Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet (40 page)

The much-touted practice of “balanced” reporting, epitomized by the
Fox News
motto “Fair and Balanced,” has displaced the commitment to accuracy in journalism that permeates Walter Lippmann’s
Liberty and the News
. Lippmann quotes an editor in 1690 already disturbed by lies in the press and appealing to the principle that “nothing shall be published except what we have reason to believe is true.” In 1920, Lippmann argued that a crisis in democracy inevitably flows from a crisis in journalism; he predicted disaster for any people “which is denied access to the facts” and not “protected by the rules of evidence.”
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For Lippmann, these were the necessary values: evidence, accuracy, truth; serious critical inquiry based on the available evidence. The norms Lippmann sought for journalism are analogous to the norms Australian scientist Peter Cullen defined for science. The objective of science is to “find a truth,” and this is done “by gaining a consensus which becomes the orthodox view.” In politics, the process is not about truth, but is one of bargaining and negotiation to find “an outcome acceptable to relevant interest groups.”
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The BBC’s benchmark also dismisses the notion of balance, as explained by Peter Horrocks, director of the BBC’s Global News Service: “We don’t use the term ‘balance.’ We talk about impartiality.… We clearly reflect the range of views, and we certainly do not exclude views.… However that doesn’t mean that everyone has an equal voice and, in factual reporting by our specialist journalists … they absolutely make clear where a consensus of views lies.”
¹¹⁵
The clamor for balance was a catch-cry of the free market think tank culture, recommended by Powell as a tactic against the claims of environmental science and on behalf of the corporate sector in its quest to neutralize the opposition. Balance, like wise use, sounds unimpeachable but is in fact a bogus alternative standard to supplant accuracy and evidence as the basis of news reporting.

In the press coverage of global warming, the US media point of view diverges sharply from the actual consensus in the scientific community, where even the elite US press represented “debates” about global warming as “evenly divided.” Maxwell and Jules Boykoff analyzed a random sample of news stories (not opinion pieces) from four prestige newspapers in the United States—the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post,
and the
Wall Street Journal
—for the period 1988–2002. On the issue of whether humans are contributing to global warming, over half their sample represented this question as an evenly divided debate. Fewer than 6 percent focused exclusively on human input, and only one-third approximated the actual scientific consensus and treated the human contribution as dominant.
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When the Boykoffs turned to the issue of whether global warming warranted immediate action, they found a pattern that was even more skewed. Nearly 80 percent of all articles throughout the period (1988–2002) took a balanced view on the need for action, with the same surges of “extra-balanced” coverage in the key years 1992, 1997, and around 2000.
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The incidence of such balanced coverage waxed and waned. In the late 1980s, when George H. W. Bush campaigned on a platform of dealing with global warming, an “even” balance was not so prominent, but by 1990 it was on the increase. It spiked at the time of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the Kyoto conference (1997), and the US election in 2000. At these times there was an increase in formulations such as “some scientists believe” followed by “but skeptics contend”; suggestions that global warming was a “hoax” or “gaffe” were juxtaposed with the findings of the IPCC.

The provision of a false balance is in fact so reflexive now that even reporters for Australia’s ABC (public radio) feel constrained to provide it. In the
AM
report on the World Meteorological Organization’s announcement that 2010 was one of the three hottest years on record, half the report was given over to the prominent Australian climate change “skeptic” Bob Carter, who claimed this was not related to global warming.
¹¹⁸
Whether the conduct of ABC reporters was affected by the views of Maurice Newman, its chairman at the time, is unknown. Newman is a stockbroker and merchant banker with links to both the CIS and the IPA, and was an appointee of the denialist Howard government. He told ABC staff, “Climate change is a further example of group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked.”
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In his speech to the staff, Newman went on to recycle the standard “skeptic” attack on scientists over emails stolen at East Anglia University, claiming “sensational revelations of unprofessional conduct,” although numerous independent investigations, including those by the British House of Commons and the US EPA, found no evidence of any kind of impropriety.
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Newman also used his speech to accuse the IPCC of “dubious research,” “politicised advocacy,” “scientifically unsupported claims and errors,” “questionable methods of analysis resulting in spurious temperature data,” and a “lack of moral and scientific integrity.” The incoming conservative Abbott government has appointed him chairman of its Business Advisory Council.

As Sharon Beder has argued, “Think tanks have more in common with interest groups or pressure groups than academic institutions. Nevertheless employees of think tanks are treated by the media as independent experts” and are in some cases preferred to scientists working in universities.
¹²¹
In the United States, reports prepared by think tanks routinely turn up in Senate hearings and congressional committees on science and the environment.

Industry has poured large sums of money into the rebuttal and denial of a wide range of environmental problems, from the damage caused by local toxins in soil, air, and water to the effects of substances with global impacts, such as CFCs and greenhouse gases. Whole sectors of industries have suppressed the known risks of their products in order to maintain and sometimes extend their business and its profits. Among these were the lead, asbestos, PVC, and tobacco manufacturers, as well as many branches of the chemicals and plastics industries. The fossil fuel sector and its dependents, such as the utilities and aluminum smelters, continue to expect society to bear the costs of their industries’ side effects today.

Yet business has gone well beyond influencing public opinion to ensure the support of democratic governments, venturing into a domain that is not accessible to any electorate. In the next chapter I turn to the creation of the WTO and the tactics big business has used to cement its international trade agenda, which often nullifies national environmental legislation.

13

International Brakes on Environmental Priorities

These deals [free trade agreements] aren’t about free trade; they’re about the right of these guys, the US multinationals, to do business the way they want, wherever they want.

—Eugene Whelan, former Canadian minister for agriculture, quoted by Elizabeth May, Canadian Parliament, 1999

By the 1970s, neoliberals had accepted the Chicago school’s repudiation of antitrust policies and its willingness to allow monopoly and cartel to operate without regulation or constraint.
¹
Ideological support for such entities facilitated the emergence of the global financial market and integrated global production, in which dispersed elements can be designed, made, and assembled separately and incorporated into vast global chains of production and distribution. These in turn demanded a modified international rulebook.

Thus, while free market think tanks were cornering the policy debate inside the various nations of the developed world—and making inroads in a few others, such as India—a parallel shift was occurring in the international institutions that govern world economic policy, ensuring that global policy would be conducted through a lens of business prescriptions, without particular regard to the planet or the powerless.

Bretton Woods and Beyond: The World Bank and the IMF

The World Bank and the IMF were already in existence, and had operated under the influence of the US from their inception. Despite attempted reforms, voting rights in both institutions are based broadly on a country’s wealth, reflected in its ability to contribute shareholdings, and, in the case of the IMF, on a country’s GDP and level of “openness.”
²
Thus, decisions are dominated by the US in particular and the developed world in general, and the heads of these organizations have traditionally been appointed by the US (World Bank) and the UK or Europe (IMF). More than half the World Bank’s economists, who enjoy determinate influence at the bank, are trained in the UK or US. There is also a revolving door between the multilateral banks and the big international financiers such as Chase Manhattan, Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and JP Morgan.
³
Even before market fundamentalism gained ideological ascendancy, the US government and the international financiers objected to any whiff of socialism. In the five years before Salvatore Allende’s election, Chile received $100 million in loans, while not a single loan was made during his term of office. Once the Pinochet dictatorship took over, it got $100 million in World Bank loans during the first two years after the 1973 coup, as well as $680 million from the US.
⁴

As neoliberal economics took hold, the bank’s economists inevitably reflected the new orthodoxy. Access to its loans was reserved for countries adopting free market policies and permitting unrestricted foreign investment. For countries aiming at equity or redistribution, prospects remained bleak. An “invisible blockade” on loans, analogous to the treatment of Chile, was imposed on Nicaragua during the socialist Sandinista regime, alongside covert military intervention via the Contras.
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The IMF was originally charged with maintaining financial stability in the world economy, a task that was seen to include responsibility for exchange rate stability and short-term lending to countries in trouble. In the late 1970s the IMF imposed “structural adjustment programs” (SAPs) as part of the conditionality of its loans. These SAPs demanded neoliberal restructuring in exchange for financial rescue, forcing privatization of state enterprises, reductions in government welfare spending, balanced budgets, and the abolition of barriers to foreign investment. The withdrawal of government agricultural programs that followed the imposition of the new rules on debtor nations deprived small farmers of whatever government support they had formerly enjoyed. As Jeffrey Sachs, a prominent US economist and former front-line neoliberal operative in Russia and Latin America, explains, “During the debt crisis of the 1980s and 1990s, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank forced dozens of poor food-importing countries to dismantle these state systems. Poor farmers were told to fend for themselves, to let ‘market forces’ provide for inputs. This was a profound mistake: there were no such market forces. Poor farmers lost access to fertilizers and improved seed varieties.”
⁶
The IMF helped dismantle modest welfare measures in dozens of third world countries while also urging neoliberal changes on the developed world, including exhorting Australia to cut taxes for those in the upper income brackets, tighten welfare compliance, and lower the minimum wage.
⁷

Labeled the “Washington Consensus,” a term coined but disliked by economist John Williamson,
⁸
the neoliberal suite of policy modifications was adopted—or enforced—almost everywhere. In Australia, for example, the Hawke-Keating Labor government began the process in 1983, and it was comprehensively implemented by the subsequent Howard-Costello Coalition government (1996–2007). Both sides of Australian politics pursued similar objectives: reducing tariffs, lowering taxes—especially on the rich, who were assumed to be anxious to invest the proceeds productively—and imposing privatization and deregulation. As Sharon Beder notes, “These were measures that would expand business opportunities, reduce the costs of doing business and minimise the regulations that business would have to abide by.”
⁹

The driving force behind these changes, whether in Australia or elsewhere, was corporate interest, especially the newly mobile international financial markets. It was TNCs trading across borders and big business in national settings that stood to gain the most from the Washington Consensus. Their company taxes were slashed, progressive taxation scales were decimated, and consumption taxes were substituted. Obligations owed by foreign firms to specific nations were weakened or abolished, and regulation was eased. Gradually, capital was permitted to move across the world with little hindrance. Economic goals took precedence over all other priorities.

Draconian measures were imposed on the world’s most vulnerable nations, beginning with Mexico in 1982 and extending to nearly eighty developing countries by the early 1990s and to East Asia after the 1997 financial crisis. The IMF’s “cash for austerity” deals were indeed miserable arrangements for their recipients; in 1997, most of the cash secured at such cost was passed on to first world creditors in acquittal of loans, while the debtor countries still owed the money to the IMF or the banks that had provided the funds.
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International Lobby Groups and Think Tanks

New international organizations came into being alongside the World Bank and IMF after the war and especially in the 1970s as the CEOs and chief ministers of the developed economies grappled with stagflation.
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The World Trade Organization was also gradually assembled, over the entire postwar period, coming into operation in 1995. These new institutions assisted the expanding TNCs in the prosecution of their specific interests.

The OECD, the World Economic Forum, and the G7, G8, and G20

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) grew out of the group of seventeen West European countries, plus Turkey, which administered the postwar Marshall Plan. In 1961, Canada and the US joined these countries to form the OECD. Later additions included Japan in 1964, Australia in 1971, South Korea, Mexico, and the eastern European countries in the 1990s, and Israel and Chile in 2010. The OECD functions primarily as a peak think tank for the “economic giants” of the world. In its own words, it “uses its wealth of information on a broad range of topics to help governments foster prosperity and fight poverty through economic growth and financial stability.”
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The OECD monitors performances, collects data, and publishes hundreds of surveys and reports every year. It may be regarded as the pioneer of the new elite international organizations.