Frightened by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it......
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 think tanks, 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.
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).
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.
Link> https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/30/donald-trump-george-monbiot-misinformation?CMP=share_btn_link
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