Big business declares war on science: The secret story of the Chamber of Commerce’s battle against the environment, global warming action

Driven by a fervor for profit and an anti-government frenzy, the Chamber is a fighting force for the 1 percent

(Credit: bikeriderlondon via Shutterstock/Salon)

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen the Data Quality Act turned out not to be the magic bullet they’d hoped for—-it only crippled but did not kill the role of disinterested scientific research in formulating policy—-the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and its sponsoring industries had to move up the food chain of federal power. Rather than merely slowing or preventing the enactment of new regulations through the courts, their new strategy moved to block unwanted laws from taking hold in the first place. This approach was well suited to their battle to conquer the forces massing to take on the defining science-versus-business battle of the dawning century: action to rein in global warning. The Chamber’s passion for transparency and truth would soon dwindle as strongly as it had flared during the salt fight.

Alarm bells had burbled for years through the scientific community, but in 1988 they clanged loudly in Washington, when NASA climate scientist James Hansen told a Senate committee that the so-called greenhouse effect was real, man-made, and destined to put life on earth into a state of upheaval.

Thereafter the heat intensified. In 1990 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming existed. By 1995 the 2,500 scientists who made up the panel warned that the burning of fossil fuels—-primarily coal and oil—-had moved the earth into an era of climate instability, one that was likely to provoke environmental, economic, and social upheaval.

As the devastating findings kept coming from a steady stream of scientific papers, the Chamber joined an angry chorus of industry groups that made strenuous efforts to shout them down. The Burson-Marsteller public relations firm coordinated a campaign dedicated to sowing continued doubt over the existence of global warming. As part of that effort, headquartered out of the rival National Association of Manufacturers, the Chamber lobbied members of Congress against bills, amendments, and U.S. ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, which would have signed the United States up for a rollback to 1990 levels of carbon emissions.

And for a few years, with the fossil-fuel-industry-friendly Bush administration in the White House and Republicans leading the House of Representatives, the regulations crew at the Chamber could move on to other urgent priorities, like pouring salt into the American diet.

Then in 2007 Democrats took over the House, and the political sands shifted again. As soon as the new majority took the gavel, a core of leading Chamber members broke ranks to urge federal action to reduce U.S. greenhouse gas emissions.

The companies that formed the United States Climate Action Partnership were motivated, mostly, by their usual spur: profit. Their executives could see oh so clearly that Congress was poised to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. If a cap-and-trade carbon crackdown could yield a money-making opportunity or competitive advantage—-well, that was something these companies could get behind.

Caterpillar, Duke Energy, General Electric, PG&E, Dow Chemical, Alcoa, DuPont—-the inaugural membership of the Climate Action Partnership had much in common with the list of Chamber board members past and present. The partnership debuted with a promise to deliver a cap-and-trade program “limiting global atmospheric GHG concentrations to a level that minimizes large-scale adverse climate change impacts to human populations and the natural environment.” The pledge, realistically, entailed serious and in some cases costly changes to how U.S. companies did business, not least partnership members. The equipment manufacturer Caterpillar, for one, could suffer mightily if coal mining scaled back. BP stood to suffer cost burdens on its U.S. operations not borne by competitors that refined their oil elsewhere. The arrival of this corporate climate action brigade would appear to put the Chamber in a treacherous position astride a divided business community, much as it had been in the fight over the Clinton health care bill more than a decade earlier. But the reality was that what most of its members wanted really didn’t matter anymore, if a large contributor or two had different priorities. The Chamber still nominally ran major policy positions through committees of members and then the membership itself, and Chamber leadership insisted that its members went through “internal debate” on its climate agenda. But climate activists on the board would later charge that the specifics of hard-line attacks on cap-and-trade never went to a board review.

In 2008, the year battle in the climate war broke out on the Senate floor, the Chamber received one-third of its $140 million in contributions from just nineteen donors, which each gave $1 million or more. The largest—-like all of them, anonymous—-gave $15.3 million. There’s no way to know if that money came from a member with a dog in the climate fight or, if so, which it was. But the contribution, and a parade of other multimillion-dollar donations that year, was a sure sign of how successfully Donohue had positioned the Chamber as a front group for hire for companies that did not want to publicly be seen as supporting politically unpopular positions.

At that moment, doing nothing on climate change was one of the least popular stands a company could possibly take. Even 60 percent of Republican voters polled said they agreed that immediate action was needed to halt climate change; among Democrats, 90 percent agreed. Across all polled, three in four said that to counter global warming, they would be willing to pay more for energy derived from renewable sources like the sun and wind.

The other thing clear by then was that it was possible, at least theoretically, to take cost-effective action to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In a report for the Conference Board, a research institute supporting effective business practices globally, the consulting firm McKinsey & Company had found that cost-effective action by the United States could feasibly reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by some four billion tons at a cost of roughly $50 a ton.

With key members of the Chamber and a public majority in favor of firm and sensible regulation, the Chamber, fueled by anonymous donations, sped in the opposite direction. Many signs pointed to the coal industry as the funder behind the Chamber’s efforts. Coal still accounted for more than one-third of all the power generated in the United States. But more to the point, the United States consumed 25 percent of all the power generated by coal in the world, second only to China. And coal, in all its uses, accounts for some 40 percent of emissions of carbon dioxide, which is the most prevalent greenhouse gas and the one driving global warming.

The Chamber’s board of directors included executives from Peabody Energy, Southern Company, Massey Energy, Duke Energy, and CONSOL Energy, all of whose business depended on the mining and burning of coal. Donohue himself had joined the board of rail giant Union Pacific, which counted on coal transportation for one-quarter of its business. Between 2004 and 2011, Union Pacific gave $600,000 to the Chamber’s leadership fund. In total, its statements to investors reveal, it gave the Chamber more than $1 million.

In the months before a climate bill came into play in the Capitol, Donohue made vague statements of principle in support of action, tempered by warnings of lost jobs, a stampede of business overseas, and cripplingly high energy prices back home. As a concept, he said, he supported cap-and-trade as a means of controlling carbon emissions. But the practical reality was that no bill could satisfy one of the Chamber’s key demands: that any solution also involve developing nations. That condition had already derailed American participation in the Kyoto Protocol, under which wealthier nations agreed to abide by carbon caps, but competing developing countries—-including economic behemoth China—-got away without obligations or costs to reduce their emissions.

Joe Lieberman: A prominent chancre on the body politic. Not surprising he'd help author a non-solution—cap-n-trade— to a grave issue.

Joe Lieberman: A prominent chancre on the body politic. Not surprising he’d help author a pseudo-solution—cap-n-trade— to a grave issue.

On December 5, 2007, the carbon cap-and-trade bill written by Senators Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) vaulted from a congressional committee onto the national stage. By March 2008, the Chamber had teamed up with the National Association of Manufacturers and other pro-fossil-fuel groups to sound the alarms at local “dialogues,” panel discussions and such with local business leaders in states with the most to lose. Up to four million jobs would be lost, they warned. Gas and electricity prices would double or more, with a loss to each household of thousands of dollars every year. Just to make sure the message got across where it counted—-to the constituents of senators who would be voting on Lieberman-Warner—-the Chamber provided breakdowns of the calamitous consequences for every state.

It was true that the costs of Lieberman-Warner would not have been borne evenly—-and the coal-mining, transportation, and coal-burning industries would unquestionably have paid for much of that hit. So would electricity customers in coal-burning states. But environmentalists challenged the math: how could the Chamber, for instance, assume no meaningful increase in use of wind energy, and no solar to speak of at all? Other studies that didn’t impose such constraints found that cap-and-trade would inflict much milder hits on the economy.

The National Association of Manufacturers study that the Chamber retailed also neglected provisions in the bill that were specifically designed to lower the cost of cap-and-trade to businesses, such as the ability to store up carbon credits for future use as their price, under an increasingly strict cap, continued to rise. Even the hyperideological Heritage Foundation, which sent an economist to speak at some of the dialogues, came up with less severe estimates for cap-and-trade’s economic hit, using its own set of skewed assumptions.

Surreally, until March 2008, the Chamber officially had no position on climate change itself, never mind a particular bill; nor could it, since so many of its leading members in industries with the most at stake had taken strong stands in favor of action. Even when Donohue did at last reveal that the Chamber supported some kind of effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he declined to get behind cap-and-trade, a tax, or any other specific strategy.

But the Chamber’s opposition to Lieberman-Warner was clear and undeniable. In the spring of 2008, as the bill’s supporters sought a supermajority of sixty Senate votes to bring it to the floor for a vote, the Chamber sponsored an apocalyptic TV and Internet ad campaign aimed at the senators who would decide. On the screen of one ad, a man bundled in a scarf and coat prepared his morning eggs in a pan held over burning candles, before he joined a pack of commuters jogging down the highway to work. “Climate legislation being considered by Congress could make it too expensive to heat our homes, power our lives and drive our cars,” warned the voice of God in the ad. “Is this really how Americans want to live? Washington politicians should not demand what technology cannot deliver. Urge your senator to vote no on the Lieberman-Warner climate bill.”

The ads were designed to shift public sentiment, but their ultimate aim was to influence the members of the Senate who would have to vote on a climate bill. As the Chamber’s Bruce Josten explained to Roll Call: “You’re always better off if you can get constituents talking” to their elected officials.

The bill fell twelve senators short of the sixty Senate yeas that it needed to go to a vote. It didn’t help that on the eve of the cloture vote, ten Democrats, most of whom voted for the go-ahead, wrote a letter to Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Senate’s environment committee, and Majority Leader Harry Reid expressing grave concerns about the bill, many of which could have been torn from the Chamber’s own talking points. All were from states that would likely have seen costs to businesses or households rise disproportionately.

Having succeeded in undermining the bill, the Chamber went on to attack the losing side. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) and Sherrod Brown (D-OH), two of the letter’s signers, were among the senators who voted for the bill even though they could expect to face blistering campaigns from the Chamber and local businesses for doing so. In the 2012 election they were, predictably, slimed in ads by the Chamber as big-government monsters, but both survived. Jim Webb (D-VA) and Evan Bayh (D-IN) voted for the bill and retired rather than seek reelection under threat of such attacks. Alone in immunity stood Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), who had already proven herself such a Chamber loyalist—-a member of the “Spirit of Enterprise” club for having voted with the Chamber at least 70 percent of the time—-that in 2010 she had earned a TV ad campaign on her behalf from the Chamber. Unlike most candidates the Chamber supported that year, she lost to her Republican rival.

The situation shifted again with the 2008 presidential election. Within months of the election of Barack Obama as president, the new chief executive opted to take strong action on his own, without waiting for Congress. The EPA moved to classify greenhouse gases as pollutants, subjecting them to regulation under the Clean Air Act. The move was a prelude to planned emissions restrictions for fossil-fuel-burning vehicles and could have ultimately reached far deeper into the economy. The Chamber and the fuel extractors and burners could challenge it all they wanted and would try to delay and destroy it in court. And the House and Senate would continue to debate cap-and-trade bills for the next two years, without reaching the necessary sixty votes in the Senate. But the power to make or break members of Congress, arguably the Chamber’s most important weapon, didn’t entirely matter in reckoning with an Obama White House determined to go it alone if it had to.

The Chamber would now have to pull off an illusionist’s trick: it would have to deliver for the fossil-fuel-industry patrons that expected it to block tough action on carbon emissions, while also representing its own broader membership and respecting its internal process of deliberation through member committees. After all, the Chamber’s tax-exempt status, and its ability to raise funds without disclosing their sources, depended on fulfilling the mission “to advance human progress through an economic, political, and social system based on individual freedom, incentive, opportunity and responsibility”—-not to carry out campaigns on behalf of individual, deep-pocketed sponsors. As it was, the Chamber’s political operation was the subject of a complaint to the IRS from Public Citizen, demanding an investigation into its declaration as tax-exempt millions of dollars in campaign-connected spending.

In late April 2009, the Chamber’s environment and energy committee organized a three-hour private pseudodebate between advocates of cap-and-trade (Dow Chemical), a carbon tax (Exxon), and technology incentives (Chamber board member Fred Palmer of Peabody Energy, who once justified his company’s anti-climate-action stance by declaring, on camera, that burning coal and emitting CO2 was “doing God’s work”). Some hundred members were in the room for what Kovacs called “quite a spirited discussion,” of which he later observed: “At the end of the debate, there were no members asking to change our policy.”

But in the days leading up to the meeting, Tom Donohue had received a stinging complaint from the VP of government affairs at member firm Johnson & Johnson, a player in the Climate Action Partnership, informing Donohue that “we would appreciate it if statements made by the Chamber reflected the full range of views, especially those of Chamber members advocating for Congressional action.” Just a few hours after the “debate,” Kovacs snubbed Johnson & Johnson’s request. He went before Congress to rip apart the latest cap-and-trade bill, mostly on the untested premise that renewable energy sources couldn’t develop fast enough to fill the gap left as fossil-fuel burning declined. The ambassador for American business was asking Congress to believe that U.S. companies didn’t have the ability to forge ahead and build a new market or compete globally.

[dropcap]R[/dropcap]epresentative Edward Markey (D-MA), one of the sponsors of the bill, couldn’t help but point out that back in the 1980s the Chamber had also fought his Telecommunications Act, which deregulated the phone industry and thereby made possible the digital communications revolution. Then and now, Markey said, the Chamber’s interest in protecting incumbent corporate powers got in the way of what was best for the nation’s society and economy. Then Markey asked a burning question: the committee had just heard from Chamber board members Alcoa and Duke Energy, speaking in support of cap-and-trade, so what in the world was Kovacs doing speaking in opposition?

Kovacs smiled meekly and made a brief argument against cap-and-trade that sounded more like a threat: that any action on its behalf was bound to become ensnared in crippling lawsuits. His written testimony launched into talking points about the Chamber’s internal policy decisions being based on “core principles” and a “transparent democratic process.” No one was fooled, but the Chamber could maintain the pretense that it favored climate action in principle.

Just two months later the Obama administration’s move to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants forced the Chamber’s toxic climate change denialism out into the open. In a technical and at first obscure briefing submitted to the EPA, the Chamber called for a public proceeding in which the science of climate change—-which it called “hugely controverted”—-could be openly debated, by participants who would be sworn under oath and could be cross-examined, just as in a court proceeding. In a Hail Mary play, trying to catch a ball thrown by misinformation campaigns promoted by companies and industry groups with mammoth greenhouse gas footprints, the Chamber was openly demanding the trial of science that its instigators had been previously denied when the subject was soot or salt.

There was little doubt what side its leadership was arguing. Eight years earlier Bill Kovacs had told a CNNfn interviewer that while global warming exists, “there’s no link between greenhouse gases and human activity.” But by the time of its summer 2009 petition to the EPA, the Chamber was forced to acknowledge that “climate change is to some extent influenced by anthropogenic GHG emissions.” The question that the Chamber was now pressing the Obama administration to open for public debate was not whether global warming was real, or at least partly caused by humans, but whether these confirmed shifts in the environment posed a threat to life—-the basis on which the EPA moved to take action.

Rather than leave its arguments to the imagination, the Chamber’s petition spelled out supposed evidence that global warming was not an imminent threat to human health. In fact, the Chamber argued in almost comical detail, climate change was poised to be a boon. Crops would grow faster and stronger as temperatures rose, while the number of illnesses and deaths attributed to heat would be outnumbered by illnesses and deaths that didn’t happen in the cold.

While the petition was pending, in a highly unfortunate but not accidental choice of historical reference, Kovacs told the Los Angeles Times that such a hearing would be the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century.” “It would be evolution versus creationism,” he insisted. “It would be the science of climate change on trial.”

The Scopes trial, as anyone who has seen the classic movie Inherit the Wind will remember, pitted legendary attorney Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan in a showdown over Darwin versus biblical creationism. Science won. Here Kovacs was suggesting, with no small measure of hubris, that science would reveal the harms of global warming as mere superstition and legend.

Kovacs’s declaration of combat served its intended purpose of attracting media attention to the Chamber’s crusade against the Obama administration’s greenhouse gas action. But once environmentalists started looking at what the Chamber was actually saying in its case to the EPA, they were flummoxed. It wasn’t just calling for a showdown over issues where scientists hadn’t yet reached consensus or where there was a case to be made for the benefits of rising temperatures. The Chamber was literally demanding that settled science be opened for debate, with testimony from industry consultants contending that the oceans were not, in fact, turning more acidic or rising as polar ice melted. Kovac wasn’t proposing a debate—-he was setting up what could have been an embarrassing rout for himself.

[box type=”bio”]Alyssa Katz is television critic for the Nation.[/box]

SOURCE: SALON

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We restarted the Cold War: The real story about the NATO buildup that the New York Times won’t tell you

PATRICK L. SMITH, SALON

RESPECTABLE VOICES IN THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA ARE BEGINNING TO DEFECT—A GREAT SIGN, EVEN IF IT MAY COME MUCH TOO LATE TO AVOID THE CATASTROPHE AHEAD
“Our leaders and media push time-worn nonsense about American innocence, while taking aggressive moves. Look out…”

Vladimir Putin, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (Credit: Reuters/RIA Novosti/Jonathan Ernst/Photo montage by Salon)

[dropcap]H[/dropcap]ave you picked up on the new trope du jour? We are all encouraged to bask in our innocence as we lament the advent of a new Cold War. The thought has been in the wind for more than a year, of course, at least among some of us. But we witness a significant turn, and I hope this same some of us are paying attention.

As of this week, leaders who know nothing about leading, thinkers who do not think and opinion-shaping poseurs such as Tom Friedman are confident enough in their case to sally forth with it: The Cold War returns, the Russians have restarted it and we must do the right thing—the right thing being to bring NATO troops and materiel up to Russia’s borders, pandering to the paranoia of the former Soviet satellites as if they alone have access to some truth not available to the rest of us.

James Stavridis, the former admiral and NATO commander, quoted in Wednesday’s New York Times: “I don’t think we’re in the Cold War again—yet. I can kind of see it from here.”

I can kind of see it, too, Admiral, and cannot be surprised: NATO has missed the Cold War since the Wall came down and the Pentagon’s creature in Europe commenced a quarter-century of wandering in search of useful enemies. At last, the very best of them is back.

The inimitable (thank goodness) Tom Friedman on the same day’s opinion page: “This time it seems like the Cold War without the fun—that is, without James Bond, Smersh, ‘Get Smart’ Agent 86’s shoe phone,” and so on.

Leave it to Tom to recall the single most consequentially corrosive period in American history by way of its infantile frivolities. He is paid, after all, to make sure Americans understand events cartoonishly rather than as historical phenomena with chronology, causality and responsibility attaching to them.

You have here a classic one-two. Stavridis’ successors in the military get on with the business of aggressing abroad and trapping Russia in a frame-up J. Edgar Hoover would admire, while Friedman buries us in marshmallow fluff sandwiches.

A couple of columns back I wondered aloud as to what all the talk of renewed Russian aggression, begun in mid-April, was all about. It certainly had nothing to do with Russian aggression for the simple reason there was none. If you saw any, please tell us all about it in the comment box.

A couple of columns earlier I questioned why John Kerry met Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov, his foreign minister, in Sochi. Altogether weirdly, the secretary of state suddenly appeared to make common cause with the Russian president.

My worst predictions are now realities. We have just been subjected to a tried-and-sometimes-true campaign preparing us for a Cold War reprise—begun, like the original, by spooks and Pentagon planners ever eager to escalate unnecessary tensions in the direction of unnecessary conflict.

Think with history, readers. We are now back in the mid-1950s by my reckoning, when the template at work today was perfected in places such as Guatemala. The Dulles brothers double-handedly transformed Jacobo Árbenz, offspring of a Swiss druggist and Guatemala’s second properly elected president, into an agent of “Communist aggression,” as the Times helpfully described him at the time. Árbenz was deposed in 1954, of course, and most Americans were obediently relieved that another “threat” had been countered. (I have always loved the purely American thought of an aggressive Guatemala.)

On through the decades, from Ho to Lumumba to Allende to the Sandinistas—every single case falsely cast as a Moscow-inspired challenge to the “free world,” every case in truth reflecting America’s ambition to global dominance. There is a golden rule at work here, so do not miss it: Americans never act but in response to a threat to human freedom originating among the mal-intended elsewhere.

Any good historian—and stop being so negative, you find good ones here and there—will tell you that the golden rule has applied without exception since the 18th century. It applied to the Mexicans in the 1840s, the Spanish in the 1890s, and countless times during the century we call American.

Even now, the golden rule is inscribed in any American history text you may pick up. It is integral to Americans’ consciousness of themselves. And in consequence it is near to impossible for most of us to grasp our role in events as they unfold before our eyes, never mind our true place in history.

“There is a golden rule at work here, so do not miss it: Americans never act but in response to a threat to human freedom originating among the mal-intended elsewhere…”

So long as the rule applies, all notions of causality and responsibility are erased from the story. This reality is very close to the root of the American crisis, if you accept the thought that we are amid one.

I view the marked deterioration of the West’s relations with Russia since April in precisely this historically informed light. We have entered upon a new Cold War, all right, and its similarity to the last one lies in one aspect more important than any other: Washington instigated this one just as Truman set the first in motion when he armed the Greek monarchy—fascist by his own ambassador’s description—against a popular revolt in 1947.

[dropcap]Y[/dropcap]ou would think it something close to a magician’s trickery to conduct a century and more’s worth of coups, political subterfuge and military interventions and keep Americans convinced that all done in their names is done in the name of good. But we live through a case in point. We now witness an aggressive military advance toward Russia’s borders on a nearly astonishing scale, yet very few Americans are able to see it for what it is.

Such is the power of our golden rule. [Faithfully implemented by the empire’s Ministry of Truth, the “free press.” —Eds.]

The theme of new Russian aggression sounded over the past couple of months reeked of orchestration from the first, as suggested in this space when it was first sounded. It was too consistent in language, tone and implication, whether it came from the Pentagon, NATO or Times news reports—which are, naturally, based on Pentagon and NATO sources.

Anything counted: Russia’s military exercises within its own borders were aggressive. Russian air defense systems on its borders were aggressive. Russia’s military presence in Kaliningrad, Russian territory lying between Lithuania and Poland, was an aggressive threat.

The caker came 10 days ago, when Putin promised his generals 40 new intercontinental ballistic missiles. Aggressive times 10, we heard over and over. “Loose rhetoric” was the incessantly repeated phrase.

In this connection I loved Ashton Carter in an exclusive interview on CBS Tuesday morning. Announcing NATO’s new plans for deployments in Eastern Europe and the Baltics, the defense secretary cited Putin’s “loose rhetoric.” The correspondent must have lost the playbook and had the temerity to ask him to explain. Whereupon the wrong-footed Carter mumbled, “Well, it’s… it’s… it’s loose rhetoric, that’s what it is.”

Got it, Ash. Loose rhetoric.

Does the secretary mind if we spend a few minutes in the forbidden kingdom known as historical reality?

Putin has not uttered a syllable of rhetoric—no need of it—since the Bush II White House floored him with its 2002 announcement that it would unilaterally abandon Nixon’s 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. “This, in fact, pushes us to a new round of the arms race, because it changes the global security system,” the Russian leader said subsequently. Whereupon Russia set about rebuilding its greatly reduced nuclear arsenal, of which the 40 new ICBMs are an exceedingly small addition.

There are no secrets here—only chronology and causality. In the context, I view the 40 new missiles as a very measured message—and of little consequence in themselves—in reply to the immodest lunge into frontline nations Carter disclosed in Estonia this week.

Where did President Obama get the idea to name this guy to head Defense? He outdoes Rumsfeld in certain respects. Not only is he deploying weapons and rotating troops in and out of six of NATO’s easterly members—the three Baltics, Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. He now advances a number of bluntly escalating nuclear “options.”

Putin’s 40 warheads are squirrel guns next to Carter’s proposals. The new sec def is talking about an offensive nuclear curtain across Europe, a “counterforce” capable of hitting Russian military installations and “countervailing strike capabilities”—pre-emptively deployed nuclear missiles that include Russian cities among their targets. (Thanks to Pepe Escobar of Asia Times for his analysis of Carter’s “Pentagonese.”)

I should remind readers at this point, lest you forget, that we American are the aggressed upon, not the aggressors.

One news report can be singled out here as the celebratory herald of the newly unveiled stance. This is the previously quoted piece in Wednesday’s Times, which appeared under the headline, “NATO refocuses on the Kremlin, Its Original Foe.” Read it here, a real lab specimen, no breach of the golden rule anywhere in its several thousand words.

I needed a minute to get past the “refocuses” in the headline, with its thought that after many years away NATO must now unexpectedly return to the Cold War scene. Preposterous. How many members have been recruited eastward since the Wall came down? I count 12, 10 of which were Warsaw Pact nations. (Slovenia and Croatia, the other two, emerged from the destruction of Yugoslavia.)

Busy time advancing in the direction of the “original foe,” one has to say.

What follows the head is an account of new training exercises and dummy B-52 bombing runs—“all just 180 miles from the Russian border,” our correspondents report effervescently. This is wound around an exceedingly well-carved account of European views of this new turn backward. The latter is meant to veil ambiguity and reluctance that run wide and deep among many NATO members while making the enthusiasm found in former Soviet satellites appear to speak for the majority.

Fraudulent, top to bottom. One, European resistance to this latest NATO advance is now a matter of record. Recent surveys by organizations such as Pew indicate that among West European members the thought of coming to the aid of any newer member may be rejected by a majority.

Yes, we read, there are divisions within the European camp. But these are put down as the consequence of Russia’s campaign to sow disunity in NATO. I had to read that bit twice—and not only because it was reported twice in the same piece. I imagine a lot of Europeans are thinking this assertion over carefully, and not with smiling faces.

Two, East European army officers and civilian officials simply cannot be taken as authoritative judges of Russia and its intentions. This is flatly illogical, and as the Times habitually makes use of them as such I take it to be purposeful trickery to skew Americans’ understanding of European views of NATO.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: Polish aristocrat, russophobe and visceral anticommunist, he’s easily one of the most malignant figures in recent world history.

As earlier noted, I ascribe a certain paranoia to the Poles, the Balts and others formerly in the Soviet orbit. For obvious reasons this sentiment is understandable. But that does not make the argument that they are rational analysts. It makes the opposite argument: They may be understandably paranoid, and have a lot of bad history behind them, but paranoids are not to be taken as sound sources of analysis. Zbigniew Brzezinski is our up-close Exhibit A.

There is craft and there is wile, and these correspondents are well on the wily side in their use of sources. To represent the American view they resort to the usual Times scam: a single-source story dressed up as a multi-source story. Everyone quoted is either Pentagon, NATO or formerly one or the other. These people all get dressed in the same locker room every morning, let’s say, given they all say exactly the same thing.

(Memo to the Times: A multi-source story means a story representing multiple perspectives.)

On the European side, the mirror image: No one from Western Europe is quoted. Everyone cited is from one or another of the newly accessed member states, most being either military officers with fingers on triggers or defense ministry officials.

It skews the analysis to the point of implausibility. These people are all preparing for a Russian invasion of the Baltics or Poland, but there is no shred of evidence Moscow is within a million miles of any such planning. Evidence of Russia’s desire to calm this circus down is mountainous—and for precisely this reason ignored.

A couple of loose ends remain to be tied up at this juncture. The E.U. just renewed its sanctions regime against Russia for an additional six months. Why? There had been considerable resistance to this only a matter of weeks ago.

That visit Kerry paid to Sochi. Why did he make it, if all we see unfolding now was already on the story board, as surely it was at the time of Kerry’s curious travels?

These questions are best answered together, to the extent we have comprehensive answers. In my view a certain bargain has in all likelihood been struck.

Prior to Sochi, it was well known that Washington’s overplayed hand in Ukraine, especially its efforts to undermine the Minsk II ceasefire, had begun to threaten a trans-Atlantic breach. I have since had it from good sources in Europe and Washington that the Obama administration is disappointed, if not worse, with the Poroshenko government in Kiev. It does not take much to be a puppet, but they do not seem capable of managing even that.

Kerry went to Sochi not to launch any new initiative with Putin and Lavrov, as I had too hopefully suggested, but simply to assuage Chancellor Merkel and other disgusted Europeans. Hence Victoria Nuland’s clumsily calculated assertions, noted in this space at the time, that Minsk II was the key to a solution in Ukraine.

Kerry’s bargain, in my view, was that if things did not improve post-Sochi, the American option would go forward. And since Sochi we have had inertia in Kiev and the drum beating night and day as to Russian aggression. In effect, NATO and Washington conspired to make sure there would be no post-Sochi progress.

The American option, to finish the thought, now lies before us.

So does the curtain rise on the Cold War revival much of Washington has spoiled for since Putin proved other than the Yeltsin-like client American strategists had initially taken him to be.

Ashton Carter: If he’s lying through his teeth (which is likely) he’s a cold-blooded criminal that should be tried before an international tribunal with the greatest urgency. If he does NOT realize he’s using the Big Lie, he’s a moron, and scarcely the person to put at the helm of US defense. So which one is it? In both cases, as usual, the American people and the world, lose.

“We didn’t want to have this new challenge,” Defense Secretary Carter told Marines aboard a destroyer floating in the Baltic Sea. “But then all of the sudden here you have behavior by Russia, which is an effort to take the world backward in time. And we can’t allow that to happen.”

Sure thing, Ash. Taking the world backward. Thrust upon us. Got it. Golden rule always.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

[box type=”bio”] Patrick Smith is the author of “Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century.” He was the International Herald Tribune’s bureau chief in Hong Kong and then Tokyo from 1985 to 1992. During this time he also wrote “Letter from Tokyo” for the New Yorker. He is the author of four previous books and has contributed frequently to the New York Times, the Nation, the Washington Quarterly, and other publications. Follow him on Twitter, @thefloutist.[/box]

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Remember: All captions and pullquotes are furnished by the editors, NOT the author(s).

What is $5 a month to support one of the greatest publications on the Left?

Perfect brainwash.

From the archives—Articles you should have read but missed the first time around.

Originally posted on Salon THURSDAY, FEB 7, 2013
Death of an American sniper

Kyle. No PTSD torments for this proud redneck.

BY LAURA MILLER

“SIDEBAR

The Undisturbed Conscience of a Mutt Warrior

Patrice Greanville
Revenge of the Mutt People (Bageant’s term for rednecks), he gave us a haunting portrait of what hard times can do to the human spirit:

Many years ago I worked at an industrial hog farm owned by the Coeur d’Alene Indian tribe in northern Idaho. The place stank of the dead and rotting brood sows we chopped out of farrowing crates — bred to death in the drive for pork production. And it stank of the massive ponds that held millions of gallons of hog feces and rotting baby pigs, and every square inch was poisoned by the pesticides used to kill insects that hogs attract and the antibiotics fed to hogs from hundred pound sacks. The Coeur d’Alene Indians refused to suffer those kinds of conditions; they wouldn’t even manage the place. They contracted it out. As my friend Walter Wildshoe said: “Only a white man would work there.”

The hog farm, however, offered one company benefit. The white manager gave employees any young pigs that developed large tumors — those with tumors smaller than golf calls went to market with the rest of the hogs — or were born with deformities such as heads scrunched sideways with both eyes on the same side, or a leg that stuck out of the muchtop of their body instead of the bottom. We employees would butcher and eat them. Among hog farm employees, all of whom were tough descendants of the Scots Irish mutt people, free pork of any kind was prized, deformed with tumors or otherwise. You never saw a Swede eat the stuff.

So I took these pigs home and, using a huge old butcher’s knife, slashed their throats in the woods, right in front of my two kids — ages two and four at the time — without flinching even as the pigs screamed almost like humans and thrashed around, splashing thick dark glops of blood everywhere. It bothered me not one bit, just like it never bothered my daddy or granddaddy. Nor did it seem to bother my children as they watched, just like it didn’t bother me as a child when my uncle handed me sacks of barn kittens to drown in the crick. And Walter would shake his head and say, “Only a white man would wrestle a hog with a butcher knife. An Indian would shoot the motherfucker with a gun.”

My point here is that we rural and small town mutt people by an early age seem to have a special capacity for cruelty, compared say, to damned near every other imaginable group of Americans.

Maybe Bageant’s words are the key to the riddle that Chris Kyle represented in life.

—PG

______________________

A self-described “regular redneck,” Kyle grew up in Odessa, Texas, and spent his youth hunting, collecting guns and competing in rodeos until he found his life’s purpose in the Navy SEALs. “American Sniper” lovingly recounts both the rigors of the special-operations force’s training program and the extravagant hazing to which new members are subjected. (Kyle was handcuffed to a chair, loaded up with Jack Daniel’s, stripped and covered with spray paint and obscene marking-pen tattoos by his buddies on the night before his wedding. Presumably his bride got the message about whom he really belonged to.)

When the action-hungry commando finally got to Iraq during the initial push of the war in 2003, he was confronted for the first time with the soldier’s prime directive: to kill the enemy. In Nasaria, Kyle shot his first Iraqi (an incident that opens the book), a woman he spotted on a road pulling a grenade from her clothing to throw at an advancing Marine foot patrol. “I don’t regret it,” he writes. “The woman was already dead. I was just making sure she didn’t take any Marines with her.”

[pullquote]While Kyle’s physical courage and fidelity to his fellow servicemen were unquestionable, his steadfast imperviousness to any nuance, subtlety or ambiguity, and his lack of imagination and curiosity, seem particularly notable in light of the circumstances of his death.[/pullquote]

It is both cruel and perverse to reproach soldiers for killing the enemy when that’s what they’re sent to war to do, and when they do so in defense of their own lives and the lives of their comrades. Nevertheless, you can expect soldiers to kill and still recoil when they kill blithely and eagerly. In “American Sniper,” Kyle describes killing as “fun” and something he “loved” to do. This pleasure was no doubt facilitated by his utter conviction that every person he shot was a “bad guy.” Fallujah and Ramadi, where he saw the most action, were certainly crawling with insurgents and foreign Islamist militants, and Kyle swears that every man he picked off with his sniper rifle was manifestly up to no good. But his bloodthirstiness and general indifference to the Iraqis and their country don’t suggest that he was highly motivated to make sure.

“I don’t shoot people with Korans,” Kyle retorted to an Army investigator when he was accused of killing an Iraqi civilian. “I’d like to, but I don’t.” Later in “American Sniper,” he announces, “I couldn’t give a flying fuck about the Iraqis.” “I hate the damn savages,” he explains. What does matter most to him are “God, country and family” (although much of the friction in his marriage arose from his ordering of those last two items). As Kyle saw it, he and his fellow troops had been sent to war in this contemptible place “to make sure that bullshit didn’t make its way back to our shores.”

In Kyle’s version of the Iraq War, the parties consisted of Americans, who are good by virtue of being American, and fanatic Muslims whose “savage, despicable evil” led them to want to kill Americans simply because they are Christians. (Later in his service, Kyle had a blood-red “crusader cross” tattooed on his arm.) While he describes patriotism as the guiding force in his life, Kyle’s patriotism is of the visceral, Toby Keith variety. It consists of loving America — specifically, being overwhelmed emotionally by the National Anthem and flag, and filled with a desire to dedicate one’s life to such symbols — rather than a commitment to tangible democratic principles, such as civilian oversight of the military. That Iraqis, too, might have been patriotically motivated to defend their own country against foreign invaders like himself does not appear to have ever crossed Kyle’s mind.

As for Americans, they come in two varieties: “badasses,” of which Navy SEALs are the premiere example, and “pussies.” The latter could be anyone from congressmen who impose onerous restrictions on, say, a SEAL sniper’s freedom to shoot anyone he deems a “bad guy,” to journalists who present unflattering reports on military activities. The recurring designation of “bad guy” suggests just how profoundly Kyle’s view of the conflict was shaped by comic books and video games, where moral inquiry takes a back seat to heroics, exhibitions of skill, gear and scoring. (In Ramadi, Kyle and another sniper, egged on by their superiors, hotly competed to be the one to officially kill the most people.)

In the world of the video game, there’s no difference between a reason to kill people and a pretext for doing so; the point of the game is to kill, and the reason (they’re “bad guys”) is just an excuse. In real life, the reason is everything (unless, that is, the killer is a psychopath). A soldier almost always has an excellent reason: protecting himself and his comrades. But when soldiers are part of an invading army, the more thoughtful among them usually end up asking why they and their buddies have been put in mortal danger to begin with. That’s why so many Iraq War memoirs resolve in bitterness and betrayal. The heroism and sacrifice of the troops were very real, but the war itself was based on lies.

All such questions about the origin of wars amount to “politics,” and they’re a bummer if what you really want is to read about exciting house-to-house battles, amazing long shots made with lovingly described high-end weapons and anecdotes celebrating the strutting prowess of elite American commandos. To get that sort of book, you need that oxymoronic thing, an unthoughtful writer. “American Sniper,” which was produced with two ghostwriters, is a work that would never have existed were it not for Kyle’s own glamorous, mediagenic reputation because he sure wasn’t going to produce it on his own; you get the impression that he exerted enormous efforts not to reflect on what happened in Iraq and why. You’ll find no mention of Abu Ghraib, the WMD fraud or the pre-war absence of al-Qaida operatives in these pages.

Kyle’s account of his return home suggests that it was not just the rationale for the invasion that messed with his simplified, sentimentally patriotic conception of the Iraq War. He went from one drunken brawl to another, including an alleged altercation with Jesse Ventura. Kyle’s description of that led to a libel suit: Ventura says the fight never happened. The former Minnesota governor has always forthrightly expressed his opposition to the Iraq War, but Kyle claimed that Ventura had insulted American troops. To judge by other passages in “American Sniper,” Kyle doesn’t seem to have understood the difference, or to have considered the possibility that opponents of the war also wanted to save American lives. War and politics: difficult to separate even when you’re hellbent on denying the connection.

Kyle finally sobered up. (It was totaling his pickup that did it, but he also missed one of his kids’ birthday parties because was in jail for a bar fight.) By all accounts, he had begun to wrestle with the war’s toxic legacy, establishing a nonprofit that donated in-home fitness equipment to veterans suffering from the physical and psychological toll of battle. Kyle’s dedication to his fellow fighters was admirable and selfless, and exercise can be great therapy. Still, the preference for activity over rumination and consideration remained a persistent theme.

Eddie Routh, the veteran who shot Kyle and his friend Chris Littlefield, had reportedly been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his experiences in the war. In the immediate aftermath of Kyle and Littlefield’s murders, many people expressed incredulity at the notion of taking a person troubled with PTSD to a firing range. One-time presidential candidate Ron Paul provoked a firestorm of criticism by questioning this choice and tweeting, “he who lives by the sword dies by the sword.” (Word of advice: Twitter, like video games, is not an appropriate forum for complex argument.) In fact, controlled exposure to triggering stimuli is an established treatment for PTSD. It works much like phobia therapies that have patients, under a therapist’s guidance, first imagine and then gradually encounter the objects of their fears. Over time, the triggers can be desensitized.

But Routh also appears to have had other underlying mental health and substance abuse issues. He’d been hospitalized multiple times for threatening to kill both himself and family members. He may have had problems that pre-existed his service or that were exacerbated by it. Furthermore, there’s no indication that Routh was receiving any kind of psychotherapy or that Kyle and Littlefield had run the firing range idea past a therapist who was familiar with his case. Why should they? What would some egghead, like the brass and the politicians, who had never been in the shit, know about it, anyway, compared to someone like Kyle who had actually been there? Routh was not just an American, but an American soldier, a person who was by definition incapable of doing anything evil.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Laura Miller is a senior writer for Salon. She is the author of “The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia” and has a Web site, magiciansbook.com.