“In a reverse takeover, federal Labor has now become a branch office of the rotten WA Labor Party, an outfit owned and run by the fossil fuel and extractive industries, its climate denialist billionaires and their propaganda outlets,” writes Bernard Keane in today's Crikey. #auspol#politics#statecapture#AtlasNetwork#gas
#AtlasNetwork pops up again re far right Christianity, a partnership made in hell.
“In order to understand why people who call themselves #Christians also oppose #government welfare, public schools, gun control & action on #climatechange, I decided to follow the #money.
What I discovered was an unholy alliance between evangelical Christians affiliated with the New Apostolic Reformation’s Seven Mountains strategy and a league of ultra-wealthy libertarians who operate a complex, #international network of #rightwing think-tanks – many of which fall under the umbrella of a group known as the ATLAS NETWORK. https://chrysstevenson.com/tag/atlas-network/
Useful: 5 of the fossil fuel industry’s biggest #disinformation tactics
proudly funded by the [#AtlasNetwork]
UNDERSTANDING the fossil fuel industry’s classic narratives is a good starting point.
DEBUNKING false claims is a critical next step. #media#journalists please debunk #climatechange#pollution
3/
Clifford S. Asness
Katherine V. Pope
Rupert Murdoch
Phillip Ruffin
Wayne L. Laufer
David Duffield
Eva Dolan
Geoff Palmer
Laura Khouri
Thomas Mcinerney
Michael L. Hodges
Shawn Peed
Thomas J. Peed
Keith Rabois
Kelcy L. Warren
Rob Granieri
Paul Levy
Ben Horowitz
Marc Andreessen
Robert T. Jr. Hale
Laura Arnold
Reid Garrett Hoffman
David Zalik
Winklevoss twins
NZ's three (count em) new fake unions keep hitting obstacles.
Pesky journalist Steve Kilgallon points out the fake "testimonials" on the NZ sites, resulting in the Queensland-based and Atlas Network-aligned owners of the sites quickly changing them.
It's hard to see these cooker-run pretend "unions" gaining much ground here in Godzone.
I find it ironic how many defenders of the #AtlasNetwork and its direct involvement with #NZPol political parties, astroturf organisations and undemocratic influencers are crying about conspiracy theories targeting them. After all, if anyone should recognise and appreciate the influential power of a good conspiracy theory then it’s the Atlas Network and their star pundit #ACT leader David Seymour.
This reeks of Atlas Network money and tactics. Dark money aims to pad its ranks with anti-mandate cookers and invent itself as a legitimate voice for "unions".
It doesn't matter that they're pure astroturf, our media will inevitably treat them like the real thing.
This Atlas interference needs to be knocked on the head promptly.
@Rjdlandscapes
All of this #NZPol government's actions are straight out of the #AtlasNetwork playbook. #NewZealand is being governed by big money foreign funders calling the shots. We must all stand up against this foreign takeover of #Aotearoa.
The shadowy #AtlasNetwork which brings together a global 'community' of right wing think tanks (often typified as #neoliberal) is (as George Monbiot points out in the Guardian this morning - not yet online), behind the cooker cutter rightist policies that #PresidentJavierMilei is bringing to #Argentina...
And so if the 'shock treatment' & re/de-regulatory agenda look familiar its because these are the policies Atlas associates have been pushing around the world.
@ChrisMayLA6 it really really is and the more of us on the receiving end realise that that is how they think and operate - always have, always will - the better. #ClassWar#AtlasNetwork
“The effort to deny Aboriginal Australians a voice is part of a global playbook from Atlas and its allies,” Walker told DeSmog. “They’ve also used it in Canada and likely anywhere else that greater Indigenous rights could impact fossil fuel and mining profits.”
It’s all part of a global playbook from the U.S.-based #AtlasNetwork to protect the profits of #FossilFuel and #mining companies, argues a Sydney researcher.
By Geoff Dembicki
Oct 10, 2023
"A campaign to deny #IndigenousPeoples a voice in Australia’s national Parliament is using tactics similar to an earlier conservative legal battle against #FirstNations communities in Canada, a new research paper argues.
"That’s no coincidence, according to the paper’s author Jeremy Walker, because think tanks linked to these efforts in Canada and Australia belong to a secretive U.S. organization called the Atlas Network that’s received support from #oil, #gas and #coal companies and operates in nearly 100 countries.
"'The coordinated opposition to Indigenous constitutional recognition by the Australian arm of the Atlas Network we can assume is motivated by the same intentions underlying the permanent Atlas campaign against climate policy [globally],' writes Walker, a senior lecturer in social and political sciences at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.
'That is, to minimise the possibility of democratic government challenging the ever-expanding frontier of fossil fuel extraction,' he argues, a charge one conservative Australian advocacy group strongly denies.
"On #October14, Australians will vote 'yes' or 'no' in a referendum that would amend the country’s constitution to create a permanent First Nations advisory body in the country’s Parliament.
"'Most Australians understand that generations of Australian government policy have failed First Nations peoples,' UNSW Sydney professor Megan Davis, who is a Cobble Cobble woman of the Barunggam Nation, told the Guardian earlier this year. 'The voice referendum is an opportunity for all of us Australians to make the difference.'
"Earlier this spring national support for the 'yes' position was over 60 percent but by September it had collapsed to 40 percent or less, polling cited by Walker suggests.
Walker attributes that largely to the efforts of a #conservative advocacy group called #Advance, which has led an extensive media campaign urging people to vote 'No' in the referendum. 'The ‘Indigenous Voice to Parliament’ will wreck our Constitution, rewire our democracy, and divide Australians by race. It’s divisive, it’s dangerous, it’s expensive and it’s not fair,' reads a website created by Advance.
The campaign’s main spokespeople are Indigenous – Warren Mundine and Australian Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price – and they have been interviewed frequently in the country’s mainstream media. Yet few Australians are aware of Mundine and Price’s connections to the wider Atlas Network, Walker argues.
"Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price is another ‘No’ campaigner with Atlas ties.
Both 'No' campaigners are long-time contributors to the Centre for Independent Studies, Walker’s paper explains, a conservative think tank founded in 1976 with grants from resource extraction companies such as #Shell, #RioTinto and #WesternMiningCorporation.
The Center for Independent Studies is in turn a member of the Atlas Network, a Virginia-based organization whose members include hundreds of conservative think tanks and organizations across the world, many of whom are active spreaders of doubt about the severity of climate change.
One of the Center for Independent Studies’ first board members, Maurice Newman, was revealed as an early backer of the organization Advance in 2018, which is now leading efforts against the Indigenous referendum. And Advance’s lead 'No' campaigner Mundine is chairman of LibertyWorks, a conservative group also associated with the Atlas Network.
"Despite these connections, Advance strongly disputes any association with Atlas.
'We have never heard of the Atlas Network and absolutely reject the incorrect assertion we have any connection to them at all,' a spokesperson for Advance wrote in an email to DeSmog. 'The idea that our referendum campaign is being conducted or coordinated by ‘fossil-fuel corporations and their allies’ or the Atlas Network is wrong and frankly bizarre.'
"In addition to Australia and dozens of other countries, several Atlas Network members are based in Canada. And they too have led efforts attempting to undermine greater recognition of Indigenous legal rights. An Ottawa-based think tank and Atlas member called the MacDonald Laurier Institute spent years advocating against Canada’s federal government adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, otherwise known as #UNDRIP.
"That’s because UNDRIP contained clauses that could potentially give Canada’s Indigenous peoples greater say over fossil fuel and natural resource projects on their territories. 'It is difficult to overstate the legal and economic disruptions that may have followed from such a step,' read documents produced by the Atlas Network and the Macdonald Laurier Institute that were obtained by DeSmog.
"The think tank has actively cultivated #ProIndustry Indigenous representatives as the face of its advocacy efforts on this and other natural resources issues in order to provide 'a shield against opponents that is hard to undermine,' according to the documents. First Nations critics refer to such strategies as '#redwashing.'
"'It’s a way of [industry] making their claims about their relationship with Indigenous peoples sound better than they actually are in reality,' Kris Statnyk, a #Gwichin First Nation lawyer based in British Columbia, told Drilled this summer.
"Walker sees a parallel between those tactics, and the current effort in Australia to prevent First Nations from having greater representation in that country’s Parliament. The 'No' campaign led by the group Advance prominently features Indigenous Australians arguing against the referendum, despite polling commissioned by advocates suggesting that 80 percent or more of First Nations people in the country support the initiative.
Like in Canada, some Australian fossil fuel and mining projects are located in or adjacent to the traditional territories of First Nations.
"Several Indigenous communities have led legal challenges against gas and coal expansion. 'Should an Indigenous Voice be constitutionalised in Parliament, First Nations representatives might raise objections to such fossil and mining projects,' Walker writes.
He argues that this is what’s at stake in the upcoming referendum vote.
"'The effort to deny Aboriginal Australians a voice is part of a global playbook from Atlas and its allies,' Walker told DeSmog. 'They’ve also used it in Canada and likely anywhere else that greater Indigenous rights could impact fossil fuel and mining profits.'"
Jeremy Walker: “exposing the oil-founded #AtlasNetwork's Australian branch as the origin and mass communication infrastructure of the #VoteNo campaign to deny First Nations a #VoiceToParliament. The story so far:”
Chris Stöcker hatte ja eine Kolumne im Spiegel zu Koch, Atlas usw. Weiß nicht mehr, wie tief er in das deutsche. Geflecht eingestiegen war und von Correctiv ist mir nix bekannt. wär nötig, auf jedenFall. Die ThinkTanks, die in der Ideologie von FDP mit ihrem faschistisch-infantilen Freiheitsbegriff eingebettet sind, sind ja bekannt.
How did we get to the point where it's the people peacefully defending the notion of a liveable planet that are the ones being arrested and branded as "radical extremists"? #climate#AtlasNetwork