Here we go again with the ALEC/Koch brothers/fossil fuel big lie machine. Yesterday, I saw this trash (“EPA carbon plan will kill 38,000 Virginia jobs, report says”) in something called “VirginiaWatchdog.org,” pushing this Big Lie “report” by something called the “Thomas Jefferson Institute.” For more on that Orwellian organization, see here:
The Thomas Jefferson Institute is a libertarian/right-wing think tank committed to “free markets, limited government and individual responsibility.” It is funded heavily by the Roe Foundation, a South Carolina-based which provides “financial support to free-market policy groups across the country” and which gives out its annual Roe Award to the likes of Grover Norquist and to others from right-wing groups like the Independence Institute (proud global warming deniers), the Reason Foundation (for years, global warming deniers who received funding from ExxonMobil), and the big-time global warming deniers at the Heartland Institute. Sensing a pattern here?
As for the Koch-Funded Franklin Center “Watchdogs” Infiltrate State Capitols. As for the Franklin Center, all you really need to know is this:
In June 2012 the Franklin Center teamed up with the Heritage Foundation to host the first annual Breitbart Awards dinner.[33] The awards honored the life and work of the late Andrew Breitbart who “pioneered a new media revolution that transformed journalism and the political landscape.”
Yes, seriously, they held a dinner to honor the far-far-far-right-wing Andrew Breitbart. Just to refresh your memory of the ever-charming Breitbart, note that “In the hours immediately following Senator Ted Kennedy’s death, Breitbart called Kennedy a ‘villain’, a ‘duplicitous bastard’, a ‘prick’ and ‘a special pile of human excrement’.” Oh, and if that’s not enough, one more thing you should know about the Franklin Center is this:
95 percent of Franklin’s revenue in 2011 came from a charity called Donors Trust…Since its founding in 1999, Donors Trust and its affiliated organization, Donors Capital Fund, have distributed nearly $400 million, becoming major vehicles for tax-exempt giving from wealthy conservatives such as billionaire industrialist Charles Koch. Koch is among an exclusive pool of donors who have used Donors Trust as a “pass-through.”
Finally, check out the Beacon Hill Institute, another far-right-wing, fossil-fuel-funded propaganda factory which works with groups like the Koch brother’s “Americans for Prosperity” and others to denigrate renewable energy and efforts to scale back greenhouse gas emissions. Great, huh?
Anyway, the bottom line is that these folks have absolutely ZERO credibility, nor does any “analysis” they put out on any subject, certainly not on energy or environmental matters, given their enormous $$$ interest in fossil fuels. So when you see breathless reports in Koch-brothers-funded blogs of a new “study” by more Koch-brothers-funded entities (in this case, the “Thomas Jefferson Institute for Public Policy” and the “Beacon Hill Institute”), what you need to do is either a) completely ignore it; or b) take the polar opposite of what they say as much closer to reality. In this case, for instance, the reality is that moving towards a clean energy economy will be an enormous jobs creator, as this is turning into a multi-TRILLION-dollar industry for the 21st century (while most fossil fuels are unburnable if we want a livable planet, meaning that entire industry is resting atop a gigantic contradiction, lie, etc. — see Bank of England warns of huge financial risk from fossil fuel investments, for instance). Oh, and any media outlet that reports the Koch brothers’ propaganda as “fact” or in a “both sides” manner should lose all claim to being a legitimate news source forever.
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