PolluterWatch Blog

Ever notice how people seem to listen to you more if you have a bag full of cash?  Tom Donohue of the US Chamber of Commerce sure has.  Politicians and corporations have as well.  But it used to be, prior to 2010, that giant multinational corporations couldn’t use their equally giant bags of cash to directly influence how people voted in elections.  Unfair for corporations you say? A travesty of justice perhaps?  Luckily for our favorite corporate interests the Supreme Court overturned hundreds of years of pesky electioneering laws in the 2010 landmark court case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.  The court ruled that corporations, because they are considered individuals under the law like you and me, are fully protected by the first amendment of the constitution, and therefore should be able to spend as much as they want on political attack ads during elections.  Now we all have free speech.  You have free speech, I have free speech, Monsanto has free speech, all are equal- just like the writers of first amendment intended hundreds of years ago.  And we can all freely spend our billions of dollars on political ads that support our own politics, thus bringing balance to the system.

But under this system it seems like some “individuals” have more free speech than others.  ExxonMobil for example made $30.46 billion dollars in profit in 2010.  That is a big bag of cash and thus, a lot of free speech.  And now, if a politician does something Exxon doesn’t like (forcing them to clean up an oil spill or curb carbon emissions for example), Exxon can bankroll millions of dollars in political ads in support of an opponent.  Most non-corporate “individuals” can’t do that.  Does that sound like a government for the people and by the people to you?

Speaking of Tom Donohue of the Chamber of Commerce, he represents an important facet of the hazardous fallout from Citizens United.  It may be that Exxon doesn’t want to alienate consumers by picking sides in a contentious political match.  Instead, they funnel money to trade and advocacy groups, like Donohue’s Chamber or Tim Phillips' Americans for Prosperity, who can then attack an offending candidate in any manner they choose, without impugning ExxonMobil’s good name.  In fact one of the most insidious and corrosive of all of the Citizen’s United case’s effects is to increase the funding (and therefore importance) of corporate front groups like Americans for Prosperity and the Chamber of Commerce, who do not reveal their funding and are not accountable to the public. 

In all seriousness the Citizens United v. FEC court case erodes the foundations of democracy in America. The decision has made it much easier for private interests with enormous wealth – like the now infamous Koch brothers – to use their riches to align public policy with their business ideologies, to the detriment of social, economic, and environmental justice.

On August 11, 2011, The Story of Stuff Project has planned an online day of protest against the landmark Supreme Court Case Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission.  To mark the occasion, the 11^th has been named “the Day when $$ equals speech."  Check out the short film explaining Citizens United and add your voice to ours and tell our government that it serves real people, not corporations.

The Guardian reports Canadian cooperation with oil supermajors BP and Shell in what Friends of the Earth Europe calls an "unprecedented" lobbying effort to peddle the world's dirtiest oil across the Atlantic. The Guardian's Terry Macalister writes:

"The Canadians have managed to delay the EU's original deadline of January 2011 for confirming baseline default values despite new peer-reviewed studies to support the European position."

Known for crippling our global climate, the tar sands also have a notably destructive impact on the indigenous community inhabiting the area that is now Northen Alberta, poisoning food and water sources while ignoring their calls for help from the government, which at the provincial and national level has repeatedly favored Big Oil. This excellent photo essay documents how destructive tar sands development has impacted the life of Melina Laboucan-Massimo, Greenpeace Canada's Climate and Energy Campaigner and member of the Lubicon Cree First Nation community:

Here in the United States, corporate titans like ExxonMobil ignore these fatal consequences as they push pro-tar sands advertisements onto consumers. As the debate over the proposed Keystone XL pipeline rages on, the US Chamber of Commerce is running a dirty lobbying campaign to support the project while the American Petroleum Institute has actually used recent oil pipeline spills as their nonsensical justification for the pipeline's construction. Check out PolluterWatch's profiles for each of these climate villians for documentation of their role in perpetuating global warming denial and inaction.

In spite of the continued and predictable madness demonstrated by Big Oil and its widespread apologists over the Keystone XL issue, activists are organizing a full two weeks of nonviolent civil disobedience outside of the White House to ensure the Keystone XL project is not actualized. More information can be found on the Tar Sands Action website.

UPDATE: SSSIP press release posted.

Speaking truth to climate lies, students at Swarthmore College resisted dirty industry scientist-for-hire Patrick Michaels during a presentation for a modest audience yesterday. As Michaels pecked away at credible scientific consensus over climate change, students held up signs highlighting Michael's true expertise: acting as a mouthpiece for the likes of ExxonMobil and other major polluters who have funded his anti-scientific public relations career. Recognizing his expertise, the satirical "Swarthmore Students for Scientific Industrial Progress" were photographed presenting Dr. Michaels with a Certificate of Corporate Climatology. Finally, a credential Michaels has earned!

Michaels has been a particularly useful arm of the climate denial machine, as his credentials include an actual Ph.D in climatology, lending him unearned legitimacy as he has spent recent years peddling misinformation about global warming on behalf of the coal and oil industries. Michaels has long been an ally to front groups heavily finanaced by ExxonMobil and Koch Industries, including the Cato Institute, the Heritage Foundation, CFACT, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and numerous others. He has published several books attacking the research of climate scientists who actually are publishing peer-reviewed climate studies, the conclusions of which are against the profitability of the polluter giants who fund Michaels' work. In the two weeks that followed the release of hacked emails between climate scientists at the Unversity of East Anglia, Michaels appeared in over twenty media interviews on major news networks to broadcast the false accusation that climate researchers were manipulating data.

Michaels has become increasingly recognized as a corporate polluter megaphone. In late January, 2011 California Representative Henry Waxman sent a letter to House Energy & Commerce Chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) asking him to question Michaels over his failure to disclose sources of funding that present a clear conflict of interest in his role as a climate misinformer.

Ironically, Waxman's inquiry was sparked by Michaels' own admission on CNN that "forty percent" of his funding came from the oil industry:

Pat Michaels' entire presentation was filmed, his connection to the Cato Institute is challenged at minute 57:00, shortly followed by his refusal to answer a question about his sources of funding. Michaels instead cited how ExxonMobil has spent "hundreds of millions" developing renewable technology--pennies of ExxonMobil's hundreds of billions in annual revenue. After Michaels' 40% figure from CNN was cited by the student challenging him to disclose his sources of funding, Michaels replied, "I don't discuss personal matters in public." See for yourself:

Pat Michaels at Swarthmore from Swarthmore Media on Vimeo.

Andrew Langer is a man who knows how to brew a Tea Party, or so he would have you believe.  He is the president of the Institute for Liberty, a right-wing think tank which published a guide on the subject.  Yet Langer’s real expertise isn’t in the brewing of the tea; it’s in the selling of the movement.  A recent New York Times article has revealed that Mr. Langer is far from a folksy tea party organizer who sticks up for the average American consumer.  In fact he is a professional bloviator with a history of work with corporate funded anti-regulatory front groups. 

One of his most recent projects, and the one that earned him attention from the Times, is called the Consumers Alliance for Global Prosperity.

Begun in August of 2010, the Consumers Alliance for Global Prosperity is an attempt to use the tea party movement to derail sustainable forestry in one of the world’s most endangered rainforest - for the benefit of an Asian paper corporation.  Here is an example of the destructive practices the Consumers Alliance supports:

Langer's  pro-deforestation campaign, called “Pulp Wars,”  attacks environmental groups, labor unions, and American businesses, accusing them of conspiring to keep Indonesians poor and American retail prices high.  The mission of Pulp Wars, according to a facebook page for the group, is to fight the “Empires of Collusion,” defined as “greedy corporations, scheming union bosses and radical environmentalists -- that are working hard to restrict free trade in an effort to make countless everyday products more expensive for consumers.”  According to CAGP, the empire includes such unlikely colluders as Greenpeace, WWF, and Staples. 

In spite of the absurdity of the claims, Pulp Wars is not the only place they are made.  Asia Pulp & Paper, a massive corporation responsible for clear cutting the Paradise Rainforest, made the exact same claims about in a report called “Green Protectionism.”  Tellingly, APP’s report came out three days before Langer released the Pulp Wars version.  The Times writes: 

“Three days later, Mr. Langer came out with his own detailed report that hewed to these same themes, and put up a Web site, pulpwars.com, to promote it. Titled “Empires of Collusion,” it reads like a brief for Asia Pulp & Paper and has been followed by reports on subjects like palm oil and American paper industry subsidies that are important to Asia Pulp & Paper and its parent company, Sinar Mas. He has worked these issues into podcasts, Facebook postings and opinion columns, often with a folksy Tea Party-friendly twist...  Although some of his material cites Asia Pulp & Paper, Mr. Langer insists that he had not even heard of the company.”

In addition to suspiciously similar reports, Langer is linked to other people and groups who have run public relations campaigns for Asia Pulp and Paper, as this graphic by the New York Times shows.

Langer and his institute are a perfect example of how professional apologists masquerade as tea party populists, couching pro-corporate propaganda in democratic language.  But he is not the biggest or the baddest in the corporate shill industry.  Groups like the Koch funded American’s for Prosperity and Dick Armey’s Freedomworks (both of whom Langer has worked closely with), are much better funded, yet their funding and motives are equally obscure. As Greenpeace’s Scott Paul says: “If you can spend as much money as you want and remain anonymous, then it doesn’t matter if you’re an overseas company or the Koch brothers, you pay the same network of anti-regulatory front groups.”