Hot Scandals

More than 1,000 emails and 3,000 data files from University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) recently exposed a global warming deception. CRU research is at the center of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports “upon which the UN and the Kyoto process base everything they do,” claimed Myron Ebell at the Heritage Foundation’s conservative Blogger’s Briefing on December 1st. Ebell is the  director of energy and global warming policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI). He called the CRU scientists “con men,” saying that these emails confirm that “a lot of what they do is dishonest and fraudulent” in a conspiratorial effort to sell the story of global warming.

The mainstream media, when it has covered this topic at all, has portrayed this as a case of hacked and stolen information presented out of context. Ebell responded that it is “hard to take things out of context where you say ‘let’s figure out how to hide the decline’―that is the decline of temperatures.” If it were up to the mainstream media, claimed Ebell, this scandal would already be over, but diligent bloggers will not let it die and will ensure that it goes on for years.

Tim Carney, author of the recently published Obamanomics: How Barack Obama Is Bankrupting You and Enriching His Wall Street Friends, Corporate Lobbyists, and Union Bosses, exposed another media-shunned topic at the Blogger’s Briefing. The media has consistently parroted President Barack Obama’s narrative that he is standing up against big business in defense of the consumer, said Carney. For example, the Altria Group, the biggest tobacco company in the world, helped draft the Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Act bill, a bill which all logic suggests they should stridently protest. So why does the media blindly report that Washington is standing up to big tobacco? Carney said that it is “because they do not understand what [he] call[s] the basic laws of Obamanomics.”

When government regulates business, said Carney, “the people who get at the table are going to be the people with the best lobbyists. And who has the best lobbyists? It’s not Mom and Pop.” Lest a confused individual think Carney’s condemnation is levied at “big, bad business,” he made it clear that he believes in the nobility of pursuing profits. He said that the profits help “society to the degree that profit is hinged to what investors and consumers want. But largely, increasingly now, profit is hinged to pleasing politicians.”  Businesses with a “seat at the table” can then regulate their competition right out of existence.

Even though Carney is attacking big businesses, he is in fact advocating the preservation of capitalist principles. He claimed this level of corporatism can prevent the essential market principle of free entry because these big business lobbyists of course do not want more competition. The mighty want the government to slow the economy down to keep out new entries, he said. Unfortunately for the increasing unemployment rate, Carney asserted that “the most important thing in creating jobs is new businesses.”

Although the Obama Administration has taken the initiative to restore confidence in businesses, Carney suggested: “Maybe that should be the job of the businesses themselves. Maybe Wall Street should be restoring confidence in Wall Street.”

One of the grandest government attempts to regulate the private market is with the health care bill. Even if there is not going to be a public option in the health care plan, there will be an individual mandate, which Carney called “the greatest subsidy any company could ever imagine―which is the government saying, ‘you know what, you have to buy this product.’” Lucky insurance companies. As Carney put it, “as the bill gets on Capitol Hill, he with the best lobbyists wins.”

Sarah Carlsruh is an intern at the American Journalism Center, a training program run by Accuracy in Media and Accuracy in Academia.