Happy New Year 2024 (and sorry for the forum being offline some hours) /DM
“The firm, it appears, was Vigilant Resources International, whose founder and chairman, Howard Safir, had been New York City’s police commissioner under the former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani,” she writes in “Dark Money.”
air-quality monitoring equipment, which he told me showed “deadly levels of hydrogen sulfide,” a foul-smelling, colorless gas that has proven carcinogenic to rats and mice. Guice took measurements in the morning, midday, and evening, and documented them all. When he told the Georgia-Pacific supervisors that he was getting readings so high that they indicated a potential for immediate illness and death, he says the company blamed his equipment. After he protested this, they offered to build a roof over the fields where the waste was being spread, but he told them that this would be like building a toxic gas chamber. “They told me it was my problem. They knew it was dangerous, but their attitude was: keep your mouth shut, do the job, and don’t get in anyone’s business,” according to Guice. Eventually, a company official took her own readings, which he says confirmed his own. At this point, the company decided to build a huge stainless-steel chain-link fence around the perimeter of its property, “so you can’t see where the work is,” he told me. Once he was able to get employment elsewhere, Guice, who had been contacted by the filmmakers behind “Company Town,” decided to blow the whistle.
The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and its Energy, Environment and Agriculture (EEA) task force has been the source of a number of “model” bills and resolutions introduced in state legislatures across the country that benefit the fossil fuel industry and weaken environmental protections. A registration list obtained by Documented from a FOIA provides a rare glimpse at the fossil fuel corporations, utilities, industry trade associations, right-wing think tanks and legislators behind many of these policies.
Newly released figures show that Koch Industries has spent almost 20 percent more on federal lobbying expenses so far this year than it had at the same time last year. With the U.S. House in Democratic hands, Koch, like other fossil fuel companies, is forced to play defense on energy issues, along with pushing back against Trump trade policies.Koch spent $9.1 million on lobbying for the first three quarters of 2019, both for the company’s own lobbyists and outside lobbying firms. At the same point last year, the company had spent $7.7 million.
As the political and philanthropic network of billionaire libertarian Charles Koch employs its latest PR strategy, the Charles Koch Foundation (CKF) and the Charles Koch Institute (CKI) increased their giving to media organizations by roughly $1 million in 2018.Koch has generally funded right-wing organizations such as the Daily Caller News Foundation, which funds much of the content on the Daily Caller website, and the Reason Foundation, which publishes libertarian-minded news and opinion on Reason.com. These and other donations continued in 2018, but the two foundations also contracted with conservative media outlet RealClearPolitics and two center-left publications, The Atlantic and Ozy Media.Overall, CKF and CKI combined to spend nearly $3.5 million on media grants and contracts in 2018. This amount is a small, but growing, portion of the foundations’ annual donations. In 2018, CKF gave out $127.5 million in donations, mostly to fund Koch’s right-wing educational and political infrastructure.
A joint investigation from CORRECTIV and Frontal21 reveals how the American Heartland Institute is supporting climate change deniers in Germany with the goal of undermining climate protection measures. We went undercover to meet with the institute’s chief strategist. He told us how the network of climate change deniers works, how donations are disguised and how they intend to use a German YouTuber affiliated with the AfD to reach young people. In the end, he made us a concrete offer.
Who’s Behind the ‘Reopen’ Protests?Link >> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/opinion/coronavirus-protests-astroturf.html
... the hero image slips a bit ...
ExxonMobil, Koch and Mercer family are past funders of critics of stay-at-home orders as fossil fuel industry struggles amid lockdowns
The Save Our Country coalition, which supports “liberate” protesters, is deeply tied to ALEC, a conservative group that has helped to pass laws in eleven states ratcheting up penalties for protesting near oil and gas pipelines.
I liked that one, vox_mundi. But aren't there as many liberal billionaires in technology and entertainment and sports as there are conservative ones in industry? Why don't they do the mirror image of the Koch brothers?
i knew one of the Koch brothers through a friend and he was a Libertarian, nothing else, no evil agenda, just didn’t like Government and gave plenty of money to the poor nd did plenty of good deeds.
TODAY’S 6-3 SUPREME COURT decision restricting the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions will benefit power plants and fossil fuel companies throughout the U.S. and profoundly hobble the government’s ability to address the worsening climate catastrophe.The decision, written by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Amy Coney Barrett, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, finds that the EPA does not have the authority to impose caps on carbon emissions by mandating a shift to cleaner energy sources. The ruling means that Congress, rather than the EPA and its staff of scientific experts, will handle the critical task of curbing greenhouse gas emissions.“Today, the Court strips the EPA of the power Congress gave it to respond to ‘the most pressing environmental challenge of our time,’” Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Stephen Breyer. “Whatever else this Court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change. Yet the Court today prevents congressionally authorized agency action to curb power plants’ carbon dioxide emissions. The Court appoints itself—instead of Congress or the expert agency—the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening.”A number of energy magnates and fossil fuel trade groups pushed for the case that could kneecap the agency and boost their profits. But perhaps no one did more to bring West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency to the Supreme Court — or ensure that ultraconservative justices would be on the bench to decide in the companies’ favor — than Charles Koch.
