Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Senator Whitehouse has a conspiracy theory, about why people aren’t embracing skyrocketing energy prices and a substantially degraded quality of life.
According to Whitehouse;
Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.
Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.
The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.
Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”
Senator Whitehouse doesn’t understand that there is no “denier” conspiracy.
Ordinary people like myself, are motivated to act because we are fed up with failed climate models being paraded as settled facts. We are fed up with our kids being force fed messages of hopelessness and despair, when they should be learning about the wonders of science. We are fed up with endless schoolyard bullying tactics, the gratuitous name calling, the utterly disproportionate legal threats, and wild, baseless accusations, being used to harass anyone who dares to question the credibility of the self appointed prophets of thermageddon.
Climategate email 1212063122.txt
>> Mike,
> Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?
> Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis.
>
> Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t
> have his new email address.
>
> We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
>
> I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature
> paper!!
>
> Cheers
> Phil
Ah! another politician who failed his science courses.
Just another Animal Farmer. Two legs bad, four legs good! (Bring in the guard dogs). Disgusting is the word for it.
I read this news at Iceagenow.info earlier today and commented:
From Wikipedia:
“A racket is a service that is fraudulently offered to solve a problem, such as for a problem that does not actually exist, that will not be put into effect, or that would not otherwise exist if the racket did not exist. Conducting a racket is racketeering.”
Sounds like AGW to me!
Spot on 🙂
Another aspect is creating a crisis, and then offering to provide a solution, for a big fee.
Kind of like a senator telling a businessman that he is thinking of supporting new regulations on his business, but can be dissuaded for a sufficient contribution.
This is fascism on the rise. Pure and simple. Environmental fascism.
I think the commonality with fascism is that the new left has decided the they must build a perfect world in their own image.
Except with with perfect weather.
I’m waiting to see how completely daft they can get.
My bet is we ain’t touched bottom yet.
A perfect world with perfect weather.
That’s perfectly daft.
I suppose this is a runup to taking Holder’s position… ain’t that scary?
If RICO can be used against climate change Truthers, how about using the same statutes against Bill, Hillary and the Foundation (otherwise known as the Clinton Crime Family). BTW, I lived in RI when Sheldon came to power. To suggest he is intellectually challenged gives a bad name to others who are challenged. The best word to describe Sheldon is DUMB.
The problem is that only the Justice dept can bring RICO charges.
There’s no way the govt would prosecute their side.
It also is a bit disengenous to accuse “Big Oil” of funding “denier” campaigns, when all major oil comanies are actively lobbying for a price on Carbon Emissions and the Rockefella family are one of the biggest cheerleaders of the Global Warming scare campaign.
It doesn’t take much investigation to see that the biggest profiteers from the war on coal are “big oil” companies or more accurately “big gas and oil”.
It should also be pointed out that raising taxes on Gasoline has shown to do nothing to cut consumption of it, but if 50% of the price is tax a 2% increase in price from the oil company only shows as 1% increase in retail price. That is the beauty of a fixed usage tax over a value added one.
In short, the war on Carbon is just as likely to have been instigated by “big oil” in the first place as it was from so called environmentalists.
If you look into the aims, goals and influence of the Trilateral Comission over the last 40 years, you will discover that this is more likely than not.
Well at least Senator Sheldon Whitehouse adds to the growing body of evidence that only idiots are elected to Congress.
That’s been the case for awhile, like getting the flu during the winter, you just come to terms with it and do what you can. It is concerning though when the idiots in charge exercise their idiocy in a way that not only undermines the practice of science but undermines a basic constitutional guarantee against government authority restricting speech.
Maybe it would be helpful for Senator Whitehouse to hit himself in the head with a wooden spoon until some semblance of sense gets knocked back into him.
The Democrat playbook looks something like this: (1) pay scientists, with tax payers money, to produce studies defending your viewpoint; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups, especially green ones, to spread doubt about real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.
Democrat senator from a postage stamp-sized state where the gene pool does not go very deep.
Good thing they’re not in the majority.
This is a conspiracy theory. Therefore according to many warmists types, (The ones that show up here are not on this thread, Hmm.) this guy is to be denigrated and then ignored.
This is liberal projection,
Good point- where are they? (They know who They are and so do we.)
I thought it was Big Gas & Oil funding the AGW crowd as part of their strategic commercial war with slightly less big Coal. This guy obviously didn’t get the memo. I guess he’ll be getting a call pretty soon about how unhelpful to the cause these comments are. It’s sure going to be tricky explaining why the Big Oil is pouring so much more cash into the climate change team bucket than the sceptics team bucket while supposedly conspiring with the latter.
Q: What do you call a politician who uses a law to selectively persecute those who disagree with him?
A: Tyrant!
As the planet fails to obey the CAGW models, the chorus of vested interests (follow the money) are becoming more alarming, more aggressive, more controlling, and much like a wounded bear, more dangerous. Talk of “rounding up climate deniers” via cutting funding to researchers who report unadjusted data and who fail to fail to exercise alarmist CO2 meme’s or firing such scientist outright, or politicians and climate alarmists refusal to even talk about failed predictions of said models et. , has now descended to the Nazi like prosecution / death threats / imprisonment for “Future Crimes against Humanity” and so on. SO then tell me , who are the conspirators? By the way I live 100 miles from NYC and for the last four nights I have had to keep my woodstove burning because overnight lows have been in the 40’s F …. Daytime highs in the 50’s and 60’s with a few hours low 70’s ….. Dang cold here for the first week of June!
“Senator Whitehouse doesn’t understand that there is no “denier” conspiracy.
Ordinary people like myself, are motivated to act because we are fed up with failed climate models being paraded as settled facts.”
I was just reading the previous post from Willis about the stability of the climate. In that post, he links to an earlier post of his called The Details Are in the Devil. I couldn’t help seeing an analogy.
In the devil post, Willis talks about a theoretical Tasmanian Dirt Devil (TDD) that pops into existence to clean up a local concentration of dirt in a large room. It’s not affected (and, more pertinently, controlled) by what’s going on in other parts of the room, it just cleans up it’s own dirt target. It could be the only TDD working in the room at that moment, or there could be others, but there’s no controlling central authority. (In Willis’ article, the TDDs are analogous to tropical thunderstorms “cleaning up” heat concentrations in the tropical atmosphere.)
Willis’ point is that because the premise on which climate models are made is wrong, the climate models are wrong. In his dirty room analogy, that there isn’t one sweeping thing (a single, large vacuum cleaner, for instance) controlling everything but individual, independent actors doing their own thing in their own area that together form the entire system of keeping the room in a steady state of cleanliness. Willis’ thought is that the climate system is regulated similarly and the models ought to reflect that.
And my claim is that Sheldon Whitehouse is making the same mistake about AGW skeptics that Willis thinks modelers are making about the regulation of the climate. Whitehouse is positing some giant, centrally controlled conspiracy that’s regulating the entire system. The reality, as far as I can see, is much more like the TDD analogy. Individuals with specific expertise and interest pop up to clean up local concentrations of pro-AGW gunk that they see in front of them. Some of them work on this side of the room, some work on the other, but they’re concentrating on their own tasks, as their motivation and abilities allow. While together they might be ridding the room of dirt, that doesn’t mean they’re answering to one set of marching orders..
Drawn by the stink of BS – I like it 🙂
Um I mean I like the analogy… 🙂
Part of the left wing psyche is that individuals do not control their own destiny. Somebody or something is always controlling. In their world there are three entities which are constantly fighting for control of people. Religion, business, govt.
This is why they fight for big govt, because they believe that there must be a master, and they want that master to be govt.
Therefor it is natural for them to see those who oppose them, not as individual actors, but instead as pawns being controlled by some evil organization.
Yeah, that was my underlying thought, too. It’s all part of a pattern of left wing thinking. It’s the grandiose, single-factor, control knob view of the world. Apparently it applies to the climate, science discussion, politics, the economy, etc. They don’t “get” individualism very well. Whether it’s the free market economy, or skepticism of CAGW. They can’t picture anything important beyond command and control from the top.
Sic Lewandowski on him! Counterfactual conspiratorial ideation!
🙂
err, in case it wasn’t clear, I mean, sic Lew on Senator Whitehouse. Sorry if my remark was ambiguous.
“Counterfactual conspiratorial ideation!”
Well interesting: Lew and Oreskes are BFF’s; Oreskes also peddles this conspiracy conjecture. Maybe Lew could therapize her? Isn’t he from the shrink profession?
No Lew is an “experimental psychologist.” It’s a field with no theory, no real subject matter, and no real intelligent discussion. It’s a bunch of craptologists who 1) make up nonsense hypothesis, 2) Run small scale odd-ball control group and treatment group tests, 3) hope that their manipulations turn up something to support the hypothesis. I actually had a member of my doctoral committee have me read a couple dozen articles from the Journal of Experimental Psych and comment on the issues of internal validity in order to sharpen my knowledge on “how not to conduct an experiment using human subjects.”
If I am not mistaken the Rico acts authorized Civil Asset Forfeiture. That allows police or government to seize the property of someone without due process of law, on the suspicion that the property was gained through some illegal activity. It is a flagrant violation of the 5th amendment. But since government no longer gives a rat’s petutti about the constitution they get away with it. This article from the Detroit Free Press shows some of the abuses:
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/02/22/civil-asset-forfeiture-michigan-seizures-aclu-heritage-foundation-institute-justice/23737663/
You have to sue the govt in order to get your property back, and the burden of proof is on you to prove you didn’t do anything illegal.
Oh, and good luck hiring an attorney, since the govt just seized all your money and property.
“Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution.”
It would appear that the only person who seems to be misleading the American people is the Senator himself . The trend of US annual temperatures for the last 10 years since 2005 is declining at( -0.69 F/decade). This decline or nationwide cooling is happening in 2/3 of the US climate regions or 34 of the 51 states . So the entire premise for reducing carbon dioxide to protect the American people from man induced carbon dioxide is a mute and the threat is totally unfounded .. One can see how misinformed politicians like the Senator make it difficult to make things happen in Washington. The only significant region ( 10 states) showing warming is the west coast and this is primarily due to the warm Pacific ocean and the recent El NINO like effects. the last few years . Carbon dioxide is not an issue here nor is it a pollutant .
“the warm Pacific ocean and the recent El NINO like effects.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/21/north-pacific-update-the-blobs-strengthening-suggests-its-not-ready-to-depart/
Whitehouse is just parroting what rational people have been screaming for years. A full blown RICO investigation of the climate fraudsters and their NGO’s and governmental partners. That date is getting close; they are panicking. Whitehouse has good reason to be worried. If these clowns lose their political cover, they should be worried, very worried.
FIFA now, OIC soon, F1 later, CAGW sooner.
http://www.cato.org/blog/sen-whitehouse-bring-rico-charges-against-climate-wrongthink
Dear Senator Whitehouse, you sir are a fool.
Sincerely,
Doug S
It may surprise many to realize that the US government actually operated a house of prostitution. For those favoring slang terms we could instead call it a whorehouse that it was that the US government was operating. Or, for those favoring brevity we could call it a brothel that our US government operated.
I brought up all three descriptions to try and give the impression, to any disbelievers, that I sort of know what I’m talking about (a wonder of the world). Anyway, the US government didn’t operate this brothel back when the country was first formed in the 1790s. Nor did it operate it in the rough and tumble frontier lands in the 1800s. It actually was operated sometime in the 1960s or 1970s. Nor did it operate it outside of the Continental US of A. And, it was not operated as a spy trap, or sting operation.
No, this brothel that the US government operated was a legally operating enterprise. In fact, it’s quite arguably a world famous place. After all, who hasn’t heard of the legendary Mustang Ranch just outside Reno, Nevada.
Now, how it came to be operated by the US government should be taught in every high school civics class across the land. Normal procedure for legal Nevada brothels is for the prostitute to keep half of what she gets from a customer and the other half goes to the house which provides her with her own room to live and work in: three weeks on; one week off. Each prostitute has a ‘floor’, or price which she will not go below. Outside of the ‘floor’ every prostitute will negotiate for the highest price they can get from a customer. The more money they make, the more money the house makes.
Does this sound like the prostitutes are independent contractors? Well, they are. Except in the Mustang Ranch case the IRS came to the conclusion that they were employees, and as such, demanded back taxes from the owner of the storied Mustang Ranch.
Needless to say, the owner didn’t have a prayer of making those kind of back tax payments. So, the IRS seized the assets and brought in an IRS accountant to run the operation. “Um, Lovebunny, you’ve got a tear in that fishnet nylon. Madame Desire, that garter doesn’t match your outfit.”
To my knowledge the shenanigans didn’t last long before (I believe it was the owner’s lawyer.) someone purchased the ranch. But, for 24-48 hours the US government was in the prostitution business.
What does the foregoing story have to do with Sheldon Whitehouse. Perhaps it’s just a cautionary tale to be careful
what you wish for. You see, my understanding of RICO is that it was enacted partly to get around those pesty Constitutional guarantees and the Bill of Rights. One of the more pernicious aspects of it being the seizure of someone’s property without due cause under the bizarre legal fiction that the property is charged with the crime, and as property it has no legal rights. Now it’s not unusual for our public servants to find themselves embroiled in corruption, whether it’s true or not, and if Sheldon (what kinda’ name is that?) should be he needs to remember that that blue jacket, black tie, and white shirt he has on are not the beneficiaries of legal rights. Imagine greeting guests at the Mustang Ranch wearing nothing but speedos.
Be careful what you hope for – you might get it. Once you set a precedent for using RICO under false pretenses, at some point ,it will end up being used by the opposition against you.
It seems to me that RICO might better apply to individuals associated with institutions (The Family) that knowingly produce a defective product (The Scam), are secretive and destroy outsiders (The Protection). These individuals and institutions organize around this framework to obtain grant money funded by the tax payers. Cheers, Mark
“Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations” sounds like a good description of the EPA and all the “scientists” and “Universities” and “Independent Researchers” that have colluded with Congress to defraud the American taxpayer of billions of $’s.