For the benefit of any new readers here unfamiliar with the people I cover, first and foremost — the man I’m referring to is the ex-head of Greenpeace USA, John Passacantando, who (with former subordinate Kert Davies, it turns out – *ahem* – his subordinate and him) was behind a false accusation seen in the New York Times and widely repeated elsewhere in early 2015 claiming skeptic climate scientist Dr Willie Soon was paid dark money to spread disinformation.
Passacantando left Greenpeace in January 2009 without ever fully explaining why or what his next venture was going to be. But after that time, within his mystery “Our Next Economy LLC” company, he’s amassed just short of $20,000,000. I just discovered I needed to ad another $50,000 to that tally, which is still incomplete without current year IRS 990 income disclosures. While this new added amount might look like chump change compared to his main growing pile, there are more onion layers to peel back around this event. Let’s start with how this might not be just a grave problem for Passacantando, it could be a “Lisa Graves” problem for him, the Sustainable Markets Foundation, and the Park Foundation, which only draws even more attention to the question: what is he up to, and was his odd name choice for his LLC actually an indicator of his plans, which he’s seemingly still treating like some kind of state secret?
. . . . Wait. Lisa-who? Allow me to explain.
The setup goes like this: unlike Passacantando’s many prior 3- and multiple 4- figure outright contractor payment receipts from the Sustainable Markets Foundation into his mystery little LLC company (for, it may be assumed, contractually-obligated work), this $50 grand is – so far – just labeled as a grant, via whatever arrangements those operate under. Odd thing about this, it is seen below the heading of “Sustainable Markets Foundation” within a page at the Park Foundation’s website, having the url address of “https://www.parkfoundation.org/grantees/sustainable-markets-foundation/ .” The grant happened back in 2020, earmarked for the mystery project name of “True North/Bold ReThink” – parenthetically, “(a project of Our Next Economy, LLC).” There’s a puzzling situation about the appearance of this new disclosure that’s only months-old — in the previous 2023 capture of this same web page by the Internet Archive in June 2023 – the page has the oldest year of 2020 like the current page does, but there is no $50,000 grant amount shown for Passacantando’s LLC company. Sometime between June 2023 and December 2023, that grant disclosure was added, as seen in the the Internet Archive’s crawl dated 12/2/2023. It was not the only thing added. The Park Foundation also added two other $50,000 grant entries going to some outfit called …… wait for it …… True North Research. Also in the Fall of 2023, the Park Foundation added something more thing to their organization, two new Trustees, noted in their Jan 4 2024 announcement.
Who is one of those new Trustees? A person named Lisa Graves. The simple irony of any amount going to whatever Passacantando’s “True North/Bold ReThink project” in a convoluted way apparently in association with Graves . . . is huge:
Lisa Graves is a lawyer and investigative researcher whose work has brought to light the ways in which dark money distorts democratic processes by privileging special interests over public interest. … Graves founded and leads a watchdog group called True North Research. … she has worked with other journalists and researchers to expose hidden streams of money advancing agendas targeting courts, schools, and other institutions of government.
As ever, far-left activists are oblivious to how their insinuations of corrupt money-handling aimed at the people / entities they fight against are actually problems they ought to see when looking in the mirror.
To wit: there is a multi-million dollar stream flowing into Passacantando’s mystery company of which he discloses nothing about to the public, and which seems to have the agenda of funneling money to Kert Davies’ service of providing documents to climate litigation lawfare efforts . . . and, now, it’s apparently also funneling money into whatever “True North/Bold ReThink” is. Worsening the appearance for all involved, the Park Foundation now discloses that their new Trustee has gotten at least a hundred grand from Sustainable Markets Foundation, if not $150 grand, where the additional amount needed to be funneled through Passacantando’s LLC.
… expose hidden streams of money advancing agendas…” That’s rich, figuratively and literally.
However, again, Lisa-who? Back in July 2022 when I described how the enormous “Greenpeace Investigations” collection of ‘industry document scans’ was taken offline, I noted my curiosity to find out more on who some other “investigative reporter” was. In spotting that individual at Amy Westervelt’s website acknowledgements page (that Amy Westervelt) while highlighting the ones I knew, I saw Lisa Graves’ name, but didn’t have available time to pursue who she was.
It seems the Park Foundation is oblivious to how unhelpful their bio page is for Graves. The only arena where those kinds of accolades are accepted without any question whatsoever is in far-left political zealot echo chambers. Among objective, unbiased examiners, it’s a sea of red flags. Not helping her situation in the least is how her “True North” site castigates ‘climate disinformation’ (while committing that exact act themselves), while she herself calls for people to be fired for putting out political misinformation, all under her banner of ‘defending democracy.’ No joke.
It might be a bit of an uphill struggle to see where her True North site and other efforts are not overflowing with disinformation, and/or where she is not enslaved to others putting out disinformation. Case in point would be her 2016 “Ending ExxonMobil Sponsorship of the American Geophysical Union” report, prepared for her when she headed the Center for Media and Democracy. Who prepared it? Geoffrey Supran, among others. That Supran, of course (*ahem* that Supran). Who does Graves thank for input into her “Ending ExxonMobil Sponsorship” report? Kert Davies and five others only a degree or three separated from accusations enslaved to impugning the credibility of skeptic climate scientists via disinformation about ‘leaked industry memos’ and other related useless accusation ‘evidence.’ Drop the underlined names from my above screencapture into my GelbspanFiles Search window in my main menu bar to see how extensively I cover each. Give Graves some credit for not working the old, never-implemented, non-Exxon (despite Al Gore’s claims) “reposition global warming” memos into the report, but she did put in the equally worthless, (never-implemented!) “victory will be achieved” memos without directly naming them. Who’s her source? The Union of Conservative Scientists’ “Deception Dossiers.” Who does UCS cite for that memo set? They never say in their Appendix B, PDF file page 38 here, but their file is identical to Kert Davies’ 2013 Greenpeace file, apart from UCS moving his page 4 up to be their page 2 – no need to trust me on that, compare the arrays of degraded photocopy dust specs in any page in one file to those in the other file’s matching page.
Meanwhile, regarding that other “Bold ReThink” within the “(a project of Our Next Economy, LLC),” what’s the connection? Try the “Introducing the Bold ReThink” July 2020 article co-authored by Carolyn Raffensperger … and Lisa Graves.
Whether it is real equality, climate change, the rights of students and teachers to have great public schools, the right wing has sabotaged democracy and the ability of government in a healthy democracy to do what it is supposed to do — create conditions that advance the well-being of all people and not just the wealthiest few.
In this new Medium publication, BOLD ReThink, we seek to unmask the domestic enemies of our democracy, of the idea that We the People can hold corporations accountable and have better public policies that protect our health and well-being.
Pure psychological projection right there. They are actually the ones who’ve sabotaged democracy, by ramming anti-science agendas down the throats of the public, while advocating and actually implementing censorship policy in areas of social media (e.g. in the pre-“X” Twitter, in Facebook and in Pinterest, to name just three) against dissenting viewpoints
This is the point where the name of John Passacantando’s mystery little LLC gets one increment more spooky. While I’ll say I easily comprehended the irony of the revelation just over ten months ago that it was Kert Davies and Passacantando behind the false accusation of Exxon paying Dr Willie Soon $1.2 million over the span of a decade+, versus almost two tens of millions to Passacantando from 2009 to 2021 via verifiable IRS 990 forums — what I never gave much thought to at all was the name Passacantando chose for his LLC company:
“Our Next Economy, LLC.”
Lacking the imagination concerning the motivation for such things, I simply guessed Passacantando might’ve wanted a name so vague that nobody would think anything illicit was going on in some outfit which could be no more than an economic think tank. An abstruse name for hiding a huge inflow of cash.
I’ll additionally admit that I utterly dismissed the late Ross Gelbspan’s massively grandiose plan to “rewire the planet” in his 2004 “Boiling Point” book. The man thought he could become the world leader on saving the planet?? Puh-lease. He was preaching this idea as recently as November 2021, narcissism on steroids disguised as fixing an alleged environmental problem, where if he’d kept at it long enough, he risk being nailed to the wall for having no expertise on climate science, and for his accusation ‘evidence’ being false to the point of epic defamation, and for committing an epic act of journalism stolen valor.
I was reminded, however, in a re-read of my May 2014 blog post about Gelbspan’s ‘redistribution of wealth’ raison d’être that part of his plan meant implementing it by regulatory force.
There is no way that a market-based system can accomplish a global transition to clean energy … It requires an energy revolution.
A 2014 reviewer of Boiling Point interpreted Gelbspan’s “energy revolution” to mean “social, political, economic and moral transformation.”
Complete revolution, in other words. Such a transformation usually is not prompted via polite suggestion; die-hard capitalists may need a little more incentive.
If you cannot rewire the world through a market based economy, then you need some other economy to accomplish that. A government-controlled one nobody is permitted to question.
Would that perhaps be . . . Our Next Economy?