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"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort."
A report published Wednesday identifies nearly 140 "climate disinformation organizations" in the United States financed by wealthy donors who receive massive subsidies from the nation's taxpayers.
The analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) and the Climate Accountability Research Project (CARP) explains that wealthy donors are "pouring billions of dollars" into nonprofit organizations to "advance misleading, self-serving agendas that do irreparable harm to our planet"—all while reaping the benefits of charitable contribution deductions in the U.S. tax code.
"Funds directed to fossil fuel industry-friendly think tanks and policy groups help turn disinformation into accepted truth and sow doubt about science," the analysis notes. "Then, these ideas get turned into action—or, more often, inaction—by the policy brass of lawmakers and presidential administrations."
The new report highlights "two troubling examples of this chain of influence: The Competitive Enterprise Institute, or CEI, received $21 million in charitable contributions from 2020 to 2022; it bills itself as 'instrumental' both in blocking ratification of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and in pressuring former President [Donald] Trump to withdraw from the 2016 Paris agreement."
"And the Heritage Foundation received $236 million in contributions over the same three years; this money allowed Heritage to write Project 2025, a policy blueprint overseen by several former Trump administration appointees, that proposes changes to the Department of Energy and the Environmental Protection Agency that would be disastrous for our climate," the report adds.
IPS and CARP estimate that donors to the two right-wing organizations were able to deduct "much of" their $257 million in gifts—effectively receiving major public subsidies.
"We are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations."
In total, the report counts 137 "climate disinformation" nonprofits that received charitable donations between 2020 and 2022, with six of them focused "largely or entirely" on climate issues. The 137 organizations collectively received $5.8 billion in contributions over the three-year period examined in the analysis, which estimates that the total sum the nonprofits spent on climate disinformation "could range anywhere from a conservative $219 million into the billions of dollars."
The three "climate disinformation charities" that held the most in assets in 2022, according to the new report, were the Charles Koch Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Seminar Network.
Between 2020 and 2022, the climate disinformation groups that received the most in total contributions were the Seminar Network, the Stand Together Foundation, and the 85 Fund—an organization connected to Federalist Society co-chair Leonard Leo.
Chuck Collins, director of IPS' Program on Inequality and a co-author of the report, said in a statement that the analysis "provides some much-needed transparency so that the American public can understand the deceptive ways in which the rich seek to advance and protect their interests."
"Based on our findings from the data sources available to us, we are calling for fundamental transparency reforms so we can assess the total amount of taxpayer-subsidized charitable donations flowing to climate disinformation organizations," said Collins. "Many of these donors have built their fortunes in energy or the banking, insurance, transportation, and legal businesses that support the carbon-intensive industries, so they have strong personal interests in ensuring the world's dependence on fossil fuels."
The report notes that wealthy donors have recently been funneling billions of dollars into so-called donor-advised funds (DAFs), which IPS and CARP describe as a kind of "charitable bank account: a donor can donate to a personalized fund managed by a sponsoring nonprofit organization, and take a charitable deduction for that donation right away, but the donor then retains advisory privileges that let them recommend grants out of the fund to whichever charities they want, on whatever timeline they want."
IPS and CARP found that the three largest sponsors of DAFs between 2020 and 2022 were the National Philanthropic Trust, the Schwab Charitable Fund, and DonorsTrust.
"Because DAFs have a near-complete lack of donor and grantee reporting requirements, they allow for a high level of secrecy in donating funds," the report observes.
Private foundations are also major funders of climate disinformation, according to the new report, which lists the Sarah Scaife Foundation, Searle Freedom Trust, and the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, among others.
The report outlines a number of potential policy changes to stem the ability of individuals and organizations with fossil fuel ties to secretively finance climate disinformation with the help of taxpayer subsidies, including barring private foundations from "using grants to donor-advised funds to meet their payout requirements" and requiring DAF sponsors to disclose "the names of all individual donors who have contributed $10,000 or more to each DAF account."
"It is high time for the American public to understand just how much charitable money is funding climate change disinformation and to recognize the key individuals behind this effort," the analysis says.
The new research, said one union leader, provides Democrats with a "clear roadmap to winning back" working-class voters.
Polling results released Monday show that working-class voters in the United States are broadly more supportive of major progressive agenda items than those in the middle and upper classes, offering Democratic political candidates what one union leader called a "clear roadmap to winning back voters we've lost to a GOP that's growing more extreme by the day."
The survey of over 5,000 registered U.S. voters was conducted last August by HIT Strategies and Working Families Power (WFP), a sibling organization of the Working Families Party.
The poll found that a majority of working-class voters either somewhat or totally support a national jobs guarantee (69%), a "public healthcare program like Medicare for All" (64%), a crackdown on rent-gouging landlords (74%), and tuition-free public colleges and universities (63%), landing them "overwhelmingly to the left" of higher-income segments of the population.
Upper- and middle-class respondents were far less likely to support the above policy proposals. Just 39% of upper-class voters surveyed, for instance, said they completely or somewhat support "a nationwide jobs guarantee" that would provide "stable, good-paying work for everyone who needs it."
WFP found that the "differences between classes are much smaller on social and cultural questions compared to economic fairness questions, and they do not uniformly point to a working class that is more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes."
The poll results, said WFP, call into question the belief that "the greater social and cultural conservatism of the working class explains the working class' drift away from the Democrats and towards the GOP."
"The working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners."
Maurice Mitchell, national director of the Working Families Party, said the new survey results underscore that "the working class is not a monolithic group that wears a hard hat and hangs out in diners."
"It's a multiracial, multigenerational group that isn't confined to a single geography, and it includes a tremendous diversity of views," said Mitchell, suggesting that Democrats learn from the results to defeat former President Donald Trump, the Republican nominee, in November.
"We need our strategy and messaging to reflect that reality," he said. "That's how we defeat Trump's MAGA movement and win back working-class voters."
The new report identifies seven "clusters" within the U.S. working class that it labels as Next Gen Left, Mainstream Liberals, Tuned Out Persuadables, Anti-Woke Traditionalists, Secure Suburban Moderates, Diverse Disaffected Conservatives, and Core MAGA—and the survey data shows "large differences" between them that help explain disparate voting behaviors. For example, just 30% of the Next Gen Left cluster—which is disproportionately young and strongly progressive—are homeowners compared to 75% of the Core MAGA cluster, which has what WFP described as "down-the-line right-wing views."
The survey results were released in the heat of an election campaign that has seen the GOP—spearheaded by Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio)—cast itself as "the party of working-class people." Democrats, whose 2024 White House ticket is backed by major U.S. unions, have lost support from working-class voters in recent years while making gains among more affluent segments of the population.
WFP said that its findings "do not contradict the widespread belief that support for Democrats is stronger among middle- and upper-class voters than it is among working-class voters," but they do "strongly call into question the explanation most commonly advanced for those political alignments, namely that the working class is simply more socially and culturally conservative than the middle and upper classes."
"Our study shows that the most salient differences in worldview between classes revolve around questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, where the working class is well to the left of the middle and upper classes, and regression analysis strongly suggests that the further left a voter is on these questions of class, distribution, and economic fairness, the less likely they were to have supported Donald Trump in 2020," said WFP.
The new analysis was accompanied by what the Working Families Party described as a "practical handbook to winning the working class," which makes up roughly 63% of the U.S. electorate.
Messaging that resonated most strongly across segments of the working class, according to the handbook, emphasized class conflict and the "need to elect Democrats who will fight for working people to keep the money they earn by cracking down on price-gouging at the grocery store, making wealthy tax cheats pay their fair share, and lowering the costs of prescription drugs."
Derrick Osobase, vice president of Communications Workers of American District 6, said in a statement Monday that Democrats must embrace and act on the new findings if they hope to reverse their recent losses among the nation's working class.
"During a time of record high corporate profits," said Osobase, "Democrats need to show working-class voters that we have their backs and will fight for an economy that works for all of us."
“The wealthiest of the wealthy have figured out how to get richer and richer and richer and richer in ways that just don’t show up on a tax form," said Sen. Elizabeth Warren at a recent Senate hearing. It's time to change that.
The first televised U.S. presidential debate came way back in 1960. Few of us who happened to watch that debate remember much about it. But a look back at the transcript of that debate — a session that concentrated on domestic issues — shows that the evening’s proceedings mentioned not a single word about a stunning domestic transformation then about midway through its third decade.
That transformation? The United States had become a significantly more economically equal nation. With federal tax rates running as high as 91 percent on top-bracket income and unions representing more than a third of America’s private-sector workers — over five times today’s private-sector union share — the United States had given birth to the world’s first mass middle class.
In just a single generation, America had gone from a nation where the richest 1 percent held nearly half the nation’s wealth to a nation where that top 1 percent held only just over a fifth of that wealth.
This stunning reality came up nowhere in that first debate between the Democratic Party candidate John Kennedy, then a U.S. senator, and Richard Nixon, the nation’s Republican vice president.
But what if that debate had explicitly recognized that reality? What if that debate’s panel of journalists had asked the candidates whether they would encourage or discourage, strengthen or trim, the tax and labor policies that had created a much more equal United States?
If those journalists had asked questions along that line, would John Kennedy, once president, have dared to ask Congress, as he did in 1963, to drop the top-bracket tax rate on America’s richest down to 65 percent?
That Kennedy-era Congress would end up lowering the nation’s top tax rate, from 91 to 70 percent. A bit over two decades later, in Ronald Reagan’s second term in the White House, that top rate would sink all the way down to 28 percent.
The current top rate? On income over $731,201, married couples filing jointly face a 37 percent tax rate. Taxpayers making 100 times that $731,201, over $73 million, face that same 37 percent top rate. And on “capital gains,” the profits from the sale of stocks and other assets, these rich pay taxes at no more than a 20 percent rate.
At last week’s first — and probable last — debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, the two candidates faced no questions on how little in taxes our contemporary tax code expects rich people to pay. Few noticed. But last week, at a Senate hearing on Capitol Hill, Finance Committee chair Ron Wyden from Oregon did his best to inject how much in taxes rich people don’t pay into America’s most high-profile political deliberations.
The bargain-basement tax rates on high incomes now in place, Senator Wyden made vividly clear, only hint at the tax windfalls our super rich are now regularly realizing.
Our billionaires, Wyden noted as he opened the hearing, can essentially “avoid paying taxes forever” through a neat trick tax justice advocates have come to label “buy-borrow-die.”
Our ultra-wealthy, Wyden went on to explain, are using their wealth to acquire valuable assets, then watching those assets appreciate and borrowing against the higher value of those assets to generate the cash they need to maintain their luxurious lifestyles. Eventually, of course, these deep pockets die, but any tax owed on their investment gains simply “disappears into the ledgers of history.” Their heirs face no tax whatsoever on the gains their benefactors have left them.
“This kind of tax trickery isn’t available to nurses and firefighters and tradesmen. Their taxes come straight out of every paycheck,” Wyden pointed out. “The ultra-wealthy get their own special set of rules.”
Long-time tax attorney Bob Lord, the current senior advisor on tax policy for the Patriotic Millionaires network and an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, expanded on “buy-borrow-die” and assorted other lucrative tax dodges in his testimony today before Wyden’s panel. Those dodges could — and should — take center stage in 2025, he agreed, as America’s lawmakers debate whether to extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts for the rich set to expire by next year’s end.
Republican lawmakers on the Senate Finance Committee spent a huge chunk of their time at today’s hearing depicting America’s rich as noble souls doing their best to create jobs in the face of a tax system that harasses them at every turn. Senator Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts disputed that depiction.
“The wealthiest of the wealthy have figured out how to get richer and richer and richer and richer in ways that just don’t show up on a tax form,” Warren noted. “The result: The top one-tenth of 1 percent pays about 3.2 percent of their wealth in taxes every year while the bottom 99 percent pays more than double that.”
The Biden-Harris administration, the Massachusetts senator added, has advanced a proposal that would subject Americans with net worths over $100 million — the nation’s wealthiest 10,000 people — to a minimum 25 percent tax on their income, well below our federal tax code’s current 37 percent top rate.
But these wealthy, Warren continued, are claiming that they don’t have the money to pay that tax because their wealth is sitting “all locked up in stocks.”
“Are these 10,000 mega-millionaires actually cash-poor?” Warren asked Robert Lord, the veteran tax attorney witness. “Are they living like monks?”
“I haven’t seen,” Lord smiled in reply, “many monks on yachts.”