Consider Obama’s healthcare reform. Although proponents often pitched the bill as a way to reign in big drug companies, the lobbying group for those very companies, PhRMA, pledged to spend $150 million to support the bill. Why? Because the new law offers drug companies lucrative benefits:• It prohibits the use of funds from Health Savings Accounts for over-the-counter medications. This would encourage Americans to buy expensive prescription drugs made by big drug companies. It would also create inefficiencies by providing an incentive to go to the doctor for a prescription rather than simply buying medication over the counter.
• The bill’s “individual mandate” requires every American to buy prescription drug insurance, which would further increase sales of prescription drugs.
• The bill creates special monopolies for complex drugs, called “biologics,” that would get a special 12-year patent instead of the standard 5-year protection. Another provision extends the patent of one specific drug, Angiomax, through 2014.
We see the same big business-big government back scratching in the cap-and-trade bill. This is supposedly meant to punish big carbon polluters, yet many of America’s biggest corporations joined together in the United States Climate Action Partnership to lobby for cap and trade. These firms, including PepsiCo, Dow Chemical, GE, Shell, and the Big Three automakers, aim to game the government’s process for distributing carbon credits to gain an advantage over their smaller competitors. Since these credits will be traded on the open market, the government would essentially be giving the corporations free money.
You may also be surprised to learn that one of the biggest advocates of The Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act, which gave the FDA the power to regulate tobacco, was Philip Morris, far and away America’s largest cigarette manufacturer. The Philip Morris parent company, Altria, spent an average of $40,000 a day lobbying for the bill over five years. This, to say the least, casts doubt on President Obama’s declaration that the bill passed “despite decades of lobbying and advertising by the tobacco industry.” As Carney notes, the bill was opposed, as usual, by smaller manufacturers. After all, new marketing restrictions on cigarettes hurt lesser-known brands much more than famous ones.
Here’s a final example: when the IRS recently proposed new regulations requiring all tax preparers to register with the IRS, pay fees, pass certification tests, and participate in continuing education programs, the rules earned the vociferous support of H&R Block, Jackson Hewitt, and Liberty Tax, three of America’s biggest tax preparers. The reason was explained in a UBS analysis: the rules would make it more difficult for small tax preparers to enter the market. Additionally, the regulations would allow H&R Block to make money selling its own continuing education programs and certifications to other firms.
Thus, it’s no surprise, really, that a former H&R Block executive, Deputy Commissioner Mark Ernst, is an Obama administration appointee at the IRS. Furthermore, H&R Block lobbying is done by the Podesta Group, a firm founded by John Podesta, the director of the Obama presidential transition.
So the next time a left-wing politician proposes new regulations to protect you from big business, look behind the scenes to see who will really profit. It probably isn’t who you think.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The Corruption of Climate Science by the Secular- Socialist Machine
Conservatives, left-wingers argue, are “anti-science.” President Obama implicitly made the accusation during his 2010 State of the Union speech, when he claimed opponents of cap-and-trade energy taxes “disagree with the overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.”
This sort of demagoguery is typical of the elitist Left; they explain the unpopularity of their values by suggesting they simply know better than the majority of ignorant Americans. Of course, the Left happily ignore and reject overwhelming scientific evidence when it’s convenient for their agenda of expanding the regulatory state and enriching their allies.
For instance, trial lawyers, a key source of money for the secular-socialist machine, are incredibly “anti-science” in their willingness to rely on junk science to gin up lawsuits. This was borne out in a 2004 study by Dr. Joseph N. Gitlin. Six outside physician consultants were asked to review 492 chest X-rays that had previously been evaluated by physician experts (called B-readers) hired by plaintiffs in asbestos lawsuits. While the B-readers found evidence of asbestos-related damage in 95 percent of the X-rays, the outside group only found it in 4.5 percent.1
The origins of today’s radical environmental movement provide a more disturbing example. That movement launched with a successful effort in the 1960s to effectively ban the insecticide DDT worldwide. This led to the reemergence of malaria in Africa, which has caused 1-2 million preventable deaths a year, according to the American Council on Science and Health. The crusade against DDT contradicts overwhelming evidence that the correct use of the chemical does not harm humans or the environment.
Likewise, the Luddite Left reject the use of all genetically modified crops despite their scientifically proven safety. Thus, for purely ideological reasons, these extremists oppose the cultivation of “golden rice,” a modified strain of rice with beta-carotene (vitamin A). This crop represents an enormous potential health breakthrough for more than 100 million people in the third world who suffer from vitamin A deficiency, a condition that can cause blindness and other major problems, especially in children.
Similar examples abound: due to a left-wing demonization campaign, the process of food irradiation, which could have prevented America’s 2006 e-coli outbreak, is barely used in the United States despite repeated tests verifying its safety.
But perhaps no anti-scientific argument is more dangerous today than the claim put forward by radical environmentalists, most notably Robert F. Kennedy Jr., that childhood vaccinations can cause autism. Numerous peer-reviewed studies have disproved this connection. Moreover, the Lancet, a prominent British journal that published a 1998 study confirming a vaccination-autism connection, recently retracted the study, whose findings had already been repudiated by ten of its thirteen co-authors.2
Yet some parents, worried by these rumors, have stopped vaccinating their children, endangering public health. Dr. Melinda Wharton of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told the AP that unvaccinated children contributed to measles outbreaks in 2008 in California, Illinois, Washington, Arizona, and New York. She added, “If we don’t vaccinate, these diseases will come back.”3
When their anti-scientific arguments are causing the return of deadly diseases once thought to have been eradicated in the United States, it’s hard to see how the Left truly champion science.
CLIMATEGATE
Ironically, by using science as a weapon to further their political agenda, the Left are corrupting the very scientific process they claim to uphold.
This is shockingly evident in climate science. Indeed, recent revelations about the degree of groupthink, coercion, and financial corruption in this field make it seem more like a political machine than a community dedicated to pursuing scientific truth.
Reports by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been one of the major sources of information upon which international leaders have proposed action to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Known as the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), the most recent report in 2007 won the IPCC, along with Al Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. However, startling revelations have shown the report manipulated scientific research to further a political agenda.
The scandal emerged when an Internet hacker published emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia, one of the IPCC’s main sources of data. The emails showed a remarkably hostile and unscientific attitude among CRU scientists and their allies toward anyone who questioned their alarmist data on global warming.
In one exchange, scientists plotted to keep global warming skeptics from being published in peer-reviewed literature. The existence of this orchestrated cam
paign undermines a common argument from global warming alarmists—that skeptics should be ignored, because their findings are usually not peer reviewed.
Emails also suggested climate scientists were motivated more by money than scientific integrity. Here’s a passage from one such email, in which a climate researcher asks how he should respond to an article by a global warming skeptic:How should I respond to the below? I’m in the process of trying to persuade Siemens Corp. (a company with half a million employees in 190 countries!) to donate me a little cash to do some CO2 measurements here in the UK—looking promising, so the last thing I need is news articles calling into question (again) observed temperature increases.4
These grants were no small potatoes: CRU director Phil Jones, who temporarily resigned that position after the emails were published, received an astounding $19 million in grants between 2000 and 20065—including money from the U.S. Department of Energy, according to Britain’s Daily Telegraph.6 As Professor Ross McKitrick, a climate change skeptic who was mentioned in some of the CRU emails, noted, “Climate sceptics are always accused of taking money from industry but it is now clear the money is on the other side. . . . [Climate change scientists] are enjoying a funding gravy train.”
The emails also suggested CRU scientists manipulated data to exaggerate warming trends. In the most famous email, Phil Jones discussed a “trick” to “hide the decline” in recent historical temperatures. When pressed, CRU admitted it had deleted the raw climate data from its servers. The lack of raw data justifying many of the CRU’s findings has been a key complaint of skeptics, who rightfully argue that normal scientific practice requires scientists to make this information available for scrutiny by other scientists.
In a further blow to the CRU’s credibility, the emails showed scientists discussing ways to avoid Freedom of Information Act requests, for example, by deleting correspondence and other information that might be sought. That seems to have been a particular concern for Phil Jones. In one email he writes, “Mike, can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4. . . . Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same. . . . We will be letting Caspar to do likewise.” Another email from Jones is even more damning:The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone. . . . We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried email when he heard about it—thought people could ask him for his model code. He has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.7
The United Kingdom Information Commission found that the efforts to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures may have been illegal, but they could not be prosecuted because the statute of limitations had expired.
THE CORRUPTION OF THE IPCC REPORT
The Climategate scandal, as it became known, led to increasing scrutiny of the IPCC report. This resulted in new revelations undermining the report itself.
Several sources used in the report were not scientific or peer-reviewed studies, but talking points lifted from political organizations or recreational magazine articles. For instance, the report argued 40 percent of the Amazon’s forests could be drastically affected by drier weather created by global warming—a claim taken from the World Wildlife Fund, an activist group that lobbies for big-government environmental policies like cap and trade.
One of the report’s most controversial claims—that climate change was increasing the number and severity of natural disasters—also came from a non-peer reviewed source at the time. When the study was finally published in 2008, it included a key addendum: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophic losses.”8
Equally embarrassing were the sources of the report’s claims that ice is rapidly melting on the world’s mountaintops, and that there is a “very high” possibility the Himalayan glaciers will disappear by 2035. The first claim was based on anecdotes from a Climbing magazine article and a student paper. The second claim once again came from the World Wildlife Fund.
The warning of disappearing Himalayan glaciers was particularly startling, since it could potentially affect hundreds of millions of Asians who depend on the glaciers as a source of water. The scientist who put the claim in the report, Dr. Murari Lal, later admitted it was included for purely political reasons: “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
Unfortunately, the corruption of climate science goes beyond the IPCC and the CRU. A computer programmer named E. Michael Smith recently discovered that NASA’s Goddard Science and Space Institute and NOAA’s Climate Data Center in North Carolina reduced the number of their temperature data stations from 6,000 in the 1970s to 1,500 in 1990. Most of the lost stations were in colder climates, creating a bias toward warmer readings.
If politics were poker, you could say the Left went “all in” on global warming, willing to use any means necessary to achieve their goals.
THE ENDGAME
The distressing corruption of climate science is intended to justify intrusive and coercive policies that the American people overwhelmingly oppose. Americans don’t want to be banned from using our own natural resources, we don’t want our companies bankrupted by suffocating regulations, and we don’t want cap-and-trade energy taxes. But these are key goals of the secular socialists, because these policies centralize power in their machine.
Allowing American individuals and businesses to develop a vast, cheap supply of energy, as occurred throughout most of American history, doesn’t further socialist goals. To the contrary, this kind of independent initiative threatens the machine. They say our energy development must be carefully planned, strictly regulated, and vigilantly overseen—and they just happen to be the planners, regulators, and overseers.
Secular socialists claim to champion science, yet they debase, distort, and deny the scientific process to further their political agenda. Science is supposed to be an open process of discovery and peer review, yet the most influential global warming alarmists worked furiously to hide their data and silence dissenting views. Meanwhile, the Left point to these scientists’ corrupt, politicized research as “evidence” that the earth faces an imminent environmental apocalypse unless we adopt their extremist green policies.
In the end, secular socialists view science much like they view morality: it’s just another tool to exploit for gaining and maintaining power.
CHAPTER NINE
Corruption at the United Nations
The United Nations was formed after World War II as a vehicle for world leaders to promote peace, human rights, and economic development. Tragically, from these noble origins, the UN has evolved into a corrupt, inept, bureaucratic machine that protects the world’s worst dictatorships.
In some ways, the UN machine is even worse than the machine of the American Left; first, since even the most despotic governments are entitled to UN membership, the UN is not limited by elections or the need to keep up democratic appearances. And second, lacking America’s legal framework for government transparency, the organization is even more prone to corruption than is the American Left.
Despite the fact that a handful of Western democracies pay the vast majority of the UN’s annual budget (the United States alone pays 22 percent), the UN’s most influential voting block is a group of 130 undeveloped countries called the G-77. Using the UN’s one country-one vote system, the G-77 has hijacked the UN to turn it into a mechanism for redistributing wealth from developed to developing countries.
The most recent and dramatic example came out of the December 2009 UN Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen. The agreement emerging from the conference called for transferring $100 billion a year from developed to undeveloped countries, a move ostensibly meant to repay the so-called “climate debt” that rich countries owe poor ones. One of
the proposed methods for transferring this money is a 2 percent global tax on international monetary transactions among industrialized countries—in other words, taxation without representation.
Redistributing wealth is not some side project at the United Nations; it is the organization’s main purpose today. In November 2009, a resolution sponsored by a number of oppressive and Marxist states, including China, Cuba, Iran, Nicaragua, Russia, Sudan, and Venezuela, and passed largely thanks to the G-77 block, called for, among other things, “the promotion of equitable access to benefits from international distribution of wealth.”1 It also reaffirms the need “to work urgently for the establishment of an international economic order . . . which shall correct inequalities and redress existing injustices, [and] make it possible to eliminate the widening gap between the developed world and the developing countries.”2
Pursuing this agenda, it’s unsurprising the G-77 uses its voting muscle to empower deeply anti-American, anti-Israel, and avowedly socialist activists within the UN bureaucracy.
For instance, a current member of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee is Swiss national Jean Ziegler, who calls the United States an “imperialist dictatorship” whose trade embargo against Cuba constitutes “genocide.” Another top UN diplomat is Nicaraguan Miguel d’Escoto, President of the UN General Assembly for the 2008-2009 session. A former foreign minister in Daniel Ortega’s far-left Sandinista government in the 1980s, he called Ronald Reagan a “butcher” and Israel an “apartheid” state. He also deemed Evo Morales, the staunchly socialist and anti-American Bolivian president, “World Hero of Mother Earth,” and declared Fidel Castro “World Hero of Solidarity.” D’Escoto claimed these human rights abusers “embody the virtues and values worth emulation by all of us.”
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