Bfgrn
Gold Member
- Apr 4, 2009
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The Doomsday Lobby
by Michael I. Niman
Much of the world focused this week on Copenhagen, where global leaders met to discuss plans to contend with catastrophic global warming. Americans, however, were more focused on golf star Tiger Woodss marital infidelity. We have our priorities.
Outside of the United States, global warming is universally acknowledged as the gravest threat humanity has ever faced. Theres no longer any debate about the certainty of climate change or humanitys role in the earths warmingjust arguments over the speed at which global destruction will rain down upon us and whos gonna field the pain of confronting it. Back in La La Land, we Americans have distinguished ourselves as the last population on earth not to really give a damn about our unfolding environmental cataclysm. By the numbers, about 40 percent of us dont believe humanity had any role in polluting the atmosphere and bringing on this mess. Children born today will see major populated chunks of South Florida succumb to the sea during their lifetimes, but hell, thats not stopping their parents from moving there.
How did we come to be so insanely stupid and so incredibly out of touch with the rest of the planets grip on reality? The answer is easy. We have an industry whose job it is to spin reality into an incoherent cerebral omelet of misinformation. Were not just dimwere educated to be idiots. Cloven-hoofed pundits and other professional liars seize every opportunity to mislead the public into acting against our own best interests. A generation ago this meant voting for Ronald Reagan and his ilk, even as they cut taxes for the rich, nickel-and-dimed the middle class, and gutted healthcare, education, recreation, housing, and social welfare programs. Reagan made Americans feel good even as he erased a century of social progress.
A few years into this insanity, working Americans actually began, like a dog dumbly following simple commands, to hate the very union movement that brought them weekends, the 40-hour work week, minimum wages, workplace safety rules, and so on. Average Americans began, on command, to identify with their oppressors rather than with their oppressed neighbors and co-workers. The ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of America, the fact that we are the only industrialized nation without government-guaranteed healthcare, the ease with which terms like homelessness roll off our tongues, the reality that one third of the residents of Buffalo are functionally illiterateall this is the result of our generation-long stupor. But social inequality can always be reversed. Thats what revolutions are often about.
...
Follow the money
So lets follow the money and get to the bottom of the Doomsday Industry. Global warming deniers cloak themselves in quasi-scientific veneers spun by pseudo-academic groups such as the Heartland Institute, the Acton Institute, the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the American Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Committee for Economic Development, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundationall of which are partially funded by Exxon-Mobil. Toss in some funding from the coal industry and the auto industry, and you wind up with no shortage of grant-funded, B-roll academics willing to parrot the company line. Mate them with the Fox News and talk radio blabber drones, and you have a manufactured debate capable of derailing climate action. Its all about Exxons short-term revenues, which last year broke all world records for corporate profits, and a dying auto industrys vested interest in peddling its mechanical dinosaurs, long-term planetary survival be damned.
The same model holds true wherever we see politicians and pundits joining forces to fight against the public good. Americans die every day because they lack healthcare, yet all attempts to develop a universal healthcare system and healthcare price controls have been thwarted for a generation by propaganda efforts funded by the private, for-profit healthcare industry. As is the case with addressing global warming, opponents of real healthcare reform arent coming up with a better proposalinstead theyve been successfully lobbying for no proposal for a generation.
Much more...
by Michael I. Niman
Much of the world focused this week on Copenhagen, where global leaders met to discuss plans to contend with catastrophic global warming. Americans, however, were more focused on golf star Tiger Woodss marital infidelity. We have our priorities.
Outside of the United States, global warming is universally acknowledged as the gravest threat humanity has ever faced. Theres no longer any debate about the certainty of climate change or humanitys role in the earths warmingjust arguments over the speed at which global destruction will rain down upon us and whos gonna field the pain of confronting it. Back in La La Land, we Americans have distinguished ourselves as the last population on earth not to really give a damn about our unfolding environmental cataclysm. By the numbers, about 40 percent of us dont believe humanity had any role in polluting the atmosphere and bringing on this mess. Children born today will see major populated chunks of South Florida succumb to the sea during their lifetimes, but hell, thats not stopping their parents from moving there.
How did we come to be so insanely stupid and so incredibly out of touch with the rest of the planets grip on reality? The answer is easy. We have an industry whose job it is to spin reality into an incoherent cerebral omelet of misinformation. Were not just dimwere educated to be idiots. Cloven-hoofed pundits and other professional liars seize every opportunity to mislead the public into acting against our own best interests. A generation ago this meant voting for Ronald Reagan and his ilk, even as they cut taxes for the rich, nickel-and-dimed the middle class, and gutted healthcare, education, recreation, housing, and social welfare programs. Reagan made Americans feel good even as he erased a century of social progress.
A few years into this insanity, working Americans actually began, like a dog dumbly following simple commands, to hate the very union movement that brought them weekends, the 40-hour work week, minimum wages, workplace safety rules, and so on. Average Americans began, on command, to identify with their oppressors rather than with their oppressed neighbors and co-workers. The ever-widening chasm between the rich and the rest of America, the fact that we are the only industrialized nation without government-guaranteed healthcare, the ease with which terms like homelessness roll off our tongues, the reality that one third of the residents of Buffalo are functionally illiterateall this is the result of our generation-long stupor. But social inequality can always be reversed. Thats what revolutions are often about.
...
Follow the money
So lets follow the money and get to the bottom of the Doomsday Industry. Global warming deniers cloak themselves in quasi-scientific veneers spun by pseudo-academic groups such as the Heartland Institute, the Acton Institute, the Annapolis Center for Science-Based Public Policy, the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, the American Enterprise Institute, the George C. Marshall Institute, the Fraser Institute, the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Committee for Economic Development, the Cato Institute, and the Reason Foundationall of which are partially funded by Exxon-Mobil. Toss in some funding from the coal industry and the auto industry, and you wind up with no shortage of grant-funded, B-roll academics willing to parrot the company line. Mate them with the Fox News and talk radio blabber drones, and you have a manufactured debate capable of derailing climate action. Its all about Exxons short-term revenues, which last year broke all world records for corporate profits, and a dying auto industrys vested interest in peddling its mechanical dinosaurs, long-term planetary survival be damned.
The same model holds true wherever we see politicians and pundits joining forces to fight against the public good. Americans die every day because they lack healthcare, yet all attempts to develop a universal healthcare system and healthcare price controls have been thwarted for a generation by propaganda efforts funded by the private, for-profit healthcare industry. As is the case with addressing global warming, opponents of real healthcare reform arent coming up with a better proposalinstead theyve been successfully lobbying for no proposal for a generation.
Much more...
