The Koch Bros., ALEC and the Power of the State

"We Don't Have the Power to Coerce Anybody"...That's Why They Need Government
by KEVIN CARSON


Were there an awards show for unintentional howlers, Charles Koch’s statement in a Forbes interview last December (“Inside the Koch Empire: How the Brothers Plan to Reshape America,” December 5, 2012) would surely be a nominee. “Most power is power to coerce somebody,” he said. “We don’t have the power to coerce anybody.”

No, but the government sure does. Maybe that’s why the Koch Brothers put so much money into lobbying groups and think tanks like the American Legislative Exchange Council and the Heritage Foundation whose main purpose is to influence government policy.

“Oh,” but you say. “They’re not looking to make money through increased government coercion. Far from it! They’re just lobbying government to get out of the economy so they can take their chances competing on their merits in an unfettered market economy.”

Well … not quite.

Kevin Carson is a senior fellow of the Center for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) and holds the Center’s Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory.

The legislative agenda pursued by groups like ALEC, Heritage, the American Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute isn’t exactly libertarian. At least not if, by “libertarian,” you mean anything more principled than “whatever big business wants from government to make it profitable.”

As an example, consider so-called “Ag-Gag” bills – written by ALEC — that prohibit undercover journalists from exposing animal abuse within corporate agribusiness. This past year such bills were introduced in nine states and signed into law in three.

The Koch Brothers are also enthusiastic advocates (to say the least) of the Keystone XL pipeline, standing to make billions from the project if it’s completed. Needless to say, Keystone’s route depends heavily on the use of eminent domain to steal land from family farmers, and Keystone’s government backers have run roughshod over Indian lands (including sacred burial grounds) guaranteed by treaty. Last I heard, eminent domain is only possible through coercion — you know, that thing David Koch said he lacks the ability to do.

The Keystone project is also heavily dependent on regulatory state preemption of ordinary common law standards of civil liability for the air and groundwater pollution and health damage fracking causes to surrounding communities. And the Koch brothers are also prominent cheerleaders for “tort reform” — i.e., making it more difficult to hold corporations liable for their wrongdoing and make them pay for the harm they’ve caused.

So the actual pattern we see is the Koch brothers and their pet think tanks actively encouraging a near-totalitarian level of state intervention to suppress all the mechanisms of civil society — investigative journalism by a free and independent press, a vigorous system of civil liability, etc. — that would help keep business honest and hold it accountable. Hardly surprising, when you consider Koch Industries got its start building oil refineries for Joseph Stalin. Say, now — he had the power to coerce, didn’t he?

While we’re at it, ALEC has actively lobbied for the draconian drug laws and for detention of “illegal aliens” [sic] that are so profitable to its sponsors like CCOA, Wackenhut and other private prison corporations. That doesn’t sound too libertarian, does it?

And how about David Addington’s new No. 3 role at Heritage? Addington was Dick Cheney’s go-to guy for writing legal memos on stuff like indefinite detention, torture, and warrantless surveillance. You can see why a guy like that would be a perfect fit for a think tank that’s all about “limited government” and “restoring the Constitution.” All sarcasm aside, I think you can see that people like this have a very, um, skewed idea of what “freedom” means.

The role of people like Charles and David Koch, and of think tanks like ALEC, AEI and Heritage, in the larger free market libertarian movement is a lot like that of the Pharisees in the Judaism of Jesus’s time. “Whited sepulchres” and “generation of vipers” are some of the terms he used, I think.

The Pharisees, Jesus said, would cavil and split hairs for years on the finer points of the law, while utterly disregarding its spirit; they would tithe their very herbs, while putting their money into their day’s equivalent of tax-free nonprofit foundations to avoid taking care of their aged parents.

The corporate Pharisees of our day strain at a gnat using “free market” rhetoric to attack welfare for the poor, but swallow a camel when it comes to welfare for corporations. They claim to favor “economic freedom” and “free trade,” while putting the entire world under the totalitarian lockdown of draconian “intellectual property” law to guarantee their enormous monopoly rents. They complain that “taxation is theft,” while their mining and agribusiness corporations act in collusion with governments to kick the peoples of world off their land.

It’s time to scourge the money-changers from the temple.

Heartland Institute Leak Exposes Strategies of Climate Attack Machine

The documents show how groups play up controversy to undermine confidence in well-established scientific findings

Bob Ward | Tuesday, February 21, 2012 | The Guardian/UK

After the leak from the Chicago-based thinkthank the Heartland Institute, much attention is now being focused on the alleged deception used by the water scientist Peter Gleick to obtain the sensitive internal documents.

And while acts of deception cannot be condoned, it is also important to note that the documents obtained by Gleick provide an insight into how some of those groups that are fundamentally opposed to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases attempt to convey the impression that their arguments are founded on science rather than on ideology.


The Heartland Institute states on its website that its mission is "to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems", and that the aim of its work on climate change is to promote "market-based, rather than government-based, solutions to environmental problems".

The Institute has been one of the most active lobbyists against policies in the United States to curb emissions, primarily by attempting to undermine confidence in the findings of scientific research that climate change is driven mainly by human activities.

One of the newly released documents shows very clearly how the institute intends to target teachers and schoolchildren with this strategy. It begins by claiming:

"Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 [kindergarten to 12th grade] students on global warming that isn't alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective."

The document then suggests that it will pay Dr David Wojick, described as "a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the US Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science", to produce teaching materials which emphasise controversy and uncertainty:

"Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact ("environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather"), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on."

This, of course, is a biased and distorted representation of current scientific knowledge, and conflicts with the approach to school lessons outlined by a recent workshop on climate change education, hosted by the United States National Academy of Sciences, which begins with the statement: "The global scientific and policy community now unequivocally accepts that human activities cause global climate change".

However, the emphasis on uncertainty and controversy is very much in line with another famous leaked document, the so-called Luntz memo, which came to light in 2003. It was prepared by Frank Luntz, the favourite opinion pollster of President George W Bush, and contained advice for Republican activists on how to talk to potential voters about environment issues. On climate change, the memo offers the following recommendation:

"The scientific debate remains open. Voters believe that there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community. Should the public come to believe that the scientific issues are settled, their views about global warming will change accordingly. Therefore, you need to continue to make the lack of scientific certainty a primary issue in the debate, and defer to scientists and other experts in the field."

The strategy of playing up controversy and uncertainty to undermine confidence in well-established scientific findings was pioneered by the tobacco industry to avoid and delay regulation of its products. As Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway point out in their book Merchants of Doubt:

"Doubt is crucial to science – in the version we call curiosity or healthy scepticism, it drives science forward – but it also makes science vulnerable to misrepresentation, because it is easy to take uncertainties out of context and create the impression that everything is unresolved. This was the tobacco industry's key insight: that you could use normal scientific uncertainty to undermine the status of actual scientific knowledge."

The Heartland Institute documents also contain details of another activity designed to give its ideological campaign against emissions regulations a veneer of scientific credibility. It notes that the Heartland Institute sponsors the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of scientists who write and speak out on climate change.

Again this echoes an approach outlined in the Luntz memo:

"You need to be even more active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view, and much more active in making them part of your message. People are much more willing to trust scientists, engineers, and other leading research professionals, and less willing to trust politicians. If you wish to challenge the prevailing wisdom about global warming, it is more effective to have professionals making the case than politicians."

And it also copies the tactics of cigarette companies which, according to Oreskes and Conway, hired a renowned geneticist in the 1950s to "head the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and spearhead the effort to foster the impression of debate, primarily by promoting the work of scientists whose views might be useful to the industry".

The Heartland Institute documents demonstrate once again how those driven by ideological dogma or vested commercial interests attempt to hide their true motives behind a facade of false controversy and uncertainty in science.