EPISODE 3/4: The playground of the GAFAM and the political world

15/09/2021 · Colin Meier

The freedom-killing disaster that trusted flaggers ^[1] of the CCDH kind would represent does not stop there. Let us return, for example, to Tom Brookes, one of its directors since 2020 ^[2]. He was previously a lobbyist for Microsoft and Apple, but since 2009 he has been executive director of the strategic communications department of the European Climate Foundation (ECF) ^[3].

Tom Brookes’ rich network

The latter is funded by a network of philanthropic foundations ^[4], often associated with the fortunes of billionaires, such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund (RBF), which gave $400,000 to the ECF from 2017 to 2020 ^[5] or Bloomberg Philanthropies ^[6]. Alongside projects to fight covid-19, these partners co-fund projects to bring political and technological solutions to climate change, in particular via the ClimateWorks Foundation (CWF) ^[7]. The CWF receives financial support from, among others, the Bezos Earth Fund ^[8] (Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon), Bloomberg Philanthropies (Michael Bloomberg, founder and CEO of Bloomberg L.P.) and Gates Ventures ^{[9], [10]} (Bill Gates, founder and former CEO of Microsoft), to name only the best known.

In addition to having several donors in common with the CWF, the ECF has received donations amounting to several tens of millions of dollars over the past six years from the CWF ^[11], whose senior adviser for global communications strategies is… T. Brookes ^[12]. The ECF, in turn, funds various projects, including media outlets such as Carbon Brief Ltd. with more than £573,000 for the year 2020 ^[13]. However, Carbon Brief was originally founded in 2010 under the name Climate Brief Ltd. ^[14] by a certain Thomas Conrad Lewis Brookes (director from 2010 to 2014) ^[15], the same Tom Brookes as at the CCDH ^{[16], [17]}, the ECF and the CWF.

John Podesta, the missing link

Let us dwell for a moment on the CWF. Its board of directors ^[18] includes, among various representatives mostly from other foundations linked to the ECF, the name of John Podesta. An official of the American Democratic Party and a long-time intimate of the Clintons, J. Podesta is known above all for two things. On the one hand, for having been Bill Clinton’s aide-de-camp during his presidency and Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager in 2016, whose private emails were leaked by Wikileaks ^[19]. These revealed not only J. Podesta’s collusion with the Democratic Party leadership and with Wall Street and pro-Israeli lobbyists during the primaries in order to smear Hillary Clinton’s only opponent, Bernie Sanders ^[20]. They also brought to light the fact that J. Podesta was aware that American allies such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia were supporting Islamist militants in Syria and in the Middle East in general ^[21].

A jumble of overlapping interests

On the other hand, J. Podesta is known for having created the Center for American Progress (CAP), an important Democratic Party think tank, of which he is also the CEO ^[22]. It so happens that among the senior fellows we come across the name of Simon Clark ^[23], the chairman of the CCDH board ^[24]. The fact that Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary under Democratic President Joe Biden, made use of CCDH reports at one of her recent press conferences ^[25] already seems less like a mere coincidence.

Among the very many financial backers of the Center for American Progress (CAP) ^[26] in 2020, we find the same foundations and multinationals of major patrons that fund the CWF ^[27] or the ECF ^[28], such as Bloomberg Philanthropies, the RBF and the CWF itself. Besides the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF, to the tune of $1.5 million ^[29]), which one sees everywhere, we find in particular the GAFAM and most of the world’s major digital players, including some of their executives or former executives in a personal capacity.

This jumble of professional and political interests, hidden behind patronage, good causes and foundations in which (often former) industry lobbyists hold positions, does not stop there for the CCDH. Kirsty McNeill, another CCDH director ^[30], is at the same time a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust ^[31], campaign director of Save the Children ^[32], but above all she is a member of the transatlantic think tank European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) ^[33] and of the board of the Coalition for Global Prosperity (CGP) ^[34]. Besides the support of numerous European embassies and foreign ministries, the ECFR’s patrons include ^[35] the BMGF and the Open Society Foundation (OSF, founded by billionaire George Soros). The CGP, for its part, enjoys the support ^[36] of many Conservative politicians, from Theresa May to James Cameron and Gordon Brown (right wing of Labour), as well as the financial support of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (to the tune of $1,217,850 ^[37]) and of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) ^[38], which also supports the CWF ^[39] and the ECF ^[40] (itself in turn supported with $3.3 million in 2019 by the OSF ^[41]).

The links of the CCDH’s leaders or of their financial backers therefore cast doubt on the reality of the organisation’s independence from the political or industrial world. Let us also note the influence of the climate agenda (or of Tom Brookes) on the “fight against disinformation” on the internet, with the very title of the webinar, which refers to the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. The fight against climate change gives rise to a controversial debate quite similar to that of the covid-19 pandemic in the way the proponents of the official truth treat their opponents.

EDMO, the European Commission’s armed wing

Let us now turn to another player in the “community of fact checkers” present at the webinar ^[42] with the Vice-President of the European Commission: Paula Gori of the European Digital Media Observatory (EDMO) ^[43]. This organisation is a hybrid entity, difficult to pin down, as it is both legally independent of the European institutions and does not enjoy the status of a European agency: the observatory is in fact a creation of the European Commission ^[44].

The latter funds EDMO to the tune of around €2.5 million ^[45] for a first phase (starting on 10 June 2020, the date the contract was signed ^[46]). Then a further €11 million will be added for the second phase ^[47], which provides for the creation of a network of national and multinational hubs across the EU dedicated to combating disinformation. The funds for this second phase will come from the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF-2) ^[48], a European programme aimed at developing digital infrastructure within the EU, which is in turn managed by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA).

EDMO’s modus operandi is clearly set out there: the aim is “to improve the detection of disinformation, the coordination of the response and cooperation with industry”. All steps that define a word that bodes ill for our lives and freedoms.

By Colin Meier, independent citizen journalist and correspondent for Germany at BAM!

[1] eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/FR/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:52020PC0825&from=en

[2] https://bam.news/en/investigation/episode-1-4-regulation-censorship-by-another-name

[3] europeanclimate.org/member/tom-brookes/

[4] europeanclimate.org/funding-grantmaking/

[5] www.rbf.org/grants-search

[6] www.bloomberg.org/press/bloomberg-commits-50m-international-effort-move-beyond-coal/

[7] www.climateworks.org/about-us/funding-partners/

[8] www.vox.com/recode/22321861/jeff-bezos-climate-earth-fund-andrew-steel-amazon

[9] www.crunchbase.com/organization/gates-ventures

[10] www.gatesnotes.com/

[11] www.climateworks.org/grants-database/

[12] europeanclimate.org/member/tom-brookes/

[13] www.carbonbrief.org/about-us

[14] find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/07222041/filing-history?page=2

[15] find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/WxCt5ApCWYF3Znh-yGWPUM9FtRA/appointments: Given that he has the same name, the same age (same month, same year), the same place of residence and the same nationality as T. Brookes of the CCDH, that he signs “Tom Brookes”, and that other sources confirm it, we can be reasonably sure that we are indeed dealing with the same person.

[16] find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/iylPI54tmStHqLamLv7vLFkUxyE/appointments

[17] www.northdata.com/Brookes,+Thomas+Conrad+Lewis,+Harrow/m0m

[18] www.climateworks.org/about-us/board/

[19] wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/

[20] thegrayzone.com/2020/01/27/dnc-perez-regime-change-agents-israel-lobbyists-wall-street-rig-game-bernie/

[21] thegrayzone.com/2016/10/11/hillary-clinton-isis-saudi-arabia-qatar-wikileaks-emails/

[22] www.americanprogress.org/c3-board/

[23] www.americanprogress.org/person/clark-simon/

[24] www.counterhate.com/our-people

[25] https://bam.news/en/investigation/episode-1-4-regulation-censorship-by-another-name

[26] www.americanprogress.org/about/c3-our-supporters/

[27] www.climateworks.org/about-us/funding-partners/