A Vitally Important Interview ― “Climate Silence”: Corporate Media Failing to Link Wildfires, Extreme Weather to Climate Crisis

This is one of the most important interviews/programs/articles that I have shared in recent times. In this interview, it is highlighted why I watch, read, and listen to Democracy Now! ― and other independent and non-corporate funded resources ― over the American mainstream media. Corporate media, including NPR/PBS, cover all of these endless climate catastrophes but without connecting the vital dots to fossil fuels and the human caused climate emergency ― something they need to be doing endlessly every single day! 

We urgently need to end climate silence!! We need to be an informed populace who will demand in everyway possible the radical changes that have so long been needed to save ourselves and make it possible to preserve a livable planet. 

There needs to be culture shift! "We need to create a new culture where rich people are not allowed to burn down this planet with impunity." Those in the media and in positions of power who perpetuate climate silence and denial and doubt are among the greatest criminals on Earth. Hopefully sooner than later they will be held to account. 

Certainly the eyes of the children are watching us all and how we are, or are not, informing ourselves, speaking the truth, standing up in every way possible in protection of them and sustaining a habitable Earth for all beings. ― Molly

We speak with author Genevieve Guenther about “climate silence” and how the corporate media routinely fails in reporting on worsening extreme weather events. “You need to connect the dots from what you’re reporting to the climate crisis, and then through the climate crisis to the use of fossil fuels that is heating up our planet,” says Guenther, whose forthcoming book is titled The Language of Climate Politics.

AMY GOODMAN: We bring in Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, a volunteer group dedicated to helping the media cover the climate crisis with the urgency it deserves. She tweeted Wednesday, “A grim milestone: the top 4 stories after the Russia headliner on the @nytimes app are all #ClimateChange stories. Of course only one article, an explainer piece, actually mentions the #ClimateCrisis and none mention #FossilFuels. This is a fail,” Professor Guenther says.

Welcome to Democracy Now! So, many would say the weather is being covered constantly. Yet you head a group called End Climate Silence. Talk about what’s missing.

GENEVIEVE GUENTHER: So, I founded End Climate Silence in 2018 after I spent a morning in my car listening to public radio and hearing three segments on stories that were clearly climate stories. One was about the drought in the Pacific Northwest. One was about the floods in Japan that year that had been displaced millions and millions of people. And another one was about how self-driving cars would change the way we moved around and change our transportation systems. And none of those stories even mentioned climate change, even though, clearly, climate change was playing a role in the creation of those stories and would have a role in the ongoing transportation systems that we would need to create in order to halt global heating. And so, I founded End Climate Silence in order to try to teach the news media that even if you’re not telling what you think is a science story or an environment story, even if you’re reporting on breaking news, as this, you know, smoke all across the United States clearly is, you need to connect the dots to what you’re — from what you’re reporting to the climate crisis, and then, through the climate crisis, to the use of fossil fuels that is heating up our planet.

So, for example, most of the stories on the wildfire smoke would talk about the unprecedented wildfires that are raging across Canada right now, and some of them even discussed the heat and the drought that’s been creating this fire weather north of the United States. But none of them actually articulated the words “climate change,” and they didn’t explain that it is the ongoing use of fossil fuels that is putting carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and creating these conditions for these extreme weather events, these disasters, which are already affecting Americans’ health, Americans’ safety, Americans’ ability to live normal lives.

So, our job and the job of the news media is to, every story, make those connections between what’s being reported and the reality of the crisis, because if you don’t do that, you’re actually performing a kind of climate denial, where you are pretending that something that is happening is not happening, where you are proceeding as if the climate crisis weren’t already here and weren’t already hurting us, hurting our children, hurting our ability to live normal lives and be healthy. So, we need to stop this practice. We need to end climate silence and always make that link to the climate crisis, even if you’re not writing a specifically — a specific climate story or a science story or an environment story.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: So, Genevieve, before we conclude, if you could explain? Presumably, you’ve spoken to some of these journalists, journalists who cover these stories without talking about the climate crisis. What do you understand about why this issue is not highlighted in their reporting?

GENEVIEVE GUENTHER: Well, I think it’s — I think that two things need to happen. There needs to be more education about climate change in news media. So, reporters who are put onto the climate beat obviously are duty-bound to educate themselves about the climate crisis. But other reporters, for example, the Chicago bureau chief who wrote one of these stories in The New York Times that didn’t mention the climate crisis, these reporters don’t have any particular professional obligation, as it stands now, to learn about the climate crisis. But as our planet heats up, even if we — you know, even if we phase out fossil fuels as soon as possible, we are going to continue to see some of these extreme weather events, until our climate reaches a certain equilibrium. So, all reporters, no matter what their beat, need to be educated in the climate crisis. And so, this needs to happen in journalism programs, and it also needs to happen in onboarding of new journalists into television stations, into newspapers, into radio stations. All venues need to have a kind of institutionalized method to educate their reporters about the climate crisis.

And then there needs to be a culture shift, where editors understand that the climate crisis is no longer a story simply for the science or environment section. It’s a story that is on the front page nearly every day, especially in the summers. And it behooves everybody to make those connections, so that readers, viewers, listeners, all citizens can be educated and informed, so that they can make the decisions they need to make in the ballot box, as activists, as consumers, as Americans and human beings on this planet.

AMY GOODMAN: And we just have 30 seconds. I know there are meteorologist groups that, for example, are doing “Show Your Stripes,” that show the climate catastrophe when they’re showing the weather. And finally, 30 seconds on your article”:https://www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-talk-about-the-carbon-footprints-of-the-rich/, “We Need to Talk About the Carbon Footprints of the Rich: Dramatically unequal consumption lies at the heart of the climate crisis.” Your final comment?

GENEVIEVE GUENTHER: Yes, I mean, my point there is that sometimes we think about emissions in terms of national contributions to the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere, but I think it’s actually more useful to think about this in terms of class. So, it’s the top 10% of people in income brackets who are contributing the vast majority of emissions. The top 1%, some of these people have carbon footprints that rise over a thousand tons of carbon a year. And we know that billions of people in Africa and in the Global South emit almost no carbon at all, and yet they’re the people who are most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They are on the frontlines. It’s coming for us all, but, obviously, the poorest people are suffering first and worst.

So, what I’m arguing there is that we don’t only need to think about national policy and federal policy, but we need to start talking about a new culture where rich people are not allowed to burn down this planet with impunity.

AMY GOODMAN: We have to leave it there, but we’ll continue to cover this issue. Genevieve Guenther, founding director of End Climate Silence, professor at New School.

Please go here for the original interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/29/climate_silence_guenther

Meet One of the Teens Suing Montana over Climate Crisis. She Says Planet’s Future Is at Stake

A highly anticipated court ruling is expected soon in Montana, where a groundbreaking, youth-led climate trial just ended after five days of dramatic testimony on who can be held responsible for the climate crisis. The landmark case was led by 16 children and young adults, ranging in age from 5 to 22, who accuse the state of Montana of violating their constitutional rights as it pushed policies that encouraged the use of fossil fuels, devastated the environment and severely impacted their health. The case is the first of its kind to go to trial in the United States, and a federal judge in Oregon just cleared the way for another children’s climate case against the U.S. government. For more, we are joined by Grace Gibson-Snyder, a 19-year-old plaintiff in the Montana case, and by Nate Bellinger, lead attorney in the trial.

Please go here for the original interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/29/montana_climate_trial

Canadian Climate Activist: Big Oil Is Fueling Fires. We Must Stop Funding New Fossil Fuel Pipelines

It cannot be overemphasized how urgent and vital this is to the welfare of life on Earth and ensuring the possibility of sustaining a habitable planet. ― Molly

As wildfire smoke fills the skies and record heat waves cook much of North America, Canadian climate activist Tzeporah Berman says governments need to be pushed to phase out fossil fuels more rapidly. “We need people to stand up to this industry. We need activism to protest in the streets, to demand our governments stand up to this industry. And we also need international cooperation,” says Berman. She also discusses Canada’s investment in the Trans Mountain Pipeline and how governments around the world are propping up the fossil fuel industry rather than embracing a transition to clean energy. Her recent article for The Guardian is headlined “Canada is on fire, and big oil is the arsonist.”

Please go here for the original interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/29/climate_berman_guenther

Canada Is On Fire, and Big Oil Is the Arsonist

 An excellent, chilling, and deeply important article.

― Molly

Fossil fuel companies and their executives don’t need our money. In fact, they use it against us.’ Photograph: Canadian Forces/Reuters

Governments need to represent us, not fossil-fuel profiteers. We need plans to phase out fossil fuel production and emissions

By Tzeporah Berman

Canada is on fire from coast to coast to coast. Thousands have been evacuated, millions exposed to air pollution, New York a doom orange and even the titans of Wall Street choking.

Catastrophic flooding in Pakistan, back-to-back cyclones in the Pacific islands and droughts in Africa haven’t been enough to create a tipping point for action. Now that climate impacts have hit the economic capital of western power, will it spur governments in the global north to get serious?

A lack of scientific knowledge about climate change is not the barrier. Nor is a lack of cleaner, safer, cheaper energy alternatives. The IPCC said as much last year – the barrier is vested fossil fuel interests putting their profit above our safety.

We know exactly which fossil fuel companies are robbing us of clean air and a secure future. We can now measure which oil companies are responsible for wildfires (13 operate in Canada), but oil executives are still calling the shots.

Internationally, big oil has been flooding the climate talks for decades. The result? The Paris agreement doesn’t even include the words fossil fuels, oil, gas or coal. And today we are on track to produce 110% more oil, gas and coal by 2030 than the world can ever burn, or it will burn us. If we are going to manage the decline of fossil-fuel production in an equitable and fair way we need our governments to stand up to big oil and start negotiating a new international agreement on fossil fuels to complement the Paris agreement.

Back at home, as the smoke rolled in, the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, promised to do whatever it takes to keep people safe. But Ottawa just backed another loan guarantee for the Trans Mountain Pipeline. “Whatever it takes” – except tackling the industries stoking the flames.

Trudeau is not alone in refusing to acknowledge the need to stop expansion of oil and gas. That same attitude – “we must act on climate change but my expansion of fossil fuels is OK” – is alive and well south of our border where Biden has recently approved the Willow project and more.

These are scary times. Global leaders declare a climate emergency while approving projects to expand oil and gas. In Canada and around the world, fossil fuel proponents are still being elected. Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, used her victory speech to rally her constituents against the federal government’s plan to clean the grid as her province burns.

For more than five decades, oil and gas companies have muddled the truth and blocked progress. They’ve spent millions on PR campaigns to convince the public that expanding fossil fuels is safe, reasonable and unavoidable and that the alternatives are problematic and unreliable. It’s working. Canadians are alarmed about climate change yet are largely unaware that most of Canada’s carbon pollution comes from fossil fuels like oil and gas. Half of the public say they’re unsure whether “solar panels emit more greenhouse gases during manufacturing than they end up saving”.

These messages and those who peddle them have an impact on politics. Canada subsidises oil and gas more than any other G20 nation, averaging $14bn annually between 2018 and 2020. Now big oil is getting tax breaks for carbon capture and storage – an unproven technology that won’t change the fact that Canada needs to phase out fossil fuels. Funding the industry to continue is like giving arsonists a tinderbox to play with.

Fossil fuel companies and their executives don’t need our money. In fact, they use it against us. Take the Koch brothers, who have funded anti-climate and anti-clean energy campaigns. Or the fossil fuel industry’s Pathway Alliance in Canada that is running “Let’s Clear the Air” misinformation ads to an audience coughing and choking on their product.

Fossil fuel companies’ net-zero pledges are meaningless and we need to stop pretending we can negotiate with them. We need to start regulating them.

John Valliant, homing in on the recent Alberta election, puts it more provocatively: “Alberta politics is still a largely and wholly owned subsidiary of the petroleum industry.” And: “The petroleum industry is a wholly owned subsidiary of fire.”

Governments need to represent us, not fossil-fuel profiteers. We need plans to phase out fossil fuel production and emissions. Plans that include protections and support for communities and workers dependent on oil, gas and coal.

But that’s not enough. Wealthy fossil-fuel producing countries like Canada must support countries in the global south to be part of the transition to clean energy so it can happen in a fast and fair way.

Oil, gas and coal are burning us. Politically and now literally. That’s why 101 Nobel laureates and over 3,000 scientists are calling for a fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty. Six countries and 84 subnational governments have already endorsed it. It’s time for yours to get on board, too.

Please go here for the original Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/20/canada-wildfires-big-oil

“What Arrogance Looks Like”: Supreme Court Justice Alito’s Ruling vs. EPA Allegedly Violates Ethics

On the final day of the Supreme Court’s term, we speak with David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect, about recent revelations detailing many of the Supreme Court conservative justices’ close relationships to Republican megadonors, and how allegations of financial impropriety further delegitimize the court’s standing as an objective legal authority. “These are lifetime appointments,” says Dayen. “This is what arrogance looks like.”

Transcript:

AMY GOODMAN: David Dayen, before we end the show, I want to ask you about another SCOTUS point. And for people who are not familiar, ”SCOTUS” is Supreme Court of the United States. As we reported today in headlines, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito leased land to a fossil fuel company for oil and gas exploration around the same time the firm stood to benefit from a major environmental case before the high court. The Intercept has just reported that Justice Alito did not recuse himself from the case, even though his family stood to profit from the outcome, and he ended up writing the 5-to-4 majority opinion in Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, which gutted protections for U.S. wetlands under the Clean Water Act. At the time, his wife, Martha Ann Bomgardner Alito, had an agreement with the firm Citizen Energy to earn revenue from any oil and gas produced on her land in Oklahoma, which she inherited from her father.

And, of course, this following the bombshell report in ProPublica that found that Justice Alito took this undisclosed luxury fishing vacation with Republican megadonor Paul Singer in 2008, then later ruled in Singer’s favor in several cases — Singer, a major donor to the Manhattan Institute, the Republican think tank that supports blocking student debt relief. Members of the Debt Collective demanding Alito recuse himself from today’s Supreme Court ruling on President Biden’s plan to give 40 million student borrowers up to $20,000 each in debt relief.

Your response to these latest revelations, which, of course, follow the revelations around Clarence Thomas and his relationship with the billionaire donor Harlan Crow?

DAVID DAYEN: Well, I mean, the fact is that the Supreme Court is really a rogue institution. It’s an example of self-regulation. Justices decide on their own whether or not to recuse. The documents that they file, while journalists can scrutinize those documents and maybe find other cases where they didn’t disclose certain gifts or other personal financial windfalls, there’s basically no sanction for it. These are lifetime appointments. I mean, this is what arrogance looks like in a manifested form. And there’s nothing much that the public can do about it, except bring pressure to bear.

And I think that some of the rulings that we’ve seen this year, which have been a little more moderate, could be a result of the legitimacy crisis sort of at the heart of the Supreme Court. And it’s good that journalists and other people are paying more attention to this circumstance, but it’s really frustrating.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, of course, we’ll continue to follow all of these issues. David Dayen, executive editor of The American Prospect. His piece, we will link to, “The Student Loan Case’s Unwilling Participant.”

Please go here for the original interview: https://www.democracynow.org/2023/6/30/samuel_alito_supreme_court_corruption

The Supreme Court’s Next Gift For Its Billionaire Benefactors

Chilling.

The authoritarian, fundamentalist, and sociopathic 

allegiance of SCOTUS with conservative justices’

billionaire benefactors and the super rich is

something we all need to be aware of and

fight to end. This is madness. ― Molly

Members of the Supreme Court sit for a new group portrait on Oct. 7, 2022. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

By Andrew Perez, Julia Rock & Rebecca Burns

The Supreme Court just agreed to hear a case next term that could preempt Congress and the Biden administration from instituting a federal wealth tax — another potentially lucrative gift for conservative justices’ billionaire benefactors and the super rich. A think tank affiliated with some of those benefactors recently pressed the court to accept the case and outlaw such taxes.

Days after the high court accepted the case, President Joe Biden reiterated his opposition to progressives’ demand that he add justices to the panel, which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority.

“If we start the process of trying to expand the court, we’re going to politicize it — maybe forever — in a way that is not healthy, that you can’t get back,” he declared.

The new case, Moore v. United States, is tailored to try to block Democrats’ promised agenda by defining what can — and cannot — count as taxable “income” under the Constitution. It specifically challenges a one-time levy on some shareholders for their foreign corporate earnings that was included in the 2017 Republican tax law.

The plaintiffs are a Washington state couple who faced a $15,000 tax bill under that provision for a stake they owned in an Indian company. They argue that their corporate earnings should not count as taxable income under the Constitution because they had not been distributed to shareholders as dividends.

Tax law experts told The Lever that the petitioners' narrow definition of "income" misreads the historical record — and pointed to several past examples of Congress enacting similar taxes.

The real goal of the case is “to slam shut the door on a federal wealth tax,” as the couple’s lawyers wrote in a 2021 column. The couple’s petition to the Supreme Court expressly decries previous wealth tax proposals from Democrats, including Biden, and urges the justices to “head off a major constitutional clash down the line.”

A host of powerful interests, including the nation’s top business lobby, pressed the Supreme Court to take up Moore. So did a conservative think tank with financial ties to two of the central names in the Supreme Court’s recent ethics scandals: Elliott Management hedge fund chief Paul Singer and Texas real estate magnate Harlan Crow. Both billionaires could benefit if Supreme Court justices were to preemptively declare that taxes on wealth are unconstitutional.

“If the Republicans on the Supreme Court take the petitioners’ side, they’d be handing a massive windfall to multinational corporations and could potentially lock in a right for billionaires to opt out of paying anything remotely close to a fair share in taxes,” said Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) in a statement.

Biden and Wyden have each pitched their own versions of wealth taxes on billionaires’ unrealized gains. Their proposals could face additional legal hurdles if the Supreme Court sides with the Moore petitioners.

“A Clean And Timely Vehicle” For SCOTUS

The Supreme Court case in question deals with the treatment of Charles and Kathleen Moore’s foreign investments under President Donald Trump’s 2017 tax bill. In 2006, the Moores invested $40,000 to help launch an Indian farm equipment manufacturer, KisanKraft, and received an equity stake in the company. The firm quickly became profitable, but the Moores, as shareholders, never paid a tax on those profits until the 2017 Republican tax law.

That law imposed a new, one-time tax on the income of multinational corporations, whose foreign earnings had previously only been taxed upon being distributed to U.S. shareholders.

The purpose of this “mandatory repatriation tax” was to tap more than $2.5 trillion in undistributed earnings of U.S. corporations through foreign subsidiaries — and raise a projected $340 billion over a decade, a key revenue booster in a tax law that overall greatly increased the deficit by cutting income tax rates on corporations and the wealthy.

Since the Moores owned a substantial stake in KisanKraft, they were taxed on a portion of the company’s income and ended up with a $15,000 tax bill.

They sued, arguing that the tax was unconstitutional because even though KisanKraft had made money, it hadn’t yet been paid out to them.

While the 16th Amendment allows the federal government to levy income taxes, the lawsuit claims that it does not permit taxes like the one the Moores paid — because, they claim, the undistributed profits counted as “unrealized gains,” and cannot be considered taxable income.

The case was dismissed by a federal district court in Washington state, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the district court decision.

In their February petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case, the Moores argue it provides “a clean and timely vehicle” for the court to establish that gains must be “realized” — meaning the underlying asset is sold — in order to be subject to federal taxes. The 2017 law, they claim, “taxes them on ownership of personal property (their KisanKraft shares), not on income they had realized.”

But the idea that income must be “realized” in order to be taxable is not rooted in history or the Constitution, argued tax law experts John Brooks, a professor at Fordham University School of Law, and David Gamage, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, in a recent paper.

The two scholars reviewed the definitions of income cited by judges in the lower court decisions, the Moore plaintiffs, the amicus briefs in the case, and definitions of income at the time the 16th Amendment was ratified, and found that “none of the definitions… includes the words ‘realize’ or ‘realization.’”

“Realization is explicitly not part of the definition of income,” Brooks told The Lever.

Brooks added that realization isn’t really the issue in the Moore case, because the company, KisanKraft realized the income.

“It is real earnings, not just fluctuation in asset values,” Brooks said.

Moreover, as Brooks and Gamage point out in their paper, Congress has on various occasions — including in 1864 and 1913 — taxed shareholders for undistributed corporate income.

Billionaires’ Think Tanks Boosting The Case

While the Moore case takes aim at a one-time tax on foreign income, the Supreme Court’s ruling could make it harder to design a wealth tax that can survive legal challenges.

Democrats designed their wealth tax proposals to capture unrealized capital gains or appreciation on assets before they’re sold — the types of income that the plaintiffs claim can’t be taxed.

Conservative groups want the Supreme Court to issue a sweeping ruling that would nullify Trump’s repatriation tax and “reaffirm the constitutional limitations on the federal government’s taxing power,” as Americans for Tax Reform, an anti-tax advocacy group, wrote in an amicus brief.

Ironically, many of the groups disputing the constitutionality of the one-time repatriation tax were key proponents of the 2017 Republican law that enacted the measure.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the nation’s top business lobbying group, filed an amicus brief boosting the Moore petitioners, suggesting that taxing their unrealized gains amounted to taxing “the collector of baseball cards still under a childhood bed.”

The Chamber previously heralded the GOP tax law as helping workers “achieve their very own American Dream,” and ran ads praising Republican lawmakers for supporting the legislation. Americans for Tax Reform has a running list on its website tracking “1,233 examples of pay raises, new job creation, facility and product line expansions, special bonuses, utility rate reductions, 401(k) match increases, and employee benefit increases” attributed to the 2017 tax law.

The Moore family has also received support from the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based think tank with financial ties to Singer and Crow, the billionaires at the center of the ethics scandals looming over the Supreme Court.

The Manhattan Institute filed an amicus brief in May lobbying the Supreme Court to agree to hear Moore and use it as an opportunity to “clarify that taxes on unrealized gains, such as wealth taxes, are direct taxes that are unconstitutional” unless they are levied on the states in proportion to their populations.

Singer is the Manhattan Institute’s chairman. His charitable foundation, the Paul E. Singer Foundation, has donated more than $7 million to the institute since 2010, tax records show. Crow’s wife joined the Manhattan Institute’s board of trustees last year.

Crow and Singer’s gifts to conservative Supreme Court justices — including Justice Clarence Thomas’ undisclosed luxury vacations, real estate deals, and other gifts, as well as a secret private jet flight provided to Justice Sam Alito — have been the subject of several recent blockbuster ProPublica investigations.

Singer has also reportedly funded conservative legal activist Leonard Leo’s dark money operation, which ran advocacy campaigns boosting the confirmations of five of the six Republican-appointed justices on the Supreme Court — including Alito.

According to the Washington Post, Leo has steered consulting payments from his dark money network to Justice Clarence Thomas’ wife.

A conservative Washington-based nonprofit, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, is also helping argue the Moore case before the Supreme Court.

While there’s no record of Singer or his foundation donating directly to the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the organization has received significant funding from a donor-advised fund that Singer has used to funnel hundreds of millions into charities.

Singer’s foundation has donated at least $247 million to the National Philanthropic Trust since 2012, according to IRS tax records. The National Philanthropic Trust has donated $1.6 million to the Competitive Enterprise Institute over the past decade. The institute had an annual budget of roughly $8 million in 2022.

Donor-advised funds are extremely opaque. The funds effectively function as pass-through vehicles for donors to distribute contributions to other charities, providing an extra layer of anonymity. It’s nearly impossible to trace whose money is going where.

However, the National Philanthropic Trust’s regular donations to the Competitive Enterprise Institute appear to have started in 2013 or 2014, shortly after Singer started using the fund to distribute much of his charitable donations.

Elliott Management and Singer’s foundation did not respond to questions about whether he has ever donated or routed contributions to the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Singer has funded several other organizations opposing the notion of a wealth tax.

Since 2010, his foundation has donated at least $850,000 to the Philanthropy Roundtable, a nonprofit for large conservative charitable donors that gave Singer an award for “philanthropic leadership” in 2018.

The Philanthropy Roundtable’s policy research director Jack Salmon recently published a column supporting the Moore case and opposing a wealth tax broadly, as well as a brief entitled: “Taxing Unrealized Gains Is Unconstitutional.”

Salmon argues in the piece that taxing wealth “could have a chilling effect on charitable giving as there will be less funds available to make charitable contributions.”

The Washington Free Beacon, a right-wing news site funded by Singer, has published numerous articles slamming Democrats’ wealth tax proposals, claiming they will not reduce inequality and questioning their constitutionality.

In 2020, a group called the “Campaign for New York’s Future” was formed to fight proposed New York state tax hikes on the super rich. The group was reportedly bankrolled by Singer — although a spokesperson denied he was funding it — and dissolved shortly after its launch. That fall, Singer’s hedge fund announced it was moving its headquarters from Manhattan to Florida.

Please go here for the original article: https://www.levernews.com/the-supreme-courts-next-gift-for-its-billionaire_benefactors/?utm_source=newsletter-email&utm_medium=link&utm_campaign=newsletter-article