain field to assure patients that OxyContin was safe. It also funded groups, like the American Pain Foundation, that described themselves as advocates for pain patients. Several of those groups minimized the risk of addiction and fought against efforts to curb opioid use for chronic pain patients.}:

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Purdue’s campaign may have helped thwart more vigorous regulation of opioid prescribing, especially in the decade after the first widespread reports of OxyContin abuse and addiction began appearing in 2001. It may also have succeeded in delaying the eventual reckoning for Purdue and the billionaire Sackler family that owns the company. Although Purdue pleaded guilty in 2007 to a federal charge of understating the risk of addiction, and agreed to pay $600 million in fines and penalties, the Sacklers’ role in the opioid epidemic didn’t receive widespread coverage for another decade. As backlash against the family swelled, the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in September.}:

“Efforts to reverse the epidemic have had to counter widespread narratives that opioids are generally safe and that it is people who abuse them that are the problem,” said Caleb Alexander, co-director of the Center for Drug Safety and Effectiveness at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who has served as a paid expert witness in litigation alleging that Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin misled doctors and the public. “These are very important narratives, and they have become the lens through which people view and understand the epidemic. They have proven to be potent means of hampering interventions to reduce the continued oversupply of opioids.”

Satel, in an email to ProPublica, said that she reached her conclusions independently. “I do not accept payment from industry for my work (articles, presentations, etc),” she wrote. “And I am open to meeting with anyone if they have a potentially interesting topic to tell me about. If I decide I am intrigued, I do my own research.”

As for Purdue’s funding of AEI, Satel said in an interview that she “had no idea” that the company was paying her employer and that she walls herself off from information regarding institute funders. “I never want to know,” she said. She didn’t disclose that the study she referred to was also funded by Purdue, she said, because “I cite peer-reviewed papers by title as they appear in the journal of publication.”

The sharing of drafts before publication with subjects of stories or other interested parties is prohibited or discouraged by many media outlets. Satel said she didn’t remember sharing the draft with Rosen and it was not her usual practice. “That’s very atypical,” she said. However, Satel shared a draft of another story with Purdue officials in 2016, according to emails she sent. In that case, Satel said, she was checking facts.

Satel said she didn’t remember why the doctor with a patient on high doses of painkillers wasn’t named in the Times story. The draft she sent to Purdue identified him as Sidney Schnoll, then the company’s executive medical director, who defended OxyContin at public meetings and in media stories. In an interview, Schnoll described Satel as an old friend and said her description of his patient was accurate. He left Purdue in 2005 and now works for a consulting company that has Purdue as a client, he said.

Purdue, in a statement, said it has held memberships in several Washington think tanks over the years. “These dues-paying memberships help the company better understand key issues affecting its business in a complex policy and regulatory environment,” it said. “Purdue has been contacted over the years by policy experts at a variety of think tanks who are seeking additional context on industry issues for their work. Our engagement has always been appropriate and aimed at providing a science-based perspective that the company felt was often overlooked in the larger policy conversation.” The company declined to discuss specific questions about internal documents and emails reviewed by ProPublica.

A spokeswoman for the Times, Danielle Rhoades Ha, said in an email that the company doesn’t know the details of how the Satel story was handled because the editors who worked on it are no longer employed there. She noted that the Times labeled the article as an “Essay” and cited Satel’s connection to AEI. Currently, she said, Times editors “generally advise reporters not to share full drafts of stories with sources in the course of fact-checking,” but there is no formal rule.

Purdue launched OxyContin in 1996, and it soon became one of the most widely prescribed opioid painkillers. By 2001, it was generating both enormous profits as well as growing concern about overdoses and addiction. That August, a column in the New York Post opinion section criticized media reports that OxyContin was being abused. The piece — headlined “Heroic Dopeheads?” — mocked a “new species of ‘victim,’ the ‘hillbilly heroin’ addict.” The real victims, the article contended, were pain patients who may lose access to a “prescription wonder drug.”

At 5:17 a.m. on the day the article was published, Eric Dezenhall, the founder of Washington, D.C., crisis management firm Dezenhall Resources, sent an email to Purdue executives, according to documents filed by the Oklahoma attorney general in a lawsuit against opioid makers.

“See today’s New York Post on OxyContin,” he wrote. “The anti-story begins.”

Purdue had hired Dezenhall Resources that summer. Dezenhall’s hard-nosed reputation fit the blame-the-victim strategy advocated by Purdue’s then-president, Richard Sackler. “We have to hammer on the abusers in every way possible,” Sackler wrote in a 2001 email quoted in a complaint by the state of Massachusetts against the company. “They are the culprits and the problem. They are reckless criminals.”

Purdue later followed this approach to fend off a New Jersey mother who was urging federal regulators to investigate the marketing of OxyContin. Her daughter had died while taking the drug for back pain. “We think she abused drugs,” a Purdue spokesman said without offering evidence. Purdue later apologized for the comment.

However, pain patients with legitimate prescriptions for OxyContin and similar painkillers can and do become addicted to the drugs. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns that “anyone who takes prescription opioids can become addicted to them,” and that “as many as one in four patients receiving long-term opioid therapy in a primary care setting struggles with opioid addiction.” A review article in The New England Journal of Medicine reported rates of “carefully diagnosed addiction” in pain patients averaged just under 8% in studies, while misuse, abuse and addiction-related aberrant behaviors ranged from 15% to 26% of pain patients.

Although Dezenhall Resources was working for Purdue until recently, it rarely has been linked publicly to the company. Purdue paid Dezenhall a total of $309,272 in July and August of this year and owes it an additional $186,575, according to bankruptcy court filings. The total amount paid to Dezenhall since 2001 was not disclosed in records reviewed by ProPublica.

Dezenhall Resources has also defended Exxon Mobil against criticisms from environmental groups and former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling as he fought against fraud charges, according to a 2006 BusinessWeek profile of Eric Dezenhall that called him “The Pitbull of Public Relations.” (Skilling was later convicted.) It reported that Dezenhall arranged a pro-Exxon demonstration on Capitol Hill to distract attention from a nearby environmental protest, and that the company discussed a plan to pay newspaper op-ed writers to question the motives of an Enron whistleblower. “We believe a winning outcome can only be achieved by directly stopping your attackers,” Dezenhall Resources states on its website.

ProPublica reviewed emails to Purdue officials in which Dezenhall and his employees took credit for dissuading a national television news program from pursuing a story about OxyContin; helping to quash a documentary project on OxyContin abuse at a major cable network; forcing multiple outlets to issue corrections related to OxyContin coverage; and gaining coverage of sympathetic pain patients on a television news program and in newspaper columns.

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“Dezenhall has been instrumental in helping with the placement of pain patient advocacy stories over the last several years,” Dezenhall Executive Vice President Sheila Hershow wrote in a 2006 email.

Eric Dezenhall told ProPublica that he does not confirm or deny the identity of clients. While declining to answer questions about Purdue, or comment on the BusinessWeek article about him, he said that his company acts appropriately and seeks fair and truthful coverage.

“We regularly work with experts and journalists, including Pro Publica, to ensure accuracy in reporting and persuade and dissuade them regarding various storylines with facts and research,” he wrote. “Ultimately, these journalists and experts decide how to use the information provided.”}:

One of Dezenhall Resources’ first moves, after being hired by Purdue, was to cultivate Satel. In July 2001, Hershow reported to Purdue officials that she and Eric Dezenhall had lunch with Satel and the doctor was “eager to get started.” Hershow said Satel had read a “debunking package” and was “interested in doing an opinion piece on the medical needs of patients being sacrificed to protect drug abusers.”

Satel said that the meeting with Dezenhall was not unusual, and that “I often talk to people who have interesting stories.”

Satel was raised in Queens and has an Ivy League pedigree. She attended Cornell University as an undergraduate before going to medical school at Brown University. She was a psychiatry professor at Yale University for several years and then moved to Washington. For a little over a decade beginning in 1997, she was a staff psychiatrist at a methadone clinic in the city.

She has become an influential voice on opioids, addiction and pain treatment. Her writings have been published in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Atlantic, Slate, Health Affairs, Forbes, Politico and elsewhere. She frequently appears on panels, television shows and in newspaper articles as an expert on the opioid crisis and pain prescribing guidelines. “We’ve entered a new era of opiophobia,” she recently told The Washington Post.

Satel has been a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute since 2000. Among the notable figures who have spent time at AEI are the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton. Current fellow Scott Gottlieb returned to AEI this year after serving as commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, which approves and regulates prescription drugs like OxyContin.

Purdue said its annual payments of $50,000 to AEI were part of the institute’s corporate program. That program offers corporations the opportunity to “gain access to the leading scholars in the most important policy areas for executive briefings and knowledge sharing,” according to the institute’s website. Corporations can choose between three levels of donations: At $50,000 a year, Purdue was in the middle level, the “Executive Circle.” Besides the annual payments, Purdue has also paid a total of $24,000 to attend two special events hosted by the institute, according to a company spokesman.

Internal emails show the main Purdue contact with AEI was Rosen, the drugmaker’s in-house lobbyist based in Washington. In one email, Rosen described the leaders of the think tank as “very good friends” and also noted that former FDA Commissioner Mark McClellan ascended to that job after a stint at AEI as a scholar. Rosen also organized a group of pain reliever manufacturers and industry funded groups into an organization called the Pain Care Forum. It met to share information on government efforts to restrict opioid prescribing, according to records produced in litigation against Purdue.

Veronique Rodman, a spokeswoman for AEI, said the institute does not publicly discuss donors. She said that the institute does not accept research contracts, and that its researchers come to their own conclusions. “It makes sense” that Satel would be unaware of AEI funders, she said.

Dezenhall’s courting of Satel soon paid off. A month after the lunch with Dezenhall and Hershow, Satel defended Purdue’s flagship drug in an article for the opinion page of The Boston Globe.

“Something must be done to keep OxyContin out of the wrong hands, but the true public health tragedy will be depriving patients who need it to survive in relative comfort day to day,” she wrote.

In February 2002, AEI held a panel discussion at its headquarters to answer the question, “Who is responsible for the abuse of OxyContin?” The panel of experts included Satel, a Purdue executive and a Purdue lawyer. Covering the event, Reuters Health reported that the panel “mostly agreed that Purdue Pharma should not be viewed as the culprit in the problem of the abuse of its long-acting painkiller OxyContin.”

Two months later, Purdue approved spending $2,000 to pay for Satel to speak to the staff of a New Orleans hospital about addiction, according to internal company records. Satel said she had “absolutely no memory of speaking at a hospital in New Orleans.” The physician who organized the planned event said he doesn’t recall if it took place, and the hospital no longer has records of medical staff talks from that period.

In 2003, a Dezenhall staffer recommended Satel as a guest to a producer for “The Diane Rehm Show” on NPR. The firm and Purdue executives, including Vice President David Haddox, helped prep Satel for the appearance. Haddox passed along what he called “interesting intel for Sally” that Rehm’s mother suffered from chronic headaches. “Thanks for helping us get her up to speed for the show,” Hershow replied.

A spokeswoman for WAMU, the NPR station in Washington that produced the Rehm show, said there was no policy to ask guests about funding of their organizations, or if there was a financial connection to the show’s topic. “For most segments, the producers would try to bring as many perspectives to the table as possible so that listeners would be better able to make their own informed judgment of the topic at hand,” wrote the spokeswoman, Julia Slattery.

ProPublica was unable to reach Haddox for comment.

Also that year, when conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh revealed that he was addicted to prescription painkillers, Purdue declined a request from CNN for a company representative to discuss the news on the air. Instead, Purdue recommended Satel, who assured viewers that OxyContin was a “very effective and actually safe drug, if taken as prescribed.” Dezenhall’s Hershow told Purdue executives in an email that she was “very glad Sally went on.” Hershow, a former investigative producer at ABC News, declined comment for this article.

In September 2004, Forbes magazine published a Satel article under the headline, “OxyContin doesn’t cause addiction. Its abusers are already addicts.”

“I am happy this morning!” Purdue’s then general counsel, Howard Udell, emailed other company executives and Eric Dezenhall with the subject line “RE: Forbes Article.” Three years later, Udell and two other Purdue executives would plead guilty in federal court to a misdemeanor criminal charge related to misleading patients and doctors about the addictive nature of OxyContin.

As part of that 2007 settlement, Purdue admitted to acting “with the intent to defraud or mislead” when it promoted OxyContin as less addictive and less subject to abuse than other painkillers. In an article for The Wall Street Journal headlined “Oxy Morons,” Satel defended the company. “The real public-health damage here comes from the pitched campaign conducted by zealous prosecutors and public-interest advocates to demonize the drug itself,” she wrote.

:{After Purdue and Dezenhall launched their “anti-story,” media reports of OxyContin addiction and abuse declined for several years. In 2001, there were 1,204 stories that included the words “OxyContin,” “abuse” and “Purdue” published in media outlets archived on the Nexis database. The number plummeted to 361 in 2002 and to 150 in 2006.

Purdue’s counterattack against an ambitious investigative series about OxyContin abuse may have contributed to that drop}:. An October 2003 series in the Orlando Sentinel, “OxyContin Under Fire,” found that Purdue’s aggressive marketing combined with weak regulation had contributed to “a wave of death and destruction.”

The series, however, was marred by several errors that were detailed in a front-page correction nearly four months later. The reporter resigned, and two editors on the series were reassigned. While acknowledging the mistakes, the newspaper did not retract the series, and its review upheld the conclusion that oxycodone was involved in a large number of the overdoses in Florida.

Dezenhall Resources, in an email, took credit for forcing the newspaper to issue the corrections. “Dezenhall’s efforts resulted in a complete front-page retraction of the erroneous 5-day, 19-part, front-page Orlando Sentinel series,” Hershow wrote in a 2006 email summarizing Dezenhall’s work for Purdue under the subject line “Success in Fighting Negative Coverage.”

Purdue officials and the company’s public relations agencies came up with a 13-point plan to generate media coverage of the errors. It included getting a doctor to talk about how the series “frightened and mislead (sic) the people of Florida” and having a pain patient write a newspaper opinion column on the subject. The Sentinel series, one Purdue official wrote to other company executives and Dezenhall’s Hershow, was an opportunity to let the country know about “all of the sensational reporting on OxyContin abuse over the past 4 years. The conclusion: this is the most overblown health story in the last decade!”

In the six years after Purdue challenged the Sentinel’s findings, the death rate from prescription drugs increased 84.2% in Florida. The biggest rise, 264.6%, came from deaths involving oxycodone. The state became a hotbed for inappropriate opioid prescribing as unscrupulous pain clinics attracted out of state drug seekers. The route traveled by many from small towns in Appalachia to the Florida clinics was nicknamed the “Oxycontin Express.”

In 2017, 14 years after the Sentinel series was published, the Columbia Journalism Review described it as “right too soon” and said it “eerily prefigured today’s opioid epidemic.”

Purdue couldn’t hold off restrictions on opioid prescribing forever. Since 2011, a growing number of states, insurers and federal health agencies have adopted policies that have led to annual declines in prescribing. Advocates for pain treatment have complained that this turnabout has gone too far, and the CDC recently advised doctors against suddenly discontinuing opioids. Still, the U.S. remains far and away the world leader in per capita opioid prescriptions.

Under increasing pressure, Purdue enlisted other public relations firms known for aggressively helping corporations in crisis. Burson-Marsteller, which after a merger last year is now known as BCW, signed an agreement in 2011 to provide Purdue “strategic counsel.” Burson-Marsteller represented Johnson & Johnson as it responded to the Tylenol poisoning case and Union Carbide after the deadly Bhopal explosion in India. According to documents, it helped Purdue identify and counter “potential threats,” such as congressional investigators and the group Physicians for Responsible Opioid Prescribing. A 2013 proposed work plan between the companies called on Burson to perform as much as $2.7 million of work for Purdue. BCW did not respond to requests for comment.

Purdue also employed the services of Purple Strategies, a Washington-area firm that reportedly represented BP after the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Purdue paid $621,653 to Purple Strategies in the 90 days prior to the drugmaker’s Sept. 15 bankruptcy filing and owes it an additional $207,625, according to court filings. Purple Strategies did not respond to requests for comment.

Purdue also added Stu Loeser to its stable. The head of an eponymous media strategy company, Loeser was press secretary for Michael Bloomberg when he was mayor of New York City, and he is now a spokesman for Bloomberg’s possible presidential bid.

Soon after Loeser began representing Purdue, Satel wrote in a 2018 piece for Politico headlined, “The Myth of What’s Driving the Opioid Crisis,” about “a false narrative” that the opioid epidemic “is driven by patients becoming addicted to doctor-prescribed opioids.”

Loeser told Purdue executives in an email that “we are going to work with AEI to ‘promote’ this so it comes across as what it is: their thoughtful response to other writing.” His team was working to target the Satel story “to land in social media feeds of people who have searched for opioid issues and potentially even people who have read specific stories online,” he added.

Loeser said in an interview that he didn’t end up working with AEI to promote the story. He said Purdue is no longer a client.

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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/exxonmobil-is-still-bankrolling-climate-science-deniers/

no lnx

ExxonMobil is still bankrolling climate science deniers

Written by Elliott Negin / Independent Media Institute October 23, 2019

ExxonMobil says it believes “the risk of climate change is real,” and it is “committed to being part of the solution.” The largest investor-owned oil company in the world also says it supports a federal carbon tax and the Paris climate agreement.

Then why, after all these years, is the company still financing advocacy groups, think tanks, and business associations that reject the reality and seriousness of the climate crisis, as well as members of Congress who deny the science and oppose efforts to rein in carbon emissions?

According to the company’s latest grantmaking report, it gave $772,500 to 10 such groups in 2018, which does not include its annual dues to trade groups such as theAmerican Petroleum Institute, which opposes a carbon tax. In addition, ExxonMobil continued to promote gridlock directly on Capitol Hill. Two-thirds of the $1.65 million it spent on congressional election campaigns during the 2017-18 election cycle went to climate science deniers.

Nearly half of ExxonMobil’s 2018 donations to nonprofit denier groups went to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Another 30 percent went to the American Enterprise Institute and the Manhattan Institute, which have been ExxonMobil grantees for 20 years. All told, the company has spent some $37 million since 1998 on a network of denier organizations—a sorry record of support that ranks second only to Charles Koch and his brother, the late David Koch, owners of the coal, oil and gas conglomerate Koch Industries.

The shred of good news here is that ExxonMobil’s 2018 denier grant budget was half of what it spent in 2017 and the lowest amount since 2012. But if the company were truly serious about addressing climate change, it would cut off such funding completely. Likewise, it would support federal lawmakers who want to curb carbon emissions, not those standing in the way of government action.

So what did ExxonMobil get for its money in 2018?

Underwriting Climate Denial at the U.S. Chamber

In 2014, ExxonMobil pledged $5 million to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Capital Campaign over a five-year period on top of its annual dues, despite the lobby group’s history of misrepresenting climate science and the economics of transitioning to clean energy. Last year, the company kicked in $350,000 for the Capital Campaign and another $15,000 for the Chamber’s Corporate Citizenship Center, bringing its total 2018 donation to $365,000.

Two years ago, the Chamber sponsored a widely debunked report that wildly inflated the cost of adhering to the Paris climate agreement to the U.S. economy. President Trump used that report as his primary rationale for refusing to honor the U.S. commitment to the accord.

Earlier this year, however, the Chamber posted a new statement on its website that suggested that the business lobby is softening its position. “We stand with every American seeking a cleaner, stronger environment—for today and tomorrow,” the Chamber now asserts. “Our climate is changing and humans are contributing to these changes. Inaction is simply not an option.” The website also features the Chamber’s definition of an effective climate policy, which it says should include, among other things, “large-scale renewables, energy storage and batteries,” and should “encourage international cooperation.”

Does that mean the Chamber has finally come to its senses? Not quite. It opposed the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reduced coal power plant carbon emissions, and supports the Trump administration’s move to repeal it. And although a Chamber spokesman told Politico in August that it is “absolutely important for the U.S. to remain in the Paris climate agreement,” he added that the “Obama administration’s pledge was unrealistic [and] was going to have a negative impact on our economy. And so we’d like to see that revisited.” In other words, the Chamber would like the United States to remain a party to the agreement so that it can try to weaken the U.S. commitment to it.

Backing Denial at the American Enterprise Institute

The American Enterprise Institute, an 80-year-old, free market think tank in Washington, D.C., has received more money from ExxonMobil than any other climate science denier organization. In 2018, ExxonMobil gave the organization $160,000, bringing its total to $4.65 million since 1998.

Economist Benjamin Zycher, an Enterprise Institute staff member who writes regularly about climate issues, argues that a carbon tax would be “ineffective” and has called the Paris agreement an “absurdity.” He also routinely cites largely debunked papers by John Christy, Judith Curry and other outlier scientists to buttress his attacks on what he calls “climate alarmism.”

Last fall, for example, Zycher took aim at the second volume of the Fourth National Climate Assessment—a periodic, congressionally mandated analysis of peer-reviewed climate science by 13 federal agencies. The report warned that by the end of this century, unchecked climate change could cause tens of thousands of deaths and hundreds of billions of dollars in damage. The Trump administration issued it the day after Thanksgiving in the hope that it would receive limited attention.

Zycher took issue with the report’s conclusions in a blog post on the think tank’s website, citing “systematic evidence on climate phenomena” that he says the report ignored. His “evidence” included half-truths, cherry-picked facts and fabrications. Contrary to Zycher’s claims, human activity is responsible for more than half of the increase in average global temperatures since 1950; sea level rise has accelerated due to climate change; and although there has been little change in the frequency of hurricanes globally, research suggests there has been an increase in hurricane intensity over the past 40 years.

Zycher also posted a column belittling a lawsuit brought by New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood that charges ExxonMobil with defrauding investors by publicly claiming to incorporate climate risks in its business decisions while downplaying or ignoring them for internal planning purposes. The lawsuit, which went to trial on October 22, alleges that ExxonMobil inflated its value, falsely assuring investors that its oil and gas reserves would not become “stranded assets” that would have to be left in the ground. Zycher accused Underwood of “picking an unpopular target and then trying to find a way to convict it of something,” and suggested that she filed the suit to advance her career.

Financing the Manhattan Institute’s Specious Case Against Renewables

The Manhattan Institute, a New York City-based think tank, received $75,000 from ExxonMobil last year for its Center for Energy Policy. Since 1998, the company has given the Libertarian policy shop more than $1.3 million.

Like the Enterprise Institute, the Manhattan Institute opposes the Paris climate accord. Senior Fellow Oren Cass, who regularly testified before Congress against Obama administration climate efforts, alleges the international agreement is “somewhere between a farce and a fraud.” The think tank is also an outspoken opponent of renewable energy, routinely calling for an end to federal subsidies for wind, solar and electric vehicles. At the same time, it is mum about the significantly bigger subsidies the oil and gas industry has been receiving over the last 100 years.

Cass’s colleague, Senior Fellow Robert Bryce, has been bashing wind power for years and, like President Trump, he wildly overstates its threat to birds. In fact, the top human-caused threats to birds are climate change, buildings, power lines, misapplied pesticides, communications towers, and oil and gas industry fluid waste pits. Bryce never mentions that. It would undermine his bogus argument.

Still another Manhattan Institute senior fellow, Mark P. Mills, wrote an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal in May titled “What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future?” In it, he maintained that, “using wind, solar and batteries as the primary sources of a nation’s energy supply remains far too expensive.” In fact, renewables are now the cheapest type of new electricity generation for more than two-thirds of the world, according to a June report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. By 2030, Bloomberg researchers project, wind and solar will “undercut existing coal and [natural] gas almost everywhere.” Mills also failed to factor in the cost of doing nothing to curb carbon pollution. The top 10 largest climate change-related disasters in 2018 alone cost at least $85 billion in damages.

Aiding and Abetting Congressional Gridlock

On top of the hundreds of thousands of dollars ExxonMobil gave to climate science denier groups last year, the company continued to fund deniers on Capitol Hill. As noted above, 67 percent of the $1.65 million it spent during the2017-18 election cycle—roughly $1.1 million—went to the campaigns of 189 climate science deniers. It then spent$11.15 million in 2018 to lobby lawmakers, more than any other oil and gas company.

One of the most talked-about climate proposals in Congress today is a carbon tax, and despite ExxonMobil’s professed decade-long support for one, it has consistently funded senators and representatives who oppose the idea. Since 2013, there have been at least five nonbinding resolutions in Congress on such a tax. Each time, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded legislators, ranging from 75 percent to 93 percent, voted against it. The most recent example of the company’s upside-down funding priorities is the outcome of a July 2018 nonbinding resolution in the House stating such a tax would be “detrimental” to the U.S. economy. Once again, a majority of ExxonMobil-funded lawmakers favored the resolution, which passed by a 229-to-180 vote. This time, 78 percent of the 174 House members who had received ExxonMobil campaign contributions since 2013 voted for it.

ExxonMobil first announced its support for a carbon tax in 2009 in a cynical attempt to derail a cap-and-trade bill in Congress, and last year, the company announced it would give $1 million over two years to Americans for Carbon Dividends, a political action group created to promote a revenue-neutral carbon tax. The proposal—developed by the Climate Leadership Council, a coalition of corporations, environmental groups and former government officials—would levy a carbon fee starting at $40 a ton in exchange for dropping all “stationary source” (non-transportation) carbon pollution regulations and granting the fossil fuel industry immunity from climate lawsuits.

In a surprise move, however, the Climate Leadership Council and Americans for Carbon Dividends recently deleted the provision shielding the fossil fuel industry from liability, apparently abandoning coalition co-founders BP, ConocoPhillips, Royal Dutch Shell and ExxonMobil, which are facing more than a dozen lawsuits for billions of dollars in climate change-related damages. It remains to be seen what ExxonMobil will do now, but based on past experience, the company likely will continue to finance lawmakers who cite fraudulent reports by the groups it funds to make their bogus case that climate change is not a threat. In other words, ExxonMobil will keep bankrolling climate science denial to make sure nothing happens on Capitol Hill.

Author’s note: Besides the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ($365,000), American Enterprise Institute ($160,000) and Manhattan Institute ($75,000), ExxonMobil gave grants in 2018 to the following seven climate science denier groups: American Council on Science and Health ($60,000), Center for American and International Law ($12,500), Federalist Society ($10,000), Hoover Institution ($15,000), Mountain States Legal Foundation ($5,000), National Black Chamber of Commerce ($30,000) and the Washington Legal Foundation ($40,000).

Elliott Negin is a senior writer at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

This article first appeared on Truthout and was produced in partnership with Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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no lnx vid

ref 11/18 shamed to do rt thing?

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a25304542/meet-the-press-climate-change-chuck-todd-danielle-pletka/

Rarely do you get news of an ongoing catastrophe and, within a couple of days, a perfect example of why we've done nothing about that exact problem. But Chuck Todd and Meet The Press were happy to oblige this Thanksgiving weekend. On Friday, the Trump administration attempted to bury a harrowing U.S. government climate-change report by releasing it on Black Friday, a notorious dumping ground for bad news. Normally, though, the bad news is just for the current administration—not the whole world.

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On Sunday, Todd hosted Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute on his teevee show. Her performance—and it was a performance—was a shining example of how the ruling class has successfully hemmed and hawed for decades, with the full support of the feckless Beltway media, slowing any kind of action and safeguarding big-business profits while experts in the field have known full well that human civilization as we know it is in clear and escalating peril

[vid]

...Right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

As Pletka so happily volunteered, she is not a scientist. So why was she invited on one of the nation's Premier Political Talk Shows to spread disinformation about a scientific issue? That two years since 1980 have been cold does not have any bearing on the scientific consensus that climate change is real and man-made. This member of the conservative intelligentsia—the American Enterprise Institute, for which Pletka works, is a right-wing "think tank"—is actually just making the more polite version of President Good Brain's argument on Wednesday:

Donald J. Trump

?

@realDonaldTrump

Brutal and Extended Cold Blast could shatter ALL RECORDS - Whatever happened to Global Warming?

114K

4:23 PM - Nov 21, 2018

This is not the first time Trump has disproved global warming on the basis he is cold today. (Elsewhere, he has simply called it a Chinese hoax.) Nobody put this crap to bed better than Stephen Colbert did all those years ago. Weather is not climate. The weather is affected by changing climate patterns, but warming global temperatures over the decades—an indisputable trend, even among denialist hacks like Pletka—does not mean every day of every year will be warmer than the previous. What it does very likely mean is more powerful storms that drop trillions of gallons of water on American cities, and bigger, more ferocious wildfires that turn the American West to ash.

Of course, Pletka probably knows this. She gave Our Beautiful Boy Chuck Todd that tried-and-true conservative line that's rapidly going stale: that surely something is happening with the climate, but who can say whether humans are causing it? Well, after years of exhaustive study, scientists have found it is "extremely likely" (terms the scientific community does not choose lightly) that humans are significantly contributing to warming global temperatures. We also know that the Beautiful, Clean Coal that Pletka suggested the U.S. has switched to does not exist. "Clean coal" is a misleading term for the same coal that continues to be the dirtiest fossil fuel in existence.

Did Todd challenge her with the facts? No. But this is what the evidence says. It's just Pletka isn't concerned with gathering the evidence and coming to a conclusion—also known as the essence of the scientific method. Here is an (albeit anonymous) account from an Atlantic reader who claims to have worked for Pletka at the American Enterprise Institute:

A number of years ago I worked for Danielle Pletka for a summer as a researcher, and her piece today matches the "scholarship" she and AEI were producing in the early part of this decade. I was rarely if ever asked to perform background research on a subject but was more often asked to provide specific evidence to support ready made assertations. At the time AEI was mobilizing in support of military action against Iraq, and it was quite clear to me that the academic process was reversed - positions designed, research dug up to support the positions.

This seems like an opportune moment to mention that Pletka is widely known as a varsity-level cheerleader for the Iraq War. More recently, she demonstrated her intricate knowledge of the conflict by suggesting to the French ambassador on Twitter that France had joined the U.S. in the conflict. OK, so that was completely and laughably wrong (Remember the idiotic Freedom Fries charade?), but at least by 2013 she was...still defending the invasion. Yes, after it embroiled the region in sectarian conflict, and after all the reasons people like Pletka peddled for going in were proven to be baseless. Eventually, this genius foreign-policy move led to the rise of ISIS. This is just another example of how, if you work in the Beltway, there are absolutely zero consequences for being completely wrong about everything.

In fact, if you work at a think tank like AEI, it might just get you a raise—if you stick to the party line. All think tanks are, to some extent, mouthpieces for their donors, but that particularly goes for a right-wing gun-for-hire shop like the Institute. The Guardian uncovered how AEI works to undermine the science on climate change in 2007:

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Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

And what did that ExxonMobil funding look like?

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobiland more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

You may remember that Exxon was also exposed as having discovered, through the work of its own scientists, that climate change was real as early as 1977. Instead of accepting this reality and beginning the work of responding to the burgeoning climate crisis, Exxon chose to fund disinformation on the topic for decades, protecting their profits in the shorter term. They're not alone among oil-and-gas outfits, many of which simultaneously started building their rigs to accommodate sea-level rise that would result from the climate change that, in public, they steadfastly disputed was happening.

One way to fund disinformation is to pay a think tank like AEI to spread it for you. And that's what Pletka was still doing, on Sunday, after just the latest report dropped detailing the catastrophic consequences of our inaction on the climate crisis. The U.S. report focused on the fact that the crisis will melt 10 percent of the American economy and send it crashing into the ocean by 2100. Farmers in the midwest will lose 75 percent of the crop yield on their corn. Rising sea levels will put trillions of dollars in coastal real estate in jeopardy. But last month's report from the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—compiled by 91 leading scientists from 40 different countries based on more than 6,000 scientific studies conducted by still more scientists—was even more apocalyptic. It found that human civilization as we know it will be in severe peril by 2040, and that we have 12 years to dramatically change course to avoid that scenario.

Amid all that, news programs like Chuck Todd's Meet The Press—offerings that putatively exist to inform the public about the world around them—are still playing host to people who are paid to spread false information about the world. Todd is not alone: CNN hosted Rick Santorum on Sunday. Like NBC News, which employs Pletka as a contributor, they pay Rick directly to spread nonsense.

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...this Week talked about the climate report for two minutes with Sen. Amy Klobuchar and noted that the administration tried to bury it.

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The report did not, from what I can tell, come up on the rest of the hour-long show...[vid]

whitehouse sen

Here's paid CNN commentator Rick Santorum praising the Trump administration for trying to bury the climate report, arguing that climate change is made up by scientists trying to make some money pic.twitter.com/lBpLMexgt9...

This festering boil on the body politic highlights another in-vogue conservative argument: that the scientists who've devoted their lives to studying the climate are really just in it for those juicy government grants to continue studying it. It's all about the money! As usual in this era, this is a case of accusing the opposition of something you're already up to.

Santorum is applying the incentive structure that exists for massive multinational oil and gas corporations and those they employ—seeking out certain findings because you have a vested financial interest in a certain outcome—to climate scientists. In reality, the kind of conspiracy that right-wingers like Santorum are alleging here would be perhaps unprecedented in scale. If this is all a big con, thousands of climate scientists spread across dozens of countries would need to all be getting their kickbacks, and have a way to secretly stay on-message. It's absurdly unlikely, and it belies the aforementioned way that the scientific community vets a scientific report's findings.

Oh, and the money in government grants ain't actually that good. That's why some "scientists" might take, say, $10,000 from AEI to dispute the scientific consensus. It's all bullshit, folks, and it's bad for ya.

...ay that the nation's major television news stations routinely play host to propagandists who are paid, directly or indirectly, to spread disinformation and muddy the waters to protect the interests of massive energy corporations, all at the expense of the future of human civilization.When Pletka said emissions are down since President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate accords—making the U.S. the only nation in the world that refuses to participate—that was just true enough: they are down in 2018, though the rate of emissions reductions slowed from the previous two years and will likely continue to slow as the Trump administration attempts to roll back our efforts to combat the crisis. The crown jewel in that regard is the Clean Power Plan, our main vehicle for meeting our obligations under the Paris agreement, which Trump has sought to repeal. At the very least, Todd is obligated to challenge this crap if he's going to host a dishonest broker—or host someone who can.

According to John Whitehouse of MediaMatters, none of the Sunday Shows hosted a single scientist while covering the climate in 2016 and 2017.

[RELATED STORIES

It's the Golden Age of Climate Denial

There Are Very Fine Scientists on Both Sides]

The Meet The Press chief will certainly defend his decision to host a climate-change "skeptic" on the basis of "intellectual diversity" and Hearing From Both Sides, as if what his viewers need is to hear both the truth and utter nonsense. Both Sides are not operating in good faith here. One side accepts the scientific consensus. On the other, the Republican Party is the only major political party in the industrialized world that disputes it. Both Sides Journalism, which falsely equates the truth about the world we've determined through the scientific method with self-serving crap dished out by the instruments of oil interests, has made it politically palatable to do nothing, for decades, about an existential threat to humanity. Friday's report further underlined the crisis facing humankind. Two days later, Meet The Press showcased part of how we've allowed things to get to this point.

But since we're on the topic of intellectual diversity, here's a suggestion: If Chuck Todd wants to talk about a scientific topic, how about having a fucking scientist on?

hiatus

https://www.ecowatch.com/global-warming-hiatus-myth-2623950948.html

The record-breaking, El Niño-driven global temperatures of 2016 have given climate change deniers a new trope. Why, they ask, hasn't it since got even hotter?

In response to a recent U.S. government report on the impact of climate change, a spokesperson for the science-denying American Enterprise Institute think-tank claimed that "we just had […] the biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years."

These claims are blatantly false: the past two years were two of the three hottest on record, and the drop in temperature from 2016 to 2018 was less than, say, the drop from 1998 (a previous record hot year) to 2000. But, more importantly, these claims use the same kind of misdirection as was used a few years ago about a supposed "pause" in warming lasting from roughly 1998 to 2013.

At the time, the alleged pause was cited by many people skeptical about the science of climate change as a reason not to act to reduce greenhouse pollution. U.S. senator and former presidential candidate Ted Cruz frequently argued that this lack of warming undermined dire predictions by scientists about where we're heading.

However, drawing conclusions on short-term trends is ill-advised because what matters to climate change is the decade-to-decade increase in temperatures rather than fluctuations in warming rate over a few years. Indeed, if short periods were suitable for drawing strong conclusions, climate scientists should perhaps now be talking about a "surge" in global warming since 2011, as shown in this figure:

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ref danielle pletka aei

US no use coal, eur does

link video

US CO2 dropped since we pulled out of Paris

right-wing panelist on Meet the Press on climate change: "I'm not a scientist ... We need to also recognize we had two of the coldest years, biggest drop in global temperatures that we have had since the 1980s, the biggest in the last 100 years. We don't talk about that."

icn 12/18

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Fact-Checking the Attacks

The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.

The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:

• White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released." This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department. Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.
• Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted inher Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios."
• The Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.
• Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwentseveral rounds of technical and policy reviewby the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. Anexpert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
• Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the reportfor including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal *Science*. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Sciencepaper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.

The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.

Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Instituteprefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.

Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.

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https://www.desmogblog.com/2018/04/18/finances-great-american-fracking-bubble

2008, Aubrey McClendon was the highest paid Fortune 500 CEO in America, a title he earned taking home $112 million for running Chesapeake Energy. Later dubbed “The Shale King,” he was at the forefront of the oil and gas industry's next boom, made possible by advances in fracking, which broke open fossil fuels from shale formations around the U.S.

What was McClendon’s secret? Instead of running a company that aimed to sell oil and gas, he was essentially flipping real estate: acquiring leases to drill on land and then reselling them for five to 10 times more, something McClendon explained was a lot more profitable than “trying to produce gas.” But his story may serve as a cautionary tale for an industry that keeps making big promises on borrowed dimes — while its investors begin losing patience, a trend DeSmog will be investigating in an in-depth series over the coming weeks.

From 2008 to 2009, Chesapeake Energy’s stock swung from $64 a share under McClendon to around $17. Today, it's worth just $3 a share — the same price it was in 2000. A visionary when it came to fracking, McClendon perfected the formula of borrowing money to drive the revolution that reshaped American energy markets.

An Industry Built on Debt

Roughly a decade after McClendon's rise, the Wall Street Journal reported that “energy companies [since 2007] have spent $280 billion more than they generated from operations on shale investments, according to advisory firm Evercore ISI.”

As a whole, the American fracking experiment has been a financial disasterfor many of its investors, who have been plagued by the industry's heavy borrowing, low returns, and bankruptcies, and the path to becoming profitable is lined with significant potential hurdles. Up to this point, the industry has been drilling the “sweet spots”in the country's major shale formations, reaching the easiest and most valuable oil first.

But at the same time energy companies are borrowing more money to drill more wells, the sweet spots are drying up, creating a Catch-22 as more drilling drives more debt.

“You have to keep drilling,” David Hughes, a geoscientist and fellow specializing in shale gas and oil production at the Post Carbon Institute, told DeSmog. But he also noted that with most of the sweet spots already drilled, producers are forced to move to less productive areas.

The result? “Productivity goes down and the costs remain the same,” he explained.

While Hughes understands the industry's rationale for continuing to drill new wells at a loss, he doubts the sustainability of the practice.

“I don't think in the long-term they can drill their way out of this,” Hughes told DeSmog.

While politicians and the mainstream media tout an American energy “revolution,” it is becoming clear that — like the housing bubble just a few years earlier — the American oil and gas boom spurred by fracking innovations may be one of the largest money-losing endeavors in the nation's history. And it caught up with McClendon.

In 2016, the shale king was indicted for rigging bids at drilling lease auctions. He died the very next day in a single car crash, leading to speculation McClendon committed suicide, a rumor impossible to confirm. However, the police chief on the scene noted: “There was plenty of opportunity for him to correct and get back on the roadway and that didn't occur.”

The same could be said of the current shale industry. There is plenty of opportunity for these energy companies to correct their path — for example, by linking CEO pay to company profits rather than oil production volumes — but instead they are plowing full-speed aheadwith a business model that seems poised for a crash.

But Hope Springs Eternal

Of course, business media and conservative think tanks are still selling the story that the fracking industry has produced an economic and technical revolution.

In 2017 Investors Business Daily ran an opinion piece with the title, “The Shale Revolution Is A Made-In-America Success Story.” It was authored byMark Perry of the American Enterprise Institute— a free market-focused think tankfunded in part by the oil and gas industry.

How does the author measure success? Not via profits. The metric Perry uses to argue the success of the fracking industry is production volume. And it is true that the volumes of oil produced by fracking shale are increasing and currently at record levels. But here is the catch — when you lose money on each barrel of oil you pump and sell — the more you pump, the more money you lose. While it is true that the industry has been successful at getting oil out of the ground, its companies have mostly lost money doing it.

However, much like with the U.S. housing boom, this false narrative persists that the fracking industry is a money-making, rather than money-losing, venture.

A Wall Street Journal headline published in early 2018 projected this eternal optimism about the fracking industry: “Frackers Could Make More Money Than Ever in 2018, If They Don’t Blow It.”

This headline manages to be, at the same time, both very misleading and true. Misleading because the industry has never made money. True because if oil and gas companies make any money fracking in 2018, it would be more “than ever.”

However, the nuance comes in the sub-headline: “U.S. shale companies are poised to make real money this year for the first time since the start of the fracking boom.”

Poised to make “real money” for “the first time.” Or to put it another way, the industry hopes to stop losing large amounts of real money for the first time this year.

In March 2017, The Economistwrote about the finances of the fracking industry, pointing out just how much money these businesses are burning through:

With the exception of airlines, Chinese state enterprises, and Silicon Valley unicorns — private firms valued at more than $1 billion — shale firms are on an unparalleled money-losing streak. About $11 billion was torched in the latest quarter, as capital expenditures exceeded cashflows. The cash-burn rate may well rise again this year.

Some historic money-losing has been going on, and is expected to continue, as reported by the Wall Street Journal: “Wood Mackenzie estimates that if oil prices hover around $50, shale companies won’t generate positive cash flow as a group until 2020.” However, Craig McMahon, senior vice president at Wood MacKenzie, notes, “Even then, only the most efficient operators will do well.”

U.S. oil produced via fracking is priced as West Texas Intermediate (WTI), which averaged $41 a barrel in 2016 and $51 in 2017. The consensus is that WTI should average over $50 a barrelin 2018, thus providing the industry another reason to keep pushing forward. However, even in 2017 with the average over $50 a barrel, the industry as a whole was not profitable.

Irrational Exuberance

In the introduction to The Big Short, Michael Lewis’ book-turned-movie about how the 2008 financial crash unfolded, he describes the finances of the housing bubble:

“All these subprime lending companies were growing so rapidly, and using such goofy accounting, that they could mask the fact that they had no real earnings, just illusory, accounting-driven, ones. They had the essential feature of a Ponzi scheme: To maintain the fiction that they were profitable enterprises, they needed more and more capital to create more and more subprime loans.”

If you substitute “shale oil and gas development companies” for “subprime lending companies,” it becomes an apt description of the current shale industry. These companies are losing more money than they make and can only sustain this scenario if lenders continue to bankroll their efforts, allowing the fracking industry to drill more wells as it points to production increases, rather than profits, as progress. Which — for now — Wall Street continues to do in a big way.

This article is the first in a series investigating the economics of fracking and where the vast sums of money being pumped into this industry are actually going. The series will look at how fracking companies are shifting these epic losses to the American taxpayers. It will review the huge challenges facing the industry even if oil and gas prices rise: the physical production limits of fracked wells, rising interest rates, rising water costs, competition from renewables, OPEC’s plans, and what happens if Wall Street stops loaning it money.

The oil industry has always been a boom or bust industry. And during each boom someone inevitably declares that “this time is different,” assuring everyone there won’t be a bust. The sentiment about the early 2000s housing bubble was much the same, with critics being drowned out by the players claiming that, this time it was different, arguing “Housing doesn’t go down in value.”

And what about for shale production? Is this time really different? Some in the industry apparently think so.

“Is this time going to be different? I think yes, a little bit,” energy asset manager Will Riley told the Wall Street Journal.“Companies will look to increase growth a little, but at a more moderate pace.” There is little evidence of restraint or moderation in the industry. Until analysts and investors start talking about profits instead of growth, however, this time is likely to end, at some point, in a completely familiar and predictable way: bust. A fate even Aubrey McClendon, the highest-paid CEO, the shale king, eventually met.

David Hughes summed up his take on the industry's financial outlook: “Ultimately, you hit the wall. It's just a question of time.”

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http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/rightwing-billionaires-are-intentionally-funding-hate-speech-college-campuses

On March 2, eugenicist Charles Murray attempted to give a lecture at Middlebury College in Vermont, with little success. Protesters shouted him down and he was sequestered in another room to answer questions over a livestream. Afterwards, Murray left the campus, but not before protesters blocked his car and injured a professor.

Labeled a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Murray is the author of the 1994 book The Bell Curve, in which he argues that inequalities of race, gender and income exist because white men are smarter and genetically superior to black people, Latinos, women and the poor. Numerous academics have panned the book for its faulty reasoning and unprovable points.

So why is someone with such fringe ideas invited to speak on college campuses, and who pays for it? It’s unlikely that many university departments would invite such an obviously racist and discredited figure. While co-presenting the Murray talk, the political science department did not invite Murray, nor did it contribute any funding for the event. The Middlebury student chapter of a far-right libertarian think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, asked him to speak, and AEI picked up the tab.

Murray is not the only controversial guest making the college circuit on a think tank’s dime. Another conservative nonprofit, Young America’s Foundation, also establishes student chapters at numerous universities and sends bigoted scholars and lecturers including Ann Coulter, David Horowitz and Ted Nugent to speak at their campus events free of charge. Bankrolling these nonprofits are conservative mega-donors including Charles and David Koch and the DeVos family, who by funding the organizations enable hate speech at institutions of higher education.

In addition, a production company connected to the right-wing billionaire Mercer family facilitated at least one college speaking gig of Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart News editor known for his racist, sexist, Islamophobic and anti-transgender vitriol.

Sending Murray to colleges

Murray has been a scholar at AEI since 1990, four years before The Bell Curve was published. In 2013, AEI founded its college chapter program, and now there are “executive councils” at more than 80 colleges and universities. At a leadership training program available to executive council members this summer, Murray is teaching a course called “The Building Blocks of Human Flourishing.”

Murray is a frequent invitee of AEI campus groups. He’s now touring the country to talk about his 2012 book on the "state of white America” and gave talks at Duke University, Columbia, NYU, the University of Notre Dame and Villanova University in late March.

Regarding the recent Murray talk at Middlebury, AEI Executive Council member Alexander Khan told the Washington Post, “Our goal was not to create a controversy, but to start a discussion and a dialogue.” Khan did not return requests for comment.

Dissenters see things differently. Nearly 500 Middlebury alumni wrote a letter to the college preceding Murray’s attempted talk, saying that traditional free speech arguments fall flat in justifying his appearance. Murray’s shoddy theories are “the same thinking that motivates eugenics and the genocidal white supremacist ideologies which are enjoying a popular resurgence under the new presidential administration.”

AEI declined to comment for this story, but other reports claim that in sponsoring Murray’s talk, the nonprofit is paying Murray’s speaker fee directly.

AEI gets most of its funding from the foundations of wealthy conservativesand a pass-through group meant to shield the identity of these very donors. Donors Capital Fund, to which conservative mega-donors such as the Koch, DeVos and Bradley families donate, is AEI’s biggest funder at nearly $23 million through 2014, according to ConservativeTransparency.org. The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, a major funder of many conservative groups, is close behind, and foundations run by Charles Koch and Richard and Helen DeVos, the parents of Education Sec. Betsy DeVos, have given more than $1 million each to AEI.

Piling on the hate speech: Young America’s Foundation

A similarly funded and probably even more conservative nonprofit, Young America’s Foundation, works to direct “public education on the ideas of individual freedom, a strong national defense, free enterprise [and] traditional values and leadership,” according to its most recent publicly available tax form. YAF spent roughly half of its 2015 budget of $17.7 million on conference and lecture programs including “lectures on college campuses” and student chapters.

Just like AEI, YAF has student chapters at colleges and universities around the nation. These “Young Americans for Freedom” chapters, which now exist at numerous institutions of higher learning as well as at high schools, can seek “logistical and financial assistance [from YAF] to host a big-name conservative speaker.”

“Radical feminists, big government bureaucrats, fringe environmentalists, race-baiters, Islamo-fascists, and run of the mill leftists are distraught that [YAF chapters] would even think about promoting conservative ideas,” the website states.

YAF’s roster of more than 90 speakers features several notable bigots including Coulter, Horowitz and Nugent. YAF farms out its speakers at a quick pace, with roughly one event per day during the final three weeks of April.

Some campuses are having quite the year. For example, after a Yiannopoulos event that was canceled because a protest got out of hand, UCBerkeley had noted Islamophobe Horowitz speak on April 12 and will host Coulter on April 27.

“We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now. We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity,” wrote Coulter in the National Review shortly after the 9/11 attacks, referring to allies of the 9/11 terrorists. An alumna of the YAF National Journalism Center’s internship program, she often makes headlines for her outrageous racist and anti-Muslim statements and regularly writes for the white nationalist website VDARE.

YAF is providing “a large portion of the funding to bring Coulter to Berkeley”as well as “logistical support before the event as well as on-the-ground support from experienced staff.”

Horowitz is a former leftist who took a hard-right turn decades ago and has now earned the titles of “anti-immigrant” and “anti-Muslim extremist” from the Southern Poverty Law Center. He runs the David Horowitz Freedom Center, which the SPLC calls “the premier financier of anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies.”

“Somewhere between 150 million and 750 million Muslims support a holy war against Christians, Jews, and other Muslims who don’t happen to believe in the Quran according to Bin Laden,” Horowitz erroneously claimed in 2007.

Among the particularly bigoted YAF speakers is anti-Muslim extremist Robert Spencer, who runs the hate site Jihad Watch, a project of the David Horowitz Freedom Center. He has said, “[T]raditional Islam itself is not moderate or peaceful. It is the only major world religion with a developed doctrine and tradition of warfare against unbelievers.”

YAF speaker Matt Walsh, an anti-LGBTQ “Christian columnist and political incendiary” for Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, has called transgender people mentally ill and perverted and written that “‘transgender’ propaganda is wrong…demented…evil...dangerous [and] abusive.”

Also on the YAF roster is musician and activist Ted Nugent, whose racist comments know no bounds. In 2014, he called the 44th president “a Chicago communist-raised, communist-educated, communist-nurtured subhuman mongrel [and] ACORN community organizer gangster.”

It’s not just the YAF speakers who have racist and white nationalist leanings. Current YAF president Ron Robinson and board member James B. Taylor ran a now-inactive political action committee called America’s PAC, which donated to the white nationalist Martel Society and consistently contributed to the campaigns of Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, a white nationalist who has recently cheered far-right European nationalists. Taylor is also former president of the National Policy Institute, which is now run by noted neo-Nazi and “alt-right” leader Richard Spencer.

YAF founded the Conservative Political Action Conference, a major right-wing event that occurs every year. CPAC rescinded its invitation to 2017 keynote speaker Yiannopoulos after videos in which he defends pedophilia surfaced, although his long record of racist, sexist and xenophobic rants was apparently not a problem.

The Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation is by far the biggest donor to YAF, and the Donors Capital Fund and its affiliate, Donors Trust, are also big contributors. The Bradley Foundation, three Koch family foundations and a foundation of the wealthy Mercer family have also given large donations.

YAF did not return a request for comment.

An ‘alt-right’ provocateur on campus

When Yiannopoulos, known for his wide-ranging hate speech, spoke at the University of Washington, the College Republicans group that had invited him had to raise money to cover increased security, as Yiannopoulos’ events often attract large protests. The student group raised over $12,000 from a GoFundMe campaign organized by its president, and the event got the green light.

Yiannopoulos charged no speaking fee. A performance agreement obtained by MuckRock shows that Glittering Steel, the production company owned by white nationalist Trump adviser Steve Bannon and connected to the conservative Mercer family, wrote the contract. Yiannopoulos told AlterNet his speaking fee was $0 “on every stop of the Dangerous Faggot Tour.” He did not directly answer questions about whether a private citizen or company paid his speaking fees behind the scenes and how exactly Glittering Steel was involved.

“Make America Number 1,” the super PAC of billionaire investor Robert Mercer, paid Glittering Steel nearly $1 million last year. Mercer is a part owner of Breitbart News, which Bannon ran for four years before joining the Trump campaign last August. The hedge fund magnate was a big part of Trump’s victory, and his daughter Rebekah was on the Trump transition team.

Yiannopoulos’ Berkeley event was sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, according to Horowitz’s online magazine, and was set to launch a joint campaign against sanctuary campuses. The Berkeley College Republicans had to provide more than $6,000 for increased security. An “anonymous donor” took care of part of that fee “with two conditions: that he remain anonymous and that the event occur.”

The Freedom Center did not respond to a request for comment.

==

hmmn blog:

thus, part of the problem with the MSM (at least on the right) is that people still think of it as media. iraq is the clearest example of the folly in this belief. the biggest proponents for the war and escalation have been fox, kristol, weekly standard and the american enterprise institute. fed kagan, who wrote the surge plan is a scholar at AEI. lynn cheney also works there. so does newt gingrich, richard perle, LEE RAYMOND of EXXON fame, John Yoo of torture fame. Alumni include DICK EVIL CHENEY, KEN LAY, ANTONIN SCALIA. because think tanks are treated as 501(c)(3)'s - irs code for charitable organizations - super rich people like the Scaife's and the Coor's funding of AEI is tax deductible. So they save money and pay the salaries for the people who write the research papers and go on tv to support their policies. and corporations give plenty as well which, for some odd reason, does not have to be made public. i kid you not. source watch states that EXXON gave at least $250,000 in 2005 to AEI alone.

==

rww

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI) is one of the oldest and most influential of the pro-business right-wing think tanks.It promotes the advancement of free enterprise capitalism, and has been extremely successful in placing its people in influential governmental positions, particularly in the Bush Administration. AEI has been described as one of the country's main bastions of neoconservatism.

American Enterprise Institute

1150 Seventeenth Street NW

Washington, DC 20036

Website: www.aei.org

Established: 1943 

President/Executive Director: Christopher DeMuth

Finances: $24,934,545 (2003 income)

Employees: more than 50 resident scholars and fellows

Board of Trustees: Chairman Bruce Kovner (Caxton Associations, LLC); Vice Chair Lee R. Raymond (Exxon Mobil Corporation); Treasurer Tully M. Friedman (Friedman, Fleischer, & Lowe LLC); Gordon M. Binder (Coastview Capital, LLC); Harlan Crow (Crow Holdings); Christopher DeMuth (American Enterprise Institute); Morton H. Fleischer (Spirit Finance Corp.); Christopher B. Galvin (Motorola); Raymond V. Gilmartin (Merck & Co.); Harvey Golub (American Express Co.); Robert F. Greenhill (Greenhill & Co., LLC) ; Roger Hertog (Alliance Capital Management Corporation);

 Martin M. Koffel (URS Corporation); John A. Luke, Jr. (MeadWestvaco Corp.); L. Ben Lytle (Anthem, Inc.); Alex Mandl (Gemplus International); Robert A. Pritzker (Colson Associates, Inc.); J. Joe Ricketts (Ameritrade Holding Corporation); Kevin B. Rollins (Dell, Inc.); John W. Rowe (Exelon Corp.);Edward B. Rust, Jr. (State Farm Insurance Co.); William S. Stavropoulos (Dow Chemical Co.); Wilson H. Taylor (CIGNA Corp.); Marilyn Ware (American Water); 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marilyn_Ware

Ware was nominated by President George W. Bush in October 2005. After Senate confirmation in December 2005, Ambassador Ware served at the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki from March 2006 to March 2008.

James Q. Wilson (Pepperdine University)

Publications: Monthly newsletter, dozens of books and hundreds of articles and reports each year, and a glossy policy magazine, *The American Enterprise*.

Read the latest news on the American Enterprise Institute on the group's Right Wing Watch index page

Principal Issues

• American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is a think tank for conservatives, neoconservatives, and conservative libertarians.
• Areas of interest include: America's "culture war," domestic policy and federal spending, education reform, neoconservatism, affirmative action, and welfare reform.
• President George W. Bush has appointed over a dozen people from AEI to senior positions in his administration. AEI claims that this is more than any other research institution.

Activities

• AEI sponsors and participates in debates and lectures on many issues.
• AEI scholars have testified before Congress on a variety of issues.
• Several AEI scholars have written articles in favor of government censorship of the arts.
• Scholar Michael Novak has argued that prayer belongs in public schools and that it doesn't violate the establishment clause.
• AEI scholars have advocated federally-fundedschool voucher programs.

Background and History

• Most of AEI's Board of Directors are CEOs of major companies, including ExxonMobil, Motorola, American Express, State Farm Insurance, and Dow Chemicals.
• Big donors include the top conservative foundations, including Smith-Richardson Foundation, the Olin Foundation, the Scaife Foundation, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation.
• Corporate supporters have included: General Electric Foundation, Amoco, Kraft Foundation, Ford Motor Company Fund, General Motors Foundation, Eastman Kodak Foundation, Metropolitan Life Foundation, Proctor & Gamble Fund, Shell Companies Foundation, Chrysler Corporation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, General Mills Foundation, Pillsbury Company Foundation, Prudential Foundation, American Express Foundation, AT&T Foundation, Corning Glass Works Foundation, Morgan Guarantee Trust, Smith-Richardson Foundation, Alcoa Foundation, and PPG Industries.
• Kenneth Lay, CEO of Enron, was until recently on the board of trustees of American Enterprise Institute. Other famous former trustees include Vice President Dick Cheney.

AEI Fellows and Scholars [partial list]

• Lynne Cheney, wife of Vice President Dick Cheney and former chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
• Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House.
• David Frum, a presidential speechwriter for President Bush, contributing editor to the right-wing magazine Weekly Standard.
• Christina Hoff Sommers, anti-feminist crusader, author of Who Stole Feminism? How Women Betrayed Women.
• Charles Murray, author of The Bell Curve, a book that asserted inherent intelligence differences between the races.
• Ben J. Wattenberg, host of PBS weekly show "Think Tank."

Updated: August 2006 

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

neocon

• History
• 2 Ties to the Koch Brothers
  • 2.1 Ties to DonorsTrust, a Koch Conduit
    • 2.1.1 DonorsTrust Funding
• 3 Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council
• 4 Controversies and Claims
  • 4.1 Minimum Wage Hikes "Simply Reckless"
  • 4.2 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform "Disastrously Wrong Response"
  • 4.3 Support for ALEC Voter ID Requirements
  • 4.4 Casting Doubt on Global Warming
  • 4.5 Support for "Regime Change" in Iraq
  • 4.6 Defending Big Tobacco
  • 4.7 NGO Watch
• 5 Personnel
  • 5.1 Board of Trustees
  • 5.2 Officers
    • 5.2.1 Former Board of Trustees Members
      • 5.2.1.1 Emeritus Trustees
      • 5.2.1.2 Former Emeritus Trustees
    • 5.2.2 Former Officers
  • 5.3 Academic Advisors
    • 5.3.1 Former Academic Advisors
• 6 Connections
• 7 Funding
  • 7.1 Corporate Donations
  • 7.2 Foundation Funding
• 8 Contact Information
• 9 Publications
• 10 Articles and Resources
  • 10.1 Related SourceWatch Articles
  • 10.2 References
  • 10.3 External Resources
  • 10.4 External Articles
    • 10.4.1 Profiles
    • 10.4.2 General articles

History

Originally set up as a spokesperson for big business and the promotion of free enterprise, the AEI came to major national prominence in the 1970s under the leadership of William Baroody, Sr.^[1], during which time it grew from a group of twelve resident "thinkers" to a well-funded organization with 145 resident scholars, 80 adjunct scholars, and a large supporting staff. This period of growth was largely funded by the Howard Pew Freedom Trust.

Irving Kristol left the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the late 1960s to work at the AEI after the CIA's funding of CCF was widely revealed in the media following initial reports in Ramparts magazine. ^[2]

President Ronald Reagan said of AEI in 1988:

"The American Enterprise Institute stands at the center of a revolution in ideas of which I, too, have been a part. AEI's remarkably distinguished body of work is testimony to the triumph of the think tank. For today the most important American scholarship comes out of our think tanks – and none has been more influential than the American Enterprise Institute."

In 1986, the Olin and Smith Richardson foundations withdrew their support from AEI because of substantive disagreement with certain of its policies, causing William Baroody, Jr.^[3][4][5] to resign in the ensuing financial crisis. Following criticism by conservatives that AEI was too centrist, it moved its program further to the right and became more aggressive in pursuing its public policy goals.^[6]

Ties to the Koch Brothers

David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."^[7]

Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.^[8]

Ties to DonorsTrust, a Koch Conduit

DonorsTrust is considered a "donor-advised fund," which means that it divides its funds into separate accounts for individual donors, who then recommend disbursements from the accounts to different non-profits. Funds like DonorsTrust are not uncommon in the non-profit sector, but they do cloak the identity of the original donors because the funds are typically distributed in the name of DonorsTrust rather than the original donors.^[9] Very little was known about DonorsTrust until late 2012 and early 2013, when the Guardian and others published extensive reports on what Mother Jones called "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement."^[10][11]

DonorsTrust Funding

The American Enterprise Institute received $19,840,954 from DonorsTrust between 2002 and 2011.^[12]

A report by the Center for Public Integrity exposes a number of DonorsTrust funders, many of which have ties to the Koch brothers. One of the most prominent funders is the Knowledge and Progress Fund, a Charles Koch-run organization and one of the group's largest known contributors, having donated at least $8 million since 2005. Other contributors known to have donated at least $1 million to DonorsTrust include the Richard and Helen DeVos Foundation, Donald & Paula Smith Family Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, and the John M. Olin Foundation.^[13]

Since its inception in 1999, DonorsTrust has been used by conservative foundations and individuals to discretely funnel nearly $400 million to like-minded think tanks and media outlets.^[13] According to the organization's tax documents, in 2011 DonorsTrust contributed a total of $86 million to right-wing organizations. Many recipients had ties to the State Policy Network (SPN), a wide collection of conservative state-based think tanks and media organizations that focus on shaping public policy and opinion.

In 2013, the Center for Media and Democracy released a special report on SPN. Those who received DonorsTrust funding included media outlets such as the Franklin Center and the Lucy Burns Institute, as well as think tanks such as SPN itself, the Heartland Institute, Illinois Policy Institute, Independence Institute, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, South Carolina Policy Council, American Legislative Exchange Council,Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, and the Cascade Policy Institute.^[14]

Ties to the American Legislative Exchange Council

In August 2011, AEI President Arthur C. Brooks spoke at a "Leadership Dinner" sponsored by Reynolds American Tobacco at the 38th Annual Meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).^[15]

Controversies and Claims

Minimum Wage Hikes "Simply Reckless"

AEI scholars caution against legislation raising the minimum wage “for the sake of low-wage workers,” claiming that mandating a higher wage increases the cost of employment and will therefore leave fewer jobs. In one article, AEI resident scholar Michael R. Strain called Seattle’s initiative to increase the city’s wage requirements “simply reckless.”^[16]

Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform "Disastrously Wrong Response"

AEI has spoken out against the financial system regulations created under the Dodd-Frank Act. In an article, AEI scholar Peter J. Wallison claimed that the 2008 financial crisis, which led to the legislation, “was not caused by insufficient regulation, let alone by an inherently unstable financial system. It was caused by government housing policies…” Wallison wrote, “The Dodd-Frank Act was a disastrously wrong response,” claiming it created uncertainty and removed the incentive for financial institutions to take risk.^[17]

Support for ALEC Voter ID Requirements

In 2008, AEI showed support for photo ID requirements for voting in elections, a "model bill" endorsed and promoted by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) in 2009. AEI resident scholar Norman J. Ornstein wrote, “I do not think, in principle, that requiring a photo ID is evil or onerous. An official photo ID can protect voters against charges that they are ineligible to vote” — as long as the ID is issued at no cost to the recipient.^[18]

Casting Doubt on Global Warming

In February 2007, The Guardian (UK) reported that AEI was offering scientists and economists $10,000 each, "to undermine a major climate change report" from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). AEI asked for "articles that emphasise the shortcomings" of the IPCC report, which "is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science." AEI visiting scholar Kenneth Green made the $10,000 offer "to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere," in a letter describing the IPCC as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent."^[19]

The Guardian reported further that AEI "has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil, and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees," added The Guardian.^[19]

Since the time of that report, AEI has continued to receive money from Exxon Mobil — a total of at least $1,520,000.^[20]

AEI and the head of its energy studies department, Benjamin Zycher, have faced criticism for distorting scientific findings on global warming from Jeffrey Sachs, a leading environmental studies scholar, Columbia University professor, economist, and UN advisor. Zycher had once criticized Sachs for misconstruing the IPCC conclusions on global warming; however, Sachs responded, "It is Zycher who distorts, misrepresents, or simply ignores the IPCC conclusions."^[21]

Sachs went on to write:

"It is time for Zycher and, indeed, the American Enterprise Institute, to come clean. The AEI, despite its roster of distinguished academics, has failed to be constructive in the climate debate. It's time that the AEI puts forward a strategy to achieve the globally agreed objective of avoiding dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."^[21]

Support for "Regime Change" in Iraq

AEI emerged as one of the leading architects of the Bush administration's foreign policy. AEI has rented office space to the Project for the New American Century, one of the leading voices that pushed the Bush administration's plan for "regime change" through war in Iraq. AEI reps have also aggressively denied that the war has anything to do with oil.

Paul Wolfowitz, who was Secretary of Defense under former President George W. Bush from the beginning of his presidential term until June 2005, is a scholar at AEI (as of July 2014).^[22] During his time in the Bush administration, Wolfowitz was a major architect of the United States’ failed Iraq policy.^[23]

Defending Big Tobacco

In 1980, AEI for the sum of $25,000 produced a study in support of the tobacco industry titled, Cost-Benefit Analysis of Regulation: Consumer Products. The study was designed to counteract "social cost" arguments against smoking by broadening the social cost issue to include other consumer products such as alcohol and saccharin. The social cost arguments against smoking hold that smoking burdens society with additional costs from on-the-job absenteeism, medical costs, cleaning costs and fires.^[24] The report was part of the global tobacco industry's 1980s Social Costs/Social Values Project, carried out to refute emerging social cost arguments against smoking.

NGO Watch

In June 2003, AEI and another right-wing group, the Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, launched a new website NGOWatch.org/NGOwatch.org to expose the funding, operations and agendas of international NGOs, and particularly their alleged efforts to constrain U.S. freedom of action in international affairs and influence the behavior of corporations abroad.^[25] AEI claimed that "The extraordinary growth of advocacy NGOs in liberal democracies has the potential to undermine the sovereignty of constitutional democracies, as well as the effectiveness of credible NGOs."^[26] Ralph Nader responded, "What they are condemning, with vague, ironic regulatory nostrums proposed against dissenting citizen groups, is democracy itself." ^[27]

Personnel

Board of Trustees

"AEI is governed by a Board of Trustees, composed of leading business and financial executives."^[28]

As of June 23, 2014 they were:

• Arthur C. Brooks, President, American Enterprise Institute
• Tully M. Friedman, Treasurer; Chairman and CEO, Friedman Fleischer & Lowe, LLC
• Daniel A. D'Aniello, Vice Chairman, Chairman and Cofounder, The Carlyle Group
• Clifford S. Asness, Managing and Founding Principal, AQE Capital Management
• Gordon M. Binder, Managing Director, Coastview Capital, LLC
• The Honorable Richard B. Cheney
• Peter H. Coors, Vice Chairman of the Board, Moslon Coors Brewing Company
• Harlan Crow, Chairman and CEO, Crow Holdings
• Ravenel B. Curry III, Chief Investment Officer, Eagle Capital Management, LLC
• John V. Faraci, Chairman and CEO, International Paper
• Christopher B. Galvin, Chairman, Harrison Street Capital, LLC
• Raymond V. Gilmartin, Chairman and CEO, Retired, Merck & Co., Inc.
• Harvey Golub, Chairman and CEO, Retired, American Express Company
• Robert F. Greenhill, Chairman, Greenhill & Co. Inc.
• Frank J. Hanna, Hanna Capital, LLC
• Seth A. Klarman, President and CEO, The Baupost Group, LLC
• Bruce Kovner, Chairman, Caxton Associates, LP
• Marc S. Lipschultz, Partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.
• John A. Luke Jr., Chairman and CEO, MeadWestvaco Corporation
• George L. Priest, Yale Law School
• Kevin B. Rollins, Senior Adviser, TPG Capital
• Matthew K. Rose, Chairman and CEO, BNSF Railway Company
• Edward B. Rust Jr., Chairman and CEO, State Farm Insurance Companies
• D. Gideon Searle, Managing Partner, The Serafin Group, LLC
• Mel Sembler, Founder and Chairman, The Sembler Company
• Wilson H. Taylor, Chairman Emeritus, CIGNA Corporation
• William H. Walton, Managing Member, Rockpoint Group, LLC
• Marilyn Ware, Chairman, Ret. American Water Works

Officers

As of June 23, 2014, AEI's officers were:^[29].

• Arthur C. Brooks, President
• David Gerson, Executive Vice President
• Jason Bertsch, Vice President, Marketing
• Danielle Pletka, Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies

Former Board of Trustees Members

• Roger Hertog
• Robert A. Pritzker, President and CEO, Colson Associates, Inc. (also President and Director of the Pritzker Foundation
• J. PeterRicketts, President and Director, Platte Institute for Economic Research, Inc.
• William L. Walton, Chairman, Allied Capital Corporation
• James Q. Wilson, School of Public Policy, Pepperdine University^[30]

Emeritus Trustees

As of June 23, 2014 the Emeritus Trustees were:^[31]

• Richard B. Madden
• Robert H. Malott
• Paul F. Oreffice
• Henry Wendt

Former Emeritus Trustees

• Willard C. Butcher
• Paul W. McCracken

Former Officers

• Christopher DeMuth - President. Researches government regulation. He became president of AEI in 1986.
• David Gerson - Executive Vice President
• Jason Bertsch - Vice President, Marketing
• Henry Olsen - Vice President, National Research Initiative
• Danielle Pletka - Vice President, Foreign and Defense Policy Studies. Research areas include the Middle East, South Asia, terrorism, and weapons proliferation.

^[32]

Academic Advisors

"AEI's Council of Academic Advisers ... including distinguished academics from a variety of policy-related fields, advises AEI's president on the Institute's research agenda, publications, and appointments, and each year selects the recipient of the Irving Kristol Award."^[33]

As of June 23, 2014, they were:

• George L. Priest, Edward J. Phelps Professor of Law and Economics, Yale Law School
• Alan J. Auerbach, Robert D. Burch Professor of Economics and Law, University of California, Berkeley
• Eliot Cohen, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University
• Eugene F. Fama, Robert R. McCormick Distinguished Service Professor of Finance, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago
• Martin Feldstein, George F. Baker Professor of Economics, Harvard University
• Aaron L. Freiberg, Professor of Politics and International Affairs, Princeton University
• Robert P. George, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence Director, James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, Princeton University
• Eric A. Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hana Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University
• R. Glenn Hubbard, Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School
• Walter Russell Mead, Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Columbia Business School
• John L. Palmer, University Professor and Dean Emeritus, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University
• Mark Pauly, Bendheim Professor, Professor of Health Care Management, Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania
• Sam Peltzman, Ralph and Dorothy Keller Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, Booth School of Business University of Chicago
• Jeremy A. Rabkin, Professor of Law, George Mason University School of Law
• Harvey S. Rosen, John L. Weinberg Professor of Economics and Business Policy at Princeton University
• Richard J. Zeckhauser, Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Political Economy, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

Former Academic Advisors

• Gertrude Himmelfarb, Distinguished Professor of History Emeritus, City University of New York
• James Q. Wilson, Pepperdine University^[34]

Connections

The following was compiled by RightWeb:^[35]

• The Center for the Study of American Business and the Center for Strategic and International Studies are said to be spinoffs of the AEI (Saloma, 1984).
• The Business Roundtable: according to journalist Sidney Blumenthal, making contributions to AEI was a pitch made at almost every policy committee meeting of the Roundtable
• During the 80s, staff members were funded with the hawkish anticommunist group Committee on the Present Danger.
• Staff alumni Jeane Kirkpatrick and William Simon were vice president and chairman of the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund.
• Alumni Michael Novak and Irving Kristol co-founded the Coalition for a Democratic Majority
• Heritage Foundation
• Council for National Policy
• Center for Strategic and International Studies
• Center for Security Policy founded by Frank Gaffney with an alleged mission to "promote peace through American strength".
• Project for the New American Century, PNAC

Funding

Corporate Donations

In 1997, Philip Morris contributed $100,000 to the Institute.^[36] During 2007, ExxonMobilcontributed $240,000 (including an addition $30,000 for the joint AEI Brookings "Judicial Education Program").^[37]

Foundation Funding

From 1990 to 2014, AEI received more than $111 million in disclosed contributions from the following organizations:^[38]

• Kovner Foundation
• Donors Capital Fund
• Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
• Smith Richardson Foundation
• Sarah Scaife Foundation
• Searle Freedom Trust

Funding has come from many other sources, such as Amoco, the Kraft Foundation, and the Procter & Gamble Fund. Records are incomplete.

Contact Information

American Enterprise Institute

1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W.

Washington, DC 20036

Phone: 202-862-5800

Fax: 202-862-7177

E-mail: info AT aei.org

Website: http://www.aei.org

Publications

American Enterprise - a bi-monthly magazine published by AEI.

Articles and Resources

Related SourceWatch Articles

• Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Republican Connection
• Koch Brothers
• Koch Family Foundations
• Americans for Prosperity
• Freedom Partners
• Cato Institute
• Heritage Foundation
• Koch Universities
• Koch Network
• Knowledge and Progress Fund
• American Encore
• DonorsTrust
• Donors Capital
• 60 Plus
• Generation Opportunity

References

1. "AEI's Diamond Jubilee, 1943-2003", an essay from the American Enterprise Institute's 2003 Annual Report.
2. Saunders, F: The Cultural Cold War, page 419. The New Press,1999.
3. William Baroody, Jr., Assistant to the President for Public Liaison: Files, 1974?77, Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.
4. "AEI's Diamond Jubilee, 1943-2003", an essay from the American Enterprise Institute's 2003 Annual Report.
5. Todd Lencz, "The Baroody bunch - William Baroody Jr," National Review (FindArticles.com), September 12, 1986.
6. [1]
7. American Enterprise Institute, National Council, organizational website, accessed June 23, 2014.
8. American Enterprise Institute, "Conservative Transparency," financial data, accessed July 3, 2014.
9. Rebekah Wilce, A Reporters' Guide to the "State Policy Network" -- the Right-Wing Think Tanks Spinning Disinformation and Pushing the ALEC Agenda in the States, PRWatch.org, April 4, 2013.
10. Andy Kroll, Exposed: The Dark-Money ATM of the Conservative Movement, "Mother Jones", February 5, 2013, accessed June 2014.
11. Suzanne Goldenberg, Secret funding helped build vast network of climate denial thinktanks, The Guardian, February 14, 2013, accessed June 2014.
12. Greenpeace, Donors Trust: The shadow operation that has laundered $146 million in climate-denial funding, accessed July 1, 2014
13. Paul Abowd, Donors use charity to push free-market policies in states, The Center for Public Integrity, February 14, 2013, accessed July 1, 2014
14. Donors Trust, GuideStar.org, IRS form 990, 2011, accessed June 2014
15. American Legislative Exchange Council, "Solutions for the States," 38th Annual Meeting agenda, on file with CMD, August 3-6, 2011
16. Michael R. Strain, Seattle do-gooders just shot themselves in the foot, American Enterprise Institute, June 7, 2014.
17. Peter J. Wallison, The case for repealing Dodd-Frank, American Enterprise Institute, November 26, 2013.
18. Norman J. Ornstein, There’s Value In Voter ID Requirement—If It’s Done Properly, American Enterprise Institute, May 7, 2008.
19. Ian Sample, "Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study," The Guardian, February 1, 2007. Accessed July 30, 2014.
20. American Bridge, Contributions to American Enterprise Institute, ConservativeTransparency.org, accessed July 8, 2014.
21. Jeffrey Sachs, How the AEI Distorts the Climate Debate, Huffington Post, February 8, 2014
22. American Enterprise Institute, AEI Scholar Paul Wolfowitz, AEI.org, accessed July 8, 2014.
23. Peter J. Boyer, The Believer: Paul Wolfowitz Defends His War, ‘’The New Yorker’’, November 1, 2004.
24. Legacy Tobacco Document Archive, A. AT ITS LAST MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE AUTHORIZED PROGRESS ON SOCIAL COST PROGRAM THROUGH FEBRUARY., University of California-San Francisco, accessed July 30, 2014.
25. [2]
26. American Enterprise Institute, statement, organizational website.
27. [3]
28. American Enterprise Institute, Board of Trustees, organizational website, accessed June 23, 2014.
29. American Enterprise Institute, Officers, organizational website, accessed June 23, 2014.
30. BusinessWeek, "Robert Pritzker: Executive Profile," December 31, 2009.
31. American Enterprise Institute, Board of Trustees, organizational website, accessed June 23, 2014.
32. Officers of AEI, organizational website, accessed June 2007.
33. American Enterprise Institute, Council of Academic Advisors, organizational website, accessed June 23, 2014.
34. AEI - Council of Academic Advisers. AEI. Retrieved on 2009-12-31.
35. Profile: American Enterprise Institute, RightWeb.
36. Matt Winokur, "Public Policy Groups", Philip Morris memo, April 21, 1997.
37. ExxonMobil, 2007 "Worldwide Contributions and Community Investments", ExxonMobil website, accessed December 2008, page 1.
38. American Enterprise Institute, "Conservative Transparency," financial data, accessed July 03, 2014.

External Resources

• NeoCon Europe American Enterprise Institute

External Articles

Profiles

• Scholars & Fellows -- List of Scholars and Fellows from AEI web site.
• Archive of Scholars and Fellows pages from web.archive.org.
• Media Transparency -- For a funding history of AEI.
• John Saloma III, Ominous Politics, New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1984.
• John B. Judis, Business and the Rise of K Street, Routledge Press, 2001.
• Media Transparency, American Enterprise Institute for public policy research (profile), accessed January 2004.
• RightWeb, American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (profile), February 1991.
• George W. Bush's February 2003 speech to the AEI about the future of Iraq.

General articles

• "A Think Tank at the Brink," Newsweek, July 7, 1986.
• Brian Whitaker, "US Think Tanks Give Lessons in Foreign Policy," Guardian (UK), August 19, 2002.
• Ian Sample, "Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study," The Guardian, February 2, 2007.
• Juliet Eilperin, "AEI Critiques of Warming Questioned: Think Tank Defends Money Offers to Challenge Climate Report," Washington Post, February 5, 2007.
• Bill Berkowitz, "American Enterprise Institute takes lead in agitating against Iran", Media Transparency, February 26, 2007.
• Jim Lobe, "Likudnik Hawks Work to Undermine Annapolis," Inter Press Service (Antiwar.com), November 22, 2007.

Categories: 

• Koch Connection
• ALEC Exposed
• Tobaccowiki
• Right wing
• United States
• Non-Government Organizations
• PNAC
• ALEC Non-Profits

==

OMG

https://www.aei.org/?s=%2A%3A%2A&fq=tags:%22poverty+studies%22

not wacko

https://www.aei.org/scholar/angela-rachidi/

. Doar has served as a cochair of the National Commission on Hunger and as a lead member of the AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, which published the report titled “Opportunity, Responsibility, and Security: A Consensus Plan for Reducing Poverty and Restoring the American Dream.”

Before joining AEI, he was commissioner of New York City’s Human Resources Administration, where he administered 12 public assistance programs. Programs included welfare, food assistance, public health insurance, home care for the elderly and disabled, energy assistance, child support enforcement services, adult protective services, domestic violence assistance, and help for people living with HIV/AIDS. In New York City, Mr. Doar oversaw a 25 percent reduction in the city’s welfare caseload and the transition to work of more than 500,000 public assistance applicants and recipients.Before joining the Bloomberg administration, he was commissioner of social services for the state of New York, where he helped to make the state a model for the implementation of welfare reform.

His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and National Review, among other publications.

Mr. Doar has a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton University.

Experience

• Member, AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity, 2014–15
• Cochair, National Commission on Hunger, 2014–15
• Commissioner, New York City Human Resources Administration, Department of Social Services, 2007–14
• Commissioner, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, 2003–06
• Executive Deputy Commissioner, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, 2000–03
• Deputy Commissioner, Child Support Enforcement, New York State Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, 1995–2000

Education

A.B., history, Princeton University

eg https://www.aei.org/publication/congress-should-fix-obamas-plan-to-end-family-homelessness/

Nicholas H. Wolfinger,W. Bradford Wilcox

May 24, 2016 | First Things

The Latino marriage paradox

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Assimilation brings both cultural change and upward mobility for American Latinos, but elements of familism remain.

Robert Doar

April 7, 2016 | Child Support CommuniQue

Reinvigorating Child Support Enforcement as an anti-poverty program

Poverty Studies

Child Support Enforcement can be a critical program for helping poor custodial parents support themselves and their children. But over the years, the program’s reach has diminished.

Arthur C. Brooks

March 17, 2016

A conservative’s plea: Let’s work together

Poverty Studies

Conservatives and liberals both believe that they alone are motivated by love while their opponents are motivated by hate. How can we solve problems with so much polarization?

Kevin C. Corinth

March 4, 2016 | The Hill

Congress should fix Obama’s plan to end family homelessness

Poverty Studies

Congress should be skeptical of the Obama administration’s proposal to end family homelessness. Providing permanent housing may sound good politically, but in reality, it is an inefficient and unfair way to try to help poor families.

W. Bradford Wilcox,Nicholas H. Wolfinger

February 29, 2016 | National Review Online

Look beyond Ferguson and Baltimore: The good news about black men

Poverty Studies, Race and Gender, Society and Culture

Most black men are doing just fine in 21st-century America, a point often lost in today’s public conversation. Their lives are often strengthened by the social, moral, and spiritual succor they receive from the black church. That’s an important piece of good news about black men as we close out black history month this February.

Robert Doar

February 26, 2016

The truth about poverty in America

Poverty Studies

There are 47 million Americans living in poverty today because our safety net programs are not doing enough to encourage work. Our highest priority should be to help people in poverty move from welfare to work.

Kevin C. Corinth

January 25, 2016 | Real Clear Policy

d housing as a poverty solution

Housing Finance, Poverty Studies

We often think there are only two ways to fight poverty — the government and private philanthropy. But living arrangements can be just as important.

Robert Doar

Thursday, December 3, 2015 | 9:00 am - 11:00 am

Opportunity, responsibility, and security: A consensus plan for reducing poverty and restoring the American dream

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Prominent scholars from across the political spectrum unveil a consensus plan for reducing poverty and increasing opportunity.

Robert Doar,Lawrence M. Mead,Michael R. Strain

December 3, 2015 | AEI-Brookings Working Group on Poverty and Opportunity

Opportunity, responsibility, and security

Economics, Society and Culture

Economic trends, cultural changes, and changes in family and marriage patterns are combining in new ways that make it harder for those born on the bottom rungs of the economic ladder to lift themselves up.

Bruce D. Meyer,Nikolas Mittag

October 26, 2015 | AEI Economics Working Paper Series

Using linked survey and administrative data to better measure income: Implications for poverty, program effectiveness and holes in the safety net

Economics, Poverty Studies

We find that CPS survey data sharply understate the income of poor households.Underreporting in the survey data also greatly understates the effects of anti-poverty programs and changes our understanding of program targeting, often making it seem that welfare programs are less targeted to both the very poorest and middle income households than they are.

October 21, 2015

Family: The name for what we choose to do together

Economics, Religion, Society and Culture

Senator Sasse, Nebraska’s newly-elected freshman senator, opened AEI’s discussion of the links between family structure and economic growth.

President Barack Obama speaks with Pope Francis at the Vatican March 27, 2014. Obama highlighted growing gaps between rich and poor ahead of his first meeting on Thursday with Pope Francis, an event that was expected to focus on the fight against poverty and skirt moral controversies over abortion and gay rights. Reuters

Timothy P. Carney

September 13, 2015 | Washington Examiner

Pope and change: How Francis’ visit is disrupting US politics

Elections, Immigration, Politics and Public Opinion, Religion

Pope Francis is not a politician, but likes a good political dustup. And the Holy Father couldn’t have packed his trip to the United States this month with more politically charged issues.

Chris Callas Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-2.0)

Natalie Runkle

August 5, 2015 1:32 pm | AEIdeas

Prisoner reentry: Promoting justice and human dignity

Pethokoukis

Human dignity, employment, and community support are integral to successful prisoner reentry.

Maura Corrigan,Robert Doar

Tuesday, July 28, 2015 | 9:00 am - 12:00 pm

Improving prisoner reentry and reducing recidivism: Successes and challenges

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

State and nonprofit leaders discuss successes and challenges in improving reentry for prisoners and reducing recidivism.

Natalie Runkle

June 29, 2015 3:24 pm | AEIdeas

‘Our Kids’: Will the next generation of Americans enjoy the American Dream?

Pethokoukis

We may not know what caused the American dream’s malaise. We may disagree as to the proper cure. But we can agree that an alive-and-well American dream guarantees our kids an equal chance at success.

Robert Doar,Charles Murray

Monday, June 22, 2015 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

The American dream in crisis? A discussion withRobert Putnam, Charles Murray, and William Julius Wilson

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Wealthy kids enjoy the many benefits of stable families who invest in their development, whereas poor and working-class kids increasingly navigate broken families, the absence of adult role models, and fewer opportunities for well-paying jobs. During this event, panelists discuss whether this snapshot is correct and what to do about it.

Angela Rachidi

June 16, 2015 4:41 pm | AEIdeas

Should we expect full participation in benefit programs?

Economics, Poverty Studies, Public Economics

Some people do not want government assistance even when eligible. The desire to be independent from government assistance is respectable and policy makers should not try to change that.

Angela Rachidi

June 11, 2015 11:48 am | AEIdeas

Rent burdens for low-income families getting worse in major cities

Poverty Studies

A recent report nicely sums up the uphill battle facing policymakers trying to address poverty and low income in large metropolitan centers.

W. Bradford Wilcox,Nicholas Zill

June 11, 2015 | Institute for Family Studies

Red state families: Better than we knew

Politics and Public Opinion, Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

In understanding the confusing contours of political and family geography, it looks like both education and ideology matter.

Brad Wassink

June 9, 2015 3:26 pm | AEIdeas

How efficient markets can help feed more of the world’s poor

Economics, Poverty Studies

Emergency food aid provided by the US government to many of the poorest people in the world saves millions of lives every year. It could save millions more if it were run efficiently.

Vincent H. Smith

June 4, 2015 | Real Clear World

Why the U.S. Food Aid System Needs Reform

Economics, Poverty Studies

A bipartisan group in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee is seeking to ensure thatFood for Peace Program funds are used in the most efficient way to help millions of people whose lives have been devastated by natural and man-made disasters.

Angela Rachidi

June 3, 2015 | American Enterprise Institute

Balancing the trade-offs: Options for expanding the childless worker earned income tax credit

Economics, Labor Studies, Poverty Studies, Public Economics

When thinking about the proper amount and reach of a childless worker earned income tax credit program, the trade-offs between reach and costs must be balanced.

Brad Wassink

June 2, 2015 9:32 am | AEIdeas

Access and nutrition: Build it and they will come?

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

It is well-documented that the diets of the poor are not as healthful  as those of higher-income Americans. There is debate over why this gap exists, but a new NBER paper suggests that lack of access to nutritional food, a common explanation for the divide, may not be its key driver.

Robert Doar

May 21, 2015 | US News & World Report

Bringing up baby

Poverty Studies

When Harvard social scientist and celebrated author Robert Putnam lists the challenges facing poor Americans, family structure is always at the top.

Angela Rachidi

May 20, 2015 | Testimony before the House Committee on Agriculture, Subcommittee on Nutrition

Federal food assistance programs: Better coordination will help households and save government dollars

Poverty Studies

The extent to which we can limit the burden on staff and on families by better consolidating and coordinating food assistance programs, the better these families will be served and the better the government’s money will be spent.

W. Bradford Wilcox

May 20, 2015 |The Federalist

Don’t hold a funeral for marriage yet

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Judging by the views expressed by some of the nation’s leading family scholars, marriage’s days in America are numbered. Recent data may suggest otherwise.

Federal Spending on Means-Tested Programs

Angela Rachidi

May 18, 2015 11:00 am | AEIdeas

Have we stopped investing in poor people?

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Spending on poor families has increased dramatically over the past few decades.

Angela Rachidi

May 14, 2015 | The New York Post

The real ways to fight poverty in New York and beyond

Economics, Poverty Studies

Increasing work and work supports and improving high-school graduation rates are better alternatives to Mayor  de Blasio’s antipoverty plan.

Angela Rachidi

May 13, 2015 | Testimony before the National Commission on Hunger

Addressing very low food security among American households

Poverty Studies

Our nation’s food assistance programs are largely adequate to address very low food security and do so for the vast majority of households. However, fluctuations in income that result from work disruptions or other causes increase the likelihood of very low food security.

Retiring New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (C) receives the applause of Federal judges for the Southern District of New York (rear) during the official dedication ceremony for the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in lower Manhattan, December 4, 2000. Reuters

Gerard Robinson

May 9, 2015 | Richmond Times-Dispatch

Moynihan and the modern American family at 50

Education, K-12 Schooling

We must acknowledge that our charge in 2015 is to work with the families we have – not with the families we want, wish for or invented 50 years ago.

Angela Rachidi

May 1, 2015 9:35 am

The balancing act of serving fragile families

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Research, such as Dr. Edin’s, demonstrate that there are many low-income men of color who embrace fatherhood and want to support their children. At the same time, many display destructive behaviors, especially when they form new relationships.

Robert Doar

Wednesday, April 29, 2015 | 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm

Improving opportunity for black men: The role of economics, culture, and policy

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

A panel of distinguished experts discuss the role of economics, policy, and culture in the struggles of black men in the United States, and how their prospects can be improved.

Shifting composition of SNAP households

Angela Rachidi

April 17, 2015 10:39 am | AEIdeas

It’s time to reinstate the SNAP work requirements

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) provides food assistance to almost 46 million people – a two-fold increase since 2006. The dramatic increase in participants and expenditures have led to proposals for cuts and work requirements to control costs.

Angela Rachidi

April 8, 2015 | Real Clear Markets

How to employ the very hard to employ

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Social enterprises may be a better alternative to government-sponsored programs for hard-to-employ people.

growth is the best social program

Angela Rachidi

April 3, 2015 1:29 pm | AEIdeas

Improve the economy, poverty reduction will follow

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

We can expect a few more years of elevated poverty rates unless the economy improves and more Americans join the labor force.

W. Bradford Wilcox

April 2, 2015 | The Washington Post

Don’t be a bachelor: Why married men work harder and smarter and make more money

Poverty Studies, Race and Gender, Society and Culture

Marriage has a transformative effect on adult behavior, emotional health, and financial well-being—particularly for men.

W. Bradford Wilcox

April 2, 2015 | Family Studies

Marriage in decline: No big deal? 3 reasons Yglesias is wrong

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

The decline of marriage is a problem because it is one of the primary reasons that the richer and poorer classes in our country are increasingly separate and unequal.

Healthcare coverage eating up large  of spending on poor

Angela Rachidi

March 31, 2015 5:19 pm | AEIdeas

Medicaid and SNAP consume most dollars for the poor

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Finding a way to pay for additional programs for the poor – such as EITC expansions, child care improvements, and job-training programs – will be difficult without addressing the current spending trajectory for Medicaid and SNAP.

Stu James,Janine Nichols,Robert Doar

March 30, 2015

Banter #177: Robert Doar on fighting poverty

Poverty Studies

AEI Morgridge Fellow in Poverty Studies Robert Doar joins the show to discuss poverty, welfare, and why the family is so important.

W. Bradford Wilcox

March 27, 2015 | The Washington Post

:{

}:

Why so many empty church pews? Here’s what money, sex, divorce, and TV are doing to American religion

Citizenship, Poverty Studies, Religion, Society and Culture

America’s churches have grown weakest in some of the communities that need them most: poor and working-class communities across the country.

Angela Rachidi

March 19, 2015 3:23 pm | AEIdeas

Improper payments are undermining the EITC

Economics, Poverty Studies

The federal government spent $65.2 billion on the EITC in FY 2014, of which 27.2% or $17.7 billion were improper.

W. Bradford Wilcox

March 12, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

Bootstraps aren’t enough

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

W. Bradford Wilcox reviews Robert Putnam’s new book, “Our Kids,” in which Putnam argues that children’s access to the core institutions that foster their development—strong families, strong schools, strong communities—is increasingly separate and unequal.

Robert Doar

March 10, 2015 | The Wall Street Journal

Making it easier to skip paying child support

Economics, Poverty Studies

With little public attention, the Obama administration has been changing America’s child-support enforcement. The most recent Census Bureau report found that in 2011 fewer than 50% of single mothers had child-support orders—down from almost 60% in 2003.

Britain's Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith delivers his keynote speech at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham, central England,October 8, 2012.  Reuters

Robert Doar,Michael R. Strain,Arthur C. Brooks

Tuesday, March 3, 2015 | 12:30 pm - 2:00 pm

Welfare reform and lessons from the United Kingdom: A conversation with UK Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Iain Duncan Smith

Economics, Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

Iain Duncan Smith, UK Department for Work and Pensions secretary of state, discusses the UK welfare reform effort with Rep. Todd Young (R-IN) and a panel of experts.

Kevin C. Corinth

February 19, 2015 | The New York Times

Homelessness can require complex solutions

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

The Housing First philosophy threatens to distract us from the solutions that would most effectively address other important needs.

W. Bradford Wilcox

February 11, 2015 |Testimony before the House Committee on Ways and Means, Subcommittee on Human Resources

Challenges facing low-income individuals and families in today’s economy

Economics, Poverty Studies, Public Economics, Society and Culture

One major challenge facing lower-income men, women, and their children is that they are less likely to benefit from the social and economic advantages associated with growing up within or being a member of a stable, married family

Robert Doar

February 10, 2015 | InsideSources

Why borrowers would be more secure with a Wealth-Building Home Loan

Financial Services, Housing Finance, Poverty Studies

With the latest edition of the National Mortgage Risk Index (NMRI) showing that bad practices are coming back,the Wealth Building Home Loan is a safer alternative to the traditional 30-year mortgage.

Kevin C. Corinth

February 5, 2015 | The Huffington Post

How Christmas spirit can solve homelessness

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

What was it about Christmas that brought temporary relief to the city’s overstretched, billion-dollar shelter system? Family.

W. Bradford Wilcox,Robert I. Lerman

February 4, 2015 | Real Clear Markets

How to revive the American dream in blue-collar America

Poverty Studies, Society and Culture

The present state of our unions is opening up an unacceptable social and economic divide between the college educated and the less-educated that is unacceptable to all of us who believe that the American Dream should be accessible to all.

Robert Doar,Brad Wassink

February 2, 2015 | The Detroit News

Hard choices to improve education

K-12 Schooling, Poverty Studies

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Our internships offer opportunities on the research side of the Institute (Economics, Health Care, Poverty Studies, Foreign and Defense Policy, Education, Politics and Public Opinion, Society and Culture) as well as on the business side (Executive Office, Development, Government Relations, External Affairs, Media Relations, Video Production, Accounting, Academic Programs, and Communications).

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L

Desmond Lachman

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Edward J. Pinto

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George L. Priest

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Jeremy A. Rabkin

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Derek Scissors

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Y

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The American Enterprise Institute (AEI), once called the “epicenter” of the neoconservative intellectual movement by Newsweek, is one of the oldest think tanks in the United States. While AEI was originally a domestic policy think tank dedicated exclusively to promoting “free, competitive enterprise” at home, over the decades AEI has entrenched itself in every field of policy debate and has become an especially prominent voice on foreign policy issues, such as the invasion of Iraq. The think tank’s historical influence has extended to the White House, as President Ronald Reagan appointed several dozen AEI scholars and fellows to work in his administration and President George W. Bush appointed over 20, including Vice President Dick Cheney. AEI is governed by a Board of Trustees that includes executives from companies such as Molson Coors Brewing Company, State Farm Insurance, and Cigna Corporation.

Notable Facts:

• Every year, AEI confers the Irving Kristol Award in recognition of individuals “who have made exceptional intellectual and practical contributions to improve government policy, social welfare, or political understanding.” The award is named for the late Irving Kristol, AEI senior fellow emeritus, who is “widely considered to be the founder of American neoconservatism,” according to AEI. Past winners include Dick Cheney, Alan Greenspan, Charles Krauthammer, David Petraeus, Paul Ryan, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas.

• In March 2010, former Bush speechwriter David Frum abruptly resigned from AEI after seven years as a fellow. While the parties provided conflicting accounts of his departure, it was widely reported that Frum was fired over his criticism of conservatives and the Republican Party.

• On September 13, 2001, an AEI scholar published a column in the Wall Street Journal suggesting that Iraq had been involved in the 9/11 attacks. In October 2002, AEI began hosting“a monthly conference series titled ‘Post-Saddam Iraq,’ which…addressed the process of Iraq’s potential transition to a democratic regime.”

352 transactions on record as a recipient.

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