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well there are two separate issues here, are there not? there's the actions of the koch brothers, the purchasing of influence through the funding of institutions that manufacture it in a context dominated by repetition, such that what is legitimate is what gets repeated...which opens onto question so of corporate sponsored/bundled junk science (in the context of this debate...this is obviously a phenomenon that operates in other areas as well...for example around tobacco) and the erasure of any meaningful line between branding and information.
the second one has to do with this specific debate, the one about climate change, that koch industries is acting on as a political (and brand protection) matter.
there are alot of issues that link the two, but a central one is the notion of corporate personhood and this in light of the supreme court ruling of a few weeks ago that allows for far greater action on the part of corporate "citizens" in political campaigns.
it seems to me that the problems that opening will create are signalled pretty well through this report, particular in the exposing of koch industries' tactics (how the money is spread).
keep in mind as well that these people are big in ultra-rightwing politics, coming out of the same kind of jurassic park that brought us the john birch society (which i think the paterfamilias co-founded). so the added bonus of this report is that it reveals the persistence of action on the part of a relatively small group of very wealthy reactionaries to shape fundamentally the information context in which they operate and by extension to shape the nature of the american pseudo-democratic system.
so the debate here can go two ways. i'm personally fine with either of them, but am inclined to consider the problem of ultra-rightwing money being used like this as a basic political problem.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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