Americans, Unclear Who We’re Fighting, Wish Obama Would Tell Us

Always witless, but after Orlando the semantic red herring over the phrase “radical Islam” turned moronic. Since the rise of ISIS and President Obama’s pledge two years ago the coming September that, “We will degrade, and ultimately destroy, ISIL” (his preferred acronym for ISIS), those on the right have seized on the president’s failure to utter those two words alongside
each other as the reason ISIS still exists. It is clear that the word went out to Republicans in Congress, the Wall Street Journal, and of course Fox News, where this gripe is almost daily program fare, that all should be making the case that Obama is unaware of the threat because he won’t obey and identify the enemy with their two word incantation. Greg Gutfeld on the Fox afternoon show “The Five” admitted their obsession with, “We’ve talked about this so long our heads will explode”. Not yet, unfortunately.

To the sensible, it is obvious that the holder of the presidency of the United States must steer clear of the antagonistic blunders of previous administrations that characterized adversarial countries as the “axis of evil”, and in this case not label the entire religion of Islam as “radical”.
Where the president went wrong was his viewing what he called merely a “talking point” as something too brainless to be concerned with, failing to realize the effect of such sloganeering with a brainless public.

It was everyone’s talking point after Orlando, especially on Fox News, which has relentlessly whined about the two word mantra for the better part of a year. On the Monday following the early-Sunday massacre, there was the Fox anchor of the midday “Happening Now” program saying Obama “called the attack an act of terror and hate but he did not use the words ‘radical Islam'”. A regular on the show, Tammy Bruce, a radio talk-show host who freely distorts, was angry at Obama for saying “that it has nothing to do with Islamic terrorism” — right after the show had aired lengthy remarks by the president in which he specifically acknowledged the link of the Orlando killings to ISIS. Eric Boling of “The Five” said that afternoon, “If President Obama can’t say it, it sends a message he can’t put the two [words] together. We’re at war and we need to all join together and realize that’s the enemy”. You would never know we’ve been bombing ISIS since September 2014.

The reason they give for why saying “radical Islam” is important takes us from dumb to dumber, yet it is repeated as if the right-wing commentators had chips installed. David Gergen, now a CNN commentator, wanting to show his proximity to the mighty, told Erin Burnett he had advised Reagan not to say the Soviet Union was the “evil empire” but now thinks he was wrong, and that the president should say the magic words. “Having plain-spoken truth about what you’re facing helps to clarify and helps to strengthen your hand”.

On Megyn Kelly’s program Monday night was former CIA Director James Woolsey reciting that reason for us once again. Kelly asked “why using the term radical Islam matters” and Woolsey responded, “You can’t fight something effectively unless you can describe it”. What’s he saying? Lacking that description, our pilots have been bombing someone other than ISIS? As in this video, ISIS might differ.

backtalk

On Tuesday, the president emerged from a national security meeting and first reported on military progress against ISIS, listing the termination of more than 120 ISIL leaders and commanders; the destruction of their financial sources, not least “destroying the storage sites where they keep their cash”; Iraqi towns overtaken; the reduction of ISIS territory in Iraq by half; closing the circle around Raqqa, the ISIS headquarters town in Syria. “It’s now been a full year since ISIL has been able to mount a major successful offensive operation in either Syria or Iraq.”

The complaints are that we have no strategy (except what Obama has been doing for months — air strikes and a refusal to re-invade Iraq — is his strategy), that we have not moved fast enough, that the 12,685 air strikes through May have not been enough. After Obama’s talk, former ambassador to the U.N. under George W. Bush and war-lover John Bolton met with the four ladies of Fox’s noon-day “Outnumbered” in which he reprieved that complaint. Like all other kvetchers who complain that “we must do something” but never come up with the something, it turned out that Bolton doesn’t mean re-invading Iraq. Rather, Obama has failed because he did not put together a coalition to fight ISIS. He failed because he couldn’t command sovereign Arab nations to obey him and send in their armies and is therefore “unfit to be commander in chief”. [6]

Obama continued in his talk to finally confront the right wing “radical Islam” obsession. Few heard his noonday remarks, and television reduced them to sound bites, so he is worth quoting at length:

And let me make a final point. For a while now, the main contribution of some of my friends on the other side of the aisle have made in the fight against ISIL is to criticize this administration and me for not using the phrase “radical Islam.” That’s the key, they tell us — we can’t beat ISIL unless we call them “radical Islamists.”

What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change? Would it make ISIL less committed to trying to kill Americans? Would it bring in more allies? Is there a military strategy that is served by this?

The answer is: none of the above. Calling a threat by a different name does not make it go away. This is a political distraction. Since before I was President, I’ve been clear about how extremist groups have perverted Islam to justify terrorism…There has not been a moment in my seven and a half years as President where we have not been able to pursue a strategy because we didn’t use the label “radical Islam.” Not once has an advisor of mine said, man, if we really use that phrase, we’re going to turn this whole thing around. Not once.

So if someone seriously thinks that we don’t know who we’re fighting, if there’s anyone out there who thinks we’re confused about who our enemies are, that would come as a surprise to the thousands of terrorists who we’ve taken off the battlefield. And the reason I am careful about how I describe this threat has nothing to do with political correctness and everything to do with actually defeating extremism. Groups like ISIL and al Qaeda want to make this war a war between Islam and America. And if we fall into the trap of painting all Muslims with a broad brush and imply that we are at war with an entire religion — then we are doing the terrorists’ work for them.

“Snark in a president is not an admirable trait”, was Bolton’s summation, who calls Obama “a small man”. After all the months of the right wing poisoning their audience against Obama over these two words, all the while knowing why Obama is careful with what he says, as earlier cited, it was “beneath the dignity of the office” for Obama to have his say, said Bolton. And Bolton, too, holds the half-witted notion that we don’t know who we’re fighting until Obama says “radical Islam”: “When you can’t say the reality, ultimately you’re going to impair your ability to deal with it.”

No surprise that nothing registered with Donald Trump. With his usual command of incoherence, he as much as said he was unable to understand Obama’s comments — beyond recognizing himself in them. “If you don’t know what the term is…if you can’t say the real name — we have a radical Islamic terrorism problem, folks, we can say we don’t, we can pretend like Obama we don’t, where Obama spent a long time talking about it and nobody at the end of that speech understood anything other than boy does he hate Donald Trump”. Obama had said, “We now have proposals from the presumptive Republican nominee for President of the United States to bar all Muslims from emigrating to America”. For Trump, the president’s failure to alienate all Muslims meant “There’s something going on”.

But, even though ridiculed by the president, the right would not give up. It has too much invested in its “talking point”. The day after the president’s remarks, a Wall Street Journal editorial went from dumber to dumbest. Quoting Obama’s questions, “What exactly would using this label accomplish? What exactly would it change?”, the Journal editorial board replied:

Since the President asked, allow us to answer. We’re unaware of any previous American war fought against an enemy it was considered indecorous or counterproductive to name. Dwight Eisenhower routinely spoke of “international Communism” as an enemy. FDR said “Japan” or “Japanese” 15 times in his 506-word declaration of war after Pearl Harbor. If the U.S. is under attack, Americans deserve to hear their President say exactly who is attacking us and why. You cannot effectively wage war, much less gauge an enemy’s strengths, without a clear idea of who you are fighting.

The need for the magic two words again. But beyond that, in the case of communism and the Japanese, we were fighting entireties. We were combating all of communism worldwide, we were declaring war against all of Japan and all Japanese. In its confusion, the Journal made Obama’s point well, to be careful not to use language that can be taken as a war against the entirety of Islam’s 1.6 billion followers.

And we don’t know who we’re fighting?

One has to wonder whether the country will ever recover from the nonstop propaganda war.

Is Your Newspaper Named Facebook?

Something of a scandal erupted in May when the website Gizmodo reported that Facebook slants left in the stories it selects for the “Trending” news list it serves up on your Facebook home page.

But the bias concern is not our topic. What was startling was mention that a Pew Research study had found that 63% of Americans consider Facebook and Twitter to be news services and go there to get their news. And Facebook Pulls the Rug from Under: 
July 7: An alarming percentage of Americans turn to Facebook for news, and news organizations have provided their content to Facebook as something of a desperate attempt to lure readers to their sites. Facebook has lured them to do so, yet has just announced that it will demote news in its “News Feed” and give greater priority to postings from friends and family. That compounds what this article says about the ever diminishing exposure of Americans to what is happening in their country and the world.
    

that report proved to be from almost a year ago. The 63% is up from 52% of Twitter users and 47% of Facebook users who answered the same Pew question in 2013. With the dominance of especially Facebook constantly on the rise, the percentage is certainly higher by now.

That print journalism is in deep decline, done in by the Internet, is not news. But here we are told that rather than turning to the newsgathering sources that have all replicated themselves on the Internet, people are turning to a single source that filters the news for them. And for a sizeable number it is likely to be their only source for news, given that — according to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in an April earnings call — users worldwide spend a jaw-dropping average of 50 minutes a day on Facebook, leaving little time to surf for news elsewhere.

Accounts of the Trending kerfuffle attempted to explain how Facebook goes about its filtering for both that relatively new feature and for its News Feed, but with fragmentary knowledge of proprietary methods. The News Feed is the jumble that runs down the center of the principal Facebook page. What news appears is commingled with the baby pictures, the happy birthdays, the photos from vacationing friends.

For news, the service taps a list of a thousand trusted sources says one account; another cites a much shorter list of recognized media names that are given added weight. Whatever is discovered is then given a “relevancy score” different for each user based on people you’ve “friended” who have shared content or commented on past posts, and news and other material that you’ve “liked” — probably directed to it by a prior Facebook News Feed item. All this tailoring means “No two users see the same News Feed or Trending items”, says the Wall Street Journal.

So not only is news filtered and selected for the Facebook population at large, it is further winnowed to only information you and a circle of friends have indicated you would like to see. The tendency would seem to be an ever-narrowing vortex reducing what one sees to only the common interests of a circle of friends. Eli Pariser, who runs the website Upworthy, saw this coming in 2011. His book, “The Filter Bubble, What the Internet Is Hiding From You”, warned that our every click and keystroke channels what comes next, weaving a kind of customized cocoon that, by serving up just what we like, closes off most of what else is going on in the world. A dangerously ill-informed public results.

free riders

Consider what else this means. First consider the newspaper. There are those who glance at the front page and go immediately to the crossword, never to return. Some may restrict their choice of reading to an index, such as the blurb list on the front page of the Journal. But most turn the pages. They see all that’s new, in all categories, a broad selection of news topics because newspapers and magazines deliver content. While heavily reliant on advertising, they have always charged the reader for subscriptions and the public has historically found them worth paying for. For their Internet versions, just about all have overcome the “information wants to be free” foolishness of the early web and have erected pay walls.

Now consider Facebook and all the rest: Twitter, YouTube, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Instagram, and so on. All of them are entirely dependent on advertising. None of them charge their users a cent, and it is worth wondering what would happen to them if they were suddenly to demand a monthly fee, however modest. It raises the question of whether they thrive only if free. Certain of them — Pandora, Spotify, for example — have tried to “monetize” with a second tier free of advertising in exchange for a monthly charge, but they’ve had trouble getting any more than a small percentage of their listeners to pay up.

What we are alerted to by the 63% revelation is that the free social media (most have news feeds of their own) are diverting the users away from the for-money news-generating websites and into their no-charge filter bubbles where they can feed off the news providers and skim the advertising revenue for themselves.

thin gruel

Whether Facebook (to continue only with Facebook for convenience; it’s by far the biggest) gathers from a thousand sources or a couple of dozen, few items are picked up from any given publication. Not only do social media users generally miss all else that is to be found at actual news sites, but Facebook parasitically summarizes the news it has found in a short abstract. One suspects that is as far as typical Facebook users go. They get the gist and skip going to the news site to read the full article where their page views would have counted toward attracting the advertising that pays for the ranks of journalists who actually do the work of finding out what is afoot in the world.

As Facebook’s dominance rises, far fewer will visit than the big circulation that newspapers have always needed to cover newsgathering costs. And it’s questionable whether those who do follow a news item into its news site do much roaming in the rest of the publication while there. Moreover, the number who do click through to the publication presumably arrive as guests. The user eludes the pay wall; the news organization misses out on that revenue.

said the spider to the fly

Not even this arrangement is good enough for Facebook. They dislike anyone leaving their site and have negotiated deals with publishers so desperate to retain an audience as to allow Facebook to suck their content into its own innards. “Hosting” is the polite name given to this usurpation. Moving it inside means users no longer need tap a link on their smart phone to go to the publisher’s site. “Nothing attracts news organizations like Facebook. And nothing makes them more nervous”, wrote The New York Times in an article describing its own negotiations to enter into what seems like a suicidal deal. Facebook intimates that the Times and others who succumb would make money from advertising running alongside the articles, but note the transformation. The publishers will have been absorbed; they will find themselves working for Facebook, vying to create material that the leviathan will pick up. Facebook becomes the universal newspaper.

the end of news?

The construct would not seem to hold promise for the future of journalism. It certainly does not support the costly investigative, adversarial role of journalism in uncovering what the world would rather keep secret. With each year won’t we discover that less and less is reported on what goes on in the dark corners of the world? And how will we know?

Facebook and its ilk may someday and discover that, as a result of its choke hold, the revenue stream has been so thinned that there are no newsgathering organizations left to feed the beast. They might just have to pay for journalists and journalism for a change.

Why Not a Basic Income for Everyone?

With growth stalled at 1.5%, with wages flat for decades and household income $4,000 less than when Bill Clinton left office, with a Federal Reserve survey finding
that 46% of Americans could not cover a $400 emergency expense without borrowing or selling something, here’s an idea that’s often floated. How about the government just paying everyone a basic income every year?

That surely must top the list of nutty ideas that bleeding-heart liberals have come up with.

Except they didn’t. It’s a Republican scheme, going back at least to Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman before him. Nixon proposed in a 1969 address on domestic programs that “the Federal Government build a foundation under the income of every American family”. There were limitations, but the idea was given voice and it persists.

The Finns are considering the idea and the Swiss just voted on it in a referendum. It lost by a huge margin — 77% against to 23% in favor — but how much of that might have been the whopping amount proposed?: $2,500 a month to be paid to every citizen.

On these shores, the latest is an essay in the weekend Review section of The Wall Street Journal by Charles Murray, a libertarian political scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, preceded by his 2006 book on the subject. In his essay,
Murray proposes that every American citizen age 21 or older receive $13,000 a year from the federal government. Of that, $3,000 must be used for health insurance. Persons earning under $30,000 a year keep the rest free of taxes. For those earning over $30,000 a graduated payback to the government sets in — up to half the original payout for someone who makes $60,000 a year or more. But all would be left with a minimum of $6,500 no matter how high their income.

what’s the catch?

One of the reasons a universal basic income is attracting renewed interest is the fear that the mix of robotics, artificial intelligence and other technologies will take away millions of jobs. Large corporations will have no compunctions about getting rid of payroll. Machines ultimately cost far less. So there is the question of what will happen to those millions of idled workers? How will they be able to support their families if there is no work?

But putting food on their table is not Murray’s mission. He at first is more preoccupied with arguing against those who fear that free money will cause people to “idle away their lives” as if the problem for the future will be jobs aplenty that will go begging and it will be industry that is idled for lack of workers.

But he does later in his article bring up the grim prospect of jobs vanishing, except one gets the picture that he is using that looming future as justification for what he really hopes to accomplish, a motive revealed in the title of the book just mentioned: “In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State”. In a jobless future when one would think safety net programs would be more essential than ever, his deal is that, in exchange for receiving an annual income, we get rid of all social programs. And he does mean all. Here’s his list:

Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, Supplemental Security Income, housing subsidies, welfare for single women and every other kind of welfare and social-services program, as well as agricultural subsidies and corporate welfare.

If the basic income program took their place, Murray claims an annual saving of $200 billion.

not so fast

Eduardo Porter of The New York Times writes of a growing interest in a guaranteed income on both left and right, but has a problem with the arithmetic. An annual payout of $10,000 a year — less than Murray’s $13,000 — to 300 million Americans amounts to more than $3 trillion a year, almost the entire amount the government collects in taxes. His recent piece is not a response to Murray, so he doesn’t figure in the funds recovery of up to half by the government from those who earn more than $30,000.

Even so, the American public would never agree to a tax hike to cover even a fraction of the added cost, so to pay for government’ s new largesse, Murray would indeed get his wish: every safety net program would have to be abolished.

That his proposal would leave everyone with at least $6,500 a year — half the $13,000 — says that his is an underhanded plan to divert money upward to those who don’t need it while leaving the poor in dire straits. The $3,000 that Murray allocates to health insurance would not buy much of a policy leaving the indigent with potentially huge medical costs in the total absence of Medicaid or Medicare should a major illness strike. For older people the average social security benefit is $16,020 a year compared to the $10,000 that Murray’s plan would provide instead. And there’s nothing else. No food stamps, rental assistance, nada.

Murray’s answer to that? He would leave it to local organizing to pick up the slack. We would return to an earlier time, reviving the town-level groups, religious and secular, that once came together to take care of their own, a “key feature of American exceptionalism” that so impressed the reliable guide to 21st Century America, Alexis de Tocqueville. Murray says this fabric of society was displaced by Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society war on poverty. He concludes by saying that the universal basic income plan “would say to people who have never had reason to believe it before: ‘Your future is in your hands.’ And that would be the truth”. It would indeed. Put another way, “Sink or swim, you’re on your own”.

Court Papers Bring Trump Fraud Cases Into the Open

There has been a curious imbalance in the media throughout the presidential campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s e-mail transgressions, under investigation by the FBI, have been a constant topic and daily fare on the Fox News channel. But there has been near silence about the fraud cases against Donald Trump and his purported university.

That changed the first day of June. In response to a legal motion filed by The Washington Post, the federal judge hearing the cases unsealed documents from a trio of lawsuits filed by former students claiming that what they got for their money at Trump University was worthless. Front page stories in the Post and The New York Times reported that instructors were required to pressure attendees to sign up for ever more expensive courses, ultimately the $35,000 course that would “teach you better than the best business school”, as a promotional video promised. Times columnist David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour congratulated a newspaper that had come late to the story:

“My newspaper had a good story on the Trump University…And we sort of had the outlines of the story, but I think what was fresh…is the way that professors at Trump University were really pressuring people to get out their credit cards, to get multiple credit cards, to max out their credit cards, just to give all this money to Trump University,…it was the machinations of scamming these people that we learned today.”

We say “late” because, if you follow us here, you read a full account of Trump University’s scams back in March. It reported on exactly those high pressure sales tactics and the fraudulent claims Trump and company had made, as attested to by former students who say the teachings of how to make money in real estate were a sham. The question is, Why has the media been avoiding this story for so long? Is America about to vote for a crook?
Read more

Exxon Contretemps Escalates as Congress Gets Into the Act

Investigative reporting last fall by the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News revealed that Exxon hid research into climate change, all the while funding groups to debunk
global warming. That led to investigations of their own by a growing number of state attorneys general, with New York’s Eric Schneiderman leading the charge.

But in a don’t mess with Texas backlash, Republican Representative Lamar Smith of that state and chair of the House science committee has started a firefight on behalf of Texas-based Exxon, alleging a conspiratorial collaboration between Schneiderman’s office and climate change activist groups, and calling on him to turn over all communications with such groups from 2012 forward.

The ranking Democrat of his own committee has accused him of improper use of the committee in an “ideological crusade” premised on “baseless conspiracy theories.”

Smith’s letter to Schneiderman accuses him of acting “under the color of law to persuade attorneys general to use their prosecutorial powers to stifle scientific discourse, intimidate private entities and individuals, and deprive them of their First Amendment rights and freedoms”. It’s an odd claim. The allegations against Exxon are of the company’s failure to disclose research in decades past. There was no discourse to be stifled. Nor can attorneys generals’ actions today stifle First Amendment rights exercised years ago. Rather, it is Exxon’s claim that they had freely exercised their First Amendment rights in those earlier years to say whatever they chose.

Schneiderman and company are motivated to expose the fraud of the fossil fuel industry for its attempt to thwart any action against climate change and create a large public faction of disbelievers. Having accused him of stifling and intimidation, Smith’s committee is doing the same, going after non-profit groups for the sin of exposing Exxon’s duplicity. He has just demanded in a letter that 350.org “divulge every communication with state officials and many private organizations related to our constitutional right to ask elected officials to investigate what Exxon knew about climate change and when”, says Bill McKibben, the group’s leader.

The Union of Concerned Scientists is e-mailing for contributions, having just received the same demands from Smith’s committee for “years’ worth of communications with state officials, other non-profits, and climate science researchers, all in an effort to cow us into silence” and giving the organization a week to respond.

Smith is lashing out in all directions. In the wake of a paper by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Smith had already subpoenaed all communications within that agency about their underlying research, even a demand for private e-mail correspondence among its scientists (that last demand since dropped).

Climate change deniers and skeptics have long pointed to barely rising temperatures over the last 18 years as proof that climate change claims range from exaggerated to outright hoax. The NOAA paper said that the temperature hiatus disappeared from the temperature charts once adjustments were made to compensate for “inconsistent historical methods of measuring temperature, especially those involving seawater”. Smith’s accusations say the agency “altered historical climate data to get politically correct results” and rushed the paper into print in Science magazine last June to bolster its case ahead of the December climate summit in Paris.

NOAA countered that the paper had taken longer to write than usual and had undergone not one but two sets of peer reviews. They might also have pointed out how careful the naysayers are to always reach back far enough to include the year 1998 — an unusually hot El Niño year 18 years ago — to make it seem that little global temperature rise has happened since. Absent 1998, the hiatus argument collapses. Moreover, to insist that the hiatus continues into this 18th year ignores that the last two years have been the hottest on record, continuing a stretch in which 15 of 17 hottest years have occurred since 2000.

findings

The web-based Inside Climate News conducted an eight month investigation that uncovered Exxon’s research into whether climate change was occurring and what ramifications it would have on the company’s operations. The site’s multiple reports, spanning four decades of Exxon’s explorations into climate science, made it a runner-up for what would have been its second Pulitzer. At one end of the globe in the 1980s, they report Exxon’s alarm at discovering that one of the world’s largest natural gas deposits in Indonesia was contaminated with immense amounts of carbon-dioxide, worrying that drilling would release and add to the threat of climate change. At the other end of the planet, the Los Angeles Times cites Exxon’s reports from the Arctic in the 1980s and 1990s in which the company’s scientists signaled management that “warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels” but that “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea.

By 1977, an Exxon senior scientist named James Black told the company’s management committee that there was “general scientific agreement” that man-made CO2 was likely causing the greenhouse effect of trapping heat in the atmosphere. He would later tell a larger audience in the company that research indicated that doubling the amount of carbon dioxide would increase temperatures two to three degrees Celsius.

The journalists’ findings show that Exxon scientists were all along acknowledging global warming and human contribution, yet in those same years, Exxon, along with others in the fossil fuel industry, funded a group called the Global Climate Coalition and its long-term campaign to persuade people that there is no global warming problem. The group was shown to have refuted its own scientists when a leaked document surfaced in which they stated unequivocally that, “The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied.” That clearly was not what coalition backers wanted to hear. Much as the tobacco industry suppressed internal reports that found nicotine to be addictive, the Coalition adhered to its agenda of spreading disinformation. Instilling uncertainty was meant to blunt any outbreak of public demand for regulatory legislation. The Coalition was disbanded in 2002 as evidence of the human contribution to global warming overwhelmed its message.

But Exxon, merged as ExxonMobil, continued its campaign to make the public think that “the role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood”. On its own, the corporation channeled some $16 million between 1998 and 2005 to a campaign of misinformation fed to a network of 43 advocacy organizations, according to a 2007 study by the Union of Concerned Scientists.

free-for-all

Schneiderman subpoenaed ExxonMobil last fall for documents following the Los Angeles Times and Inside Climate News exposés. ExxonMobil has cooperated, turning over thousands of internal documents dating back to the late 1970s.

In March, Claude Walker, the attorney general of the Virgin Islands followed suit, subpoenaing documents and threatening to use RICO, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, against the company. ExxonMobil filed suit to block the subpoena.

Walker also subpoenaed the Competitive Enterprise Institute, requesting a decade of communications, documents and private donor information for the years 1997-2007. CEI fired back with a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, adorned with 43 endorsements, against Schneiderman and others accusing them of “Abuse of Power” for investigating “100 businesses, nonprofits, and private individuals who question their positions on climate change”. It is the only mention we have seen of so many investigative targets; the ad contains no substantiation. It says “every American should reject the use of government power to harass or silence those who hold difference opinions”. There is no chastisement of Smith’s committee for doing the same.

Walker revoked the subpoena. Apart from the hazards of the Virgin Islands picking a fight with the endless resources of Exxon’s in-house legal staff, it is possible that the other attorneys general may have thought he had gone too far afield, their target being Exxon. But CEI won’t let the matter drop. It is going forward “with our motion for sanctions” against “a constitutional outrage”.

is there a case?

Schneiderman has the investigative powers of New York’s Martin Act and other laws unique to that state as a financial capital. He is investigating Exxon for “defrauding the public, defrauding consumers, defrauding shareholders.” At least four other states’ attorneys general have announced that they are conducting investigations.

Exxon is saying that it was exercising its First Amendment rights to express its concerns. Schneiderman says the First Amendment is not a shield protecting fraud. But his claim of defrauding the public and consumers would seem overly broad. Exxon kept itself a step removed by funding others such as Global Coalition and the Cato Institute to do the disparaging of climate science. Won’t they say there was no guilt by management for not reporting research warnings that they may have thought far-fetched? As a matter of law, Schneiderman’s case against Exxon would seem limited to the company’s failure to notify investors of the degree to which climate change could affect its operations and therefore its bottom line and share price.

Even that seems iffy. While it may be viewed as scandalous that Exxon was secretly concerned about CO2 likely to cause global warming as far back as the 1950s, a reminder is called for that there was nowhere near any certainty of cause and effect then, so who is guilty, and of what? As a spokesman for ExxonMobil said, “To suggest that we had definitive knowledge about human-induced climate change before the world’s scientists is not a credible thesis”.

That still holds true into the 1980s and 1990s. A legal defense would be that, at the time Exxon was carrying on its research, the question of whether or not human activity was the cause of warning was still hotly debated (and in certain steadily diminishing pockets still is), so again, absent any certainty that the hypothesis was true, why did Exxon owe the public an announcement of the product of its research? Exxon can also maintain that, as a major corporation with world-wide operations, it must look into every contingency that would affect its future, and that there was no hypocrisy in conducting scientific investigations while the non-scientists in management clung to a different view.

That’s a legal defense, hardly credulous outside a courtroom. Just plain folk would find it deceitful, as when Lee Raymond, the Exxon CEO at the time, dismissed global warming as a “premise that defies…common sense”, refuting his own company’s warnings, and at 1999’s annual meeting said that “projections are based on completely unproven climate models” when Exxon’s research reports in the 1980s and 1990s were based on climate models from the Canadian Climate Centre and NASA’s Goddard Institute.

But it does suggest that trying to make a case of clear culpability for harm to the general public will be difficult to prove. And it can be added that, while that general public was learning of the dire future that rising temperatures caused by the human release of carbon dioxide will bring, those were the years when we went on a spree of buying “gas guzzling” pick-up trucks and SUVs. So, who brought the harm? Millions with our uninterrupted and inefficient use of fossil fuels. It is rather like those who sued the tobacco companies for the death of a spouse from lung cancer, claiming that they didn’t notice the warning label on all those packages in all those years.

The path that the activist groups are reportedly following is the same as the campaign as that which leveled Big Tobacco. It apparently began with a 2012 workshop in California with representatives from the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Climate Accountability Institute and the Massachusetts-based Global Warming Legal Action Project. They were subsequently
joined by 350.org, the Al Gore-founded Climate Reality Project, Greenpeace and funding from the Rockefeller family philanthropies.

These groups realize that the most valuable by-product of the legal campaign is the negative publicity against the fossil fuel companies for their campaign of deception that fueled the denier belief that climate change is questionable or a conspiratorial lie.

And even if a suit were successful and led to a huge settlement, Schneiderman and cohort would look to a lifetime of motions for delay and appeals. Exxon is the company, let’s remember, that was responsible for the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill that destroyed the ecology — the birds, the fisheries — of Prince William Sound, Alaska. The company then fought a jury award of $5 billion in damages for 20 years, finally paying in 2009 a tenth of the original amount.