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AGelbert

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The Koch Brothers Exposed!
« on: April 04, 2022, 07:15:57 pm »
The 🦕🦖 Koch Brothers Exposed!
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Thom Hartmann Program
Published on Aug 15, 2019

The story of the Koch Brothers and why they refused to lose control of a company and Charles Koch with his political attitude.

The Koch’s want to own capitalism and control it entirely their own way. How has that affected the affluence of Americans for good or bad.

Christopher Leonard joined Thom to discuss the Koch Brothers.

📽️ WATCH NEXT: Kochland: The Secret History of 🦕🦖 Koch Industries
 

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So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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AGelbert

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Re: The Koch Brothers Exposed!
« Reply #1 on: April 04, 2022, 07:16:55 pm »
August 23rd, 2019

TRNN Documentary: Trump, The 🦕🦖 Koch Brothers and Their War on Climate Science

May 23, 2018

We replay this TRNN documentary on the Koch Brothers and their war on climate science, on the occasion of David Koch's death on August 23rd, 2019. Narrated by Danny Glover, this documentary special reveals how climate change science has been under systematic attack.


Story Transcript

DANNY GLOVER: 2016 was the hottest year on record, topping a decade of increasingly warm years. Powerful storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, melting glaciers, declining ice caps, and droughts stalk the planet.

MICHAEL MANN: There’s anywhere from 97% to 99% consensus among the world’s scientists studying this problem, that climate change is real and human caused.

DONALD TRUMP: The office of President of the United States.

DANNY GLOVER: Yet how did a climate change denier get elected President of the United States?

CHARLIE CRAY: Trump’s win has created a fossil fuel field day.

DANNY GLOVER: Donald Trump has claimed that climate change is an expensive hoax. This summer, he announced the United States was pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord.

DONALD TRUMP: The bottom line is that the Paris Accord is very unfair at the highest level to the United States.

DANNY GLOVER: Even before that dramatic move, Trump had already signed an executive order rolling back former president Barack Obama’s climate regulations.

DONALD TRUMP: It reverses the previous administration’s Arctic leasing ban.

DANNY GLOVER: Trump wants to see a revitalization of the coal industry.

DONALD TRUMP: Over the past two years, I’ve spent time with the miners all over America.

DANNY GLOVER: He plans to scrap NASA’s climate research program and has approved the Keystone XL Pipeline, which would route oil from Alberta’s tar sands to the Gulf of Mexico.

DONALD TRUMP: When completed the Keystone XL Pipeline will span 900 miles. Wow.

DANNY GLOVER: He’s also set out to gut the Environmental Protection Agency.

DONALD TRUMP: First of all, I want to congratulate Scott Pruitt, who’s here someplace. Where is Scott?

DANNY GLOVER: Appointing the climate change denier Scott Pruitt to run it.

KENNETH VOGEL: Pruitt has been a skeptic, is the term that they like to use, of climate change.

SCOTT PRUITT: Human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.

DANNY GLOVER: The fact that climate change deniers now inhabit the most powerful positions in the world’s most powerful government is no accident. Or that most Americans don’t perceive that global warming causes a catastrophic threat. This is largely the handiwork of two brothers, David and Charles Koch.

KENNETH VOGEL: The Kochs are going to have a lot more influence in any Republican administration.

DANNY GLOVER: Ken Vogel is an investigative reporter in Washington, DC. He has followed the Koch brothers for years.

KENNETH VOGEL: They’re thrilled that Donald Trump won and Hillary Clinton lost, but I think they’re even surprised by how much ability they have to shape the Trump administration.

CHARLIE CRAY: For the most part, this is going to be incredibly beneficial for the Kochs and the best major of that so far is how many people are working for the Trump administration who were, over their careers, supported by the Kochs.

DANNY GLOVER: Just who are the Koch brothers?

CHARLIE CRAY: The Koch brothers are two of the wealthiest individuals in the United States.

DANNY GLOVER: David and Charles Koch own Koch Industries, a $100 billion conglomerate based in Kansas that refines, transports, and sells oil. The company is also into chemicals, minerals, paper products, and commodities trading, employing 100,000 people in more than 60 countries. And it controls one to two million acres of Alberta’s tar sands, the third largest reserve of oil in the world.

MIKE CASEY: The Kochs are a vertically-integrated fossil fuel conglomerate and they have a vertically-integrated influence-peddling apparatus to go with it.

DANNY GLOVER: Indeed, the Kochs are more than just about selling oil. One of the goals of the Koch political network is to get Republicans elected to office, and the occasional Democrat.

KERT DAVIES: They have a vast network now, a political network that rivals the other parties. They’re bigger than the Republican party and the Democratic party, in their organizing might.

NEWS REPORT: Senator Ron Johnson will beat back a challenge from Democrat Russ Feingold, in a …

DANNY GLOVER: During last November’s election, the Kochs spent hundreds of millions of dollars on key Congressional and Senate seats.

NEWS REPORT: Republicans from all across the country are going to be marching to your door to figure out how you came from, what, a 10-point deficit …

DANNY GLOVER: Which was likely critical for the Republicans retaining control of both chambers of Congress.

ROB PORTMAN: You know, we won because of the work we did for the people of Ohio.

KENNETH VOGEL: Even as the Kochs were not a major factor in their direct spending on the presidential race, the infrastructure that they set up around the country did have an impact on getting voters, getting their type of voters, out to the polls, and that probably did have an impact on not only the Senate race, but also even in the presidential race.

CHARLIE CRAY: They supported and focused on about eight Senate campaigns, and I believe, seven of the eight that they supported won. Most of these were fairly critical Senate seats.

NEWS REPORT: This monster of a storm system is the remnants of a powerful Pacific typhoon.

DANNY GLOVER: While Trump and the Republicans, with the encouragement of the Koch brothers, are rolling back climate change measures, global temperatures keep climbing.

NEWS REPORT: Australia’s record-breaking heat wave is continuing to fuel outbreaks of wildfires across scores of thousands of hectares in the southeast of the country.

MIKE CASEY: The worst predictions keep coming true, so you’re looking at an unprecedented drought in the west, you’re looking at extreme weather all over the place.

NEWS REPORT: The water level at Oradell reservoir is nearly immeasurable.

DANNY GLOVER: Four years ago, carbon dioxide passed 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, the highest level in more than four million years. Scientists now forecast temperatures will rise 2.5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.

MIKE CASEY: The science around global climate disruption is 97%.

DANNY GLOVER: While NASA predicts this will mean more severe weather and impact on communities worldwide, the US Republican-controlled Congress and Senate refuse to take action, voting down the McCain-Lieberman climate change bills and refusing to vote on the Paris Agreement.

CHARLIE CRAY: United States Congress is the single biggest obstacle to the global resolution of climate change.

DANNY GLOVER: The U.S. Congress and Senate’s inaction on climate change was by design.

MICHAEL MANN: That gulf between scientific opinion and public opinion has been bought with hundreds of millions of dollars of special interest money.

MIKE PENCE: In the mainstream media, Chris, there is denial of the growing skepticism in the scientific community about global warming.

DANNY GLOVER: The campaign to sow doubt about climate change and prevent meaningful action began decades ago, particularly as the science became more certain.

CHRIS MATTHEWS: If your party wants to be credible with science, you gotta accept science, do you? Accept science.

MIKE PENCE: I always wanted to play in “Inherit the Wind”.

DANNY GLOVER: In 1988, NASA climatologist James Hansen testified in front of Congress.

JAMES HANSEN: The greenhouse effect has been detected, and it is changing our climate now.

DANNY GLOVER: Climatologists like Michael Mann at Penn State University discovered that temperatures had risen by 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit since the late 1800s. Two-thirds of that warming has occurred since 1975.

MICHAEL MANN: The observations were showing that there was a prominent warming trend in the data that was outside of what we would expect from natural climate variability.

DANNY GLOVER: Yet, long before climate scientists began raising alarm about global warming in the 1980s and ‘90s, scientists who worked with the oil industry had realized years earlier that burning fossil fuels would cause climate change.

KATHY MULVEY: From what we understand the oil industry was aware of climate impacts and climate science decades ago. Exxon Mobil in particular was actually conducting cutting-edge climate science research decades ago.

DANNY GLOVER: Exxon scientists warned the company this warming was caused by burning fossil fuels and that the consequences would be catastrophic.

But Exxon, along with other oil companies, hid this information from the public.

KATHY MULVEY: The oil industry embarked on a campaign of deception and disinformation.

NAOMI ORESKES: The whole strategy is about creating doubt, making the public, making politicians, making political leaders feel that we don’t really know for sure whether or not this is a problem.

DANNY GLOVER: Harvard University science historian Naomi Oreskes studies how the oil industry creates doubt about climate change.

NAOMI ORESKES: So, if you can create doubt in people’s minds, you can delay action. So that’s what this is all about.

ALIYA HAQ: During the ‘90s and the 2000s, Exxon Mobil and a number of oil companies were well-known for funding climate denial activities.

DANNY GLOVER: The oil industry uses the same methods and even the very same public relations firms that tobacco companies employed to spread doubt about the dangers of smoking.

NAOMI ORESKES: We do know that some of the key people who began challenging climate science, who began denying climate science in the late 1980’s had previously worked for the tobacco industry.

We know that they began to use the same strategies and tactics, often the same arguments, the same vocabulary.

DANNY GLOVER: The driving force behind spreading doubt was the American Petroleum Institute. API is the lobbying arm of the oil industry. In 1998, API wrote an internal memo that said: “Victory will be achieved when average citizens understand uncertainties in climate science.”

JANE MAYER: The industry at large spent something like over a half-billion dollars, sort of disseminating doubt and basically trying to confuse people in the United States.

DANNY GLOVER: High effort companies like Exxon eventually stopped financing climate denial groups, because of pressure from the environmental organizations.

KERT DAVIES: Exxon had to back off and in about 2005, ’06, and ’07, they stopped funding the very groups that they had been sending millions to in the years prior, and they dropped them like a hot potato. In the meantime, the Koch money came in.

DANNY GLOVER: The Koch brothers quickly filled the void with even harsher methods.

GREENPEACE VIDEO: Perhaps their greatest achievement is helping convince the world that global warming doesn’t exist.

DANNY GLOVER: Greenpeace soon dubbed the brothers’ apparatus the “Climate Change Denial Machine”.

KERT DAVIES: It’s a network of corporations and think tanks, front groups.

MIKE CASEY: They are arguably the biggest sugar daddies of the fossil fuel front groups that have gotten tremendous traction.

DANNY GLOVER: Charles Koch has said that, “Even if the planet is warming, it would not have catastrophic consequences”, and argues climate scientists’ models for future warming are faulty.

ALIYA HAQ: The Koch brothers have spent, at this point, $80 million on climate denial front groups. That money has been focused at both the federal and state level.

DANNY GLOVER: The Koch brothers politics were shaped by their father, Fred Koch, a chemical engineer who grew up in Texas, and seems to have had few scruples. Back in the 1930s, Fred invented a new kind of technology to refine oil.

JANE MAYER: He had a hard time getting work in the U.S., and so he tried to find work elsewhere in the world and ended up selling his process to very unlikely sources.

DANNY GLOVER: Jane Mayer is an investigative reporter for the New Yorker magazine in Washington, DC, and author of “Dark Money,” a bestselling book about the Koch brothers.

JANE MAYER: Quite ironically, given that Fred Koch became one of America’s most right-wing anti-communists, he made the beginning of his fortune by setting up oil refineries for Josef Stalin.

DANNY GLOVER: Another early customer for Fred’s technology were the Nazis in Germany, after 1933.

JANE MAYER: He ended up building a refinery for Adolf Hitler that had to be greenlighted specifically for Hitler after he became Chancellor in Germany. It became very important during World War II.

DANNY GLOVER: Fred eventually set up Koch Industries in Kansas, invested in oil refineries. He had four sons. Two of them, Charles and David, eventually took over running his company.

JANE MAYER: Charles Koch has always been the dominant brother in the family. He’s domineering, he’s smart, and he’s ruthless. His younger brother, David, has been more good-natured and going along with him.

DANNY GLOVER: But the brothers also embraced their father’s distaste for government regulation.

KERT DAVIES: They don’t like the government, and they want the government to be smaller and disabled. That would help their business a lot, if there was fewer regulations.

DANNY GLOVER: Still, by the 1990’s, the brothers realized they needed clout in Washington.

JANE MAYER: Koch Industries is becoming a huge company. It’s a fossil fuel company with a horrendous record for environmental violations, and it runs smack into the new regulations that are being imposed by the Environmental Protection Agency beginning in the ‘80s.

DANNY GLOVER: The Kochs wanted to change those laws.

NEWS REPORT: The 1996 presidential campaign-

DANNY GLOVER: To do that, they set their sights on influencing the Republican party.

JANE MAYER: It’s 1996. David Koch at this point goes from trashing conventional politicians to becoming the Vice Chair of Bob Dole’s presidential bid on the Republican Party ticket.

Archive Footage: You’ll get a better feel of who Bob Dole is and what he’s all about.

NAOMI ORESKES: It was a big fight within the Republican party at that time about whether or not Republicans should accept the reality of climate change and look to market base solutions to fix it, or whether they should deny it. One of the things that we know is that there was tremendous lobbying and advertising from the fossil fuel industry on the denial side.

DANNY GLOVER: At the very time of that internal debate, the Kochs built a network of at least 17 think tanks and front groups to influence the entire political system. Often referred to as “the Kochtopus”.

CHARLIE CRAY: The Kochs have created a multi-dimensional political apparatus to create a tectonic shift in American politics.

ROBERT MAGUIRE: The single most important thing to understand about the Koch network today is that it is unparalleled in its complexity.

DANNY GLOVER: Today the Kochs fund a wide range of organizations, from the National Rifle Association, the Cato Institute, Heritage Fund, US Chamber of Commerce, DonorsTrust, and the American Legislative Exchange Council, but its most powerful weapon is an organization called Americans for Prosperity.

JANE MAYER: Americans for Prosperity is now the primary political front group that the Kochs founded and fund. It’s just become a guerrilla army that is almost like a third party in the United States now.

DANNY GLOVER: Housed in this office tower in Arlington, Virginia, just across the river from Washington, DC, Americans for Prosperity strikes fear into the hearts of politicians.

KERT DAVIES: When Obama was elected, they emerged as the key force in driving the Tea Party. They grabbed it and they corporitized it.

DANNY GLOVER: And appears on Fox News regularly.

FOX NEWS REPORT: What we’re gonna have if this climate change legislation passes, this cap and trade, are gas prices through the roof today.

DANNY GLOVER: Today, the Kochs’ political apparatus spends hundreds of millions of dollars during elections.

MARCO RUBIO: Thank you very much. Thank you.

DANNY GLOVER: And puts out tens of thousands of TV advertisements to get their chosen Republicans elected.

POLITICAL AD: Kay Hagan, taking care of Washington insiders.

ROBERT MAGUIRE: The largest purpose of that money was to change control of Congress. To change control of the presidency. To elect Republicans.

DANNY GLOVER: All told, Koch money has gone to more than half of all Senators and nearly 40% of all Congressmen. While it’s still not known exactly the total they spent in the 2016 election, it’s estimated to have been more than half a billion dollars.

KENNETH VOGEL: When the Kochs estimate how much they’re going to spend, it’s always sort of a dicey proposition because they end up raising and spending a lot more money than they say is for just overt partisan politics, and they say, “This is for issue-based advocacy.”

DANNY GLOVER: Either way, it’s a huge increase from the 40 million dollars Americans for Prosperity spent in 2010 to help Republicans win control of Congress during the mid-terms.

ROBERT MAGUIRE: In 2012, it had $400 million, which was well above anything it had had prior to that.

DANNY GLOVER: And in 2014, they spent $290 million to help the Republicans win control of the Senate.

POLITICAL AD: You have sold West Virginia out. Families are suffering.

ROBERT MAGUIRE: We know that Americans for Prosperity, just to name one group, had run 33,000 ads in tight Senate races around the country.

DANNY GLOVER: The Kochs also hold conclaves twice a year, inviting fellow billionaires and hitting them up for cash.

JANE MAYER: That club grew from just a few members in 2003 to now 400-450 of the richest, most conservative businessmen and women in America, and it’s attracted all kinds of important dignitaries, too.

DANNY GLOVER: Including Supreme Court justices and Republican stars like Ted Cruz, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, Marco Rubio.

MIKE PENCE: This is a great day for energy independence.

DANNY GLOVER: And Mike Pence, the current Vice President.

ROBERT MAGUIRE: So, as a major donor, you get to spend a weekend chatting with the person who’s going to be making policy that could drastically affect your bottom line.

DANNY GLOVER: One of the key purposes of this political apparatus is to ensure that no legislation is passed to curb the burning of fossil fuels.

CHARLIE CRAY: The Kochs have gotten over 170 members of the House to take a pledge that they will never support any legislation that places a tax on carbon.

KERT DAVIES: So they screwed up the entire House of Representatives for years.

DANNY GLOVER: The Kochs’ influence on the Republicans on climate change is powerful.

NAOMI ORESKES: We had period where a number of important Republican leaders again, were coming to the fore, saying this was real.

DANNY GLOVER: By 2008, leading figures in the party, such as Mitt Romney, Senator John McCain, and Republican House Leader Newt Gingrich were calling for action on global warming. Gingrich even appeared in this ad with Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, calling for steps to be taken.

NANCY PELOSI: We don’t always see eye to eye, do we Newt?

NEWT GINGRICH: No, but we do agree, our country must take action to address climate change.

NAOMI ORESKES: And then there was tremendous pushback from the Americans for Prosperity, which as many people know, is the Koch brothers-funded political movement.

DANNY GLOVER: Indeed, in 2011, Gingrich renounced the ad.

NEWT GINGRICH: First of all, it’s probably the dumbest single thing I’ve done.

KERT DAVIES: I think they saw that as a bigger threat than Al Gore or Bill Clinton or anything on the left.

ALIYA HAQ: And unfortunately, you saw a number of Republicans that once supported climate action, suddenly rushing that back.

DANNY GLOVER: And Republicans who refused to toe the line, such as Bob Inglis, a conservative Congressman from South Carolina, pay a heavy price. Inglis had become convinced that climate change was real.

JANE MAYER: So when the evidence was in front of his own eyes, he changed his point of view and he started speaking out about climate change.

DANNY GLOVER: In 2010, when Inglis was running again for Congress, Americans for Prosperity swung into action to win the primary.

KERT DAVIES: And he lost badly, to a very under-qualified candidate who the Koch machine brought in. So, he was then hung up in the public square as an icon of what happens when a Republican turns good on climate change.

DANNY GLOVER: Another one of those icons, for example, was climate scientist Michael Mann at Penn State University, authored the famous ‘Hockey Stick Curve’ that visibly showed how humans had impacted climate change going back centuries. In 2005, Mann was attacked by a member of Congress.

MICHAEL MANN: Joe Barton decided to use his authority as the Chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee to hold hearings, to subpoena my personal records, all of my personal emails.

DANNY GLOVER: Yet Greenpeace soon revealed that Barton, a Republican Congressman, received money from the Kochs’ political action committee.

MICHAEL MANN: And they attempted to smear me in op-eds and conservative-leaning newspapers.

DANNY GLOVER: While the Kochs were attacking legitimate climate scientists, they were funding scientists who denied global warming was caused by burning fossil fuels.

WEI-HOCK SOON: And I’ve been receiving money from whoever that wants to give me money.

NAOMI ORESKES: One of the key strategies is to recruit either scientists or people who pretend to be scientists. Sometimes they are actually scientists but rarely scientists in the particular field.

DANNY GLOVER: One example is Wei-Hock Soon, at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics. He believes that climate change is caused by variations in the sun, and not CO2, and that more carbon in the atmosphere is good for growing plants.

KERT DAVIES: We sent a Freedom of Information Act request in to the Smithsonian and we requested who was funding him, and eventually after years of discussion, got back a list of his grants.

SPEAKER: Who is funding your grants, just in your …

DANNY GLOVER: In total, Soon received $1.2 million from the oil industry, a large portion of which have come from the Koch brothers.

NAOMI ORESKES: In the correspondence between him and the industry, he speaks specifically about deliverables, about particular products, particular papers, making particular arguments that the fossil fuel industry wants.

DANNY GLOVER: And yet Soon has no training as a climate scientist. His background is aerospace engineering.

SPEAKER: Dr. Soon has already talked about those issues on the stage today and in the past.

NAOMI ORESKES: When he was asked, he says, “Well, these are my authentic beliefs, I’m not being paid to say anything I don’t believe,” and that may well be true. The point is though that he is a complete outlier science. He has views that are shared by almost no one in the scientific community.

REPORTER: Mr. Koch. Excuse me, Mr. Koch, I have a question.

KOCH BROTHER: Come on, get to it.

REPORTER: You’re wanted for climate crimes.

DANNY GLOVER: The Kochs’ funding of climate denial has not always gone smoothly. Physicist Dr. Richard Muller of the University of California Berkeley, was a global warming skeptic who the Kochs backed. But in 2012, Muller produced a study that concluded global warming was caused by carbon dioxide.

RICHARD MULLER: I was flabbergasted. Not only was global warming real, and roughly consistent with what the previous groups had said, but the match to carbon dioxide … and the fact that solar variability was not responsible.

DANNY GLOVER: All of this activity to generate doubt is effective. According to a Yale survey, 70% of Americans believe global warming is real, but only 53% of those people think it’s caused by human activity. Just 16% think climate change is something to be very worried about.

NAOMI ORESKES: I think we have very, very strong evidence in this case to support the conclusion that these campaigns have been highly impactful. So, until quite recently, many Americans have thought that the science was unsettled, even though scientists will tell you that it’s been settled for 20 years. So why would they think that?

DANNY GLOVER: As a result, politicians are not taking action, and that includes Democrats. Even when the Democrats control both Houses of Congress, they did little to address the crisis.

NAOMI ORESKES: Most Republicans in Congress, and even some Democrats, are very, very afraid to try to do something about climate, for fear that they will be targeted by fossil fuel interests, and that they could lose their seats.

DONALD TRUMP: America will start winning again. Winning like never before.

DANNY GLOVER: The election of Donald Trump means fighting climate change in the United States has become more difficult than ever. After all, David Koch attended Trump’s election victory party. But most significantly, one-third of Trump’s transition team was made up of people who were linked to the Koch brothers’ vast political network.

KENNETH VOGEL: Some of the folks who had a pivotal role in Trump’s campaign, his transition, and now his presidency, who have Koch network ties include Donald Trump’s very first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, his vice president Mike Pence, his Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short, his Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, the EPA administrator, all the way down to Andrew Bremberg, the Domestic Policy Director who worked at Freedom Partners, actually putting together the executive orders that the Koch network would like a theoretical Republican president to sign.

DANNY GLOVER: Other important Koch-linked Trump officials include his former Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, Trump’s campaign manager and current advisor Kellyanne Conway, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and the head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo.

SCOTT PRUITT: I believe that we as an agency, and we as a nation, can be both pro-energy and jobs, and pro-environment.

DANNY GLOVER: And already Trump and its new head, Scott Pruitt, want to cut the EPA budget by as much as 30%. Pruitt played a key role in persuading Trump to pull out of the Paris Accord.

SCOTT PRUITT: You have corrected a view that was paramount in Paris, that somehow the United States should penalize its own economy, be apologetic, lead with our chin, while the rest of the world does little.

KENNETH VOGEL: The Kochs see Scott Pruitt as someone who is going to strip away some of the climate regulations that they see as limiting job growth, and it should be said, limiting their own company’s ability to do some of the things that it wants to do.

DANNY GLOVER: And even if Donald Trump is removed from office before his term ends, waiting in the wings to replace him is Vice President Mike Pence, a strong champion of the Koch brothers’ interests.

ALIYA HAQ: This is not the way our democracy should be working. Incredibly powerful, rich people who spend this kind of money should be held accountable.

MICHAEL MANN: They have polluted our public discourse, they have skewed media coverage of the science of climate change, they have paid off politicians.

ALIYA HAQ: Considering what this means for our health, for our kids’ futures, for our planet, it is unconscionable that the Koch brothers are denying climate change and fueling this kind of anti-climate activity.

NEWS REPORT: The situation in Antarctica offers cause for concern as well.

DANNY GLOVER: Scientists now fear if action is not taken to drastically cut greenhouse emissions soon, global warming will run out of control, with major extinctions around the globe, large coastal cities such as New York and Tokyo underwater, and wars and conflict due to mass migration of people becoming the norm.

MICHAEL MANN: The number of lives that will be lost because of the damaging impacts of climate change, in the hundreds of millions. To me, it’s not just a crime against humanity, it’s a crime against the planet.

DANNY GLOVER: In October 2016, seven of the world’s top climate scientists warned the planet is on track to sail past the two degrees Celsius threshold for dangerous global warming by 2050. Even if all the countries that signed the Paris Accords fulfill their pledge, that model was created before a climate crisis denier was elected President of the United States.

https://therealnews.com/stories/trump-the-koch-brothers-and-their-war-on-climate-science
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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Re: The Koch Brothers Exposed!
« Reply #2 on: April 04, 2022, 07:18:30 pm »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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February 28, 2022


Supreme 🐘🦕😈🦕🦖🐍 Court Hears Moot Climate Case To Dismantle Federal Gov’t Ability To Regulate

Remember when multi-shirting white nationalism peddler turned Presidential strategist 😈 Steve Bannon said the Trump administration would bring about the “deconstruction of the administrative state?” Many were skeptical that the administration would be successful at undoing 130 years of governance, and indeed, it may seem like it failed.

That undoing might be underway today, as the Supreme Court hears West Virginia v. EPA, a case The Federalist Society the Supreme Court 🦖 justices appointed by 🦖🐘 presidents who lost the popular vote could use as a vehicle to fulfill Bannon’s promise, and effectively destroy the federal government’s ability to protect the public from any manner of threat, from climate change and more traditional pollution, to bad pharma, financial scams, and food safety inspections.

Because for the past century and half or so, and specifically since the Court decided Chevron v. NRDC in 1984, federal courts recognized a degree of deference in the relationship between Congress passing laws and the executive branch then developing regulations to enforce those statutes. The creation of those regulations requires lots of careful consideration by subject matter experts, like scientists, to set how strict a pollution limit should be, for example, or how low the risk of a side-effect should be for a medication to be approved and sold. Congress more or less sets a goal, and the federal government figures out how to meet it. And when things end up in court, the deference goes to federal agencies, since they’re staffed with the experts who know the issue best. 

But now, the Supreme Court has decided to take up a case against Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which never went into effect. The Trump administration tossed the proposed plan, and the Biden administration is content to leave it dead, because we met the emission reduction goals addressed in the proposed plan without it ever going into effect. Why is the Court taking a case about a law that never was and never will be?

Unfortunately, the likely reason is because a majority of the justices intend to use it to achieve a decades-long plan by conservative, industry-funded legal lobbyists, to achieve what Bannon never could: a deconstructing of the administrative state.

The Supreme Court hears argument today, and the justices will decide in the next few months whether, or more likely how extensively, to incapacitate the federal government’s ability to protect the public. A majority of the justices could choose a path where unless Congress explicitly legislates, for example, that CO2 emissions should be below X million (billion) tons per year, or that it is illegal to sell a specific combination of herbal supplements as a medication that claims to cure COVID or Parkinsons or any other ailment or disease, regulatory bodies like the EPA and FDA wouldn’t be able to do much, if anything, about it.
 
That’s the short version. The long version?

…how much time ya got?

Because there’s lots of reading you’ll need to do to understand the whole ugly story. Rachel Cleetus of the Union of Concerned Scientists has an  op-ed in Scientific American, if you want a science take. On the law side,  Vox has a great explainer on the moot case, Richmond Law Professor Noah Sachs  educated us about the possible consequences in the American Prospect, and  Pamela King covered how Justice Kavanaugh (who  lied to Congress, almost certainly committed sexual assault, and still hasn't explained  who paid off his credit card debt) should recuse himself from the case (but obviously won’t), and  Jennifer Hijazi covered the amicus brief filed by Democratic lawmakers.  Karen Sokol explained it concisely at Slate, and Elie Mystal doesn’t mince words about it at The Nation:  Supreme 🦕👿 Court vs. the Earth. Meanwhile,  Sierra ClubNRDC, and  EDF all have blog posts running down the high stakes of the case.

But it’s a piece by  Andrew Perez in the Daily Poster that we’ll focus on, because Perez focused on the fact that beyond Bannon, this assault on the government’s ability to protect the public from profiteers, has been fueled for decades by the Koch empire.

The Koch network’s chief political arm, 🐘🦖 Americans for Prosperity/b], led campaigns supporting the confirmation of all three of Trump’s Supreme Court justices: Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch. Barrett’s confirmation was a particularly significant win for the fossil fuel industry — she has familial ties to Shell Oil, and refused to recuse herself in a case involving that oil giant.



Several more 🦖 Koch-funded dark money groups have filed similar amicus briefs in the case. That includes the Cato Institute, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and the Mountain States Legal Foundation.

This is essentially the 🦖end game of decades of covert lobbying and legal disinformation, a culmination of hundreds of millions of dollars of PR spending, front group think tank reports, academic-center white papers and good old fashioned dirty politics

Unfortunately, with the Supreme Court solidly in the hands of 🦖😈 polluters, there’s little we can do.


Aside from, of course, stacking the courts with enough uncompromised judges to rule in the public’s best interest, instead of polluters’.
 

And if you think court-packing sounds radical, just wait until you see the changes that result from the decision this Court makes.

« Last Edit: April 04, 2022, 07:26:20 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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March 23, 2022



Over $50 Million in Funding For Climate 😈 Disinfo 🐍 Organizations Between 2014-2020, Coming From 🦕 Koch And 🦖 Similarly Shady Sources

On Monday, Alex Kotch at the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD)  published the latest count of climate disinfo funding, tallying up over $50 million in “donations” to climate denial groups, straight from industry profits, billionaire ideologues fortunes, and everything in between.

Between 2014 and 2022, there was $54,298,510 that went to just eight organizations that, per Kotch, “represents key groups primarily focused on energy and the environment that consistently mislead the public about the climate crisis.” 

While bearing in mind that this is just the verifiable drop in an otherwise much larger and murkier bucket of fossil fuel funding for climate disinfo, which when including advertising and PR budgets is likely in the hundreds of millions, not tens of millions, it is still quite a sizable figure, and one that is hardly coming from grassroots supporters. 

In fact, it’s mostly coming from a couple dozen billionaires, conservative dark money pass-throughs, and 🦖 industry sources. “A dozen of the largest nonprofits donated $47.8 million to the leading climate denial organizations, accounting for 88% of the funds CMD was able to track down using FY 2014-20 federal tax returns.” 

The Koch Foundations of course makes the list at number eight, right behind the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers. Donors Trust/Donors Capitol Fund, the right’s “dark-money ATM,” tops the list, of course, followed by the Searle, Scaife, Mercer, Dunn and Bradley foundations, all more or less just tax write-off vehicles for rightwing billionaires trying to simply buy the reality they want.


Jennie King of the Institute for Strategic Dialogue told Kotch that “bad actors are using a tried and tested playbook to weaken public mandates and create confusion [about] viable solutions going forward.



This includes weaponizing climate response within a broader ‘culture wars’ frame and conflating it with any supposed controversy, from Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates to critical race theory, trans rights, or geopolitics.”

Similarly, the tobacco-defending climate deniers at Heartland lost over half their donations between 2019 and 2020, and that overall the recipients' totals have dwindled from their 2016 peak. 

This may be an indication that even as the fossil fuel industry begrudgingly begins to co-opt climate change and clean energy, they’ve done so well at integrating it into the Republican party that generally conservative funders could be keeping the charade going, even after it served its purpose of buying the industry a few decades of unchecked, climate-changing profits. 

The little climate disinfo troll is all grown up now, and finding fun new pursuits attacking Trans people, defending racism, and, of course, spreading anti-covid/mask/vaccine propaganda.

The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, Government corrupting, human health depleting CRIME. Since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE!  Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on! 
« Last Edit: April 04, 2022, 07:25:33 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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CleanTechnica

April 4, 2022

Originally published by Union of Concerned Scientists 👍👍👍, The Equation. By Elliott Negin

It’s Time For Charles Koch To Testify About His Climate Change 🦖 Disinformation  Campaign

The US House Oversight and Reform Committee kicked off its investigation of the fossil fuel industry’s decades-long climate change disinformation campaign last fall by inviting top executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to testify about their role and subpoenaing their companies for internal documents.

The committee followed up that hearing — during which the executives disingenuously denied funding such a campaign — with another hearing on February 8 focusing on the oil companies’ inadequate plans to cut their carbon emissions. The next round is slated to feature board directors from the same four oil companies testifying on their companies’ climate pledges, followed by testimony from social media companies and advertising agencies about the part they have played in manufacturing doubt about climate change.

But before the committee wraps up its investigation, it would be sorely remiss if it didn’t haul in libertarian industrialist Charles Koch, the Daddy Warbucks of climate disinformation, for questioning.

The 20th-richest person in the world with a net worth of $58 billion, Koch, 86, is the longtime CEO of Koch Industries, a conglomerate that owns oil refineries and pipelines; markets crude oil, coal, chemicals, wood pulp and paper; trades energy derivatives; and boasts annual revenues of $115 billion. The second-largest privately held company in the country, Koch Industries is one of the top 25 US corporate water and carbon polluters, is a defendant in a climate accountability lawsuit brought by the state of Minnesota, and is continuing to operate its businesses in Russia while Koch-backed groups oppose US sanctions imposed on the Kremlin after it invaded Ukraine.

Koch family-controlled foundations donated more than $145 million to a network of 90 think tanks and advocacy groups from 1997 through 2018 to disparage climate science and block efforts to address climate change. Since the death of Charles Koch’s brother David in 2019, the Charles Koch Foundation has continued to finance this disinformation campaign, giving more than $17 million to 23 groups in 2019 and 2020, pushing the Koch grand total north of $162 million. By contrast, the second-largest funder of climate disinformation, ExxonMobil, spent $39.2 million on some 70 denier groups from 1998 through 2020.

To maintain leverage on Capitol Hill, Koch Industries’ political action committee (PAC), affiliates and employees also contribute significantly more to federal candidates, party committees, outside groups, leadership PACs and 527 groups than their counterparts at BP America, Chevron, ExxonMobil, or Shell. In the 2018 and 2020 election cycles, Koch Industries’ total outlay of $26.7 million was more than the $21.7 million the four oil and gas companies contributed collectively.

In addition, Koch Industries spent more than $38 million on its Washington lobbying operation during the last two full election cycles, from 2017 through 2020. That’s slightly less than ExxonMobil’s $40.98 million and Chevron’s $39.47 million, but the company enjoyed a distinct advantage over the two oil giants besides outspending them on campaign contributions: President Donald Trump’s transition team head, Vice President Mike Pence — a longtime Koch network veteran who played a key role in promoting the Koch-founded and -funded Americans for Prosperity’s 😈 “No Climate Tax” pledge when he was in the House — tapped at least 50 Koch network alumni to work inside the Trump administration. They included 🦖 Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt and White House Legislative Affairs Director Marc Short. Egged on by Koch devotees both inside and outside the government, the Trump administration rolled back at least 260 regulations, including more than 100 environmental rules.

The Biden administration cleared out the Koch disciples when it took office and is in the process of rolling back the Trump rollbacks, but Koch and his donor network still hold considerable sway over the Republican Party. They will continue to spend hundreds of millions on Capitol Hill and, looking ahead to 2024, a number of Koch network stalwarts are considering a run for president, including Pence, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Florida Sen. Rick Scott. The Koch network, with its toxic anti-government bias, will likely cast a long shadow over Washington for years to come.

Decades of Disinformation

For more than two decades, the Koch network has been diligently spreading disinformation to sabotage efforts to transition to a clean energy economy, more often than not by attacking proposed climate policies on economic grounds. Examples of its malfeasance are legion:

To stop a version of the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill in the Senate after it squeaked by in the House in 2009, Americans for Prosperity persuaded a critical mass of lawmakers to sign its “No Climate Tax” pledge, disingenuously calling the bill “the largest excise tax in history.” Since then, the overwhelming majority of legislators who have received campaign contributions from Koch Industries’ PAC and employees have rejected a carbon tax in amendments and nonbinding resolutions.

To slow the exponential growth of solar power, the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council has armed utilities and state lawmakers with model legislation against net metering, which credits solar panel owners for the excess energy they generate and return to the grid, claiming that rooftop solar credits will drive up non-solar customers’ electric rates. The Energy Department, however, concluded that the credits will have a negligible impact on monthly electric bills.

To undermine the widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), the Koch network has urged Congress to kill the federal income tax credit for EV buyers. “Congress should not be in the business of picking winners and losers by subsidizing one form of energy over others, regardless of its source,” Philip Ellender, Koch Industries’ president of government and public affairs, argued in a letter to Congress in October 2018. Never mind that the oil and gas industry has benefited from massive annual federal subsidies for more than 100 years.

After succeeding in prodding President Trump to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate agreement, arguing that the accord would threaten the “economic future of our country,” the Koch network is now spearheading a campaign to kill the Biden administration’s Build Back Better plan, falsely claiming that it “is the biggest spending bill in American history.”

There are plenty of other examples, but the above sample illustrates the breadth of the Koch network’s reach. Charles Koch and his fellow travelers have played an outsized role scaring the public about the potential impact of climate solutions on their pocketbooks (but at the same time, they spent more than $20 million to promote President Trump’s $1.5-trillion tax cut that largely benefited corporations and the ultra-wealthy). By practically any measure, Koch is as consequential a disinformer as the four oil company executives who testified last fall before the House Oversight Committee combined.

Put Koch Under Oath

If the House Oversight Committee called Charles Koch to testify, it could, for starters, ask him about his views on climate change.

The executives from BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell who testified last October downplayed the central role human activity — mainly burning fossil fuels — plays in triggering climate change, but after much hemming and hawing they all conceded that global warming poses an “existential threat.”

Koch, for his part, has never acknowledged that climate change is a serious problem and rarely talks about it publicly. On the rare occasion when reporters broach the topic, he responds with … disinformation.

Koch’s most recent public comments about climate change came during lengthy interviews with the Washington Post in 2015 and 2016. Asked if he worried about climate change in an August 2015 interview, Koch replied that he believes “it’s been warming some” but added that “[t]here’s a big debate on that, because it depends on whether you use satellite measurements, balloon{s}, or you use ground ones that have been adjusted.” Climate scientists, he added, “have these models that show it, but the models don’t work….”

In fact, all of the measurements Koch cited indicate that there has been a long-term global warming trend due to climate change. And, coincidentally, just a week before the Washington Post published the Koch interview, a peer-reviewed study found that global climate models are even more accurate than previously thought.

In August 2016, the Washington Post ran another Koch interview, during which he was asked if anyone could produce a study that would convince him “that carbon regulation is necessary to heed off disastrous global warming.” “Yeah,” Koch replied. “If we … use the scientific method rather than trying to shut down and shout down and punish anybody who wants to enter into debate about it…. If we’re all trying to find the truth of the matter, then I’m all for that.”

Notably, Koch did try to get to the truth of the matter in his own way a few years earlier. The Charles Koch Foundation donated $150,000 to Berkeley Earth, a nonprofit research institute founded in 2010 by Richard Muller, a physicist and self-proclaimed climate science skeptic, to review the temperature data that underpinned global-warming claims. Presumably to Koch’s surprise — and dismay — Muller announced in a July 2012 New York Times op-ed that his investigation verified that global warming is indeed real, is “almost entirely” caused by human activity, and is even worse than what the climate science community had concluded at the time.

It would be enlightening for the House Oversight Committee to ask Koch about Berkeley Earth’s findings, especially since after Muller announced them, the Koch network stepped up its campaign to characterize climate policies as being too costly, despite the fact that the consequences of failing to curb carbon emissions will cost infinitely more than taking preventive measures.


Since late 2012, for example, the Koch brothers financed “bogus studies” falsely claiming that state standards requiring utilities to ramp up their use of renewable energy would dramatically drive up electric rates. Six years later, in 2018, when the House was about to vote on a nonbinding carbon tax resolution, Ellender — the Koch Industries lobbyist — took the same tack. “A carbon tax would make energy more expensive and raise the costs of consumer products and services on which people depend,” he wrote in a letter to the lawmakers. “It would also make US producers less cost competitive, driving production and jobs to other parts of the world.”

The House passed the resolution, which stated that “a carbon tax would be detrimental to the United States economy,” by a 229 to 180 vote. Nearly 70 percent of the representatives who voted for the resolution — 159 — collectively received more than $1.28 million in campaign contributions from Koch Industries PAC and employees during the 2018 election cycle.

Investing in Clean Energy While Trashing It

Koch’s jaundiced take on climate change would undoubtedly be welcomed by the 20 Republican members of the Oversight Committee, 14 of whom are climate science deniers. During the 2020 election cycle alone, Koch Industries’ employees and PAC gave more than $136,000 in campaign contributions to 18 of the GOP committee members, while their counterparts at BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell collectively donated $40,347 to 14 of them.

The committee members who are less beholden to the fossil fuel industry, however, should take the opportunity to press Koch about his company’s seemingly contradictory investments in sectors that his network is still trying to knee-cap, such as electric vehicles and renewable energy.

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Koch Industries subsidiaries have invested at least $750 million in a range of battery technologies and battery-related raw materials, chemicals and recycling. Among the Koch conglomerate’s relatively new holdings are New Jersey zinc battery startup Eos Energy Enterprises and Canada’s lithium-ion battery recycler Li-Cycle Holdings, lithium development company Standard Lithium, and Lithion Power Group, a lithium-ion battery startup.

Likewise, Koch subsidiaries have jumped into smart grid and electric vehicle charging technologies. In 2020, Koch Engineered Solutions acquired Sentient Energy, a smart grid solutions company, and last year Koch Strategic Platforms invested in EVBox, a Netherlands-based electric vehicle charging station manufacturer.

Koch Engineered Solutions is also bullish on solar, but not on distributed rooftop solar, which the Koch network has been trying to stop. Last November, it bought DEPCOM Power, an Arizona company that builds large-scale solar power plants, and plans to supply solar farms in the United States and Canada.

Koch Industries’ relatively recent investments in batteries and renewables — which, granted, amount to a tiny percentage of the conglomerate’s far-flung operations — are just the beginning, according to Koch Engineered Solutions President Dave Dotson. “We are believers in the electrification of everything, driven by economics and consumer trends,” he told S&P Global Market Intelligence, “and look for where we can add value across the electric value chain from generation to end-user consumption.”

Dotson’s business strategy should come as a surprise to anyone who has been closely following his boss, and should prompt the House Oversight Committee to ask Koch how his company’s recent shopping spree squares with his network’s ongoing campaign against climate solutions.

An unabashed libertarian, Koch likely would respond that the private sector should take the lead, not the government, on energy — and just about everything else. For Koch, government efforts to manage the economy, protect public health and the environment, and provide social welfare programs are a slippery slope to totalitarianism and must be rolled back, if not eliminated. In his most recent book (co-authored with Brian Hooks), Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, Koch argues that individuals, corporations and nonprofit groups are better suited to solve society’s most pressing problems — including the coronavirus pandemic than the government.

Koch’s philosophy, however, fails to account for the fact that it was the private sector — specifically the fossil fuel industry — that got us into the dire situation in which we find ourselves today, faced with increasingly severe climate change-driven impacts. Major oil companies were aware their products wreck the climate at least 50 years ago and have spent hundreds of millions of dollars since then to manufacture doubt about climate science, disparage renewables and block government action. Now that Koch Industries, as well as some oil majors, see that there is money to be made by diversifying into clean energy technologies, they are slowly adding them to their portfolios but spending a fraction of what they are still dedicating to their oil, gas and chemical operations. It’s much too little, much too late.

If the House Oversight Committee is serious about getting to the bottom of the fossil fuel industry’s longtime campaign to stymie climate policy, it should call Koch on the carpet. By doing so, the committee could shine a light on his prominent role in sponsoring disinformation, as well as expose the threat he and his followers pose to US democracy.

This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Originally published by Union of Concerned Scientists, The Equation. By Elliott Negin

https://cleantechnica.com/2022/04/03/its-time-for-charles-koch-to-testify-about-his-climate-change-disinformation-campaign/
« Last Edit: April 04, 2022, 08:30:40 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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One More Win for 🦖 Charles Koch’s 🦍 Dystopian 👿 America
« Reply #7 on: July 05, 2022, 05:28:11 pm »
The Class Struggle

July 4, 2022 ~~ recommended by larrymotuz ~~

July 1, 2022 By Pam Martens 👍 and Russ Martens 👍

The Supreme Court’s EPA Decision Is One More Win for Charles Koch’s Dystopian America


SNIPPET:

Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH), the Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, released the following statement yesterday on the Supreme Court’s decision:

“Let’s be clear about what is at the heart of the matter – the Supreme Court has sided with corporate power and polluters over the people and the planet. Stripping the Environmental Protection Agency of its ability to regulate under the Clean Air Act hobbles the agency’s ability to protect Americans’ health. This decision will not just impact the EPA. The reasoning in this case will set us back decades in the fight against climate change and will reverberate throughout our government, making it harder to protect families and communities. This court continues to legislate from the bench in increasingly dangerous ways, and it’s up to Congress and the President to act as checks on them as the founders intended. I’ll be working with my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to ensure that today’s decision does not impede our nation’s response to the climate crisis."

Full article:
https://ongoingclassstruggle.blogspot.com/2022/07/the-supreme-courts-epa-decision-is-one.html

AGelbert COMMENT: It is painfully obvious to those with critical thinking skills that a Real Opposition Party, not only does not exist in the US of Oligarchs, but has methodically, with malice aforethought, been prevented by TPTB from organizing into existence. This is the present corrupt Oligarchy governing status quo.




In my 75 years of existence, I seriously doubt this Socially Destructive, Social Darwinism based abusive status quo has changed in any way. The Perception Management Pig lipstick may have been better (SEE: "The Audacity of Hopium", etc. Ad nauseam) from time to time, but the Oligarchy's gate keepers were firmly entrenched a couple of years before I was born.

I think the Oligarchs solidified their power over we-the-people on that fateful night Wallace was robbed of the Candidacy for the VP position. The ruthless Oligarchic greedballs won on July 21, 1944, the last day of the Democratic National Convention, when the LACKEY for the American Oligarchs, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, was nominated for vice president. 🥺 


Despite our (disguised dictatorship with "democracy" Pig Lipstick) corrupt status quo, up until now, my hope has been that Catastrophic Climate Change would spur TPTB to act responsibly out of survival instinct, if nothing else. I hoped they would, because of ACTUAL enlightened self interest (not the greed based Capitalist baloney propaganda they push), take aggressive legal and financial action to, not only stop, but reverse, Catastrophic Climate Change.

But, as the recent Orwellian Decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court evidences (i.e. Children with Hansen Climate Lawsuit will not be heard because, uh, "they don't have Standing" AND The US Environmental Protection Agency "Cannot Legally Protect Americans from Environmental Damage"), the Oligarchs are too committed to their morally bankrupt ideology/Social Darwinist religion (see graphic below) to act with common sense.
 

Yesterday, I tried to reason with a legal sophistry spouting poster attempting to defend the latest abysmally stupid Supreme Court Decision against the EPA. That 🐍 sophist, besides rambling on in long winded this and that about said Decision, finished with a ridiculous claim that the "CORE" issue was about properly applying the regulatory framework (i.e. "Legal" boundaries of EPA enforement actions). Of course I called BS on that sophistry laden baloney. Unfortunately, it appears that my graphics pointing to the REAL CORE ISSUE were like WATER OFF A 😈 Roberts Supreme Court, 🦍 Social Darwinist, 🦖 Hydrocarbon Hellspawn loving DUCK. 🤦‍♂️

Today (see link after this paragraph), I have more evidence to back my firm view that the Supreme Court is shooting themselves, and we-the-people, in the FACE (not just the foot) by deliberatly ignoring the CORE EVIRONMENTAL ISSUE of human society at this time (i.e. Catastrophic Climate Change). No, I don't expect the reality challenged water carriers for the 🦖 polluters and the 😈 Supremely corrupt Court to get it, but I am certain many people of conscience do, and will pass this on for the good of all humanity.


 
July 4, 2022


« Last Edit: August 15, 2022, 02:38:24 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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📢 🦕 Koch Spent Over 💰 $1 Billion On 2020 Elections 😡
« Reply #8 on: August 15, 2022, 02:25:07 pm »

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August 15, 2022



After 🦕 Chuckie Koch's Kinder, Gentler Rebrand Attempt, 😈 He Spent Over $1 Billion On 2020 Elections


Hey, remember back in 2018 when Politico Magazine told us Chase Koch, son of Charles Koch, "wants to steer the conservative juggernaut his family created toward a kinder, gentler libertarianism?" Or what about in 2020, when the Wall Street Journal's Doug Belkin helped Charles "call me 'Chuckie'" Koch attempt to rebrand as a "philosopher and, he hopes, unifer?" 

Well if you were, like us, more skeptical than the "journalists" who credulously served up this PR as "reporting", then congratulations! You're not stupid enough to be a political access-driven DC journalist. 

Because it turns out that even as ol' Chuckie was telling the WSJ how much he laments his past partisanship, he was still steering ungodly amounts of money into the election. Belkin claimed that "Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates," but that seems to have undersold things by an order of magnitude or two. 

It's taken two years for all the paperwork to go through, but Connor Gibson crunched the numbers for the Center for Media and Democracy, and tallied up that "Koch Industries spent only $22.4 million on federal lobbying and campaign contributions in the 2020 election cycle." 

But even that is "only" a fraction of the total spend, as across the 28 organizations that Koch controls, plus his family and Koch Industries executives, the total Koch spend on the 2020 election cycle was at least $1.1 billion. 

Yes, billion, with a "B"! 

The supposedly post-partisan 😇 ;) Koch 👿🦖 network spent $1,100,000,000 influencing American politics, in just one election cycle! 

And even THAT is a conservative figure, Gibson notes, because "these calculations likely fail to account for the total policy and political spending overseen by Charles Koch since Koch Industries and a fleet of Koch-controlled limited liability companies (LLCs) do not disclose similar finances." 

Over a billion dollars, and that's just from what they're forced to disclose! 

"Even though Koch told reporters he was so displeased with Trump," Gibson writes, "that he might even support Democrats — a rhetorical trick he pulls every few years — the tens of millions of dollars his organizations invested in U.S. Senate and House races went almost exclusively to Republicans."

 

And it's not just the "good" Republicans who respect norms and traditions like not overthrowing Democracy because you're a loser: "Koch has financed groups involved in extremist activity, including the 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol. In 2022, Koch Industries is still financing many politicians who worked to invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election, despite signaling to Politico that it would discontinue such support." 

He's certainly getting what he paid for, too: "His astroturf organization 🦖 Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent "seven figures" on efforts to support the confirmations of Trump nominees 👿 Neil Gorsuch, 🐍 Brett Kavanaugh, and 🦖 Amy Coney-Barrett—for a total price tag of between $3 and $10 million." 

Regardless, who wants to guess which supposedly DC-savvy, access-driven journalistic mockery will fall for it the next time Chuckie Koch wants some sympathetic press?

« Last Edit: August 15, 2022, 02:57:23 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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CleanTechnica

Janaury 17, 2023 By Steve Hanley

Wyoming 🐘🦖 Republicans Propose Electric Car 😈 Ban

 

Full article (check out the comments!):
https://cleantechnica.com/2023/01/17/wyoming-republicans-propose-electric-car-ban/

Just ONE of several comments I made: Steve Hanley, please check this out. It seems the action in the story you just published is part of a multi-pronged quixotic 🦖 effort (SEE: NAZI Battle of the Bulge 👉 WWII) to prevent the now inevitable bankrupting of 🐘 their 🦖 hydrocarbon hellspawn owners:


Janaury 20, 2023


SNIPPETS:
If you thought that Republicans value profits above all, think again! As it turns out, sometimes they will shoot themselves, corporate profits, and American jobs in the foot all at the same time, simply because they love to hate China.

Last week, Governor 🐘 Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) blocked Ford’s plan to build an ⚡ electric vehicle plant in Virginia because 🐵 he “felt that the right thing to do was to not recruit Ford as a front for China to America.”
That’s right: He’s talking about 🦅 Ford Motor Company, the quintessential 🦅 American corporation, which simply happens to be looking into a partnership with the Chinese company Contemporary Amperex Technology. ... ...

So, from climate change to Hunter Biden’s past, everything is always somehow China’s fault, according to the GOP, the party that proudly supported the offshoring of American jobs to China in the first place.

Next time Republicans lament the loss of American jobs and the weakening of American businesses or trot out Sinophobia to justify poor economic conditions, remember that they're only bringing up China to deflect from the fact that their fossil-fueled policies are actually to blame.

Read more: 👀
« Last Edit: June 25, 2023, 04:07:48 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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January 23, 2022



Since 1907, The 🦕 Methane Gas Industry's Known Gas Stoves Are Dangerous


In 2023, in response to a new study showing that over one in eight cases of childhood asthma can be attributed to gas stove use, the 🦕 methane gas 👿 industry attacked the study as "not substantiated by sound science," invoking a phrase popularized by the tobacco industry. The American Gas Association’s 😈 statement implied that inquiries into the negative health effects of gas stoves are a new phenomenon, writing that "as concerns over emissions from gas ranges are raised and debated," the trade association would "continue to work with regulators and policymakers to help ensure they have sound data to work with." 

This could not be further from the truth. In fact, the industry should support recently-proposed regulations requiring gas stoves to be sold with ventilation hoods because it itself has recognized the vital importance of ventilating gas stoves for over a hundred years.

Concerns about the health effects of gas stoves have existed since the 1800s. As early as 1839, "the injurious effects of an excess of nitrogen and carbonic acid gas" from gas stoves were already "too well known to require comment," according to a text on heating and ventilating public buildings and apartments.

Since at least the early 1900s, the methane gas industry has known about the dangers of exposure to gas stove emissions in unventilated rooms. In the Proceedings of the Natural Gas Association of America from 1909, on page 193, that association's President Mitchell said he believes "the association will go on record" that "no gas of any kind should go into a heating stove without a flue connection." The following day of the group's second annual meeting in 1907 opened with just that question, and debate ensued, with one person offering that they "cannot be responsible for people's carelessness." Ultimately, the group concluded that "we condemn any appliance installed in such a manner as to permit the products of combustion to enter the room."

However, these early concerns did not stop the methane gas industry from aggressively promoting its toxic product. On page 249 of the Proceedings, the group discusses the need for "constant advertising" about "the merits of gas as fuel" to gin up customers, such as the baker who "must be taught that no heat is more easily regulated: that the even temperature necessary for baking may be obtained from natural gas heat."

In 1928, a San Diego public health official cited the American Gas Association's "experimentation" on carbon monoxide poisoning, which found that "a good deal depends upon intelligent installation of the proper gas appliances." While proper installation is indeed important, the AGA’s work seemed to essentially deflect blame onto consumers of second-hand stoves, stoves "which have never been inspected or approved by the American Gas Association," and those that lack "proper ventilation."

In the following decades, the science behind the health consequences of gas stoves has strengthened. In 1947, MIT research chemist Richard Berger 👨‍🔬👍 wrote in "To Prevent Cancer" that " the housewife who doesn’t smoke may make most of her carcinogenic contacts with coal tars from the kitchen stove (when coal or gas fired)" and that "Measured in terms of freedom from generation of carcinogenic irritants, electric heat (because it has no combustion products) is ideal for cooking and heating."

(Side note: by 1958, the American Petroleum Institute's Smoke and Fumes' Committee on air pollution reported spending about a quarter-million dollars a year on research—about $2.5 million in today's dollars.)

In 1977, researchers found "boys and girls from homes in which gas was used for cooking" had "more cough," chest colds and bronchitis, and "concluded that elevated levels of oxides from nitrogen arising from the combustion of gas might be the cause of the increased respiratory illness." A follow-up in 1979 concurred: "The prevalence of one or more respiratory symptoms or diseases was higher in children from homes where gas was used for cooking than in those from homes where electricity was used."

The twin asthmatic influence of tobacco smoking and gas cooking was noted as early as 1983: "exposure of children during the first two years of life to gas cooking or cigarette smoking appears to be associated with an increased risk of hospitalization for respiratory illness."

Despite a century of "Cooking With Gas" advertisements, convincing people since 1909 that gas is great for baking and despite years of home renovation TV sponsorships, it looks like the🦕 industry 😈 conveniently forgot to let people know that it's dangerous not to ventilate your gas stove. 

The lack of public awareness about kitchen ventilation is evident in several more modern studies. In a 2007 survey, some 39% of California households never, rarely, or only sometimes used their kitchen exhaust fans while using the stovetop. A 2014 study found that while asthma rates were lower in children whose parents ventilated their gas stoves, over half of the families surveyed did not do so.

Gas stoves are the only gas appliance that isn't required to have outdoor ventilation, and many people, particularly renters in low-income urban areas already facing a disproportionate impact from climate change and industrial pollution, simply do not have any ventilation for their stoves. 

The health consequences of gas stoves have been "raised and debated" since at least 1839, and the methane gas industry admitted to the need for proper ventilation of gas stoves as early as 1909. However, in 2023, over one hundred years later, the industry is choosing to completely reject even the most basic regulations of their toxic product, while Republicans are promising that you'll have to pry their gas stoves out of their cold, dead hands.
https://climatenexus.org/hot-news/
« Last Edit: January 24, 2023, 01:05:32 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

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March 25, 2023



🐵 Dave 🐍 Wiegel At Semafor Latest To Carry 🦖 Koch 😇 Water About Supposed Schism ::) With 🦖 Trump


It's 2015, and Koch network operatives are reportedly not working with Donald Trump's presidential campaign, as its operatives go to work for the Donald Trump campaign.   

It's 2016, and Koch network operatives are staffing Donald Trump's presidential transition team, and the Trump administration.   

It's 2017, and Koch network operative Mike Pence is Vice President under Donald Trump.

It's 2018, and Koch network operatives are attacking the idea of more inclusive climate policy, and denying even their own anti-climate lobbying.

It's 2019, and Koch network operatives are reframing themselves as climate champs, and rebranding as “Stand Together,” while lying about the Green New Deal and denying the climate consensus. "

It's 2020, and a Koch network operative admits anyone who fell for the prior rebrand ruse is "going to be surprised" because the plan is "to go bigger than ever before." Ten months later, a Koch network operative, Charles “Chuckie” Koch gives an interview about the network's less-partisan rebrand, even as he sets up a new disinfo center at Tufts and spends over $1 billion helping Republicans in the 2020 elections.

It's 2021, and Koch network operatives are lobbying against EPA regulations, using hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to inject disinfo into schools and universities. 

It's 2022, and Koch network operatives are telling media they're going to figure out who's behind all this polarization, as though they're not the ones spreading fake news attacking their clean competitors, defending doing business in Russia, spending over $50 million on climate disinfo, buying a Supreme Court majority, and sending errand-boy Mike Pence on an ill-fated anti-ESG crusade potentially robbing taxpayers of hundreds of millions to billions of dollars.

It's 2023, and Koch network operatives are claiming to rebrand as less partisan and separate themselves from Donald Trump, not on ideological grounds, but because they want someone "who can win." Semafor, the newest entry in the access-driven DC press world, takes this as an opportunity to prove once again that it puts a greater priority in appeasing fossil fuel sponsors and billionaires who, like them, claim to want to reduce polarization, than it does on doing actual journalism. 

It's like Semafor's David Weigel read Popular Information's February explainer on "how Koch manipulates the media" and decided it was his turn to write the same exact sort of story that hacks have run about Koch and Trump since 2016, with a headline wondering, "Did Donald Trump break the Koch machine for good?"
 
No.

For the past eight years, Koch network operatives have played supposedly-savvy DC reporters for saps, pretending to oppose a political operation even as they staff it.

It's a testament to the perverse incentives of some Beltway press that—despite the obvious duplicity of these constant supposed rebrands—Koch network operatives keep finding success in running the same obvious disinfo play, even at outlets that, just days earlier, covered that playbook!

Full Newsletter:
https://newsletter.climatenexus.org/20230324-are-you-sure-youre-in-good-hands?
« Last Edit: March 25, 2023, 11:38:20 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12

AGelbert

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September 14, 2023 by Greg Palast

"They couldn’t kill us all"
100 Crucial Seconds of A Story Buried

The Osage of Oklahoma were the richest people on the planet.
Until 🦕🦖 they killed them.
For their oil.

This is an investigation I’ve worked on quietly for 27 years. And now I’m finally able to give you a 100-second preview, here…

Long Knife Teaser Original


In the 1920s, after discovery of the massive oil field on the Osage Reservation, the US government took away the Osage’s right to their wealth, instead appointing a white Guardian for each Osage to “protect” their money.

Here’s how their guardians protected them: Osage Anna Brown was shot in the head, her mother Lizzie poisoned, and her sister Rita was burnt to death when her home was dynamited. 


Sixty, and likely many more, Osage were assassinated.  And their “ guardians,” their murderers — inherited their oil rights.

That story, of the murder-for-oil Reign of Terror, is movingly portrayed in the film, Killers of the Flower Moon, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, to be released next month.

However, as Osage Principal Chief Geoffrey Standing Bear tells me, “But it’s not over. It’s still happening.

Where Killers of the Flower Moon ends, our new documentary, Long Knife, begins: the hidden story of the Osage over the 100 years since the Reign of Terror.

I’ve been waiting a long time to tell this story. Nearly three decades ago, as an expert in energy industry fraud and racketeering, I was asked to investigate the massive theft of oil from the Osage. The trail of evidence led straight to a guy I had never heard of, “Charlie” — Charles Koch.

I wrote a documentary exposing  “ Charlie” — but it never saw the light of day: no one cared about some small-time oil-rustler from Wichita.

Now the story can at last be told: the ☠️ genesis of the 🦕🦖 Koch brothers’ 💰 billions — and the creation of the Kochs’ political ☠️ Death Star. The Koch dark money machine was first launched for the purpose of 😈 quashing the federal indictment over his crimes against the Osage that promised to put Charles Koch behind bars for a decade.

We need your support to complete our film about the Kochs and the Osage’s unending fight for control of their own lands and lives.

Join me...
Add your name in the credits as a Producer, Co-Producer or Supporter.
Or simply be a Film Backer.


The “guardianship” horror was ended by Congress—but replaced by putting the Osage under “Trusteeship"
Chief Standing Bear explains what he wants you to know:

…This is like a 🦍 military occupation. It is. This is our land, and we bought this land, this mineral estate, with our own money. Department of Interior, says, ‘It belongs to us and, and not you.’ And who do they get to help manage? Well, take a look: Koch Oil. The end game is to extract as much wealth from our lands as possible.”

Standing Bear, an accomplished trial attorney, showed me his name listed in the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ big leather book of “incompetent” Osage.

It was not long ago that “incompetent” Osage literally couldn’t buy a sack of potatoes without approval of the BIA agent, the “Ma-he-kah,” the “Long Knife.”

We have located some extraordinary people who have waited years to tell this story: The lead FBI agent who had an armed showdown with Koch operatives. And the US Prosecutor in charge of the Koch investigation for the US Senate—two men furious that Koch could bury a federal indictment. (We have a copy of it!) And we have filmed the confession of one of the men “Charlie” ordered to steal from the Osage—wounded to his soul for what he had to do to keep his job.

And you’ll meet the Osage, warriors of a new kind. They have been left with 10,000 abandoned oil wells dripping poisons and spewing methane, possibly America’s worst source of ozone threatening discharges. Their fight has just begun.


We need your help, your commitment, your name in the credits, so these revelations can see the light of day.
 
LONG KNIFE
OSAGE OIL AND THE NEW TRAIL OF TEARS

Reported by Greg Palast
Directed by David Ambrose.
And produced by George DiCaprio…and YOU
« Last Edit: September 14, 2023, 04:39:04 pm by AGelbert »
So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you, for this sums up the Law and the Prophets. Matthew 7:12