Why do so many Americans deny climate change?
Climate change denial, while not exclusive to America, is much more prevalent here than the rest of the world.
The common answer from liberals is “they’re just stupid”, and the common answer for conservatives is “they’re completely right”.
However, it’s way beyond plain ignorance. The reality is that few billionaires, primarily the Koch brothers of Koch Industries, have funneled millions into super PACs and propaganda to promote their agenda–which would require quite an ignorant population. Koch Industries is known for polluting (obviously), cracking down on unions, and disregarding worker safety.
It all begins with the Tea Party. They’re generally seen as ‘populist’ anti-government folk. This is right and wrong. Members of the Tea Party don’t necessarily know who backs them, and their party wasn’t founded on a lot of these principles in the first place. What they do know, however, comes from the ruling class in the form of advocation for ‘freedom’.
Here, we’ll be looking at the Koch brothers in particular, because they are among the wealthiest people in the world and the primary source of American climate change denial–and politicians’ obstruction of the environmentalist movement. Before anyone says I’m making up conspiracies, all this information is documented and proved to be factual. The book detailing all of this received very good reviews. It’s called “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right”, written by bestselling author Jane Mayer.
Let’s start with basic propaganda tactics used by the Koch brothers.
1. Buy support in the media. For the Koch brothers, conservative media was an easy target.
2. Create your own “news” outlets.
3. Fund groups to run media campaigns.
4. Pick reporters who obey your rules.
5. Attack those who expose your tactics.
A key element of the Koch brothers’ strategy is influencing the media. Through media, they have advanced their political and ideological goals and attacked those who stand in their way. The Koch brothers and their network have paid conservative media figures to promote their message, bankrolled front groups that run aggressive anti-environmental media campaigns, and even created their own right-wing “news” outlets. Meanwhile, they’ve garnered some favorable mainstream media coverage by tightly controlling reporter access to their summits and other events, while attacking and otherwise intimidating journalists who dare to shine a light on their activities.
Propaganda doesn’t end at climate change denial. The views of a ‘free market’ libertarian worked best when it came to courting disenfranchised voters. Here’s some information from Charles Koch himself in an interview.
One year ago, the Koch brothers announced that they were budgeting nearly $900 million for campaign spending for the 2016 election year, a figure that was on par to match the spending of both major political parties.
The Kochs are, according to mainstream belief, more or less right-leaning, an assumption no doubt prompted by their propensity to sponsor Republican candidates far more often than they do Democrats. But if you listen to this back-and-forth between Inskeep and Charles Koch, some surprisingly anti-Reaganite, anti-conservative rhetoric comes out of Koch’s mouth as naturally as campaign funding comes out of his pocket. His anti-government ideals don’t come as any surprise, but when he blatantly bashes corporate welfare and crony capitalism, it seems as though he is undermining the very goal of spending money on political candidates.
Instead, as he unravels his borderline coherent political views, Charles reveals that the Kochs simply see Republicans as the current lesser of two evils. Or, as he phrases it, “The Democrats are taking us down the road to serfdom at 100 miles an hour, and the Republicans are at 70 miles an hour.”
What the brothers are really behind, a point that might be a bit foggy in this interview, is a libertarian ideology that is reminiscent of old-school, academic, Friedman-and-Hayek-style classical economic liberalism.
Propaganda doesn’t end in the media, either. Universities have been useful in spreading the Kochs’ agenda:
Charles Koch has long advocated for universities to advance corporate interests. Universities offer a sense of prestige and trust to Koch’s lobbying, serving to influence both current and future policy and regulation efforts. Universities complement Koch’s efforts to influence a long-term change in American culture, and to increase the ideological appetite for a low-regulation economy where negligent companies like Koch Industries are hard to hold to account.
[…]Clayton Coppin, who taught history at George Mason and compiled the confidential study of Charles’s political activities for Bill Koch, describes Mercatus outright in his report as “a lobbying group disguised as a disinterested academic program.” The arrangement, he points out, had financial advantages for the Kochs, because it enabled Charles “to have a tax deduction for financing a group, which for all practical purposes is a lobbying group for his corporate interest.
Of course, the Koch brothers are far from being the only culprits in the climate change denial case. A network of other wealthy individuals fund many of the same organizations:
What do we get out of this?
1. The burden of climate change should not be blamed on average Americans.
2. The ‘free’ market agenda is a tool of the ruling class.
4. ‘Crony capitalism’ is just capitalism in practice.
“Yes, friends, governments in capitalist society are but committees of the rich to manage the affairs of the capitalist class.” - James Connolly
titsay
romaincrisis
yousharknotpass
