By John Stark
After the US Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, some people feared that unregulated contributions would pour into politics and buy elections.
NPR has a report outlining several key Senate races in which massive amounts of SuperPAC money failed to buy the desired outcome for SuperPAC contributors.
I don’t want to minimize the impact that money has on our political processes. But the fear that advertising money will buy voters’ allegiance has always seemed more than a little elitist. At its core, that argument boils down to “Political advertising will sway the ignorant masses.” Nobody making this argument claims to be a part of the ignorant masses. Nobody ever says, “I’m afraid political advertising will hypnotize me into voting Republican.” The fear is that some other guy–that dumb guy down the street–won’t be smart enough to do his own thinking and is at risk of political hypnotism.
Advertising may get me into a car company’s showroom but it won’t make me buy the car. Advertising may get me to try your brand of beer or eat at your restaurant, but if I don’t like your beer or your restaurant I won’t be back.
If it wasn’t the billionaire Kochs and their fossil fuel cabal that caused the omission of global warming from the campaign, what was it?
The Kochs wrote the 1994 Contract on America and funded the Tea Party to enlist cover for their polluting operations. Like Berkshire Hathaway, after the end of the industrial era, they picked up dirty businesses at bargain prices, and now they are buying suppression of the information about global warming to profit off carbon emissions.
See the bad news about carbon emissions reduction in the PwC report released last week (incidentally reported in Reuters and not in the major US newspapers., to my knowledge).
Boudou, are you saying that nobody has heard about global warming because of the Koch Brothers? (Just last week, Whatcom County’s major newspaper had front-page photos that document the shrinkage of the glaciers on Mount Baker.)
Maybe the real problem is that people HAVE heard about global warming, and they may even accept the scientific evidence indicating it is caused by human activity. Maybe the real problem is that despite all this, they are not ready to embrace any politician who calls upon them to make sacrifices because of it. Presidents and presidential candidates, with vast amounts of market research data at their fingertips, are aware of this and avoid the issue because it isn’t a winner.
I didn’t see a lot of ad money spent with the Herald this time.
What I’m saying is that to learn about the PwC report, you had to read Reuters, and that none of the presidential candidates mentioned global warming and none of the debate moderators asked a question about global warming. The history is that the polluters have continually promoted doubt about global warming, in fact, using the some of the same sources like Dr. Fred Reich, that were used by the tobacco industry on smoking, then second hand smoke, by the chemical industry on the ozone hole, etc. As a long-time reader of the New York Times, I was infuriated by their “science” writers blowing smoke about global warming. On the other hand, Bill McKibben has been writing clearly about global warming at least since a 1988 article in the New York Review of Books, but who reads that?
There are published survey results that show around 50% (or more) of Americans are global warming deniers, in contrast to Europe, where more like 90% accept that it is happening. That difference must be attributed to failure of American leadership and media.
Follow the money, and it leads back to the polluters. My supposition is that the polluter with a bag of cash in hand effectively told each side in the election: “I know where to spend my money to effectively help or hurt you. Work with me and I will direct my money where it won’t hurt you.” In a word, extortion. We will never know what happened in former Halliburton CEO Cheney’s secret meeting on energy. We do know that he and Don Massey fiddled the regulations to allow mountaintop removal, as well as our current coal train fiasco with the major polluter Berkshire Hathaway, Inc., owner of MidAmerican Energy and the railroad, and Goldman Sachs.
Coincidentally, here is from a new email from the Center for American Progress Action Fund, which says the polluters’ ads did not have much effect:
“The 2012 campaign season was one of the most expensive in history, with an estimated $6 billion spent on television ads in races up and down the ticket. Not surprisingly, corporate polluters and other dirty energy interests were some of the largest outside spenders in the 2012 campaign cycle. These groups—which include Restore Our Future, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the American Energy Alliance, Americans for Prosperity, Crossroads GPS, and several more—bet big and lost big.
“In just the last two months of the campaign, outside groups linked to dirty energy sources or the promotion of a dirty energy agenda spent more than $270 million on TV ads in the presidential, House, and Senate races and industry ads promoting oil, gas, and coal interest, and more than $31 million was spent on energy-related ads, according to a Center for American Progress Action Fund analysis of data from Kantar Media’s CMAG.”