{"id":83777,"date":"2016-12-05T12:00:50","date_gmt":"2016-12-05T12:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=83777"},"modified":"2016-12-02T18:46:39","modified_gmt":"2016-12-02T18:46:39","slug":"the-misinformation-machine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/12\/the-misinformation-machine\/","title":{"rendered":"The Misinformation Machine"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"george<\/a>Donald Trump\u2019s staff are drawn from an opaque network of corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots campaigns.<\/em><\/p>\n

1 Dec 2016 – <\/em>Yes, Donald Trump\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. The bloggers and institutes whipping up this anger were funded by oil and coal companies.<\/p>\n

Among those with whom I clashed was Myron Ebell of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). The CEI calls itself a think tank, but looks to me like a corporate lobbying group. It is not transparent about its funding, but we now know it has received $2 million from ExxonMobil<\/a>, $5 million from a group called the Donors Trust<\/a> (which represents various corporations and billionaires<\/a>), $800,000 from groups set up by the tycoons Charles and David Koch<\/a>, and substantial sums from coal, tobacco and pharmaceutical companies<\/a>.<\/p>\n

For years, Ebell and the CEI have attacked efforts to limit climate change, through lobbying, lawsuits and campaigns. An advertisement released by the institute<\/a> had the punchline \u201cCarbon dioxide: they call it pollution. We call it life.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has sought to eliminate funding for environmental education<\/a>, lobbied against the Endangered Species Act, harried climate scientists<\/a> and campaigned in favour of mountaintop removal <\/a>by coal companies. In 2004, Ebell sent a memo <\/a>to one of George W Bush\u2019s staffers, calling for the head of the Environmental Protection Agency to be sacked. Where is Mr Ebell now? Oh. Leading Trump\u2019s transition team for the Environmental Protection Agency<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Charles and David Koch \u2013 who for years have funded extreme pro-corporate politics<\/a> \u2013 might not have been enthusiasts for Trump\u2019s candidacy, but their people were all over his campaign. Until June, Trump\u2019s campaign manager was Corey Lewandowski who, like other members of Trump\u2019s team, came from a group called Americans for Prosperity <\/a>(AFP).<\/p>\n

This purports to be a grassroots campaign, but it was founded and funded by the Koch brothers<\/a>. It set up the first Tea Party Facebook page and organised the first Tea Party events<\/a>. With a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars, AFP has campaigned ferociously on issues that coincide with the Koch brothers\u2019 commercial interests in oil, gas, minerals, timber and chemicals.<\/p>\n

In Michigan, it helped force through the \u201cright to work bill\u201d, in pursuit of what AFP\u2019s local director called \u201ctaking the unions out at the knees\u201d<\/a>. It has campaigned nationwide against action on climate change. It has poured hundreds of millions of dollars<\/a> into unseating the politicians who won\u2019t do its bidding and replacing them with those who will.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>; Barry Bennett, whose Alliance for America\u2019s Future refused to disclose its donors when challenged<\/a>; and Thomas Pyle, president of the American Energy Alliance, funded by Exxon and others<\/a>. This is to say nothing of Donald Trump\u2019s own crashing conflicts of interest<\/a>. Trump promised to \u201cdrain the swamp\u201d<\/a> of the lobbyists and corporate stooges working in Washington. But it looks as if the only swamps he\u2019ll drain will be real ones, as his team launches its war on the natural world.<\/p>\n

Understandably, there has been plenty of coverage of the racists and white supremacists empowered by Trump\u2019s victory. But, gruesome as they are, they\u2019re peripheral to the policies his team will develop. It\u2019s almost comforting, though, to focus on them, for at least we know who they are and what they stand for.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Don\u2019t imagine that other parts of the world are immune. Corporate-funded think tanks and fake grassroots groups are now everywhere. The fake news we should be worried about is not stories invented by Macedonian teenagers<\/a> about Hillary Clinton selling arms to Isis, but the constant feed of confected scares about unions, tax and regulation drummed up by groups that won\u2019t reveal their interests.<\/p>\n

The less transparent they are, the more airtime they receive. The organisation Transparify runs an annual survey of think tanks. This year\u2019s survey<\/a> reveals that in the UK only four think tanks \u2013 the Adam Smith Institute, Centre for Policy Studies, Institute of Economic Affairs and Policy Exchange \u2013 \u201cstill consider it acceptable to take money from hidden hands behind closed doors.\u201d And these are the ones all over the media. When the Institute of Economic Affairs, as it so often does<\/a>, appears on the BBC to argue against regulating tobacco, shouldn\u2019t we be told that it has been funded by tobacco<\/a> companies since 1963<\/a>? There\u2019s a similar pattern in the US<\/a>: the most vocal groups tend to be the most opaque.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

__________________________________<\/p>\n

About George Monbiot: Here are some of the things I try to fight: undemocratic power, corruption, deception of the public, environmental destruction, injustice, inequality and the misallocation of resources, waste, denial, the libertarianism which grants freedom to the powerful at the expense of the powerless, undisclosed interests, complacency. Here is what I fear: other people\u2019s cowardice. My<\/em> new book<\/em> How Did We Get into This Mess? is published by Verso.<\/em><\/p>\n

Published in the<\/em> Guardian 30th<\/sup> November 2016.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 monbiot.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump\u2019s staff are drawn from an opaque network of corporate-funded thinktanks and fake grassroots campaigns. 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-83777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83777","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=83777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}