David Koch, billionaire businessman and influential GOP donor, dies

Because a POS is dead, why the hell do you think?

 

No. Soros has no where near the toxic influence of the Kochs and their network going back decades but I would like to see corporate influence through billionaires and their lobbyists somehow removed from the political process so that government for and by the people can be more of a reality.

The same challenge of removing religion from politics for past generations will be in removing big money from politics for the coming generations.

 

The only think tanks you mentioned are Cato and Hertitage...what’s radical about them?

 

Can you read a chart? I know you know how to use google and you could research any of the think tanks or foundations mentioned in the charts if you had an honest desire to inform yourself. I even mentions the Heartland and the private trusts like TC4.

I guess I just answered my question as to whether you were just playing games or not.

And if you don't think Cato is radical then you don't understand who they are and what they do and are unlikely to understand even if explained to you.

 

Did Ginsburg or Soros die?

 

Cato's mission: "The mission of the Cato Institute is to originate, disseminate, and increase understanding of public policies based on the principles of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace."

The Founders could have written that. I guess to a socialist that is radical.

 

They are a hard right Libertarian organization that promotes climate change denial and corporate propaganda. That is what they do. And yes, organizations like this have radically restructured the American political and economic institution to benefit corporations and the very wealthy......to someone cheering on the inequality, social and environmental destruction this has caused and the polarization of the nation's political dialogue into the misinformed, scientifically illiterate hatefest we have today, then Cato must seem very mainstream and normal.

 

I can...you said radical think tanks and. Listed two along with a number of PACs. You are right the Koch’s were quite brilliant in their funding campaigns and spreading their message.

What’s radical about Cato?

 

The Russian collusion, Putins choice, seems to be living beyond its expiration date!

 

Cato isn't a climate change denial organization....just the opposite:https://www.cato.org/research/global-warming

The say it's real, and man contributes.

What else do you not know about this organizatino that you claim is so radical?

 

You are two weeks behind me in that decision.

 

Lol, you didn't even read any of the story lines beneath Cato's statement did you. They have been front and centre in funding all kinds of the denierati including Pat Michael's who was a fellow at the institute and Lord Monckton, one of the UK's weirder deniers. I think it is true that they are trying to moderate their image through the legal fight with the Koch's over share control and distancing themselves from Pat Michaels but the history is still there. Actually that is interesting and something I didn't know. They have changed their public policy from the glory days of Climategate:

"The Cato Institute in Washington, D.C., quietly shut down a program that for years sought to raise uncertainty about climate science, leaving the libertarian think tank co-founded by Charles Koch without an office dedicated to global warming.

The move came after Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who rejects mainstream researchers’ concerns about rising temperatures, left Cato earlier this year amid disagreements with officials in the organization."

“They informed me that they didn’t think their vision of a think tank was in the science business, and so I said, ‘OK, bye,’” Michaels said in an interview yesterday. “There had been some controversy going around the building for some time, so things got to a situation where they didn’t work out.”

A spokeswoman said Cato’s shuttering of the Center for the Study of Science does not represent a shift in the institute’s position on human-caused climate change. But the think tank moved decisively to close down the science wing that was overseen by Michaels. Ryan Maue, a meteorologist and former adjunct scholar, also left the center.

“While it is true that, with the departure of Pat Michaels, we have deactivated our Center for the Study of Science, we continue to work on science policy issues,” Khristine Brookes, the spokeswomen, wrote in an email. She didn’t mention climate change.

Michaels is among a small number of academics with legitimate climate science credentials who downplay the human contribution to rising temperatures. He is a frequent guest on Fox News and other conservative outlets, and he has spent years attacking efforts to address climate change. He was influential in the administration of President George H.W. Bush, and he helped turn the GOP away from climate policy at a time when conservatives were embracing it (Climatewire, Dec. 5, 201. That shift has endured.

Cato also is no longer affiliated with Richard Lindzen, an emeritus professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has long been critical of established climate science. Lindzen was a distinguished fellow at the think tank. It’s unclear when he left Cato, and Brookes declined to comment on personnel issues.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/201...n-prominent-center-challenged-climate-science

https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Cato_Institute


LOl, I bet you don't even know who Richard Lindzen is.

So it looks like they are distancing themselves from their previous position as the effects of climate change become more indisputable. However, in the past they have fought tax reform, produced all sorts of papers and support for privatization of everything from education to the water supply and social security. The opposed campaign finance reform and any regulation on Wall St. after 2008.

They may have moderated a bit as the evidence for global warming becomes more and more undeniable but when major shares were owned by the Kochs the were front in centre in trying to delay any action on climate change as long as possible though every tactic the right used from attacking scientists to funding crackpots like Michaels and Monckton.

They also helped the tobacco industry by funding crackpot research that cigarette smoke wasn't harmful and even beneficial.

You read their mission statement and soak it up like cool-aid. I sense it is because you just don't want to know or you would have accessed any of the videos or links I posted up-thread and gotten all this information.

https://www.thenation.com/article/independent-and-principled-behind-cato-myth/

I know you want to minimize the amount of money the Koch's have put into influencing politicians and funding Libertarian causes but you really should read or watch on utube any of Jane Mayer's Dark Money series or Naomi Oreske's Merchants of Doubt presentation if you want to understand how the Koch's network has used billions of dollars to influence the political discourse in America and the delay of any action to mitigate emissions and the effects we are seeing all around the planet due to climate change.

In fact, much of the discourse you see on forums like this, especially the same old denier talking points you hear regurgitated over and over again are a direct result of blogs and think tanks funded by the Koch network as well as the research of the odd contrarian scientists like Pat Michaels, or Roy Spencer or Willie Soon whose research is directly funded through fossil fuel funded organizations like the Heartland Institute or Cato through it's past association with Michaels.



"Michaels played a starring role in Channel 4's The Great Global Warming Swindle and is regularly used by the US media, largely because he is one of the very few deniers who has any relevant scientific credentials.

He maintains that: "When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too."

Something he is less keen to reveal is that, as a leaked memo from an electricity company shows, he has recently been paid at least $100,000 by companies involved in coal-fired power production to make the public case against climate change. In 2007 Michaels withdrew as an expert witness from a court case about climate change, after it became clear that his other sources of funding could be revealed to the public."

"Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, whose academic qualification is a classics degree, maintains that "politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." He came to public notice with a long paper published on the website of the Sunday Telegraph, accusing the UN of scientific fraud. His paper was filled with sciencey equations and calculations, which were rapidly dismissed as bunkum by real scientists.

He has threatened several of those who have challenged his scientific claims with libel suits, but they have not yet materialised. Though he has never held a seat in the Lords, he maintained in a threatening letter to two US senators that he was "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature".

He has also claimed that, among other unlikely feats, he was responsible for winning the Falklands war. His grand statements about climate science and his own credentials have earned him the nickname among some environmentalists of Viscount Monckhausen."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/06/climate-change-deniers-top-10

This is interesting:

"Not only does the climate denial movement appear in danger of aging out, raising funds is getting more difficult. Traditionally funded by fossil fuel companies, Heartland’s oil and gas money has dried up in recent years as the scientific consensus around climate change has grown stronger, putting oil and gas companies under pressure from shareholders and the public to stop funding groups that deny the problem.

Earlier this year the libertarian Cato Institute disbanded its climate denial program, the Center for the Study of Science. And yesterday’s Heartland conference had fewer than half the number of speakers and panelists as its first International Climate Change Conference in 2008. The number of sponsoring organizations has also fallen by more than half since 2008."

The vast majority of the world’s climate scientists agree that climate change could prove devastating to life as we know it unless we take swift and sweeping action to decarbonize the economy . But those “wild predictions have been pronouncedly exaggerated,” according to the British gadfly Lord Christopher Monckton, who holds the title 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley.

One of the more colorful figures in the climate denial universe, Monckton ticked off a list of problems scientists have linked to climate change that Monckton says we really don’t need to worry about. According to him, the world is seeing less, not more, drought; sea levels are falling not rising; forest fires are causing less damage; hurricane activity is decreasing, too; and carbon dioxide is actually improving the global environment by “greening” places like Australia’s Great Sandy Desert. “That’s why we need more CO2, because it greens the planet,” he declared."

http://inthesetimes.com/article/219...e-denial-conference-heartland-institute-trump

 

There statement is clear...they believe in it and man had has a hand

 

Yeah, well, my mission statement is to embrace Trumpers for the wonderful, engaging and truly special little people that they are and to hold their dear leader's every word close to my heart because a little alternate facts never hurt no one..........

Catchy, huh?

 

Sure is

 

Why don't you pick a group you like and we'll dig up all the dirt we can find on them?

 

Here;s more:

 

I'm sure whoever inherits that money won't be supporting AOC.

 

Kay......off topic but how bout the Field Ornithologists of British Columbia ........or better yet, the Union of Concerned Scientists......

 

Giving millions of dollars to charity makes someone a POS?

 

So keep the US fossil fuel dependent on fossil fuel? How does that make sense?

Can the US be powered without the use of fossil fuel?

 

Try... the US dependent on fossil fuel.

David Koch tried his best for you to not find out by not even trying.
While fossil fuel, something he preached, is damaging the environment.

 

What do you think would've been tried if Koch hadn't have got in the way?

 

So the "Drain the Swamp" crowd is mourning the loss of a "Swamp" architect? I don't think I've ever witnessed a more hypocritical, oblivious crowd then the MAGA crowd.

 

That the US would have build the biggest windmill on the planet.
You know,... get some science in there for the Chinese to steal.
Instead,... the US is at the back of the line.