It's not just the money channeled to our governmental employees and representatives. Their methods reach every aspect of our society feeding their own story line with no regard except to further their own interests and goals. RSG
Frightened
by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
Many of his staffers are from an opaque corporate misinformation
network. We must understand this if we are to have any hope of fighting back
against them
Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, like other members of Trump’s team, came
from a group called Americans for Prosperity.
Yes, Donald Trump’s
politics are incoherent. But those who surround him know just what they want,
and his lack of clarity enhances their power. To understand what is coming, we
need to understand who they are. I know all too well, because I have spent the
past 15 years fighting them.
Over this time, I have watched as tobacco, coal, oil, chemicals
and biotech companies have poured billions of dollars into an international
misinformation machine composed of thinktanks, bloggers and fake citizens’
groups. Its purpose is to portray the interests of billionaires as the
interests of the common people, to wage war against trade unions and beat down
attempts to regulate business and tax the very rich. Now the people who helped
run this machine are shaping the government.
Trump’s
climate denial is just one of the forces that point towards war
I first encountered the machine when writing about climate
change. The fury and loathing directed at climate scientists and campaigners
seemed incomprehensible until I realised they were fake: the hatred had been paid for.
The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal
companies.
Among those I clashed with was Myron Ebell of the Competitive
Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a thinktank, but looks to me
like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but
we now know it has received $2m from ExxonMobil, more than $4m from a
group called the Donors Trust (which represents various corporations and
billionaires), $800,000 from groups set up by the
tycoons Charles and David Koch, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and
pharmaceutical companies.
For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit
climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute had the
punchline “Carbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.”
It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education,
lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists and
campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo to one of George W
Bush’s staffers calling for the head of the Environmental
Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Ebell now? Oh – leading Trump’s transition team for the
Environmental Protection Agency.
Former
campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, like other members of Trump’s team, came
from a group called Americans for Prosperity. Photograph: UPI/Barcroft Images
Charles and David Koch – who for years have funded
extreme pro-corporate politics – might not have been
enthusiasts for Trump’s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign.
Until June, Trump’s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski, who like other members of Trump’s
team came from a group called Americans for Prosperity (AFP).
Donald
Trump's first 100 days as president – daily updates
This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers.
It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party
events. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned
ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers’ commercial
interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.
In Michigan, it helped force through the “right to work bill”,
in pursuit of what AFP’s local director called “taking the
unions out at the knees”. It has campaigned nationwide against
action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into
unseating the politicians who won’t do its bidding and replacing them with
those who will.
I could fill this newspaper with the names of Trump staffers who
have emerged from such groups: people such as Doug Domenech, from the Texas
Public Policy Foundation, funded among others by the Koch brothers,
Exxon and the Donors Trust; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for
America’s Future (now called One Nation)
refused to disclose its donors when challenged; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American
Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others.
This is to say nothing of Trump’s own crashing conflicts of interest. Trump
promised to “drain the swamp” of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in
Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he’ll drain will be real ones,
as his team launches its war on the natural world.
Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists
and white supremacists empowered by Trump’s victory. But, gruesome as they are,
they’re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It’s almost
comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and
what they stand for. By contrast, to penetrate the corporate misinformation
machine is to enter a world of mirrors. Spend too long trying to understand it,
and the hyporeality vortex will inflict serious damage on your state of mind.
Don’t imagine that other parts of the world are immune.
Corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The
fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers about
Hillary Clinton selling arms to Islamic State, but the constant feed of
confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that
won’t reveal their interests.
The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive.
The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of thinktanks. This year’s survey reveals that
in the UK only four thinktanks – the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy
Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange – “still consider it
acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors”. And these are
the ones that are all over the media.
When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does,
appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn’t we be told
that it has been funded by tobacco companies since 1963? There’s a similar pattern in the US:
the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.
As usual, the left and
centre (myself included) are beating ourselves up about where we went wrong.
There are plenty of answers, but one of them is that we have simply been
outspent. Not by a little, but by orders of magnitude. A few billion dollars
spent on persuasion buys you all the politics you want. Genuine campaigners,
working in their free time, simply cannot match a professional network staffed
by thousands of well-paid, unscrupulous people.
You cannot confront a
power until you know what it is. Our first task in this struggle is to
understand what we face. Only then can we work out what to do.
