A letter that a group of 20 far-right House Republicans released earlier this week as part of a campaign in support of slashing Medicaid appears to have been authored by the head of a research institute with ties to the Koch network. Politico reported Friday that “digital metadata embedded in a PDF copy” of the letter that was circulated inside the House of Representatives “lists the author…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Matt and Sam talk to historian Erik Baker about his new book, Make Your Own Job: How the Entrepreneurial Work Ethic Exhausted America.
This post was originally published on Dissent Magazine.
In an era of retrenchment in social policy, food assistance is becoming more generous and inclusive. But Republican politicians are attempting to gut one of the most popular programs: free school lunch.
This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.
On Jan. 25, 2018, dozens of private jets descended on Palm Springs International Airport. Some of the richest people in the country were arriving for the annual winter donor summit of the Koch network, the political organization founded by libertarian billionaires Charles and David Koch. A long weekend of strategizing, relaxation in the California sun and high-dollar fundraising lay ahead.
“I get up every morning and I try to figure out how to screw with the labor unions.” These were the words uttered by Rick Berman during a 2014 talk to the Western Energy Alliance, a fossil fuel industry group, according to The New York Times, which received a leaked recording of the presentation. Berman is a high-profile corporate consultant who has made headlines for decades because of his…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Minnesota on Thursday scored a significant procedural win in a lawsuit seeking to hold Big Oil accountable for lying to consumers about the dangers of burning fossil fuels and thus worsening the deadly climate crisis.
In a unanimous ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit agreed with a lower court that the state’s climate fraud lawsuit against the American Petroleum Institute, ExxonMobil, and Koch Industries can proceed in state court, where it was filed.
“This ruling is a major victory for Minnesota’s efforts to hold oil giants accountable for their climate lies, and a major defeat for fossil fuel companies’ attempt to escape justice,” Richard Wiles, president of the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement.
“Big Oil companies have fought relentlessly to avoid facing the evidence of their climate fraud in state court, but once again judges have unanimously rejected their arguments,” said Wiles. “After years of Big Oil’s delay tactics, it’s time for the people of Minnesota to have their day in court.”
Fossil fuel corporations have known for decades that burning coal, oil, and gas generates planet-heating pollution that damages the environment and public health. But to prolong extraction and maximize profits, the industry launched a disinformation campaign to downplay the life-threatening consequences of fossil fuel combustion.
“Big Oil companies have fought relentlessly to avoid facing the evidence of their climate fraud in state court, but once again judges have unanimously rejected their arguments.”
Dozens of state and local governments have filed lawsuits arguing that Big Oil’s longstanding effort to sow doubt about the reality of anthropogenic climate change—and to minimize the fossil fuel industry’s leading role in causing it—has delayed decarbonization of the economy, resulting in widespread harm.
Since 2017, the attorneys general of Connecticut, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Vermont, and the District of Columbia, along with 35 municipalities in California, Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina, Washington, and Puerto Rico, have sued fossil fuel giants in an attempt to hold them financially liable for misleading the public about the destructive effects of greenhouse gas emissions from their products.
“Minnesota is not the first state or local government to file this type of climate change litigation,” the Eighth Circuit declared Thursday. “Nor is this the first time” that fossil fuel producers have sought to shift jurisdiction over such suits from state courts to federal court, where they believe they will be more likely to avoid punishment.
“But our sister circuits rejected them in each case,” the federal appeals court continued. “Today, we join them.”
According to the Center for Climate Integrity, “Six federal appeals courts and 13 federal district courts have now unanimously ruled against the fossil fuel industry’s arguments to avoid climate accountability trials in state courts.”
Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice moved for the first time to support communities suing Big Oil by urging the U.S. Supreme Court to reject Exxon and Suncor Energy’s request to review lower court rulings allowing a lawsuit from three Colorado communities to go forward in state court.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
A small group of billionaires who come from the top 0.000002 percent of wealthiest people in the U.S. have spent nearly $900 million in the federal midterm runoffs this election cycle, a new report finds, and could reach $1 billion in political spending by the time the cycle is over.
According to a report released Thursday by Americans for Tax Fairness (ATF), just 465 American billionaires had donated an unprecedented $881 million by the end of September — even before last-minute campaign pushes in the last five weeks before Election Day. This is already more than the amount that billionaires spent in the entirety of the 2018 midterm election.
Further, the vast majority of this spending — $643 million, or 73 percent — comes from just 20 billionaire households, including prominent figures like the Koch family, Peter Thiel, George Soros, Michael and Susan Bloomberg and Jeffrey Yass. Of the top 10 donor families, eight lean Republican while two lean Democrat.
This is a staggering amount of money spent by an astoundingly small number of people in order to influence elections that will affect the entire U.S. population and beyond. The data is a stark illustration of the vast amount of influence that billionaires have over the political system that has been afforded to them by conservative tax cutting and Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which allows billionaires and corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections.
Indeed, as the report finds, this small group of billionaires has spent 27 times more on this election than they ever spent around 2010, when Citizens United was decided; in the 2010 election cycle, for instance, billionaires spent $32 million.
BREAKING: New analysis finds that 465 billionaires had pumped $881,000,000 into the 2022 federal midterm elections by October.
That’s 27x more than they contributed before Citizens United was decided.
By the time this cycle is over, their donations could climb to $1 billion. pic.twitter.com/8FIUG8WNZ2
— Americans For Tax Fairness (@4TaxFairness) November 3, 2022
The majority of the $881 million spent this cycle has gone toward Republicans, by a three to two margin, ATF finds. Democrats have received about 39 percent of the funding, while 59 percent has gone toward Republicans. The rest of the funding, 2 percent, has gone toward causes that most progressives oppose, like supporting Israel or cryptocurrency, ATF finds.
There has also been a massive influx of fundraising for Super PACs that are created for a single candidate. Such donations have risen by 150 percent between 2018 and this election cycle, increasing from $128 million to $323 million as of the beginning of November. About 75 percent of single-candidate Super PAC spending goes toward Republicans, the report finds.
Such massive injections into elections are often more than just a political donation — they can represent huge tax savings for billionaires in the future or win them other political favors.
“They aren’t donating to candidates because they like them. This is a transaction,” wrote former Ohio state senator Nina Turner about the report on Thursday.
Indeed, billionaires have gained trillions of dollars of wealth throughout the past few years. This growth is at least partially due to a tax code that is written to favor the rich — in part because billionaires push candidates to do so. Yass, for instance, has dodged $1 billion in taxes over the past six years, while billionaire donor Ken Griffin spent $54 million to shoot down a tax-raising initiative — a move that is now saving him tens of millions of dollars in taxes each year.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Just before the November 2 election, in which Trump-endorsed Glenn Youngkin defeated Democrat Terry McAuliffe in the Virginia governor’s race with the help of 57 percent of white women, a right-wing dark money group called Independent Women’s Voice (IWV) spent thousands in ads to promote its new attack website, ToxicSchools.org.
The site features a scandalizing 2016 Washington Post headline: “McAuliffe vetoes bill permitting parents to block sexually explicit books in school.” But what the ad (and the headline) obscured was the actual context of the resolution: The Republican bill was a response to one mother who sought to ban Toni Morrison’s groundbreaking novel Beloved, a story about Black trauma and resilience in the decades following the end of slavery, because of a scene of sexual violence. Strikingly, it would have made Virginia the first state in the country to allow parents to censure such school books.
Much of this story is not new. As Jenn Jackson observes in Teen Vogue: “Current events may be relatively silent on the role of women in white supremacy, but history is quite loud.” The indelible image of white mothers in Little Rock, Arkansas, heckling 15-year-old Elizabeth Eckford, the first of the Little Rock Nine to arrive the day their public high school integrated in 1957, may come to mind. In her historical account of white women’s involvement from the 1920s to the 1970s in efforts to stop school integration, Mothers of Massive Resistance, Elizabeth McRae refers to these white women as the “constant gardeners of segregation.”
But there are differences, too. Today’s “mothers of massive resistance” appear to represent an organic local uprising of “concerned parents,” but the outcry is being stoked by dark money groups like IWV.
Attacks on public school curricula can serve many purposes, including undermining teachers’ unions, promoting school privatization and impacting elections, like Virginia’s. They also conjure outrage among the most racist elements of the Republican base.
Proposed legislation prohibiting discussions of systemic racism (which Republicans are misrepresenting as “critical race theory”) could be far-reaching, potentially banning pedagogically fundamental terms like “anti-racism,” “diversity training,” “patriarchy” and “whiteness” from schools, as one bill that recently passed the Wisconsin legislature did.
The manufactured outrage toward discussions of racism in schools is largely fueled by women-led astroturf groups, such as Parents Defending Education (which has deep ties to the Koch network), Moms for Liberty, No Left Turn in Education, and the Free to Learn Coalition (funded by the Leonard Leo network, who orchestrated the packing of the courts under Trump).
These astroturf groups are a reminder yet again that the white nuclear family is one of the most powerful forces for reproducing white supremacy. Part of the way this works is through hoarding resources, something even some liberal and progressive white women do when they declare their support for policies like school desegregation and then refuse to send their white children to integrated schools. “Tracking,” the designation of separate paths for students based on educational performance, sometimes called “modern-day segregation,” is another way.
So how have right-wing women’s groups, funded by anonymous donors, come to take an oversized role in local school politics as concerned moms?
As historian Nancy MacLean has shown, men like economist James M. Buchanan and billionaire Charles Koch, who funded Buchanan’s center at George Mason University (the impetus for which was Buchanan’s antipathy toward school integration in Virginia), have sought to intentionally hide the political nature of their libertarian-minded organizations for decades.
Dark money organizations spawned by Koch and other billionaires have since spread like a noxious, invasive weed, from the Heritage Foundation to Americans for Prosperity to Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. In recent years, this network has integrated women-led groups that provide a “soft” cover for a deeply political agenda.
But don’t let the fact that there are women out front fool you. The women championing today’s dark-money attacks on public schools serve a regressive political agenda, just as the women who tended the gardens of segregation did almost a century ago.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
According to the new book, Free Speech and Koch Money: Manufacturing a Campus Culture War, 50 years ago, attorney Lewis Powell — later a Nixon appointee to the U.S. Supreme Court — developed a strategy to increase the number of pro-business speakers on college campuses. As Powell evaluated the post-1960s college milieu, he determined that if conservatives insisted on the right to promote free market ideas to students, academic institutions would capitulate, fearing that if they resisted, they would be tarred as intolerant of diverse points of view.
It was a brilliant realization and one that conservative libertarians have since built on. Free Speech and Koch Money tracks that little-known development, zeroing in on the many ways that right-wing influence has been exerted throughout academia.
At its core, authors Ralph Wilson and Isaac Kamola write, is a fabricated “crisis” in which conservative voices are posited as being silenced by the left. To counter this, deep-pocketed conservatives, with Charles Koch at the helm, have poured money — $256 million between 2005 and 2017 — into cash-strapped public and private colleges and universities. The effort, they write, was a blatant effort to steer curricula and hiring, and funnel students into jobs and internships with conservative groups.
The upshot was the development of an “academic ecosystem in which donor-preferred ideas can thrive. This ecosystem includes its own journals, conferences, professional organizations, and academic centers,” the authors write, complete with an echo chamber of media outlets — including Fox News, The Washington Examiner, The College Fix, RealClearPolitics, The Daily Caller and the Daily Wire — that are eager to promote an array of questionable ideas. Among them, “money is speech, corporations are people, and all regulations are oppressive.”
Wilson and Kamola spoke to Truthout about the book, the growing threat to democracy and the fabricated free speech violations that have roiled U.S. college campuses.
Eleanor J. Bader: Why and when did you begin investigating the Koch network?
Ralph Wilson: In 2011, I was a graduate student at Florida State [University] and learned that the Koch network was donating a few million dollars to the school. It became clear that they were trying to exert influence and control what was being done with their money. For example, they wanted to play a role in the selection of the chair of the Economics Department, and control other hiring decisions and funding for grad students.
Isaac Kamola: I teach political science at Trinity College and in 2017, Campus Reform, a Koch-funded group that pays students to write articles denouncing allegedly left-wing professors, targeted a Trinity faculty member. It was terrible. This led me to get involved with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). That summer, 2017, I attended the AAUP Institute and met Ralph and Samantha Parsons, who was then a staff person at UnKoch My Campus. Thanks to this meeting, I learned about dark money being funneled to campuses throughout the country by the Koch network, with the goal of undermining the academy.
In addition to Campus Reform, a slew of groups exist to entice students and bring right-wing speakers like Ann Coulter, Candice Owens, Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos to campus. Why do these groups and speakers hold appeal?
Kamola: When I go into a classroom, I reach 20 or 30 students. My goal is to help the students critique power and think about ideas before accepting them. After the course ends, the students go out into the world and live their lives. In contrast, the Kochs and the groups they control, like DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund, channel what is taught in class into a political project, linking students with internships or a post-college career. This allows them to transfer the college experience into a practical outcome.
Wilson: I’ve heard Koch-funded professors talk about their recruiting strategies and confess that they look for students who don’t fit in, the loners, the students who are looking for a group activity. The Koch network sees its work as creating an alternative student experience, an academy within the academy. Back in the 1970s, Charles Koch said that while there is an intellectual motivation that conservative libertarians can tap into, they also have hundreds of millions of dollars to throw around. This can be appealing to both students and faculty. They offer a pre-made career path that people apparently find hard to turn down.
Kamola: Yes! To apply for a few thousand dollars from, say, the National Science Foundation, you need to go through an arduous process. But if you go to the Koch-funded Institute for Humane Studies, you can apply for $50,000 by writing three short essays. That can be enticing.
The Koch network charges that conservative ideas are suppressed on many campuses and insists that everyone should be able to say whatever they want, no matter if it offends or endangers people of color, the LGBTQIA community, women, Muslims, Jews or progressives. Groups like the ACLU agree that all speech should be encouraged; that the best way to counter intolerance is to offer more speech. Why do you disagree?
Kamola: This can be tricky. The fundamental problem I have with free speech absolutism — the idea that everyone should have the right to say whatever they want whenever they want — is that it offers one solution for every situation. If you are a student of color or a Jewish student and neo-Nazis storm onto campus, your security will be threatened. This is not something to take lightly; security has to be protected. In addition, the idea that the best way to counter offensive speech, so-called “bad” speech, is with “good” speech, ignores the power dynamic, the fact that some people are marginalized within the academy. When groups come in and scream about free speech absolutism, it essentially buys into a libertarian free market idea that all ideas are equal. This is a fantasy.
The idea of free speech absolutism runs counter to the idea of collective responsibility for one another. Why does the Koch network elevate the individual above all else?
Wilson: Conservative libertarians are working hard to inoculate students against what they see as dangerous collectivism, the idea of being responsible for one another.
Kamola: The elevation of the individual is fundamental to libertarian ideology. The enemy is collectivism. For 50 years, ideas about radical individualism have been pushed into the mainstream: Individual consumer choices are the best way to battle climate change, or more recently, that COVID-19 masks and vaccine mandates violate individual freedom. Conservative libertarians reject the idea that people should look out for one another since it undermines the elevation of the individual.
Why have university administrators, faculty and students been so willing to accept this point of view?
Wilson: One of the driving forces behind the writing of Free Speech and Koch Money was to expose the ways conservative student groups like Campus Reform, Young Americans for Liberty, Young Americans for Freedom, Turning Point USA and the legal groups that threaten to sue universities on their behalf are connected. University officials are only going to be scared by threatened legal action if they believe the supposed violation of free speech is real. The book shows that these campaigns are usually orchestrated by the same small group of people operating from outside the campus to whip up a frenzy around supposed violations of the First Amendment.
Kamola: Administrators hear allegations about the denial of free speech, freak out, and too often think they have to act immediately. They don’t have to panic. Most colleges and universities already have policies on accepting donations, for creating faculty committees regarding academic freedom, and for inviting speakers to campus. They don’t have to accept bullying by outside forces. But this requires the administration to trust the faculty and students to defend existing policies.
Wilson: A lot of the resistance we’ve seen on campuses comes from faculty who are organizing to oppose the Koch network’s influence at their school. Unfortunately, faculty tend not to wield as much power as the administrators who make decisions about accepting money, allowing libertarian economic or political science centers to open, or welcoming provocateurs to speak.
They’re also the ones who are most easily cowed by the threat of negative publicity.
Kamola: In some places where centers have been challenged, the Koch network has opened offices and think tanks off campus. They’ve also started off-campus groups for conservative students when opposition on campus gets too vocal or they feel a need to sidestep constraints.
Have any campuses been able to completely remove Koch money and influence?
Wilson: Yes, but the efforts need to be sustained. At Troy University in Alabama, several professors were heard discussing the ways donors had influenced their work. This was in 2016 and resulted in massive public outrage. The Kochs had funded an economic center at Troy and after the protests erupted, they paused their funding, but the center bounced back after a few years, so this was a temporary victory. It showed us that there is a need for sustained resistance and vigilance on the ground.
Kamola: That’s the idea behind the Kochs’ funding of hundreds of different campus-based economic and political science centers around the country. If controversy erupts in one place, they can go elsewhere. It’s like Whack-a-Mole. Thankfully, there is now a growing awareness of the Kochs and their network — known as the Kochtopus — and we’re hopeful that growing anger over the buying of influence will result in a large, concerted pushback in many more places.
I was horrified to see that many so-called “campus free speech bills” have been passed by statehouses to give conservative student groups the right to discriminate against queer and non-Christian students.
Wilson: Fourteen states have passed bills and they have had an impact. In one case, an anti-abortion group threatened to sue a college if they were not allowed to parade around campus with pictures of bloody fetuses. The Koch network is like a pump mechanism, churning out legislation and then dangling grants that can be pulled at any time if the right strings are not pulled.
Kamola: This has had a cascading effect, with legislation to restrict the teaching of critical race theory passing in 28 states. The effort to dictate what goes on in the classroom is the goal of these funders. A vast number of groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), advances model legislation. There’s also the LIBRE Initiative, The American Energy Alliance, the State Policy Network and many, many more. As we wrote in the book, since the 1970s, Charles Koch has seen universities as student recruitment sites and places to groom libertarian faculty members and train the next generation of policy wonks.
Furthermore, the right understands that it is easier to organize a hierarchy than it is to organize a democracy and they operate with a degree of revolutionary furor that the left tends to misunderstand or underestimate. We need to take this fervor seriously. Conservative libertarians are hellbent on transforming society with their autocratic world view. They don’t believe education is a public good, but instead, see it as a private good that individuals should pay for themselves.
So, how do we fight back?
Wilson: There’s no single solution to protecting free speech or removing the Koch network from campus. The best policy is to let the academy regulate itself — to let faculty governance work and let committees investigate and formulate recommendations that the administration takes seriously — to protect the safety and speech of faculty and students.
Kamola: We have to remember that the manufactured outrage over free speech is not something that deserves attention. Rather, we need to pay attention to the organizations that are generating the outrage and ask why they’re doing this.
Wilson: The guiding principle in our research was to follow the money. In order to track these groups, we used the Corporate Genome Project database. The project documents how the Koch networks and other corporate donors manufacture political narratives and advocate public policies in their interest. This can help folks better understand what we’re up against and help explain what’s happening on campuses across the country. This is the best tool we have to effectively resist the influence of big money on society.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Fox Corp. PAC, a political action committee for Fox News parent Fox Corporation, has donated to Sen. Joe Manchin’s (D-West Virginia) re-election campaign, according to a recent filing uncovered by CNBC.
The PAC, according to OpenSecrets, is funded largely by Rupert Murdoch, who owns Fox News, and other Fox Corporation and Fox News executives such as Murdoch’s son. The PAC in June gave $1,500 to Manchin, the conservative Democrat who has been under fire by progressives for his ties to right-wing interest groups.
According to CNBC, the donation was the PAC’s first to Manchin, which would indicate that conservative groups are taking more interest in the lawmaker. Indeed, dark money groups with ties to other right-wing figures like the Kochs have launched pressure campaigns to influence the West Virginia senator as he continues to uphold conservative policy in his role.
Koch advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, for instance, has encouraged followers to cheer Senator Manchin for standing against key Democratic proposals like voting rights and election finance transparency. Meanwhile, far right figures like former president Donald Trump have heaped praise on Manchin for standing up for the filibuster, which acts as the single largest roadblock to the Democrats’ agenda.
Manchin’s motivations are unclear, but Republicans have made their goals extremely transparent: to obstruct Democrats in Washington while reaping chaos and spreading fascism across the country. To that end, Manchin’s opposition to filibuster abolition strengthens the GOP.
But Manchin may not be so clear-minded. He continually insists upon pursuing an obsolete notion of bipartisanship with Republicans who have, in no uncertain terms, stated that they’re uninterested in partnering with Democrats.
The most recent iteration of Manchin’s bipartisan obsession came as the lawmaker has again asserted that he wants to water down the Democrats’ landmark voting rights and campaign transparency bill, the For the People Act or S. 1.
Texas Democrats, who recently fled the state to block GOP-led voter suppression efforts, travelled to Washington to plead with Congress to pass bills that protect voting rights in the country. They met with Manchin, who on Thursday said that, despite his meeting with the Texas lawmakers, he still wants to water down S. 1 to only address voting procedures and voting rights. Why? Because, as he told CNN, he somehow thinks Republicans would support such legislation, even though they are leading the charge across the U.S. to suppress voters so that they never lose an election again.
Manchin also said Thursday that he doesn’t want to carve out an exception to the filibuster for S. 1, which advocates and fellow Democrats have suggested.
In recent months, Manchin has proposed his own changes to the For the People Act. His changes essentially gut some of the most important parts of the bill — most notably, provisions of the bill that would overhaul election finance to reduce corruption.
S. 1 proposes creating new, strict laws regarding campaign finance disclosures. Experts have said it would greatly reduce the influence of dark money and corporations on elections by exposing corporate interests and their ties to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
Manchin himself has been accused of having such ties, with praise from right-wing pressure campaigns and, as was exposed in recent bombshell reports, ties to Exxon lobbyists. A recently leaked call between Manchin and Wall Street donors, too, painted a damning picture of a give-and-take relationship between large financial interests and politicians that the lawmaker seems to champion. In other words, if the filibuster is abolished and these financial ties are severed or put under more scrutiny, Manchin’s wallet may suffer.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The attack on Critical Race Theory is the latest right-wing onslaught against “cultural Marxism” and its hidden intention to destroy US and Western civilisation, writes Jonathan Lockhart.
This post was originally published on Green Left.
New reporting by CNBC has found that the advocacy arm of Charles Koch’s network has been pressuring Sen. Joe Manchin (D-West Virginia) to oppose key Democratic priorities like voting rights and labor provisions.
The Koch advocacy group, Americans for Prosperity, has been orchestrating an online campaign to push Manchin to stand against proposals like the For The People Act, or S.1, Democrats’ keystone voting rights bill, and the abolition of the filibuster.
In 2018, the group started a video series focused on Manchin’s home state called the “Mountaineer Minute.” In the series, they call on supporters to urge Manchin to align with conservative and Koch network priorities, citing the “dramatic impact” of their grassroots supporters. Americans for Prosperity leaders also praise Manchin for his “courage” in opposing filibuster abolition.
The conservative group has created a page on their website called “West Virginia Values” with a prominent link to sign a letter urging Manchin to oppose Democratic ideas — what it labels “bad, partisan policies.” “Ideas like Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, packing the court and ending the filibuster run counter to the values of folks here in the Mountain State,” the letter reads.
The website also lists policies that Manchin has opposed like the Green New Deal and the For the People Act, praising him for “hold[ing] the line.” The rest of the page is dedicated to a list of policies that Americans for Prosperity says Manchin should oppose like the pro-union PRO Act, minimum wage increase and a partisan infrastructure package, the latter two of which the senator has already compromised.
Heritage Action, the advocacy side of the conservative Heritage Foundation, which receives funding from the Koch Foundation, also organized a rally in March to get Manchin to oppose legislation like the For the People Act.
Evidently these campaigns have worked because Manchin recently came out in strong opposition to the Democratic legislation that will greatly expand voting rights, effectively killing the legislation. Even if Democrats succeeded in abolishing the filibuster — which also Manchin opposes — the legislation would not get the 51 Democratic votes it would need to pass the Senate.
Manchin’s reasons for opposing many of the reforms proposed by Democrats sound largely spurious, especially in light of the revelations about the Koch network campaign. In the op-ed he recently penned explaining his opposition to S.1, for example, Manchin cites the lack of Republican support for the bill as his reason for opposing it, conveniently leaving out mention of his vote earlier this year for the stimulus package, which was passed entirely along partisan lines with zero support from Republicans in both houses of Congress.
This is not the first time the West Virginia senator’s motives for opposing Democratic priorities have come into question. Back in April, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which also receives Koch money, announced that it would be rewarding Manchin and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Arizona) for their stance against President Joe Biden’s initiatives. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the major aims of the For the People Act is to cut back on the influence of money in politics.
Groups like Heritage Action have their own reasons for opposing the For the People Act, however. In a leaked video obtained by Mother Jones, Heritage Action leaders bragged about writing voter suppression legislation that is then hawked by Republican state legislators across the country.
In the video, Heritage Action also said they “had a little fun with Senator Manchin” in pressuring him to oppose both S.1 and filibuster abolition.
The Koch network holds enormous sway over Republicans and is at least partially responsible for the dangerous state of the party today. Manchin, however, has previously defended the Koch family, saying “they’re providing jobs.”
Meanwhile, a group of civil rights leaders met with Manchin on Tuesday morning in an attempt to get him to change his mind on the voting rights issue, but to no avail.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
DonorsTrust, the preferred donor conduit of the Koch political network, has launched a new funding stream to resist public health measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and use the crisis to further its broader policy goals.
The $422 million donor advised fund often referred to as the Right’s “dark money ATM” pins the “humanitarian crisis” created by the pandemic not on the 549,000 deaths in the U.S., but on “the actions of elected officials” who have tried to limit the virus’ spread.
Instead of funding food banks, homeless shelters, or first responders, the billionaire-backed DonorTrust’s new “Growth and Resilience Project” focuses on speeding up the reopening of the economy, reducing regulations, and countering media and government “narratives” to “ensure the American citizen sees government intrusion into our lives and livelihoods as counterproductive and harmful.”
Operatives with deep ties to DonorsTrust decide on which organizations get funding through this new project, including Kim Dennis, Chairman of DonorsTrust and President of the Searle Freedom Trust; Tracie Sharp, President of the State Policy Network (SPN); Brad Lips, CEO of the Atlas Network; Adam Meyerson, President of the Philanthropy Roundtable; and Lawson Bader, President and CEO of DonorsTrust.
Searle Freedom Trust, consisting of wealth inherited from pharmaceutical company G.D. Searle & Company — which created the artificial sweetener aspartame marketed as “NutraSweet” and is now part of Pfizer — is a major backer of right-wing infrastructure. Its latest IRS filing first obtained by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) shows it distributed more than $24 million in grants in 2019, including over $1 million to SPN and another $2.9 million to SPN’s state affiliates; $663,000 to DonorsTrust; and $150,000 to Philanthropy Roundtable.
DonorsTrust and its sister organization Donors Capital Fund doled out $165 million in grants in 2019, CMD first reported. Of this $165 million, SPN received $7.3 million, and 49 of its 64 state affiliate members received a total of $10.7 million. DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund added another $512,000 to Atlas Network and $864,000 to Philanthropy Roundtable.
A significant amount of overlap in membership exists between SPN — a web of right-wing “think tanks” and tax-exempt organizations in 50 states, Washington, D.C., Canada, and the United Kingdom — and the Atlas Network, the Johnny Appleseed of anti-regulation whose mission is to populate the world with “free market” voices.
To date, 19 organizations have received $785,100 through the Growth and Resilience Project, with grants ranging between $25,000 and $50,000 each.
Some of the funds have been contributed to organizations that have worked to make the case that the economy is safe to reopen. The Job Creators Network Foundation (JCNF) received $50,000 for its “Get Back to Work Project,” which uses existing relationships with doctors and health care professionals to “provide reliable advice about loosening restrictions” in “radio interviews, op-eds, letters to the editor, social media, and TV appearances.”
CMD wrote about the “Unlock Our Schools” campaign by JCNF’s sister organization, Job Creators Network (JCN), which blamed teachers unions for the shutdown of in-person schooling as well as its “Flatten the Fear” ad campaign, which featured doctors urging the reopening of economies.
The right-wing Franklin News Foundation, publisher of the watchdog.org rebrand The Center Square, received $50,000 to produce stories that relate “an alternate perspective to legacy media’s unfair coverage of individuals who disagree with state shutdowns as radical or heartless.”
Another right-wing media producer, Free the People, received a $50,000 grant to create a “Freedom Over Fear” video series that created videos such as “Why We Need Religious Freedom During a Crisis” and “How We Lose Our Property Rights in Crisis.”
Other funds distributed through the Growth and Resilience Project went toward efforts to attack government regulations. Tennessee’s SPN affiliate the Beacon Center received $50,000 to produce research that would lead to a decrease in professional licensing regulations and “spur local governments to embrace permit freedom.”
The Competitive Enterprise Institute received a grant of $50,000 for its “#NeverNeeded Campaign” to shift attention to “the social and economic harms imposed by ill-conceived rules and regulations exposed by the efforts to control the pandemic.”
Another $50,000 went to SPN’s Florida affiliate, the Foundation for Government Accountability, for its effort “to cut down government red tape that stands in the way of a fast recovery.”
More funds from the Growth and Resilience Project went to research and data gathering efforts to aid movement objectives. American Juris Link, a group created to be “basically like the SPN for litigators,” received $41,000 to improve Ballotpedia’s COVID-19 tracker of every court case challenging public health orders due to the pandemic, CMD reported.
The Tax Foundation also got $50,000 for its “COVID-19 Response Center,” a resource for the media, lawmakers, and the public to follow legislative responses to the pandemic and how the Tax Foundation believes they will impact the economy.
The following also received grants distributed through the Growth and Resilience Project:
A full list of proposals received by the Growth and Resilience was published for DonorsTrust donors to consider. Among them are proposals from the corporate bill mill the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) for a “A Rapid Response Roadmap to Reopen America and Save Our Country,” and from FreedomWorks for an “Economic Reopening and Recovery Plan,” which it proposed to work on with ALEC’s favorite economists Art Laffer and Stephen Moore’s Committee to Unleash Prosperity.
CMD exposed ALEC’s role in leading the “Save Our Country” coalition and the movement to reopen the country amidst the pandemic against the recommendations of public health experts and epidemiologists.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Wealthy predators are playing stock market games with companies needed to develop and produce clean technology Continue reading
The post Meet the “New Koch Brothers” appeared first on BillMoyers.com.
This post was originally published on BillMoyers.com.