Saturday, 23 February 2013



The educational charities that do PR for the rightwing ultra-rich

Billionaires control the political conversation by staying hidden and paying others to promote their brutal agendas

David H Koch
David Koch, of Koch Industries, pictured here in his role as chairman of Americans for Prosperity at the Defending the American Dream Summit in November 2011. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Conspiracies against the public don't get much uglier than this. As the Guardian revealed last week, two secretive organisations working for US billionaires have spent $118m to ensure that no action is taken to prevent manmade climate change. While inflicting untold suffering on the world's people, their funders have used these opaque structures to ensure that their identities are never exposed.
The two organisations – the Donors' Trust and the Donors' Capital Fund – were set up as political funding channels for people handing over $1m or more. They have financed 102 organisations which either dismiss climate science or downplay the need to take action. The large number of recipients creates the impression of many independent voices challenging climate science. These groups, working through the media, mobilising gullible voters and lobbying politicians, helped to derail Obama's cap and trade bill and the climate talks at Copenhagen. Now they're seeking to prevent the US president from trying again.
This covers only part of the funding. In total, between 2002 and 2010 the two identity-laundering groups paid $311m to 480 organisations, most of which take positions of interest to the ultra-rich and the corporations they run: less tax, less regulation, a smaller public sector. Around a quarter of the money received by the rightwing opinion swarm comes from the two foundations. If this funding were not effective, it wouldn't exist: the ultra-rich didn't get that way by throwing their money around randomly. The organisations they support are those that advance their interests.
A small number of the funders have been exposed by researchers trawling through tax records. They include the billionaire Koch brothers(paying into the two groups through their Knowledge and Progress Fund) and the DeVos family (the billionaire owners of Amway). More significantly, we now know a little more about the recipients. Many describe themselves as free-market or conservative thinktanks.
Among them are the American Enterprise Institute, American Legislative Exchange Council, Hudson Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Reason Foundation, Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, Mont Pelerin Society and Discovery Institute. All pose as learned societies, earnestly trying to determine the best interests of the public. The exposure of this funding reinforces the claim by David Frum, formerly a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, that such groups"increasingly function as public relations agencies".
One name in particular jumped out at me: American Friends of the IEA. The Institute of Economic Affairs is a British group that, like all the others, calls itself a free-market thinktank. Scarcely a day goes by when its staff aren't interviewed in the broadcast media, promoting the dreary old billionaires' agenda: less tax for the rich, less help for the poor, less spending by the state, less regulation for business. In the first 13 days of February, its people were on the BBC 10 times.
Never have I heard its claim to be an independent thinktank challenged by the BBC. When, in 2007, I called the institute a business lobby group, its then director-general responded, in a letter to the Guardian, that "we are independent of all business interests". Oh yes?
The database published by the Canadian site desmogblog.com shows that American Friends of the IEA has (up to 2010) received $215,000 from the two secretive funds. When I spoke to the IEA's fundraising manager, she confirmed that the sole purpose of American Friends is to channel money to the organisation in London. She agreed that the IEA has never disclosed the Donors' Trust money it has received. She denied that the institute is a sockpuppet organisation: purporting to be independent while working for some very powerful US interests.
Would the BBC allow someone from Bell Pottinger to discuss an issue of concern to its sponsors without revealing the sponsors' identity? No. So what's the difference? What distinguishes an acknowledged public relations company taking money channelled by a corporation or a billionaire from a so-called thinktank, funded by the same source to promote the same agenda?
The IEA is registered with the Charity Commission as an educational charity. The same goes for Nigel Lawson's climate misinformation campaign (the Global Warming Policy Foundation) and a host of other dubious "thinktanks". I've said it before and I'll say it again: it is outrageous that the Charity Commission allows organisations that engage in political lobbying and refuse to reveal their major funders to claim charitable status.
This is the new political frontier. Corporations and their owners have learned not to show their hands. They tend to avoid the media, aware that they will damage their brands by being seen to promote the brutal agenda that furthers their interests. So they have learned from the tobacco companies: stay hidden and pay others to do it for you.
They need a network of independent-looking organisations that can produce plausible arguments in defence of their positions. Once the arguments have been developed, projecting them is easy. Most of the media is owned by billionaires, who are happy to promote the work of people funded by the same class. One of the few outlets they don't own – the BBC – has been disgracefully incurious about the identity of those to whom it gives a platform.
By these means the ultra-rich come to dominate the political conversation, without declaring themselves. Those they employ are clever and well-trained, with money their opponents can only dream of. They are skilled at rechannelling public anger that might otherwise be directed at their funders: the people who tanked the economy, who use the living planet as their dustbin, who won't pay taxes and demand that the poor must pay for the mistakes of the rich. Anger, thanks to the work of these hired hands, is instead aimed at the victims or opponents of the billionaires: people on benefits, trade unions, Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union.
The answer, as ever, is transparency. As the so-called thinktanks come to play an ever more important role in politics, we need to know who they are working for. Any group – whether the IEA or Friends of the Earth – that attempts to influence public life should declare all donations greater than £1,000. We've had a glimpse of who's paying. Now we need to see the rest of the story.
Twitter: @georgemonbiot. A fully referenced version of this article can be found at Monbiot.com

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Thursday, 21 February 2013

US supreme court hears Monsanto soybean patent case


The agribusiness giant's latest patent dispute headed to the Supreme Court on Tuesday
MDG : Soybeans sit in a field before being harvested in Ines Indar , Argentina
Soybeans in a field before being harvested. Photograph: Diego Giudice/Getty Images
Vernon Hugh Bowman, a 75-year old Indiana farmer, says that switching to Monsanto Inc.'s "Roundup Ready" soybeans "made things so much simpler and better." Monsanto's patented beans can survive when they are sprayed with the herbicide glyphosate, also known as Roundup, which makes pest control much easier. Monsanto is less impressed with Bowman: The Supreme Court heard oral arguments yesterday on a lawsuit that the company filed against him in 2007, accusing him of violating its patent on Roundup Ready soybeans.
Here's what happened: Bowman bought seeds from a grain elevator that sold soybeans as grain for animal feed, industrial use, or other non-planting purposes. The elevator contained a lot of "second generation" Roundup Ready seeds—the spawn of original seeds that other farmers had bought and harvested from Monsanto. That's not surprising, since "[Roundup Ready soybeans are] probably the most rapidly adopted technological advance in history," said Seth Waxman, who is representing Monsanto. "The very first Roundup Ready soybean seed was only made in 1996. And it now is grown by more than 90 percent of the 275,000 soybean farms in the United States."
Bowman then planted the soy beans—and that's the part that Monsanto objects to. Farmers who plant Monsanto soybeans have to sign an agreement saying they will not save the "second-generation" seeds and use them for the next harvest. Bowman didn't re-plant his own Monsanto seeds, but he did plant seeds that contained somebody else's second-generation Monsanto seeds. According to Monsanto, buying that grain and planting it to make more soybeans (as opposed to buying the grain to use for food or another purpose) is a patent violation, too.
Why aren't the owners of the grain elevator to blame? After all, they're the ones who sold the soybeans to Bowman, right? Wrong, says Monsanto: The grain elevator was selling the soybeans as grain for general purposes, not planting. Monsanto contends that the patent violation is Bowman's fault because he took the grains and used them to create new versions of Monsanto's patented soybeans that Monsanto, the patent holder, hadn't sold him.
The company claims that violations like this could stymie investment in similar products in the future. "It would be near impossible to recoup your investments with that first sale and so the more likely consequence is that research dollars would be put elsewhere," said Melissa Arbus Sherry, assistant to the solicitor general at the Department of Justice, during the argument.
"They want the farmers to take all the risks associated with farming, yet they want to control how they use those seeds all the way down the distribution chain."
Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to agree. "Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?" he asked.
But Bowman's lawyer, Mark Walters, argues that there have to be limits on how far and how long the patent on a GMO soybean extends. "They want the farmers to take all the risks associated with farming, yet they want to control how they use those seeds all the way down the distribution chain," he said during oral argument.
Monsanto is no stranger to patent battles: Think Progress reports that the company devotes $10 million per year and 75 staffers to investigating and prosecuting farmers for patent violations. It has also sued more than 400 farmers over the last 13 years for patent infringement.
The Obama administration reportedly backs Monsanto, and urged the court to stay out of this case because it could have implications for patenting other products that can reproduce in fields like nanotechnology and genetics.

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