Frightened
by Donald Trump? You don’t know the half of it
George Monbiot
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
Wednesday 30
November 2016 06.00 GMT
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.
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.”
Former campaign
manager Corey Lewandowski, like other members of Trump’s team, came
from a group called Americans for Prosperity. Photograph:
UPI/Barcroft Images
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.
• Twitter:
@GeorgeMonbiot. A fully linked version of this column will be
published at monbiot.com
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