Ohio’s Chief Justice Rips Republican Attempts to Undermine Judiciary

September 16, 2020 by staff

Statement by Justice Maureen O’Connor (Republican), Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Ohio, on September 16, 2020

I condemn in the strongest possible terms both the statement released by the Ohio Republican Party on September 15, 2020, and its unsigned authors. The statement disparages the integrity of Franklin County Common Pleas Judge Richard Frye. The publication accuses Judge Frye of colluding with the Ohio Democratic Party and labels him a “partisan judge.”

Every one of Ohio’s 722 judges, 800 magistrates, and numerous active-retired judges should be greatly concerned and voice their dismay at the irresponsible Republican Party allegation that politics controlled the judge’s decision. This is a blatant and unfounded attack on the independence of the Ohio judiciary. Contrary to the statements in this, disgraceful, deceitful piece, judges don’t decide cases based on partisanship. That would be easy. It is also a mistake to say that there is not a legitimate case in controversy. The only thing clear about this matter is that the law is not clear, and it remains to be seen what the ultimate interpretation of the statute will be.

To accuse a judge of deciding the matter before him on partisan politics and further accuse the judge of “obstruction of his judicial responsibility” is without merit and is meant to further the false narrative that judges have no conscience, no legal responsibilities, and no capacity to decide what the law is beyond the raw politics of the issue.

The Republican Party’s statement should be seen for what it is: part of a continuing string of attacks against any decision that doesn’t favor a political end, regardless of party, even if that decision may be legally correct and indeed legally required. I will not address the merits of the lower court’s decision. The case may very well find its way to the Supreme Court of Ohio, and I would be asked to weigh in then. I will retain my independence and sit on the Court to hear the matter if it does. Attacks on the judiciary only serve to undermine the public’s confidence in the courts. Attacks such as these, no matter the source, reflect poorly, not on the judiciary, but on the leadership of those who would perpetrate them.

Below is the attack by the Ohio Republican Party to which Justice O’Connor responded.

Trump knew coronavirus was deadly and highly contagious while intentionally misleading Americans

September 9, 2020 by staff

By Robert Costa
First published September 9, 2020 in The Washington Post

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the novel coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear, and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

Aside from exploring Trump’s handling of the pandemic, Woodward’s new book, “Rage,” covers race relations, diplomacy with North Korea and a range of other issues that have arisen during the past two years.

The book also includes brutal assessments of Trump’s conduct from former defense secretary Jim Mattis, former director of national intelligence Daniel Coats and others.

The book is based in part on 18 on-the-record interviews Woodward conducted with the president between December and July. Woodward writes that other quotes in the book were acquired through “deep background” conversations with sources in which information is divulged and exchanges recounted without sources being named.

“Trump never did seem willing to fully mobilize the federal government and continually seemed to push problems off on the states,” Woodward writes. “There was no real management theory of the case or how to organize a massive enterprise to deal with one of the most complex emergencies the United States had ever faced.”

Woodward questioned Trump repeatedly about the national reckoning on racial injustice. On June 3, two days after federal agents forcibly removed peaceful protesters from Lafayette Square to make way for Trump to stage a photo opportunity outside St. John’s Episcopal Church, Trump called Woodward to boast about his “law and order” stance.

“We’re going to get ready to send in the military slash National Guard to some of these poor bastards that don’t know what they’re doing, these poor radical lefts,” Trump said.

In a second conversation, on June 19, Woodward asked the president about White privilege, noting that they were both White men of the same generation who had privileged upbringings. Woodward suggested that they had a responsibility to better “understand the anger and pain” felt by Black Americans.

“No,” Trump replied, his voice described by Woodward as mocking and incredulous. “You really drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? Just listen to you. Wow. No, I don’t feel that at all.”

As Woodward pressed Trump to understand the plight of Black Americans after generations of discrimination, inequality and other atrocities, the president kept answering by pointing to economic numbers such as the pre-pandemic unemployment rate for Blacks and claiming, as he often has publicly, that he has done more for Blacks than any president except perhaps Abraham Lincoln.

In another conversation about race, on July 8, Trump complained about his lack of support among Black voters. “I’ve done a tremendous amount for the Black community,” he told Woodward. “And, honestly, I’m not feeling any love.”

They spoke again about race relations on June 22, when Woodward asked Trump whether he thinks there is “systemic or institutional racism in this country.”

“Well, I think there is everywhere,” Trump said. “I think probably less here than most places. Or less here than many places.”

Asked by Woodward whether racism “is here” in the United States in a way that affects people’s lives, Trump replied, “I think it is. And it’s unfortunate. But I think it is.”

Trump shared with Woodward visceral reactions to several prominent Democrats of color. Upon seeing a shot of Sen. Kamala D. Harris of California, now the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, calmly and silently watching him deliver his State of the Union address, Trump remarked, “Hate! See the hate! See the hate!” Trump used the same phrase after an expressionless Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) appeared in the frame.

Trump was dismissive about former president Barack Obama and told Woodward he was inclined to refer to him by his first and middle names, “Barack Hussein,” but wouldn’t in his company to be “very nice.”

“I don’t think Obama’s smart,” Trump told Woodward. “I think he’s highly overrated. And I don’t think he’s a great speaker.” Trump added that North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un thought Obama was “an asshole.”

“Rage” includes the first-reported excerpts of letters Trump exchanged with Kim, and quotes Trump in his interviews with Woodward using expletives to defend their pen-pal relationship. Even as U.S. intelligence chiefs warn that North Korea is unlikely to ever surrender its nuclear weapons and that Trump’s approach is ineffective, the president told Woodward he is determined to stay the course and dismissively says the CIA has “no idea” how to handle North Korea.

“I met. Big fucking deal,” Trump told Woodward, waving off criticism of his three face-to-face meetings with Kim. “It takes me two days. I met. I gave up nothing.”

Foreign affairs experts say Trump gave up much — including by postponing and then scaling back the U.S. joint military exercises with South Korea that had long angered North Korea, as well as by granting Kim the international stature and legitimacy the North Korean regime has long craved.

Trump told Woodward he evaluates Kim and his nuclear arsenal like a real estate target: “It’s really like, you know, somebody that’s in love with a house and they just can’t sell it.”

Kim welcomed Trump’s overtures with over-the-top prose in letters. Kim wrote that he wanted “another historic meeting between myself and Your Excellency reminiscent of a scene from a fantasy film.” And he said his meetings with Trump were a “precious memory” that underscored how the “deep and special friendship between us will work as a magical force.”

In another letter, Kim wrote to Trump, “I feel pleased to have formed good ties with such a powerful and preeminent statesman as Your Excellency.” And in yet another, Kim reflected on “that moment of history when I firmly held Your Excellency’s hand at the beautiful and sacred location as the whole world watched with great interest and hope to relive the honor of that day.”

Trump was taken with Kim’s flattery, Woodward writes, telling the author pridefully that Kim had addressed him as “Excellency.” Trump remarked that he was awestruck meeting Kim for the first time in 2018 in Singapore, thinking to himself, “Holy shit,” and finding Kim to be “far beyond smart.” Trump also boasted to Woodward that Kim “tells me everything,” including a graphic account of Kim having his uncle killed.

Trump did not share his letters to Kim — “those are so top secret,” the president said — though Woodward writes that Trump sent Kim a copy of the New York Times featuring a picture of the two men on the front page. “Chairman, great picture of you, big time,” Trump wrote on the paper in marker. (Trump falsely boasted to Woodward, “He never smiled before. I’m the only one he smiles with.”)

Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?”

In the midst of reflecting upon how close the United States had come in 2017 to war with North Korea, Trump revealed, “I have built a nuclear — a weapons system that nobody’s ever had in this country before. We have stuff that you haven’t even seen or heard about. We have stuff that Putin and Xi have never heard about before. There’s nobody — what we have is incredible.”

Woodward writes that anonymous sources later confirmed that the U.S. military had a secret new weapons system, but they would not provide details, and that the sources were surprised Trump had disclosed it.

The book documents private grumblings, periods of exasperation and wrestling about whether to quit among the so-called adults of the Trump orbit: Mattis, Coats and former secretary of state Rex Tillerson.

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied, “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Woodward describes Coats’s experience as especially tortured. Coats, a former senator from Indiana, was recruited into the administration by Vice President Pence, and his wife is quoted as recalling a dinner at the White House when she interacted with Pence.

“I just looked at him, like, how are you stomaching this?” Marsha Coats said, according to Woodward. “I just looked at him like, this is horrible. I mean, we made eye contact. I think he understood. And he just whispered in my ear, ‘Stay the course.’ ”

Pence was the president’s one constant booster publicly and privately in Woodward’s book. When Coats considered resigning because of Trump’s handling of Russia, Pence urged him to “look on the positive side of things that he’s done. More attention on that. You can’t go.”

The loathing was mutual. “Not to mention my fucking generals are a bunch of pussies. They care more about their alliances than they do about trade deals,” Trump told White House trade adviser Peter Navarro at one point, according to Woodward.

Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, is quoted by Woodward as saying, “The most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots,” which Woodward interprets as a reference to Mattis, Tillerson and former National Economic Council director Gary Cohn.

Kushner was a frequent target of ire among Trump’s Cabinet members, who saw him as untrustworthy and weak in dealing with heads of states. Tillerson found Kushner’s warm dealings with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “nauseating to watch. It was stomach churning,” according to Woodward.

Kushner is quoted extensively in the book ruminating about his father-in-law and presidential power. Woodward writes that Kushner advised people that one of the most important guiding texts to understand the Trump presidency was “Alice in Wonderland,” a novel about a young girl who falls through a rabbit hole. He singled out the Cheshire cat, whose strategy was endurance and persistence, not direction.

The book charts the Trump administration’s failings and missteps on the pandemic, including the decisions and actions of Pottinger, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield, infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci and others.

Fauci at one point tells others that the president “is on a separate channel” and unfocused in meetings, with “rudderless” leadership, according to Woodward. “His attention span is like a minus number,” Fauci said, according to Woodward. “His sole purpose is to get reelected.”

In one Oval Office meeting recounted by Woodward, after Trump had made false statements in a news briefing, Fauci said in front of him: “We can’t let the president be out there being vulnerable, saying something that’s going to come back and bite him.” Pence, Kushner, chief of staff Mark Meadows and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller tensed up at once, Woodward writes, surprised Fauci would talk to Trump that way.

Woodward describes Fauci as particularly disappointed in Kushner for talking like a cheerleader as if everything was great. In June, as the virus was spreading wildly coast to coast and case numbers soared in Arizona, Florida, Texas and other states, Kushner said of Trump, “The goal is to get his head from governing to campaigning.”

Woodward writes that Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) suggested former president George W. Bush speak personally with Trump about global vaccine efforts, but that Bush demurred.

“No. No,” Bush told Graham, according to Woodward. “He’d misconstrue anything I said.”

In their final interview, on July 21, Trump vented to Woodward, “The virus has nothing to do with me. It’s not my fault.”

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The Shrouded Weapon of Patriotic Correctness

July 21, 2020 by staff

July 22, 2020

Displaying his signature blend of victimhood and vitriol in a recent speech, President Trump accused political protesters of pushing a “cancel culture — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”

Put aside the hypocrisy of those words coming from a man who’s called for dozens of people to be fired for expressing opinions he dislikes. The more serious issue is the popular claim that “political correctness” presents a great threat to our freedom. In truth, its counterpart — patriotic correctness — suppresses dissent more widely and imposes greater consequences.

Take the story of country music stars The Dixie Chicks. The three women band leaders never faced notable criticism of their Confederacy-friendly name. Yet the band downsized their name to The Chicks for their just-released album, Gaslighter, simply announcing, “we want to meet this moment.”

Contrast that to 2003, when the band stepped out of line with country music political orthodoxy.

Days before the invasion of Iraq, vocalist Natalie Maines told a London audience, “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President [G.W. Bush] is from Texas.”

The backlash was immediate and savage as thousands of country music radio stations forbid DJs from playing The Chicks, slashing their record sales. Some groups staged events destroying recordings by The Chicks and band members received numerous death threats.

The Chicks nearly vanished for years, but several multi-platinum albums granted them the wealth and power to resume their career years later. Their comeback single, “Not Ready to Make Nice,” defiantly rebuffed would-be suppressors. But less powerful country artists confirm the fear of getting “Dixie Chicked” influences everything from their lyrics to political engagement. That fear is just starting to ease nearly two decades later.

Performers identified as right-wing, like country star Toby Keith, may deter some invitations to perform with their stances, but face no such organized intimidation.

Patriotically correct doctrines include: American exceptionalism is unquestionable, even though we trail other wealthy nations in many key measures. Our military spending is untouchable. Service members should receive preferential treatment without regard to personal merit. And patriotism should be expressed with chest thumping and flag waving, not dissent that aims to illuminate and correct our biggest flaws.

The NFL is among the institutions enforcing those rules. When President Trump attacked Colin Kaepernick for this kneeling protest against police killings of Black people, the NFL didn’t merely fail to defend an employee, it effectively halted his career. Silencing one of the league’s most visible stars made it unnecessary to tell any athletes just trying to make a team to “shut up and play.” Message received.

And what is the playing of our national anthem at sporting events other than institutionalized patriotic correctness?

Patriotic correctness is so omnipresent we rarely notice it and, like racial biases, practice it unconsciously. In an interview, liberal icon Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg called Kaepernick’s protest “dumb and disrespectful,” giving the patriotism police a quote to weaponize. (She later apologized.)

Meanwhile, right-wingers play the victim when grifters like Milo Yiannopoulos lose speaking gigs for business reasons, failing to fulfill contractual promises or when college students organize to stop their fees from going to such self-promoting provocateurs.

As Alex Nowrasteh of the libertarian Cato Institute says, “every group has implicit rules against certain opinions, actions and language as well as enforcement mechanisms — and the patriotically correct are no exception. [But] they are near-uniformly unaware of how they are hewing to a code of speech and conduct similar to the PC lefties they claim to oppose.”

To be clear, political correctness can do harm to the free exchange of ideas, and too many Americans are ready to judge others for a careless utterance, but the patriotic correctness unleashed on The Chicks is both more pervasive and severe than any progressive pressure.

The Chicks blacklisting yielded only a setback — one they had the power to overcome by virtue of their previous success, but their persecution silenced many more vulnerable people.

The most powerful suppression of speech is accomplished through implied threat and voluntary compliance, not punishment.

The writer, Jeff Milchen (@JMilchen), is a political consultant who founded Reclaim Democracy! and the American Independent Business Alliance.

Chevron Corporation Caught Scheming to Pit Minorities Against Greens

June 18, 2020 by staff

Corbin Hiar, E&E News
June 18, 2020

It was an audacious messaging campaign: White environmentalists are hurting black communities by pushing radical climate policies that would strip them of fossil fuel jobs.

The email to journalists, sent by a public affairs firm at the height of national protests over systemic racism earlier this month, accidentally contained the name of a high-profile client.

It was Chevron Corp.

The Virginia-based communications firm, named CRC Advisors, urged journalists to look at how green groups were “claiming solidarity” with black protesters while “backing policies which would hurt minority communities.”

“Despite this claimed solidarity, environmental organizations, composed of predominantly white members, are backing radical policies like the Green New Deal which would bring particular harm to minority communities,” wrote John Gage of CRC in an email sent to media outlets including E&E News.

The story pitch included an offer to connect journalists with black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal, a sweeping government jobs program advanced by progressive lawmakers who champion environmental justice issues for communities of color.

The email ended with a revealing tagline.

“If you would rather not receive future communications from Chevron, let us know by clicking here.”

Chevron denied involvement in the messaging campaign, but the email’s accidental nod to the oil giant is renewing suspicions among activists and academics that Chevron’s public statements about climate change fail to match its lobbying activities. While Chevron has promised to do more to slow rising temperatures, observers view the email as a shadowy continuation of the fossil fuel industry’s past efforts to undercut legislation aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Chevron’s fingerprints appear to be on this,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard University history professor and the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a 2010 book about how scientists with ties to Big Oil worked to obscure the truth about global warming.

Oreskes described previous instances of oil and gas companies working with communications firms to advance industry talking points. But the CRC effort is remarkable, she said, for trying to leverage national unrest about systemic racism and police violence to promote an expansion of oil and gas drilling.

“There’s no socially acceptable language to describe how despicable this is,” she said. “It’s hard for me to contain my fury.”

Chevron, a longtime CRC client whose shareholders recently called on the oil major to detail its lobbying on climate change, says it had nothing to do with the message.

“Thanks for the opportunity to clarify the situation,” Chevron spokesman Sean Comey said in an email.

‘A clerical error’

The email received by an E&E News journalist on June 3 included quotes from two black conservatives who oppose the Green New Deal.

They were Ken Blackwell, a Republican who served as Ohio’s secretary of state in the late 1990s and has gone on to stump for a wide variety of conservative causes, and Derrick Hollie, a former advertising executive.

The email portrayed CRC as playing a helpful role in distributing Blackwell’s and Hollie’s concerns with the climate plan and its effect on black communities.

Instead, the firm appears to have organized the campaign. Hollie, who said he doesn’t personally know Blackwell, revealed that CRC approached him with the idea.

“They was like, ‘Derrick, would you mind being a part of something that we’re working on?’ I said, ‘Absolutely.’ And they asked me to put together a quote,” Hollie said in a phone interview.

“I didn’t know what they were going to do with it,” he added. “I figured they were going to put it in an op-ed or something like that.”

Gage, the account executive at CRC, said in an email to E&E News that he had contacted journalists “on behalf of Mr. Blackwell and Mr. Hollie regarding this issue and inadvertently attached a disclaimer from another client’s media list onto that email.”

“This was, in effect, a clerical error,” Gage said.

The Green New Deal is a conceptual resolution that calls for a sweeping public jobs program and asserts that the government should “achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions through a fair and just transition for all communities and workers” in a decade’s time.

That would require overhauling the nation’s oil-dependent transportation system “to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions” and invest in “zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and high-speed rail,” the proposal says.

Chevron hasn’t directly lobbied on the Green New Deal, but it has pressed members of Congress and the Trump administration about “Energy Transitions, technology, and climate change,” lobbying disclosures show.

Energy prices — another major focus of the CRC pitch — are also an issue Chevron has lobbied on.

“Radical policies like the green new deal that raise the cost of driving to work and heating our homes would target the African-American community and … would make us even more vulnerable and marginalized than we already are,” Blackwell said in the email sent by CRC. He is currently an adviser to Trump’s reelection campaign and senior fellow at the Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group.

Blackwell’s quote was partially featured in the headline of a June 4 story on the website of the conservative Daily Wire.

‘White environmental extremists’

Hollie is the president of Reaching America, a nonprofit group whose tax-exempt status was revoked by the Internal Revenue Service in 2017 because it repeatedly failed to file required annual reports.

Since then, Hollie has testified twice in the House Natural Resources Committee against efforts to transition the U.S. economy away from fossil fuels. At a February 2019 hearing, he denied receiving any funding from fossil fuel companies or corporations.

“With black communities ablaze, the same nearly uniformly white environmental extremists assure us of their solidarity while at the same time trying to kill high-paying oil and gas jobs that have been the cornerstones of progress in lifting up working-class minority communities,” Hollie was quoted as saying in the CRC email to journalists. “Any program such as their Green New Deal that makes energy more expensive or jeopardizes jobs is counter-productive, reckless, and wrong.”

To be sure, the environmental movement has struggled with its own racial disparities. The largest green groups are overwhelmingly white, and they have historically overlooked communities of color when trying to reduce pollution. Some have racist pasts (Greenwire, June 5).

But people of color are also underrepresented in much of the oil and gas industry. For example, a 2016 report by the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, found the oil and gas business to be “among the worst in terms of employment and earning equity for women, African American and Hispanic populations.”

Reaching America is based in Bennsville, Md., but its sparse website is registered to Domains By Proxy LLC, an Arizona firm that shields the identities of web address owners.

CRC also has a limited online presence.

The group is led by Leonard Leo, President Trump’s informal adviser on judicial nominees, and Greg Mueller, a conservative communications executive. The firm recently hired two Trump White House communications staffers and a Fox News veteran. CRC’s website lists no staff, clients or contact information.

Although Hollie and his group have a long history with CRC, he denied having a formal role with the firm.

“Hell no! I wish I did,” he said with a laugh. “This guy named Jay Hopkins is who I deal with.

“I knew CRC had an energy client,” he added. “I didn’t know it was Chevron.”

Hopkins, a senior account manager at CRC, has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry.

Prior to working at CRC, Hopkins did communications for Citizens for a Sound Economy, a think tank established in 1984 by the oil barons Charles and David Koch. The group eventually split and formed the tea party groups FreedomWorks and Americans for Prosperity.

In 2002, Hopkins joined CRC, which was previously known as Creative Response Concepts and CRC Public Relations.

During his time at CRC, he “identified and recruited third-party organizations to serve as surrogates for clients,” “wrote and placed client op-eds in top-line publications,” and “cultivated strong relationships with journalists nationwide, particularly focusing on reporters in energy,” according to his LinkedIn profile.

Blackwell, the former Ohio secretary of state, has written numerous op-eds over the years in support of the U.S. oil and gas industry as well as Chevron and other CRC clients.

In a 2012 Reuters blog post, Blackwell described Brazilian authorities’ attempt to penalize Chevron for a 3,600-barrel oil leak off the coast of Rio de Janeiro as “one of the most shameless shakedowns of an American company by another country in recent memory.”

After a two-year legal battle, a federal judge in Brazil ordered the California-headquartered company to pay around $135 million in compensatory actions (Greenwire, Oct. 2, 2013).

Blackwell didn’t respond to calls or emails for comment. Hopkins didn’t respond to emailed questions about his work at CRC.

Hollie, meanwhile, said that Reaching America works with organizations across the political spectrum.

“I don’t appreciate being used as a racial pawn during this time and would appreciate if you leave me out of your vendetta against Chevron and CRC,” he said in a follow-up email.

‘Not being candid’

Experts on corporate influence campaigns suggest that CRC is engaged in a shadowy campaign to shape federal policy on climate change.

The firm may be “attempting to influence public policy surreptitiously using industry money,” said Marcus Owens, a partner at the law firm Loeb & Loeb LLP. “I’ve been doing this for nearly 50 years now, so I think I have a fairly well-developed sense of who’s not being candid.”

The involvement of the former Ohio secretary of state, in particular, was an indicator for Owens, the former head of the nonprofit division at the IRS.

“You don’t hire Ken Blackwell if what you want to do is run a soup kitchen or truly educate people about anything,” he said. “You hire him if you want to run a political organization and you want to court industry or people who donate to right-of-center causes.”

What CRC did is a textbook example of the “most unethical type of PR,” according to Pallavi Kumar, a communications professor at American University.

“It’s just a way where they put together a coalition and therefore you think it’s something, but it’s done by a corporation,” said Kumar, who worked in corporate public relations for two decades before becoming an academic. “To me, they really screwed up by showing it’s coming from Chevron.”

Kumar got her start in PR at E. Bruce Harrison Co., which helped promote the Global Climate Coalition. Prior to its dissolution in 2002, the industry group was opposed to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and was supported by Chevron. (Kumar says she did not work on that account.)

The oil major’s ongoing involvement with CRC is troubling to some of the company’s shareholders.

“If Chevron is hiring public relations companies that are putting out a message that is contrary to what the company is publicly espousing, that is a concern,” said Danielle Fugere, the president of As You Sow. “Just hiring these individuals or these groups for public communications purposes raises red flags.”

Her shareholder advocacy group backed a climate lobbying proposal put forth by the French investment group BNP Paribas Asset Management at Chevron’s annual shareholder meeting last month.

It called for the oil company’s board of directors to issue a report describing “if, and how, Chevron’s lobbying activities (direct and through trade associations) align” with the goal of the Paris Agreement, which calls for limiting average global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius.

Chevron’s board urged shareholders to vote against the resolution because the company “shares the concerns of governments and the public about climate change risks” and “adheres to the highest ethical standards when engaging in lobbying and political activities.”

A majority of its investors, however, backed the proposal (Energywire, May 28).

Comey, the Chevron spokesman, indicated that the company doesn’t plan to detail its work with CRC in the climate lobbying report shareholders requested.

“They help us with communications,” he wrote, referring to CRC. “They are not involved in lobbying.”

Kumar, of American University, described CRC’s work this way: “Stealth lobbying, AstroTurf lobbying, front groups.”

While those tactics aren’t new, the focus of the campaign surprised her. The firm is trying to take advantage of the Black Lives Matter movement, she said.

David Pellow, the African-American director of the University of California, Santa Barbara’s global environmental justice project, argued that Chevron’s involvement with CRC shows the oil company is more focused on countering support for the Green New Deal than helping communities of color.

With the U.S. in recession and tens of millions of Americans out of work, “the Green New Deal is now looking much more reasonable as a proposal,” he said. “And that’s got to have big polluters worried.”

Chevron has been criticized for its slow response to the widespread protests over police violence against people of color. The company released a statement on racial injustice on June 5 — two days after CRC pitched a story attacking a resolution that seeks to address that issue and combat climate change.

Comey said that “it’s important that we face and address the systemic racism and discrimination that denies African Americans equal access to opportunities for advancement.”

Chevron, he added, is leading by example: “For more than 25 years, diversity and inclusion have been a part of our corporate culture.”

But Pellow, who is also the chairman of UC-Santa Barbara’s environmental studies department, said the company’s actions speak louder than its words.

“If you’re perpetrating climate disruption, as Chevron is, then you’re also perpetrating racial injustice,” he said. People of color “the world over are being harmed disproportionately by climate change.”

FAIR USE NOTICE: This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of criminal justice, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more information go to: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Time to Reverse Corporate “Constitutional Rights”

April 7, 2020 by staff

By Representative Pramila Jayapal
February 5, 2020

This past fall, Amazon challenged the proudly progressive character of my home city, Seattle, pouring $1.5 million into its City Council elections.

In doing so, Amazon placed not just a thumb but also a fistful of cash on the scales of our democracy. Thanks to immediate organizing on the ground and the speaking out of elected officials, the cynical and last-minute corporate spending on elections backfired: Nearly all of the Amazon-backed candidates lost their races.

However, on this 10th anniversary of the US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission that catalyzed our current era of super PACs and corporate power, the clear danger posed by money in politics is real. Citizens United vastly expanded the rights of corporate entities and the super-wealthy to spend or invest their money to influence political elections and deepened the corrupting electoral influence of big money.

In the 10 years since Citizens United, we’ve seen newly created super PACs and “dark money” political nonprofits spend staggering sums, taking in unlimited donations without having to disclose them. While they cannot coordinate their spending with specific candidate campaigns, they can spend on political attack ads and other forms of political influence. From 2010 to 2018, super PACs spent roughly $2.9 billion on federal elections while dark-money spending rose from $129 million in the period from 2000 to 2008 to $964 million from 2010 to 2018.

It is important to note that Citizens United was not the first time political money in elections has been equated with “free speech” and corporations have been equated with people with constitutionally protected rights. The claim that corporate entities are legal persons with constitutional “rights” has been around for over a century.

Political money as free speech originated in the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo decision, while corporate political free speech rights began with the 1978 First National Bank v. Bellotti ruling.

But corporate constitutional rights extend beyond First Amendment free speech rights. Corporate constitutional rights began in the 1880s when Supreme Court Justices hijacked the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment—intended to guarantee equal protections for black Americans—claiming the rights of people also applied to corporate entities. Courts also interpreted sections of the original Constitution to protect corporate “rights” over those of people and communities, even though corporate entities are not mentioned anywhere in our Constitution.

The collective consequences of this have been devastating.

The corporate First Amendment “right not to speak” means that consumers may end up knowing less about what’s in the food they eat. The corporate First Amendment religious “right” granted in the 2014 Hobby Lobby decision gives a for-profit corporation the right to deny reproductive health care coverage based on religious belief.

The corporate Fourth Amendment search and seizure “rights” prevents warrantless inspections of many businesses to ensure safe working and environmental protections.

The corporate Fifth Amendment takings “rights” defines certain corporate regulations that protect private land as a “taking,” with the corporation being justly compensated for lost current and/or future profits.

Therefore, any full remedy to the questions of money into elections must address not only the immediate effects of Citizens United but also the entirety of corporate constitutional rights.

That is why in 2019, I introduced House Resolution 48, the We the People Amendment calling for ending all corporate constitutional rights—as well as political money as free speech.

The flood of money into elections following Citizens United and other court decisions has eroded public trust in our elected leaders to seriously address issues like health care, climate change, wealth inequality, guns, and infrastructure. Only by ending all of these corporate constitutional rights and the corrupting influence of political money as “free speech” can we have a government that represents all of us rather than only the interests of the super-wealthy.

The We the People Amendment (HJR 48), co-sponsored by 67 of my House colleagues, enjoys widespread support with the American public. The national group Move to Amend has been educating and organizing citizens across the country, building an authentic, grassroots movement seeking a systemic solution to address the harms of Citizens United.

The American people urgently want us to return our government back to the people instead of the highest bidders. It’s up to all of us to make that happen.

Pramila Jayapal represents Washington’s 7th District in the United States House of Representatives.

Dying to Vote (And a Warning for November)

April 7, 2020 by staff

By Jeff Milchen
April 7, 2020

Three years ago today, Mitch McConnell and the Republican Party completed the heist of the century — confirming Neil Gorsuch to occupy a U.S. Supreme Court seat held open for more than a year. Now Gorsuch’s decisive vote is forcing thousands of Wisconsin citizens to make an unconscionable choice: sacrifice your vote or risk your life to be counted.

Accurately describing yesterday’s malicious ruling by the Court is almost impossible to do without sounding hyperbolic. By a 5-4 vote, the Justices ruled that voters who requested an absentee ballot, but have not yet received it (at least several thousand citizens), must line up with masses of people to vote in-person. This despite a statewide order banning non-essential travel and gatherings of more than 10 people. So people not only are forced to choose between being disenfranchised and risking COVID-19, but must violate a State order to go to the polls!

The SCOTUS sided with Republican Party plaintiffs in reversing a U.S. District Court ruling that extended the deadline for absentee ballots — it gave voters one week after today to receive and return absentee ballots. This follows Republicans refusingd to approve a plan to send ballots to all registered voters. Instead, citizens had to request ballots individually, and more than one million did, leaving the State completely unable to fulfill the requests.

The Republicans’ disenfranchisement tactics aren’t motivated by intra-party primaries, but a hotly-contested State Supreme Court contest and other “non-partisan” races.

Extreme gerrymandering enabled Republicans to control the Wisconsin legislature despite being beaten by 10 percent of total votes in the 2018 elections. A State Supreme Court not dominated by Republican judges would likely strike down those gerrymanders, driving the imperative to close the circle by suppressing likely progressive voters.

Governor Tony Evers convened a special session of the legislature in hope of forging a bipartisan agreement to postpone the election and enable voting by mail, but Republicans refused to consider any action.

As if being forced to vote in person during a pandemic isn’t hellish enough, Milwaukee will open no more than five out of a normal 180 polling places today. It seems most poll workers weren’t eager to risk their lives for some extra pocket money. With projected turnout, 10,000 or more voters could jam the locations, making safe “distancing” impossible.

In Milwaukee County, more than 1300 residents have COVID-19 cases and 45 have died. As of Friday, 81 percent of the dead were black, while black and Hispanic residents vastly outnumber whites in the City.

In a separate legal fight that could have eliminated the need for the SCOTUS ruling, Wisconsin Governor Evers issued an executive order yesterday suspending in-person voting until June 9 due to the severe public health threat. But Republican legislators immediately challenged the order with the Wisconsin Supreme Court. In a 4-2 ruling, the Court blocked Evers’ decree and opened the door for the SCOTUS to strike down the absentee voting extension.

No Justice signed their name to the SCOTUS’ majority opinion, which is no surprise to anyone who reads the wafer-thin reasoning. The majority declared extending the date by which absentee ballots could be received and counted violates the Constitution because it “fundamentally alters the nature of the election” too close to Election Day. Apparently, voters failing to receive a ballot does not rise to the level of election-altering.

The majority opinion by Justices Roberts, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Thomas mentions the COVID-19 pandemic only in closing and slinks away from the fundamental issue by saying, “the Court should not be viewed as expressing an opinion on the broader question of whether to hold the election, or whether other reforms or modifications in election procedures in light of COVID–19 are appropriate. That point cannot be stressed enough.” Don’t forget: these Justices cancelled hearings as of April to ensure their own safety.

The denial of responsibility directly echoes Bush v Gore, but this time, some voters get to catch a virus and die.

Of course, the Republican tactics not only are an assault on democracy in Wisconsin, but a warning for our national elections this fall. Donald Trump repeatedly has attempted to undermine confidence in elections, raised baseless claims that mail-in voting would invite voter fraud, and endorsed numerous schemes to disenfranchise poor people and minorities.

Map of states with mail-in voting — Graphic by DailyKos

And five Supreme Court Justices have proven they’re willing to ignore clear evidence of discriminatory impacts to poor and minority citizens — at least without video of the perpetrators confessing racist intentions.

While most Americans already are challenged by the daily grind of staying afloat financially while surviving a pandemic, planning to thwart corruption like Wisconsin’s in the November election is essential. One place to start is checking to see if your state has (at least) no-excuse voting by mail and, if not, loudly demanding it (or universal vote-by-mail). Publicizing potential pitfalls with mail-in-voting is also essential to plan ahead.

And while it won’t be achieved this year, those of us who value democracy need to stop solely playing defense against the endless array of vote suppression tactics devised by Republicans. We should shift significant energy toward driving an affirmative right to vote into the U.S. Constitution via Amendment. Working to place it in each state’s Democratic, Green and other party platforms this year is a fine first step in that process.

Jeff Milchen founded Reclaim Democracy! He is an organizer, speaker and writer helping advance entrepreneurship, grassroots democracy and self-reliant communities. Engage him on Twitter at JMilchen

Recommended Resources:

Books
The Hidden History of the War on Voting by Thom Hartmann
Election Meltdown by Richard L Hasen

Current Articles
Trump Won’t Steal the Election, but Your Governor Might by Elie Mystal
We’ll Need Vote-by-Mail in November. And It Could Be a Legal Nightmare by Edward B Foley
Trump is Wrong About the Dangers of Absentee Ballots by Rick Hasen
Protecting Our Elections During the Coronavirus Pandemic by Elizabeth Warren
The cycle of disenfranchisement in Wisconsin is detailed well by columnist Will Bunch
In Election Law Blog, Richard Pildes of the right-wing Federalist Society defends SCOTUS’ Wisconsin ruling