I Been Tellin' Ya, Dammit

This - like most other "conservative" projects - is all about privatization. 

• Fund the campaigns for wingnut school board candidates
• Cut School budgets
• Complain about "underperforming schools"
• Make sure you use negative terms like "government schools" and name your efforts to kill public schools things like "Kids First" or "Parents Matter" or something that sounds right, but is actually a wolf-in-sheep's-clothing kinda shit 
• In the meantime, steal wages and push down on the benefits so regular people have less opportunity - and far fewer resources available - to fight for their interests

REVEALED: Confidential documents describe secret effort to elect lawmakers for school privatization

Confidential documents reveal that a group of school privatization groups actually work together to use their resources to try to buy seats in the Tennessee legislature.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WTVF) — Confidential documents reveal that a group of school privatization groups, each claiming to be separate entities with separate agendas, actually work together to try to buy seats in the Tennessee legislature for candidates who are willing to vote against traditional public schools.

The documents, leaked to NewsChannel 5 Investigates, show how those groups — working as part of what they call the "Tennessee Coalition for Students" — sometimes try to convince voters that politicians who support traditional public schools are just bad people.

"You're creating an oligarchy of people who influence your policy," said J.C. Bowman, a self-described conservative who serves as executive director of the Professional Educators of Tennessee.

"We're getting the best government that money can buy, and they are buying it."

Case in point: a seat in the state House bought and paid for in 2022 by special interests.

Running for the House in 2022, Maryville realtor Bryan Richey had no fancy ads of his own, and he spent a measly $15,000 in the Republican primary.

But Richey had opinions that appealed to school privatization groups.

"In my personal opinion on school choice, we have taxpayer dollars that are there to educate students. I don't care what arena - whether it's private school, public school, home school," Richey told NewsChannel 5 Investigates.

As a result, a group of powerful forces who want to privatize Tennessee schools got together and decided Richey would be a good investment.

Tennesseans for Putting Students First mailer in support of Bryan Richey
"My understanding is that there was quite a bit of money came in from outside the state," said former Rep. Bob Ramsey, R-Maryville.

During the Republican primary, Ramsey found himself under a well-financed attack by the independent groups supporting Richey.

One Facebook ad from school privatization forces told voters, "Bob Ramsey voted to raise your gas tax 30 percent."

Online and by mail, those groups began to demonize the incumbent representative who had always supported traditional public schools.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Ramsey: "At some point did you realize that you might be in trouble?"

"Yes," Ramsey said.

"When the mailers just would not quit coming and they were so offensive and fictitious and cruel, really, just plain cruel, I knew it was going to be a rather blood bath on my end."

When the reports were in, Richey got $52,038 in help from Make Liberty Win, a dark money group with ties to billionaire Charles Koch.

The Tennessee Federation for Children spent $38,439 to help Richey, who got another $30,044 in ad spending from Team Kid PAC and $15,484 from Tennesseans for Putting Students First.

Altogether, that's $136,005 — nine times as much as Richey spent himself.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked Richey: "I was trying to figure out how these seemingly independent groups decided that you were their guy."

"I have no clue," the newly elected representative insisted.

But the confidential documents obtained by NewsChannel 5 Investigates show how those seemingly independent groups work together to elect lawmakers who will vote their way.

We showed our stash of documents, some from campaigns in 2016, to Tennessee Education Association lobbyist Jim Wrye.

"So this was the presentation they were using?" Wrye asked. "Phil, what I wouldn't have done to have this right then and there."

We asked Wrye: "Is it widely known that these groups are working together?"

"Well, it's kind of blatantly obvious," Wrye said.

Again, we pressed. "But they don't admit it?"

"No, certainly not," the TEA lobbyist agreed.

Among the documents were ones drafted for the 2016 legislative races and submitted to a foundation controlled by the billionaire Walton family of Walmart fame, asking for funding for their "Tennessee Coalition for Students."

That coalition included the groups Tennesseans for Student Success, StudentsFirst (now known as TennesseeCAN), Stand for Children and the American Federation for Children.

Among the coalition's goals: "the defeat of at least four anti-education reform incumbents" — with a total proposed budget of $3.7 million dollars.

"I knew they were working together, but I'm surprised at how much political money that they are spending in our campaigns," J.C. Bowman said.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates showed Bowman a strategy document where the groups describe plans to use their big money in "key races ... where the opportunity exists to shape the balance of power in the Legislature."

As a litmus test, the groups would only support politicians who support privately operated charter schools, state interventions to take over traditional public schools and private choice — in other words, school vouchers to send tax dollars to private schools.

We asked Bowman: "Should the public know if the Walton family is trying to pick legislators in Tennessee?"

"Absolutely," he insisted.

"Like NASCAR, we joke about it that NASCAR has the little signs of all the sponsors they have. Politicians are going to need to wear the same thing."

In the case of then Nashville state Sen. Steve Dickerson, R-Nashville, the document notes: "We must protect this seat."

It was an effort viewed to be worth an investment of $563,807.

In the case of then Senate Education Chair Delores Gresham, R-Somerville, "This is a seat that we must all protect."

The investment there: $307,097.

And while the groups cited then Rep. Eddie Smith, R-Knoxville, as a "reliable vote" on most issues, their main concern was keeping his Democratic opponent, Gloria Johnson, out of office.

Johnson read the document's summary of why she was viewed as a threat: "She would create almost incalculable problems because of her effectiveness."

"I've never been so proud in my life," the Knoxville Democrat said with a laugh.

Ironically, two years earlier, the same groups sent out a mailer branding her "one of the least effective legislators in the state House."

"Everything thing they do is built on, is a house of lies," Johnson said. "They win elections by lying about their opponents and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Republican Bob Ramsey said he believes he was targeted in 2022 because of his support for traditional public schools.

"I trust our education system implicitly. I am a product of it, my children were products of it," he said.

One of the groups attacked him for supporting a Republican plan to increase gas taxes to pay for roads.

Then after his defeat, they put out a news release touting the outcome as a sign that their education agenda was winning.

"They ran on everything other than education," Jim Wrye observed.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates asked the TEA lobbyist, "So why do they not run on those issues?"

"Simple, I mean, the candidates would lose every time," Wrye said.

With Bryan Richey, the money invested proved to be a good bet.

This year, he helped defeat a Republican-sponsored bill to protect successful school districts from having those privately operated charter schools forced on them by the state.

He also tried to expand school vouchers to fund private schools statewide — a platform he received thanks to those school privatization groups that wrote the checks to get him elected.

NewsChannel 5 Investigates reached out to the groups involved in the coalition.

None would go on camera, and they did not respond to a number of specific questions posed by email.

Still, in separate statements, they did not deny that they do have this arrangement nor that they are working together to try to flip even more seats to their side in next year's elections.

Ryan Cantrell, vice president of government relations for the American Federation for Children, said in a statement:

"As you may know, coalitions of all types regularly come together to support public policy issues on which they agree. We are proud to work on our shared cause alongside allies, all of whom may have various focuses and positions but agree that parents should be empowered with more choice in education. We comply with every applicable law in our work and will continue working to advance school choice, which polls consistently show is a top issue for voters in both parties."

Sky Arnold, communications director for Tennesseans for Student Success, said in a statement:

"Tennesseans for Student Success is dedicated to a vision of providing and ensuring access to a high-quality public education for all students and we support leaders who have demonstrated a commitment to that vision. Decisions about how to engage are made by TSS, and where appropriate, communicated to individuals or organizations with shared priorities following the guidelines and regulations established by state and/or federal campaign laws. We are strictly focused on ensuring that all students, regardless of income or zip code, have access to an effective, high-quality public education."

Arnold insisted that the group "has never advocated for any form of private school choice," although he did not deny that the group works with the coalition to elect lawmakers who are willing to back school vouchers.

TennesseeCAN did not respond to NewsChannel 5's inquiry.

Documenting The Fuckery

I suspect most people will tag this TL;DNR. OK fine - don't give it its due - ya big baby.

Look, I suck at reading. It took me like 40 minutes to get thru this thing. At least give it a shot. Get some of the background on what we're up against.

What Ginni Thomas and Leonard Leo wrought: How a justice’s wife and a key activist started a movement

Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a trove of so-called “dark money” was about to be unleashed. Two activists prepared to seize the moment.

The Supreme Court’s decision in the 2010 Citizens United case transformed the world of politics. It loosened restrictions on campaign spending and unleashed a flow of anonymous donor money to nonprofit groups run by political activists.

In the months before the ruling dropped in January of that year, a group of conservative activists came together to create just such an organization. Its mission would be to, at the time, block then-President Barack Obama’s pet initiatives.

The activists included Federalist Society leader Leonard Leo and his ideological soulmate, a hard-edged activist named Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

“Ginni really wanted to build an organization and be a movement leader,” said a person familiar with her thinking at that time. “Leonard [Leo] was going to be the conduit of that.”

She also had a rich backer: Harlan Crow, the manufacturing billionaire who had helped Thomas and her husband in many ways, from funding luxury vacations to picking up tuition payments for their great-nephew.

At the time, the Citizens United ruling was widely expected, as the court had already signaled its intentions. When it came, it upended nearly 100 years of campaign spending restrictions.

The conservative legal movement seized the moment with greater success than any other group, and the consequences have shaped American jurisprudence and politics in dramatic ways.

From those early discussions among Leo, Thomas and Crow would spring a billion-dollar force that has helped remake the judiciary and overturn longstanding legal precedents on abortion, affirmative action and many other issues. It funded legal scholars to devise theories to challenge liberal precedents, helped to elect state attorneys general willing to apply those theories and launched lavish campaigns for conservative judicial nominees who would cite those theories in their rulings from the bench.

The movement’s triumphs are now visible but its engine remains hidden: A billion-dollar network of groups, most of which are registered as tax-exempt charities or social welfare organizations. Taking advantage of gaps in disclosure laws, they shield the identities of most of their donors and some of the recipients of the funds. Among those who’ve been paid by the groups are leading thinkers and individuals with close personal ties to Leo — including a whopping $7 million to a group run by a close friend and his wife. They also include a for-profit business for which Leo himself is chairman and which received tens of millions of dollars from his nonprofit network.

Leo’s role as the central figure in this movement has long been known, culminating in his acquisition last year of what many believe to be the largest political donation in history. Few are aware of the extent to which the movement’s baby steps were taken in concert with Ginni Thomas.

Two months before the Citizens United decision, but after the justices had signaled their intentions by requesting new arguments, attorney Cleta Mitchell — later to play a role in Donald Trump’s false claims about the 2020 elections — filed papers for Ginni Thomas to create a nonprofit group of a type that ultimately benefited from the decision. Leo was one of two directors listed on a separate application to conduct business in the state of Virginia. Thomas was president. She signed it on New Year’s Eve of 2009, and Crow provided much of the initial cash. A key Leo aide, Sarah Field, would come aboard to help Thomas manage the group, which they called Liberty Central.

After Liberty Central went public, it provoked an outcry over a Supreme Court justice’s wife promoting causes like overturning Obamacare that were before her husband’s court. Leo and Thomas changed gears. His network reactivated a dormant group, the Judicial Education Project, which would go on to become a major supplier of amicus briefs before the nation’s highest court. She created a for-profit consulting business using a similar name — Liberty Consulting — that enabled her to perform consulting work for conservative activist groups.

The Judicial Education Project supplied some of her business: Documents indicate Leo ordered at least one recipient of his groups’ funds, Kellyanne Conway, to make payments to Ginni Thomas for unspecified work, according to a Washington Post story earlier this year.

Now, Liberty Consulting is a focus of interest from congressional committees probing the Supreme Court’s ethics disclosures. Senate Democrats have demanded that Leo and Crow provide a list of “gifts, payments, or other items of value” they’ve given Thomas and her husband.

Meanwhile, Leo’s network of nonprofits — whose annual donations have skyrocketed into the hundreds of millions of dollars — is the subject of an investigation by the Washington, D.C., attorney general, POLITICO reported last month. The probe followed a POLITICO report in March that raised questions about whether Leo’s groups were enriching him and his friends by hiring their businesses and donating to their nonprofit groups.

Together, the probes have combined to raise the question of whether Leo’s groups have taken advantage of lax disclosure laws to send additional business and funds to Ginni Thomas, among other activists. That would be legal as long as Thomas was providing services commensurate with the payments.

“The real question then is, ‘what is Ginni Thomas qualified to do, what did they pay her to do, and was it fair market value?’” said Laura Solomon, a Pennsylvania tax attorney who represents hundreds of charitable and other tax-exempt organizations and philanthropists.

Leo, Thomas, Crow and Conway did not respond to questions about their financial relationships, and whether Leo’s groups continued to ask contractors to work with Thomas.

Asked how much money overall Leo has directed to Thomas, when the payments began and if they ever stopped, a Leo spokesman responded: “No comment.”

Thomas’ representative, attorney Mark Paoletta, did not respond to questions.

In a July 25 letter to Congress, Leo’s lawyers said his advocacy work is protected under the First Amendment and that any congressional inquiry into his relationships with Supreme Court justices is “politically charged” and tantamount to harassment.

In a July interview with The Maine Wire, a conservative outlet near his home, Leo spoke about his efforts to “defend the Constitution” and why his nonprofit groups don’t reveal their donors.

“It’s not to hide in the shadows,” he said. “It’s because we want ideas judged by their own moral and intellectual force.”

Launching a Movement

Many people trace the start of the conservative legal movement to 1982, the year of the founding of the Federalist Society, which provided a forum for law students and professors with conservative ideas to incubate their theories.

But the movement that has had such a profound impact on the courts today — one that involves money and politics, more than legal theories or principles — gained steam in the wake of the Citizens United decision.

The case followed a highly unusual path — one blazed by a five-justice conservative majority who seemed determined to strike a blow against campaign finance restrictions.

Initially, the dispute centered on whether a conservative nonprofit’s unflattering documentary on former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton violated campaign finance laws. Instead of resolving the case along the lines argued by the lawyers, the justices took the unusual step of asking for re-arguments based on a sweeping question — whether they should overrule prior decisions approving laws that limited spending on political campaigns.

The re-argument took place on Sept. 9, 2009. Two months later, on Nov. 6, Mitchell filed an IRS application on behalf of Ginni Thomas to form the group that became Liberty Central Inc. Paperwork Thomas signed on New Year’s Eve listed Leo, then the Federalist Society’s executive vice president, as one of two directors. Field, one of Leo’s right-hand people on state courts at the Federalist Society, came aboard to help Thomas in her new endeavor.

Neither Field nor Mitchell responded to requests for comment.

The application was approved seven days before Clarence Thomas joined the 5-4 majority on a decision that would open the door to a new era of major spending on groups like the one his wife was forming. After putting up $500,000, the lion’s share of her nonprofit’s seed money, Crow held an event for Ginni Thomas at his palatial home in Dallas. The group later made clear its goal was disassembling President Barack Obama’s agenda, mainly the Affordable Care Act.

The Supreme Court

Justice Anthony Kennedy, a Ronald Reagan appointee, assumed in his majority opinion in Citizens United that donations and spending around such groups would be transparent. Justice Thomas, in his concurring opinion, argued against “forcibly disclosed donor information,” which could “pre-empt citizens’ exercise of their First Amendment rights.”

The Citizens United decision — which extended free speech rights to corporations, nonprofits and unions — effectively curbed efforts to rein in political spending, while paving the way for follow-up rulings from courts and the Federal Election Commission that would unleash additional billions of dollars in donations. Those donors would spawn a boom in tax-exempt “charitable” and “social welfare” groups as vehicles for spending on political activity.

A key part of the attraction to these groups was that they could shield the identity of donors, many of whom are reluctant to invite scrutiny of their own agendas.

Speaking out

Just five weeks after the decision, on Feb. 18, Ginni Thomas took the stage at CPAC, an annual gathering of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists. Wearing a white T-shirt emblazoned with a Liberty Central logo, Thomas introduced herself as an “ordinary citizen from Omaha, Nebraska” who felt “called to the front lines” of a battle against “arrogant elites” who “think they know how to manage our lives from cradle to grave.” She evoked the passing of “patriots,” including her 91-year-old mother and Barbara Olson, who had perished in the plane that hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, as her inspiration.

“When she was gone, I knew I had to work harder,” Thomas said of Olson, whose widower, Ted, had been a lawyer for Citizens United.

Thomas did not credit Crow, Leo or the Citizens United decision for her new grassroots initiative. That year, she was paid $120,500 from Liberty Central, according to tax records.

The group was destined to have only a short lifespan, thanks in part to a misstep by Thomas. In October, she left a voicemail for Anita Hill, the woman who had accused her husband of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings in 1991. In it, Thomas demanded an apology for the 19-year-old accusations.

“I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband,” Thomas reportedly said, asking Hill to “pray about this.”

The ensuing news reports drew unwanted attention to Thomas’ new nonprofit, which by then was expressly targeting Obama and his agenda. The news led many ethics specialists to question whether it was appropriate for a Supreme Court justice’s spouse to be leading such a political effort, especially with the court preparing to consider a high-profile challenge to Obama’s health care initiative.

The following month, it was reported that Thomas was stepping down from her top leadership position at Liberty Central, which was eventually absorbed into another nonprofit. Leo came to her defense, bemoaning the “spat of press stories about a single phone call that she made.”

Incorporation records show Thomas had already pivoted to form her own for-profit consulting firm in the state of Virginia. On Nov. 16, Thomas’ “expedited service request” to incorporate her consulting business was approved. And Leo turned to another vehicle he could use to pay her with no apparent paper trail. The Judicial Education Project, a tax-exempt charity that had been founded by three of Leo’s associates in 2004 but soon became dormant, was reactivated and began receiving donations in 2010.

And far from retreating, Thomas merely moved her networking behind the scenes.

“She remained active in the [conservative legal] movement for sure,” said the person who had attended early meetings about her plans and who was granted anonymity to discuss private meetings. “People just always assumed she had to stay below the radar.”

She was a frequent attendee at major coordinating events among conservative nonprofits and was considered “a very popular activist figure,” the person said.

Thomas’ brief run as president of her own nonprofit had given her a taste of a lifelong dream. Thomas grew up tagging along with her mother, a Nebraska GOP Party activist. A 1986 Good Housekeeping article that mentioned the young Virginia Lamp said she aspired to run for Congress, but her biggest challenge was “finding a husband who’ll be supportive of a woman in public life.”

Liberty Central had been explicit about its intent to assist “citizen activists,” launching an “activism how-to website” in August and an ad campaign a month before the 2010 midterm election in which challenging Obamacare was the conservative movement’s primary objective.

Thomas continued her activism after leaving the nonprofit, with Leo helping to send money in her direction.

According to the documents obtained by the Post, Leo told Conway he wanted her to “give ... another $25K” to Thomas and that the records should have “no mention of Ginni, of course.” At Leo’s behest, Conway’s polling firm billed the Leo-affiliated JEP $25,000 that day as a “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, Leo arranged for between $80,000 and $100,000 to go to Thomas through Conway for unspecified work in 2011 and 2012, according to the documents.

Limiting disclosures

There is no direct paper trail for JEP’s spending on Conway’s business, let alone Thomas.

The IRS requires that nonprofits must identify only their top five highest-paid contractors making more than $100,000 annually, but that leaves many contractors off the list. True North Research, an investigative watchdog group, found at least $25 million of the $240 million that JEP has spent on grants and expenses since 2010 — including salaries and contractor fees — went to people whose identities were not revealed.

“This money could have gone to anyone,” said Lisa Graves, the leader of True North Research and former deputy assistant attorney general in the Clinton administration.

In its filings for the year after Leo asked Conway to give money to Thomas, the JEP reported spending a total of $150,000 on “polling,” which could have covered the payments, but Conway’s firm, The Polling Company, was not listed on its paperwork. A spokesman for Leo said JEP used “multiple polling contractors” and that he is “unaware” of any connections between Thomas and those contractors.

In 2011, the judiciary’s policy-making body, a panel overseen by Chief Justice John Roberts, received a complaint from a sitting judge after a watchdog group revealed that Clarence Thomas hadn’t reported hundreds of thousands of dollars earned by his wife.

Clarence Thomas filed amended reports, explaining that his wife’s income was “inadvertently omitted due to a misunderstanding of the filing instructions.” No formal review was conducted, though the panel asserted there was no “willful” wrongdoing by the justice.

The filing requirements themselves were porous enough, however, that justices could effectively omit naming any of their spouse’s clients or the amount of money they were receiving. Thus, in subsequent disclosures, Clarence Thomas would go on to simply list that his wife had received money from her consulting business, without detailing how much or from whom, or whether any of the people paying her had interests before the Supreme Court.

Likewise, gaps in disclosure requirements for nonprofits were large enough that no one could keep track of who was funding Leo’s network. In some instances, the gaps were exacerbated by irregularities. In 2011, JEP reported to the IRS having received no more than $50,000 in donations, even though another Leo-aligned entity, the Wellspring Committee, reported having given JEP $136,000 that year. A spokesman said JEP took in more than expected and accounted for the surplus in a subsequent reports.

The lack of a requirement to report donors became more noteworthy as JEP’s revenue began to grow.

In 2012 — the year Leo asked Conway to direct payments to Thomas through Conway’s polling business — the formerly inactive nonprofit reported receiving $1.5 million. The next year, Thomas’ former law clerk, Carrie Severino, became one of the group’s three directors; by 2014, the nonprofit’s annual revenues were up to $9 million from nothing reported just five years previously, according to tax filings.

Severino did not respond to questions through the Judicial Crisis Network, another Leo-aligned group which she heads.

Pushing an agenda

Meanwhile, JEP was becoming a major vehicle for filing amicus briefs on behalf of the conservative legal movement seeking to influence the Supreme Court. More than just expressions of support for one side or the other, these briefs often encompassed extensive fact-finding and analysis, spanning scores of pages. The goal was to offer conservative justices arguments that they could incorporate into their opinions.

The lead attorney on the first amicus brief JEP joined was former Thomas law clerk John Eastman, who would later advise Trump on theories for overturning the 2020 election. The brief argued that Obamacare’s provision requiring minimum coverage was an “oppressive mandate” and that it was “tainted” by “abuses of the legislative process.” With the support of Roberts, the court ruled against JEP’s position. Clarence Thomas, along with the other conservative justices, joined a dissent that would have found the individual mandate unconstitutional. In later years, the mandate would be effectively ended by Congress repealing its tax penalties.

Many of the JEP’s subsequent briefs listed Severino as counsel of record.

In 2013, JEP filed a Severino-authored brief arguing in favor of striking down a Massachusetts law that made it a crime to stand within 35 feet of entrances to abortion clinics. The state claimed the law was necessary to prevent clashes between demonstrators. JEP, however, argued that abortion clinics provide “incomplete and misleading information about the abortion procedure” and that the law interfered with the rights of “sidewalk counselors.” The court unanimously struck down the law, though a five-justice majority rejected JEP’s contention that the law was aimed at curbing the rights of anti-abortion protesters.

The University of Texas Tower is shown on the university campus.
In 2015, JEP filed a brief in support of a petitioner challenging a University of Texas affirmative action program. | Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

In 2014, JEP weighed in on the landmark case of Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, in which the court decided that companies can opt out of contraception coverage for employees based on the owners’ religious objections. The opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito and joined by Clarence Thomas, adopted many of the arguments JEP made in its Severino-authored brief, mainly that Obamacare’s coverage requirements burdened the Hobby Lobby owner’s right to free exercise of religion.

In 2015, JEP filed a brief in support of a petitioner challenging a University of Texas affirmative action program, which it called a “back-door” and secretive process. Clarence Thomas and Alito agreed it was “categorically unconstitutional.” The court’s majority disagreed, but later, in 2023, a more conservative court would adopt the position advocated by JEP.

Curbing oversight

Efforts to determine who was funding such advocacy, and whether they had direct interest in the cases, are complicated by gaps in disclosure rules and oversight of nonprofit groups. The rules governing such groups were designed for traditional charities such as Kiwanis Clubs or PTAs. But once activist groups started organizing under the same tax provisions, the IRS was forced to become the arbiter of what constituted politics and what did not.

Since JEP was registered as a charity, “the [IRS] limitations are very clear that you can’t do anything engaged in politics” and cannot organize a nonprofit for the benefit of any private interest or individual, said John Koskinen, a former IRS commissioner from 2013 to 2017 who reviewed the paperwork provided by POLITICO. Though such groups can engage in advocacy and limited lobbying, they are prohibited from participating in campaigns for or against political candidates.

Those who claimed the IRS wasn’t properly scrutinizing such groups quickly ran into a powerful countermovement claiming the opposite.

Mitchell, the lawyer who had helped Thomas set up her own ill-fated nonprofit, began championing a public relations offensive to combat IRS scrutiny of the same nonprofits her allies were erecting. She claimed that the tax agency, then overseen by the Obama administration, was disproportionately targeting conservative groups and called for an independent counsel.

The agency “is so corrupt and so rotten to the core that it cannot be salvaged,” Mitchell said in 2014.

A two-year investigation by the Department of Justice “found no evidence that any IRS official acted based on political, discriminatory, corrupt or other inappropriate motives” and closed with no charges. It did find “substantial evidence of mismanagement, poor judgment and institutional inertia” as IRS officials cut corners to deal with an explosion of Tea Party-aligned nonprofit applications similar to Thomas’ group. But it also found that some progressive groups experienced similar processing delays and extra scrutiny.

Thereafter, the division that polices such nonprofits was effectively neutered by budget cuts. Audit rates plunged as the division became overwhelmed by hundreds of new nonprofits supposedly doing charitable and educational work but actually doing mostly political work. Clawing back funding for the IRS remains a top demand of conservative lawmakers in annual congressional budget negotiations.

The timing of the campaign against the IRS was no coincidence, said Koskinen, the former IRS commissioner who was in office during that period in the Obama administration.

“It shouldn’t surprise anyone that some of the people attacking the IRS and supporting cuts to its budget after 2010 were the same people pushing the envelope of how to move ‘dark money’ around to maximize its political effect,” Koskinen said. “The fewer auditors the IRS had, the lower the odds of being caught.”

Backing Trump

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 opened the door to countless new opportunities for the burgeoning conservative legal movement.

Leo himself had played a strong role in ensuring Trump’s election. When conservatives expressed doubts about the surprise GOP nominee, Leo helped reassure them by persuading Trump to commit to choosing Supreme Court nominees from a list that Leo himself drafted.

Then, after Trump’s victory, Leo worked hard to ensure that the president followed through.

When Conway joined the White House as an adviser to new president, with a hand in judicial nominations, Leo helped facilitate the sale of her polling firm to a Virginia company where he is now chairman.

Leo’s closeness to the White House sparked a fresh surge in donations to his network. In 2020, he announced JEP was being rebranded as the 85 Fund, and its annual fundraising skyrocketed to $65.7 million.

That year also marked the ultimate triumph of the conservative legal movement, as the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett established a 6-3 majority of justices aligned with Leo’s Federalist Society. Leo used his dark-money groups to fund campaigns urging the confirmation of those justices, including Barrett.

Then, as Trump approached a difficult re-election campaign in 2020, the 85 Fund created a subgroup, The Honest Elections Project, dedicated to amplifying claims of Democrats cheating in elections and pushing for voting restrictions.

Since Trump’s defeat, the Honest Elections Project has seized on momentum created by his unfounded claims of a stolen election to push anti-fraud measures that critics say will make voting harder for everyone.

“Tens of millions of voters harbor grave doubts about the future legitimacy of the democratic process,” the group says on its website. “They expect voting to be secure, accessible, and honest — even in a pandemic. What they got was an election marred by dysfunction, hundreds of agenda-driven progressive lawsuits that undermined voting safeguards, and a system that in many places failed to deliver prompt results. That is not how elections are supposed to work.”

A growing network

The Honest Elections Project is now just one limb of Leo’s fast-growing operation, fortified by what is believed to be the largest political donation in history: $1.6 billion from 91-year-old manufacturing magnate Barre Seid.

But with that immense war chest has come further scrutiny of the network’s spending. In March, POLITICO reported that since Leo became chairman of the for-profit CRC Advisors in 2020, the JEP and another Leo-affiliated group has paid the firm at least $43 million. A few weeks later, a progressive watchdog group filed a complaint with the D.C. attorney general and the IRS requesting a probe into what services were provided and whether Leo was in violation of laws against using charities for personal enrichment.

The probe is ongoing, and a lawyer for the Leo-affiliated groups involved called the complaint “sloppy, deceptive and legally flawed.”

Leo did not respond previously over multiple weeks to requests for information about what services the public relations firm provided to his nonprofits.

He wasn’t alone in declining to do so.

Other Leo allies have nonprofits and have declined comment to POLITICO on what services they provided in exchange for millions of dollars, including Ronald Cass, a Boston University law school dean emeritus who runs a nonprofit registered to his home address in Virginia called The Center for the Rule of Law.

Among the nation’s highest-paid law school deans at the time, Cass resigned his position in 2004 amid controversy over promising $36 million for a new law school building that didn’t fully materialize.

Leo was best man at Cass’ wedding and, in 2018, when Cass’ daughter was a debutante featured at one of the nation’s most exclusive galas, Leo and his wife Sally were among the attendees. Cass was also a longtime friend of Justice Antonin Scalia. In a sign of the family’s proximity to the Supreme Court, Cass was the master of ceremonies at a July 2016 dinner honoring Scalia’s memory. (Leo and Cass both sat at Clarence Thomas’ VIP table according to a seating chart.) Cass’ daughter is slated to clerk for Alito.

Cass’ group, described as an independent “center of international scholars analyzing rule of law issues,” doesn’t have much of a footprint. His wife, Susan, is the only other principal officer listed on paperwork filed in Virginia.

Between 2013 and 2021, Cass’ nonprofit took in nearly $7 million from JEP, according to tax filings. Yet POLITICO did not find a record of the annual paperwork the IRS requires of grantees detailing revenues and expenditures. Further, the group’s tax-exempt status had been auto-revoked by the IRS in 2011, the documents show.

Unless an exception is granted, the IRS requires such organizations to file the forms to keep their tax-exempt status, and all charitable grantors like JEP are required by federal and state laws to ensure grantees are using funds for charitable or educational purposes.

If Cass were running a charitable organization, as indicated on JEP’s annual filings for several years, it should have been filing the IRS forms. If not, it should have paid tax as a for-profit entity, said Koskinen.

Ronald and Susan Cass did not respond to multiple emails seeking comment about whether their organization paid tax, a record that is not subject to public disclosure.

In addition, Cass and Leo have both declined to comment on the nature of Cass’ services since POLITICO first reported in March about sizable payments received by his Center for the Rule of Law.

“Mr. Cass is a recognized expert across a wide variety of legal topics such as administrative law, antitrust, constitutional law, intellectual property, international trade and the legal process,” said the Leo spokesman. “Any organization would be fortunate to work with Mr. Cass and his wealth of knowledge.”

Pushing for answers

Philip Hackney, an expert on tax law and charities who worked in the Office of the Chief Counsel at the IRS under former Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, said he thinks the payments to Cass’ group merit further investigation.

“It’s not a small amount of money going to an organization that lost their tax-exempt status, and they started paying them after they lost their tax-exempt status,” said Hackney, who is now a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “This is not a good look.”

Ellen Aprill, a tax law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who reviewed the same documents, called the filings “especially odd,” while cautioning further facts are needed before judging whether they are “inconsistent with the rule of law.”

Such potential IRS filing inconsistencies, JEP’s reactivation at the time when Thomas’ own nonprofit experiment fell apart and the large sums JEP has taken in and paid out make a compelling case for a closer look at how much money Thomas may have received from Leo-affiliated sources, said Eric Havian, a San Francisco attorney who has represented whistleblowers for more than 25 years and reviewed tax records at POLITICO’s request.

Whatever the state of their financial dealings, the personal and professional relationship between Thomas and Leo clearly remains strong.

Last year, Thomas came under fire over text messages revealing she pressured the Trump White House to challenge the 2020 election, a move that put renewed scrutiny on her husband, who had participated in cases related to the election. A day before the news broke, the Judicial Crisis Network, another part of Leo’s nonprofit constellation that is headed by Severino, launched a $1.5 million ad buy entitled “Misunderstood” that promoted Clarence Thomas and his judicial record.

Leo’s firm CRC Advisors has reportedly been the registered agent for several web domains related to Clarence Thomas and was responsible for promoting a PBS documentary on his life and audio and Kindle releases of his memoir.

In 2017, a conservative news site published remarks from what was supposed to be a private confab of conservative luminaries attending an awards ceremony honoring “heroes of liberty.” Ginni Thomas presented the newly created awards, including one to her one-time nonprofit business partner.

In introducing him, Thomas said Leo has “single-handedly changed the face of the judiciary,” and described him as a “disciplined strategist,” “wonderful father” and “mentor to me.”

Thomas also gave a nod to Leo’s role as a behind-the-scenes player.

“He has many hats,” she said. “That isn’t even all he does. He doesn’t really tell all that he does.”

The Costs Of Climate Change

So I guess maybe the clear-eyed, pragmatic, let-the-markets-figure-it-out, level-headed conservatives - uhm - aren't.

Or - way more likely - they're being exposed as the cynical manipulative parasites they are.

There's a solid pattern being reprised that has to be acknowledged and sharply denounced. A pattern that points to the shitty things that plutocrats do to keep their profits (and their own portfolios) fat and healthy at the expense of everybody and everything else.

Black Lung? Yeah, but you can be proud of your family's tradition of working the mines and braving the dangers - like men - like good Americans.

Radiation sickness? Cancer? But isn't it your patriotic duty to stay in there and produce the weapons necessary to defend the nation? The arsenal of freedom is counting on you.

COVID? You're not going to let a little flu stand in your way are ya? You're working people - you need to work.

What's a little hot weather? You're no snowflake. Working up a good sweat won't hurt you. And just think how great it's going to be slammin' a few beers after work on a day like this. Plus, you'll have big time bragging rights. The Facebook memes are gonna do you proud.

They seem to think it's just a matter of better PR - that they can politic their way around it. But the truth is that these business geniuses are ignoring reality - the reality they're always trying to convince us they're so finely tuned in to.

• If the cost of lawsuits is less than or equal to the cost of product safety, then it's no big deal - carry on.
• If the cost of the labor force's healthcare is more than the cost of workplace safety, then we'll just externalize that cost by shifting the burden onto the workers themselves, or making sure our coin-operated politicians give us plenty of loopholes so we can make the taxpayers pick up the tab. So carry on.

Everything is factored in as the cost of doing business, with absolutely no regard for the fact that they and their businesses have to exist in the same reality as the rest of us. And I think that's what they're selling - they're trying to get us to accept the premise that given enough money and power, you don't even have to obey the laws of physics.

And BTW, you noticed how they changed the nomenclature a while back, right?

We used to be "personnel" - as in living, breathing, feeling, thinking people.

Now they call us "human resources" - as in "capital' or "raw materials".

Like we're nothing more than the interest payments on a bank loan that'll be written off, or sold off, or palmed off on whoever can be suckered into buying what's left of a dying business.

... or a load of bauxite, to be smelted down, used to stamp out as many beer cans as possible, and then discarded along with the rest of the slag.

Heat Is Costing the U.S. Economy Billions in Lost Productivity

From meatpackers to home health aides, workers are struggling in sweltering temperatures and productivity is taking a hit.

As much of the United States swelters under record heat, Amazon drivers and warehouse workers have gone on strike in part to protest working conditions that can exceed 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

On triple-digit days in Orlando, utility crews are postponing checks for gas leaks, since digging outdoors dressed in heavy safety gear could endanger their lives. Even in Michigan, on the nation’s northern border, construction crews are working shortened days because of heat.

Now that climate change has raised the Earth’s temperatures to the highest levels in recorded history, with projections showing that they will only climb further, new research shows the impact of heat on workers is spreading across the economy and lowering productivity.

Extreme heat is regularly affecting workers beyond expected industries like agriculture and construction. Sizzling temperatures are causing problems for those who work in factories, warehouses and restaurants and also for employees of airlines and telecommunications firms, delivery services and energy companies. Even home health aides are running into trouble.

“We’ve known for a very long time that human beings are very sensitive to temperature, and that their performance declines dramatically when exposed to heat, but what we haven’t known until very recently is whether and how those lab responses meaningfully extrapolate to the real-world economy,” said R. Jisung Park, an environmental and labor economist at the University of Pennsylvania. “And what we are learning is that hotter temperatures appear to muck up the gears of the economy in many more ways than we would have expected.”

No shit, Sherlock. It's not like the smart guys haven't been trying to tell us that for the last 30 or 40 or 50 fuckin' years.

A study published in June on the effects of temperature on productivity concludes that while extreme heat harms agriculture, its impact is greater on industrial and other sectors of the economy, in part because they are more labor-intensive. It finds that heat increases absenteeism and reduces work hours, and concludes that as the planet continues to warm, those losses will increase.

The cost is high. In 2021, more than 2.5 billion hours of labor in the U.S. agriculture, construction, manufacturing, and service sectors were lost to heat exposure, according to data compiled by The Lancet. Another report found that in 2020, the loss of labor as a result of heat exposure cost the economy about $100 billion, a figure projected to grow to $500 billion annually by 2050.

Other research found that as the mercury reaches 90 degrees Fahrenheit, productivity slumps by about 25 percent and when it goes past 100 degrees, productivity drops off by 70 percent.

And the effects are unequally distributed: in poor counties, workers lose up to 5 percent of their pay with each hot day, researchers have found. In wealthy counties, the loss is less than 1 percent.

Of the many economic costs of climate change —- dying crops, spiking insurance rates, flooded properties — the loss of productivity caused by heat is emerging as one of the biggest, experts say.

“We know that the impacts of climate change are costing the economy,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Adrienne Arsht-Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center, and a former global executive for environmental and social risk at Bank of America. “The losses associated with people being hot at work, and the slowdowns and mistakes people make as a result are a huge part.”

Still, there are no national regulations to protect workers from extreme heat. In 2021, the Biden administration announced that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration would propose the first rule designed to protect workers from heat exposure. But two years later, the agency still has not released a draft of the proposed regulation.

Seven states have some form of labor protections dealing with heat, but there has been a push to roll them back in some places. In June, Governor Greg Abbott of Texas signed a law that eliminated rules set by municipalities that mandated water breaks for construction workers, even though Texas leads all states in terms of lost productivity linked to heat, according to an analysis of federal data conducted by Vivid Economics.

Business groups are opposed to a national standard, saying it would be too expensive because it would likely require rest, water and shade breaks and possibly the installation of air-conditioning.

“OSHA should take care not to impose further regulatory burdens that make it more difficult for small businesses to grow their businesses and create jobs,” wrote David S. Addington, vice president of the National Federation of Independent Business, in response to OSHA’s plan to write a regulation.

Marc Freedman, vice president of employment policy at the United States Chamber of Commerce, said, “I don’t think anyone is dismissing the hazard of overexposure to heat.” But, he said, “Is an OSHA standard the right way to do it? A lot of employers are already taking measures, and the question will be, what more do they have to do?”

The National Beef slaughterhouse in Dodge City, Kan., where temperatures are expected to hover above 100 degrees Fahrenheit for the next week, is cooled by fans, not air-conditioning.

Workers wear heavy protective aprons and helmets and use water vats and hoses heated to 180 degrees to sanitize their equipment. It’s always been hot work.

But this year is different, said one worker, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. The heat inside the slaughterhouse is intense, drenching employees in sweat and making it hard to get through a shift, the worker said.

National Beef did not respond to emails or telephone calls requesting comment.

Martin Rosas, a union representative for meatpacking and food processing workers in Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma, said sweltering conditions present a risk for food contamination. After workers skin a hide, they need to ensure that debris doesn’t get on the meat or carcass. “But when it’s extremely hot, and their safety glasses fog up, their vision is impaired and they are exhausted, they can’t even see what they’re doing,” Mr. Rosas said.

Almost 200 employees out of roughly 2,500, have quit at the Dodge City National Beef plant since May, Mr. Rosas said. That’s about 10 percent higher than usual for that time period, he said.

But even some workers in air-conditioned settings are getting too hot. McDonald’s workers in Los Angeles walked off the job this summer as the air-conditioned kitchens were overwhelmed by the sweltering heat outside.

“There is an air-conditioner in every part of the store, but the thermostat in the kitchen still showed it was over 100 degrees,” said Maria Rodriguez, who has worked at the same McDonald's on Crenshaw Boulevard in Los Angeles for 20 years, but walked out on July 21, sacrificing a day of pay. “It’s been hot before, but never like this summer. I felt terrible — like I could pass out or faint at any moment.”

Nicole Enearu, the owner of the store, said in a statement, “We understand that there’s an uncomfortable heat wave in LA, which is why we’re even more focused on ensuring the safety of our employees inside our restaurants. Our air-conditioning is functioning properly at this location.”

Tony Hedgepeth, a home health aide in Richmond, Va., cares for a client whose home thermostat is typically set at about 82 degrees. Last week, the temperature inside was near 94 degrees.

Any heat is a challenge in Mr. Hedgepeth’s job. “Bathing, cooking, lifting and moving him, cleaning him,” he said. “It’s all physical. It’s a lot of sweat.”

Warehouse workers across the country are also feeling the heat. Sersie Cobb, a forklift driver who stocks boxes of pasta in a warehouse in Columbia, S.C., said the stifling heat can make it difficult to breathe. “Sometimes I get dizzy and start seeing dots,” Mr. Cobb said. “My vision starts to go black. I stop work immediately when that happens. Two times this summer I’ve had heart palpitations from the heat, and left work early to go to the E.R.”

In Southern California, a group of 84 striking Amazon delivery workers say that one of their priorities is getting the company to make it safe to work in extreme heat. Last month, unionized UPS workers won a victory when the company agreed to install air-conditioning in delivery trucks.

“Heat has played a tremendous role — it was one of the major issues in the negotiations,” said Carthy Boston, a member of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters representing UPS drivers in Washington, D.C. “Those trucks are hotboxes.”

Many factories were built decades ago for a different climate and are not air-conditioned. A study on the effects of extreme temperatures on the productivity of auto plants in the United States found that a week with six or more days of heat exceeding 90 degrees Fahrenheit cuts production by an average of 8 percent.

In Tulsa, Okla., Navistar is installing a $19 million air-conditioning system at its IC Bus factory, which produces many of America’s school buses. Temperatures on the floor can reach 99 degrees F. Currently, the plant is only cooled by overhead fans that swirl high above the assembly line.

Shane Anderson, the company’s interim manager, said air-conditioning is expected to cost about $183 per hour, or between $275,000 and $500,000 per year — but the company believes it will boost worker productivity.

Other employers are also adapting.

Brad Maurer, vice president of Leidal and Hart, which builds stadiums, hospitals and factories in Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Tennessee, said managers now bring in pallets of bottled water, which they didn’t used to do, at a cost to the company of a few thousand dollars a month.

Rising heat around Detroit recently caused his employees to stop working three hours early on a Ford Motors facility for several days in a row — a pattern emerging throughout his company’s work sites.

“It means costs go up, production goes down, we may not meet schedules, and guys and women don’t get paychecks,” Mr. Maurer said. Labor experts say that as employers adapt to the new reality of the changing climate, they will have to pay one way or the other.

“The truth is that the changes required probably will be very costly, and they will get passed on to employers and consumers,” said David Michaels, who served as assistant secretary of labor at OSHA during the Obama administration and is now a professor at the George Washington School of Public Health.

“But if we don’t want these workers to get killed we will have to pay that cost.”

Yacht Buyers

The author makes one slip - he assumes the mega-wealthy can be shamed.

It can work with some - kinda - but it's wrong-headed, and needs to be stomped out of our thinking.

Plutocrats assume they're very special in a very special kind of way. They think their genius at "creating wealth" exempts them from the need for the moral code that binds the rest of us to each other.

The need to adhere to an ethical framework is just not something they believe applies to them.

Above all else, they need to believe their own press clippings about how they're different from other people, so they get to do things and live in ways that no one else can. They hate the "collective", so they have to hate anything that requires a collective effort - except of course the collective effort that keeps putting billions in their pockets, or the one that looks a lot like the crew of a SuperYacht.

The Superyachts of Billionaires Are Starting to Look a Lot Like Theft

If you’re a billionaire with a palatial boat, there’s only one thing to do in mid-May: Chart your course for Istanbul and join your fellow elites for an Oscars-style ceremony honoring the builders, designers and owners of the world’s most luxurious vessels, many of them over 200 feet long.

The nominations for the World Superyacht Awards were all delivered in 2022, and the largest contenders are essentially floating sea mansions, complete with amenities like glass elevators, glass-sided pools, Turkish baths and all-teak decks. The 223-foot Nebula, owned by the WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum, comes with an air-conditioned helicopter hangar.

I hate to be a wet blanket, but the ceremony in Istanbul is disgraceful. Owning or operating a superyacht is probably the most harmful thing an individual can do to the climate. If we’re serious about avoiding climate chaos, we need to tax, or at the very least shame, these resource-hoarding behemoths out of existence. In fact, taking on the carbon aristocracy, and their most emissions-intensive modes of travel and leisure, may be the best chance we have to boost our collective “climate morale” and increase our appetite for personal sacrifice — from individual behavior changes to sweeping policy mandates.

On an individual basis, the superrich pollute far more than the rest of us, and travel is one of the biggest parts of that footprint. Take, for instance, Rising Sun, the 454-foot, 82-room megaship owned by the DreamWorks co-founder David Geffen. According to a 2021 analysis in the journal Sustainability, the diesel fuel powering Mr. Geffen’s boating habit spews an estimated 16,320 tons of carbon-dioxide-equivalent gases into the atmosphere annually, almost 800 times what the average American generates in a year.

And that’s just a single ship. Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht. This fleet pollutes as much as entire nations: The 300 biggest boats alone emit 315,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, based on their likely usage — about as much as Burundi’s more than 10 million inhabitants. Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Then there are the private jets, which make up a much higher overall contribution to climate change. Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. (Private plane use has surged since then, so today’s number is likely higher.)

You’re probably thinking: But isn’t that a drop in the bucket compared to the thousands of coal plants around the world spewing carbon? It’s a common sentiment; last year, Christophe Béchu, France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

But this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier wrote last year in Le Monde.

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

“If some people are allowed to emit 10 times as much carbon for their comfort,” Mr. Baumard and Ms. Chevallier asked, “then why restrict your meat consumption, turn down your thermostat or limit your purchases of new products?”

Whether we’re talking about voluntary changes (insulating our attics and taking public transit) or mandated ones (tolerating a wind farm on the horizon or saying goodbye to a lush lawn), the climate fight hinges to some extent on our willingness to participate. When the ultrarich are given a free pass, we lose faith in the value of that sacrifice.

Taxes aimed at superyachts and private jets would take some of the sting out of these conversations, helping to improve everybody’s climate morale,” a term coined by Georgetown Law professor Brian Galle. But making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

Last June, @CelebJets — a Twitter account that tracked the flights of well-known figures using public data, then calculated their carbon emissions for all to see — revealed that the influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

As media outlets around the world covered the backlash, other celebrities like Drake and Taylor Swift scrambled to defend their heavy reliance on private plane travel. (Twitter suspended the @CelebJets account in December after Elon Musk, a frequent target of jet-tracking accounts, acquired the platform.)

There’s a lesson here: Massively disproportionate per capita emissions get people angry. And they should. When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

Change can happen — and quickly. French officials are exploring curbing private plane travel. And just last week — after sustained pressure from activists — Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam announced it would ban private jets as a climate-saving measure.

Even in the United States, carbon shaming can have outsized impact. Richard Aboulafia, who’s been an aviation industry consultant and analyst for 35 years, says that cleaner, greener aviation, from all-electric city hoppers to a new class of sustainable fuels, is already on the horizon for short flights. Private aviation’s high-net-worth customers just need more incentive to adopt these new technologies. Ultimately, he says, it’s only our vigilance and pressure that will speed these changes along.

There’s a similar opportunity with superyachts. Just look at Koru, Jeff Bezos’s newly built 416-foot megaship, a three-masted schooner that can reportedly cross the Atlantic on wind power alone. It’s a start.

Even small victories challenge the standard narrative around climate change. We can say no to the idea of limitless plunder, of unjustifiable overconsumption. We can say no to the billionaires’ toys.

SuperYacht sinks off Italian coast

Shifting The Blame

Typical. Instead of looking at Russia's invasion of Ukraine and seeing what an asshole Putin is for launching a war of conquest, China says we should look at it and see the big bad American boogey man.

Permanent Standard Disclaimer:

That's not to say the US has nothing to be ashamed of when it comes to fucking with things we have no business fucking with.

But this is not one of those things.

Yes, we have a vested interest in a free and democratic Ukraine, and helping Ukraine in service to that interest is good dual-purpose policy.

The spread of democracy is an all-round good thing in itself. And whenever democracy takes hold anywhere, it works against autocratic dickheads everywhere - like Putin and Xi. And also against plutocratic dickheads like most of the "conservatives" here in USAmerica, Inc.

As always, I maintain a firm belief that forces are at work all over the joint trying to move every country towards a global plutocracy. But that's a slightly different rant.

The focus here is on the way these dickheads try to deflect and shift the blame. They either blame the victim (Putin'a bullshit about "De-Nazification"), or they deflect to something like his secondary rationalization of "NATO is out to get us", which is what Xi is picking up on, with the variation of "everything bad that happens can be blamed on Washington".

Democracy in Ukraine is in fact a "threat to Russian", but it's only a threat to "Putin's Russia", and it's in Xi's best interest to lean in favor of a fellow-autocrat, while trying not to look like he's directly supporting Putin's war. And that's another exercise in selective reasoning because of Xi's ambitions of "taking Taiwan back".

It's been said that Geopolitics is a worldwide poker game where everybody's cheating and everybody knows everybody's cheating. So it should never come as a surprise when some event or series of events reveals what a fucked up mess it really is.

Anyway ...

A year later, China blames U.S. ‘hegemony’ — not Russia — for war in Ukraine

Ahead of the first anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China has launched a public diplomacy offensive to wrest control of the narrative about its role in the conflict, trying to clear itself of accusations that it has sided with Russia while accusing the United States of turning the conflict into a “proxy” war.

Few of the positions staked out by Chinese officials in a flurry of speeches and documents this week are new, but they have underscored why Beijing continues to stand by Moscow even as it professes “deep concern” about the conflict: It considers the United States — not Russia — the progenitor of global insecurity, including in Ukraine.

Beijing insists it is neutral in the conflict, but those claims routinely clash with its rhetorical and diplomatic support for Russia.

That was illustrated this week, with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, arriving in Moscow in a show of solidarity with Russia — especially when contrasted with President Biden’s unannounced trip to Kyiv, where he walked the streets with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.

The China-Russia relationship has stood the test of stormy international circumstances and remained “as stable as Mount Tai,” Wang told Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday, using a Chinese idiom for rock-solid.

“Crisis and chaos appear repeatedly before us, but within crisis there is opportunity,” he said.

By actively responding to the challenges of the times, the two nations can bring about an even deeper comprehensive strategic partnership, and that relationship “will not be overpowered by a third party’s coercion or pressure” because it is built on a strong economic, political and cultural foundation, Wang added.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping is expected to visit Russia some time this year, but the Kremlin declined Wednesday to be drawn on reports that it could be as soon as April.

From the beginning of the war, China has tried to protect its rapidly deepening economic and political ties with Russia at the same time it tried to assure Western audiences that it wants peace and should not be a target for sanctions.

But as China’s role as a lifeline for an isolated Russia grows, it is becoming harder for Beijing to stay on the sidelines.

The Foreign Ministry in Beijing has declined to comment on reports that Xi will deliver a “peace speech” on Friday, exactly one year since Russia launched its invasion, saying only that China will issue a document clarifying its stance on the day.

The problem with China’s story of being an honest broker is that Russia remains a “key ally in the effort to push back against the U.S.-led order,” said Arthur Kroeber, partner at the research firm Gavekal Dragonomics.

“The true purpose of Xi’s speech” — assuming it takes place — “will be to drive a wedge between the U.S. and its European allies, by suggesting that China, not the U.S., is the real advocate of a peaceful resolution of the Russia-Ukraine war,” he wrote in a note on Wednesday.

The latest propaganda blitz also provides a clearer picture of Xi’s foreign policy priorities as he embarks on a third term in power. Bringing about an end to the war is only one item in Xi’s ambitious agenda to reshape the global order so that the United States and its allies cannot slow China’s rise or challenge its territorial claims. And to that end, China remains closely aligned with Russia.

An attempt to justify China’s stance on the war in Ukraine to a conflicted domestic audience, the new wave of propaganda is also a way to rebuff growing concern that Beijing will step up support for Putin’s war effort as it enters its second year.

Beijing has rejected U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s warning that China might be considering providing “lethal” support to Russia as a “wild accusation” and accused the United States of wanting Ukraine to “fight till the last Ukrainian.”

“It’s plain for the world to see who is calling for dialogue and striving for peace and who is adding fuel to the fire, handing out knives and instigating hostility,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said on Tuesday.

Ding Chun, director of the Center for European Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai, said Blinken’s claim was a “strategic statement” meant to warn China. “It’s not a substantive accusation, but rather a part of U.S. strategy to tell China not to have the intention [to do so],” he said.

But it’s not just the United States that is concerned about China’s intentions. Zelensky told the German daily Die Welt this week that he hoped China would make a “pragmatic assessment” and avoid allying itself with Russia’s war effort, because if it did “there will be a world war.”

In response to fears that the conflict could expand, Wang Wen, a professor at Renmin University, said it was wrong for Zelensky to speculate about Beijing’s actions. Instead, “he should thank China for promoting humanitarian aid to Ukraine. If China really were to support Russia, then Zelensky’s life would get even worse,” he said.

(In the month after the invasion, China gave Ukraine $725,000 of humanitarian aid and $1.5 million in other forms of aid. It hasn’t announced additional support since then.)

Seeing the United States as a source of instability — while giving aggression from Russia and other authoritarian states a pass — is a longtime stance of the Chinese Communist Party. But under Xi, it is a worldview that has become more deeply embedded into China’s foreign policy and echoed by its national security establishment.

Lu Xiang, a researcher at the state-run Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the true threat to Ukraine’s autonomy is Western support. Having once been part of the Soviet Union means that “if a big country from outside the region uses Ukraine as a chess piece to weaken Russia’s strategic interests, then that means [Ukraine’s] sovereign interests will of necessity be suppressed,” he said.

At the core of Xi’s priorities for promoting China’s security is an effort to counteract the United States’ influence in the international order, often by enlisting countries that share similar grievances.

Chinese complaints about American “abuse of hegemony” in global military, political and economic affairs were listed in a five-page document issued by the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday, which called the Ukraine conflict a case of the United States “repeating its old tactics of waging proxy … wars.”

Separately this week, China issued a “concept paper” that staked out positions on global hot-spot issues, from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Pacific islands.

China’s foreign minister, Qin Gang, released the document at an event in Beijing, running through a string of broad commitments to uphold the U.N. charter, reject the use of nuclear weapons and protect territorial integrity, while also taking thinly veiled swipes at the United States for “abusing unilateral sanctions” and building security blocs.

The document, which did not mention Russia, made only passing reference to the “Ukraine crisis” as an issue to be resolved through dialogue. It repeated that “legitimate security concerns of all countries” should be taken seriously — a phrase often used by Beijing in defense of Moscow.

Qin also used the event to call for countries to stop “clamoring about ‘Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow.’”

Since the start of the war, China has tried to draw a distinction between Russia’s actions and its own escalating military aggression in the Taiwan Strait. For many in the self-governed island democracy, however, the war has been a wake-up call for the need to be better prepared to repel an attack from China.

Missing from the newly proactive stance China laid out this week is any indication that Beijing is willing to take a leading role in peace negotiations.

“Neither Russia nor Ukraine can defeat each other completely in the short term,” said Fudan University’s Ding. “China has emphasized the need to stop the war and promote peace, but it has not explicitly said that it wants to be a mediator in this war, and it is very difficult to do so in practice. Although China has a better relationship with Russia, it is a question of to what extent Russia will listen to China’s thoughts.”

Both Sides Don't

The Less Talked About Part of Kevin McCarthy’s Deal With Republican Radicals

The most talked about part of the deal Kevin McCarthy made with Republican radicals to become Speaker of the House involved concessions to those members on rules, powerful committee assignments for members of the House Freedom Caucus and the creation of a new select committee on the “weaponization” of government that would give Republicans like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio an official platform from which they could undermine the investigations into President Donald Trump and the Jan. 6 insurrection.

And although there has been plenty of chatter about the effect this may have on the basic functioning of government, less remarked on but still significant is McCarthy’s pledge to force major budget cuts using the debt ceiling as leverage with the Biden administration. McCarthy has also agreed to pursue a resolution committing the federal government to a balanced budget within the decade, which could not be done without major cuts to Social Security, Medicare and a lot of what’s left of the American welfare state.

None of this comes as a shock or a surprise. Conservative opposition to social insurance goes back to the New Deal itself, with figures like the previous president Herbert Hoover denouncing Franklin Roosevelt’s policies as “socialism” that would place the nation on a “march to Moscow.” And of course, successive Republican Congresses have, since the 2010 Tea Party wave, tried to pass or force gigantic cuts to federal social spending, with the debt ceiling as their preferred hostage.

This juxtaposition of extreme opposition to social insurance with contempt for constitutional democracy and rule of law helps illuminate the tight connection between these two strands of contemporary Republican thought. Many of the Republican radicals who seized control of the House last week also voted to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and they have been vocal apologists for the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.

One of the key insights driving the creation of the modern welfare state was an adaptation of the older republican idea that self-government could not be sustained in the absence of economic security and independence. In the original conception, to own a farm and manage a homestead was to secure your economic standing and cultivate the habits of citizenship.

The closing of the frontier, the growth of industrial capitalism and the transition to wage labor for most workers forced Americans to rethink the terms of republican freedom. Populism — the insurgent movement that emerged in the late 19th century to put national economic life under democratic control by the “common people” — was one attempt to renegotiate the terms of American freedom. The more elite-driven Progressive movement, coming as it did in the wake of the collapse of the Populist Party, was another.

For the Populists, freedom meant popular control over economic decision-making. For Progressive intellectuals like Walter Lippmann, it meant security from economic want. “Instead of hanging human dignity on the one assumption about self-government,” Lippmann wrote, “you insist that man’s dignity requires a standard of living.” Government, then, is judged according to whether it is producing “a certain minimum of health, of decent housing, of material necessities, of education, of freedom, of pleasures, of beauty, not whether at the sacrifice of all these things, it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that happen to be floating around in men’s minds.”

You can think of the New Deal, in this context, as an attempt to synthesize the Populist and Progressive conceptions of freedom. Organized through industrial unions, workers have the power to shape their collective economic fate and, in turn, use the administrative capacity of the state to secure their economic footing and provide freedom from want and from dependency on the arbitrary power of private employers.

Of course, for the employers, this kind of arbitrary power is just another name for “liberty,” and a large part of the conservative opposition to social insurance and the welfare state stems from the belief that this expansion of state power is a threat to the sanctity of the market and the liberty of individuals to act within it.

But left untouched by a democratically accountable state, the free market is just another arena for the domination of the many by the few, of the subordination of labor to the dictates of capital.

Social insurance and the welfare state are more than a ballast against the winds of capitalism; they are part of the foundation of self-government and the cornerstone of democratic citizenship as we now understand it, where individuals are as free as possible from the arbitrary domination and authority of others.

Extreme opposition to social insurance and the safety net is, in that case, a natural fit for an authoritarian movement that tried to overturn the constitutional order and now wants to use the power it has to clean up as much of the scene of the crime as it can manage.

It is, for that matter, a natural fit for the entire Republican Party. Even after you exclude the MAGA radicals, you find a political party whose hostility to a broader, more equitable democracy is deep-seated and profound. You might even say that the rich tradition of American republicanism deserves a better and more faithful namesake.