Nina-Bytes: Discreet Lies of Immense Proportions

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Over the past eight years, I've spent a great deal of time writing about what I've now come to call the "tri-headed serpent" that threatens the larger labor class in our society. Broadly speaking these threats would be capitalism, its violent handmaiden fascism, and ruling class propaganda that prevents us from uniting to stop these threats to our very survival. Recent social and political developments in the Pig Empire have forced me to focus a lot on the rise of fascism, but since these three heads more or less share the same body, it's important to stay focused on all three of these calamities simultaneously. 

Today then, I'd like to share a couple of stories from left wing independent media that directly touch on murdering the planet for capitalism, but also indirectly expose the propaganda model media's complicity in "leading us to our own doom." First up, let's look at this October 12th, 2022 feature by Sam Knight over on Truthout.

Lobbyists Admit Big Banks Don’t Plan to Honor Climate Pledges

The story here is simple enough; a powerful banking lobby group, The Bank Policy Institute, has publicly admitted that the banks they represent have zero intention of keeping the various "net zero" pledges they've made. Of course, we've already talked about why even these promises are wholly inadequate to prevent climate crisis and will likely usher us into an ecofascist future; but it really says something when the bankers call even genocidal half measures an "aspirational solution." That's not an exaggeration either, as our article notes:

"Specifically, the lobbying group rejected the notion floated by the agencies that regulations should ensure banks’ greenhouse gas commitments to the public “are consistent with their internal strategies and risk appetite statements.”

“The final guidance with respect to public communications should recognize the aspirational nature of external commitments and the fact that these commitments and plans will need to adapt over time as data and methodologies improve and external circumstances change,” the organization said.

The institute urged regulators to “establish realistic expectations with respect to public statements” and said the government “should calibrate its expectations as to the granularity between external statements and internal risk appetite statements accordingly.”

To be clear, I can't say that as a student of left wing theory and Pig Empire history I'm particularly surprised by this development; the entire history of capitalism is about looting the commons for money, and leaving the labor class to deal with the fallout. Still, when influential capitalist institutions that literally have the power to dictate policy to your government start openly admitting they're fine with destroying all life on earth while pretending to be part of the solution, you'd think that might merit a little notice in the larger discourse. 

We'll come back to this idea in a moment; in the meantime let's look at our second article. This October 23rd, 2022 post from Andy Rowell shared on Common Dreams looks at where Big Oil is sitting on the verge of the controversial COP27 climate summit coming this November.

Ahead of COP27, Big Oil Climate Denial More Potent Than Ever

Once again, this isn't really a complicated story. In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Chevron CEO Mike Worth pretty much went off; and let the cat out of the bag in the process. Promising to drill more oil, not less, and low key pushing climate science denial, Worth and presumably the company he runs, went on the offensive:

"He told the FT that western governments had made a global oil and gas crunch worse by "doubling down" on climate policies that had made energy markets "more volatile, more unpredictable, more chaotic."

And even though the UN has warned that we cannot afford to drill for more oil and gas if we want a livable future, Worth predicted that fossil fuels are "going to run the world tomorrow and five years from now, 10 years from now, 20 years from now."

He also fudged his belief over whether fossil fuels were the primary driver of climate change. "The IPCC concludes that anthropogenic climate change is a real thing and that the use of fossil fuels has contributed, and so we accept that," he said. But then, according to the Financial Times, Worth "rejected the blame attributed to oil companies" for providing "a legal product that complies with all the laws", and pledged that Chevron would increase oil and gas supply."

 

Please keep in mind that these aren't random internet cranks or even our esteemed Congresswoman from Q-Anon. These guys are absurdly rich and powerful people in industries, banking and fossil fuels, that drive the entire Pig Empire economy. They can, and do, move governments to forge the rules under which we operate a capitalist society. And they're more or less admitting they plan to kill us all in the not-so long term, because there are profits to be made right now. Furthermore, these are not isolated incidents; they are part of a consistent pattern of capitalist lies uttered while the ruling class locks us all into climate apocalypse proactively.

Alright then; so how does this involve the propaganda model media? Well just ask yourself if your favorite corporate propaganda outlet disguised as news, even reported on either of these events? If so, did they explicitly put it in the context of an open plan to murder billions like I have? Of course not. But you can be sure that those same corporate media outlets, including the ones who portray themselves as somehow "liberal" in their pervading ideology, have told you about these company's climate pledges, and will continue to share their lies with you in the future.

In other words, billionaire investors and the companies they control are actively conducting an open genocide against perhaps all of humanity, and the corporate media they also control, are busy covering it up. It's a closed loop of homicidal capitalist f*ckery; mass murder is on the menu and the capitalist order is happily shuffling us all towards the rotating knives in anticipation of the meal. The simple truth is that it's not a question of fighting capitalism, or fascism, or climate catastrophe; in a reactionary society where the profit motive rules all, these problems are one and the same beast and must be destroyed together.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Podcast at “Kropotkin’s Barbershop” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: In Between Days

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Days After Climate Summit, Biden To Hold ‘Carbon Bomb’ Gulf Oil Sale

It is not lost on me that I've spent a lot of time recently here on Nina-Bytes essentially wasting my breath, by pointing out the hypocrisy of neoliberal leaders when it comes to the subject of climate crisis. The problem with this approach of course is that we live in a time of unprecedented ruling class power; our society is post-accountability, and post-shame, so the capitalists merely shrug and go right on killing us for dollars. Still, there are times when the stench of corruption and rot become overwhelming; moments when the "my bum is on your lips" nature of the news is too infuriating to ignore. So, despite the fact that I wanted to talk about something else, virtually anything else today, let's talk about how Joe Biden is literally killing the planet while pretending he gives one solitary rat's anus about the climate apocalypse.

In this November 13th, 2021 piece by Chris D'Angelo over on Huffington Post, we discover that on November 17th, mere days after the end of the COP26 climate conference, the Biden administration intends to conduct the largest offshore oil and gas lease sale in U.S. history. Yes, that would be the administration working for Joe Biden, the same guy who promised just last week that America would lead "by the power of our example" in the fight against climate catastrophe. Inexplicably, spokespeople for the U.S. government, and the President himself, have insisted that this all ties into a short term strategy to increase fossil fuel production, while still meeting long term goals. There's just one problem with that excuse - the fields being sold today won't be operational for five to ten years; long after our time runs out to cut emissions in half by 2030.

To be clear, there are mitigating circumstances involved in this story. Specifically, the Biden Administration argues that it actually cannot stop the oil lease sale "following the June decision by a Trump-appointed federal judge in Louisiana to strike down Biden’s executive order temporarily pausing new oil and gas leases across federal lands and waters." The government has appealed this highly-spurious ruling, but as our author's study indicates, this isn't even close to the full means Biden had at his disposal to stop this. Furthermore without an injunction, the leases will be sold in the meantime, long before the appeal plays out. This in turn makes it very unlikely the projects on those oil patches will ever be stopped by the government.

The fact is, Joe Biden is almost eighty years old and neither he, nor his political party, have ever given one flying f*ck about climate crisis. Biden's rhetoric is simply that, rhetoric, and if he has to doom every future generation on Earth to geohell to please his corporate donors, that's what he's going to do. You don't have to take my word for it, just watch his actions and the actions of his government for all the proof you'll ever need.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. 

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

 

Nina-Bytes: Big Oil, Political Will and Crimes Against Humanity

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

Fossil Fuel CEOs Will Testify About Role in Climate Denial Before Congress

As announced yesterday, Congress is hauling in the CEO's of four major oil companies, and two powerful lobby groups, to testify (presumably under oath) before the House Oversight and Reform Subcommittee on Environment. The group, which includes executives from ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Shell Oil, the American Petroleum Institute, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, will specifically face questions about the industry's role in supporting climate change denial. The hearing, which is scheduled for October 28th, probably wouldn't have happened without the threat of a potential subpoena; although subcommittee chair Ro Khanna was too polite to do more than imply as much in the media. The obvious question here however is, what exactly is Congress hoping to learn?

Did Big Oil collectively lie about fossil fuels and climate crisis? Unquestionably, yes! We've caught them doing so. Did these same companies fund climate science denial propaganda? Absolutely! Once again, we caught them red-handed. Furthermore, none of this is new information; I was reading about it myself in books like Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate" in 2014, and Oreskes and Conway's "Merchants of Doubt" way back in 2010. Frankly, these people have never stopped lying about fossil fuels and climate crisis! The fact that these executives and their predecessors are not already in prison for what amounts to mass murder, is one of the most galling injustices of our time.

If you're asking me in a vacuum whether it's better to have these hearings, or to not have them, when discussing the objectively genocidal activities of oil executives over the past five decades, my answer is that having them is better than nothing. As many in the media have already noted, there are significant potential parallels between this situation and the 1994 Congressional hearings that ultimately brought Big Tobacco down to size; or at least into court, to get sued. Maybe someone talks too much. Maybe someone gets caught spouting obvious lies under oath. I'm not so cynical I'd pass up a chance to fuck with Big Oil and see if they panic. But I'm not getting my hopes up either.

The reality here is that we already know who is responsible for the climate crisis. We already know fossil fuel companies knew what they were doing. We know they purposely mislead and deceived the public. Even if nobody in power will admit it, we know they're responsible for the deaths of millions already; with perhaps billions more on the horizon. There's no mystery here for the subcommittee to solve; no secret to expose on live TV. It's not a lack of knowledge preventing society from holding these folks accountable, it's a question of money, power, and political will.

Let's be very clear now. We don't need a hearing, we need to start making arrests; and Ro Khanna doesn't have the power to make that happen. These folks have openly destroyed the world with absolute impunity for forty years; telling obvious and outrageous lies to protect their profits. It's not a secret, everyone, including everyone in government knows; yet they're allowed to continue unmolested. That isn't going to change because of this hearing. Until oil executives start going to jail for what they've done, there's no reason to expect anything to change at all.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Article Analysis: On Greta, Right Wing Propaganda and "Conspiracies"

Editor's note: this article originally appeared September 26 on Facebook; for my latest piece "On "Left Wing" American Media and Class Tensions in the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination Contest" please click here. All analysis by Nina Illingworth unless otherwise indicated.

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Attacks on Greta Thunberg Are About More Than Anti-Environmentalism

In today's article analysis piece I'd like to take a look at a very important expose that was recently picked up in America by Teen Vogue - I'm sharing the original here out of solidarity for indie and activist media and because DesmogUK has a great graphic that shows all the companies and think tanks they're talking about in the article.

I happened to run across this important piece by Mat Hope while I was writing about the U.S. media's obscenely moronic coverage of Greta Thunberg's visit to the UN myself and I'm including it today so we can discuss it in a much broader perspective than just "stories about Greta."

In regards to Thunberg, I really don't see much point in debating the effectiveness of her activism and I frankly don't care whether or not you "trust her" because I can't really see why it matters.

You can tell me that she's just giving all those corrupt planet-murdering politicians a free photo-op and I'll agree with you readily enough. I will however also counter by asking you precisely what she was supposed to do - stay home? You can say that screaming at politicians on TV isn't going to solve the problem and that's absolutely correct, but I'll say at least she got to scream at them. I'd like to scream at them, wouldn't you? I think at the point that you were expecting a sixteen year old climate activist from Sweden to start the green socialist energy revolution we're going to need to actually save our species; you kind of already jumped the shark.

What I'd like to talk about instead is the network of oil-soaked think tanks, reactionary media organizations and talking head right wing pundits this piece exposes and what you can extrapolate about the larger western media environment from its re-posting on Teen Vogue.

At this point I don't really think it's "breaking news" to most observers on the left that there is a massive, billionaire and corporate funded climate catastrophe disinformation network operating on the right (and even in the center) of the American political class - including donors, politicians and the various corporate media factions. This is now an established fact even in milquetoast mainstream liberal circles - although not necessarily among the "liberal" elite who have a vested interest in climate science denial no matter how much they pretend otherwise.

Okay so why is that? After all, when independent media first exposed the Koch Industries connection to the anti-climate science wing of the larger American "Tea Party" (also a Koch funded astroturf operation, with lots of help from Wall Street oddly enough) it was immediately derided as a "conspiracy theory" by all the usual suspects.

So what's different about this "conspiracy theory" and say the Bernie Sanders media blackout; what makes this now widely-accepted story a proven "conspiracy" while the American left's direct quotation of Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" to explain the Washington Post's bias against grassroots organizing and the larger (and diverse) labor class is merely a "conspiracy theory?" It certainly can't be a question of sources or proof - roughly seventy-five percent of Manufacturing Consent is raw data that demonstrates corporate media really does have an implicit and inescapable bias towards establishment power.

The simple answer is that due to factionalism and divergent interests in the upper classes of American establishment power, this issue was reported on fairly and extensively in the mainstream corporate media; albeit primarily by "liberal" outlets. I could write a whole essay about precisely why the "liberal" media corporations (who are still very much tied into oil, or at least the economy built entirely around it) chose to run with this story instead of all the other stories but the long and short of it is that the Koch network attacks on bog standard center-right Democrats were more painful than losing some fossil fuel executive donors and thus the "liberal" establishment fought back - by letting their in-pocket media lapdogs actually do some journalism for once.

So while the idea that a bunch of right wing nutjob billionaires have brought together political parties, think tanks, media organizations and puppet scientists to lie about murdering the planet for profit is on its face shocking and scandalous - the fact is you can buy books about the subject in mainstream book stores and you'll read about it in mainstream "left-leaning liberal" publications on a fairly regular basis. That in a nutshell is why everyone knows about this "conspiracy" and nobody except disingenuous right wing propagandists calls you "crazy" for talking about it.

If you take a step back and look at the larger political and class warfare picture however, the exposure of this right wing pro-fossil fuel industry propaganda network lying in plain sight does bring up a number of interesting, if not disturbing questions.

If a network of right wing elites can literally up and buy a revolution to protect Wall Street, promote climate science denial and smear left wing activists at will in the public sphere, what else might rich people with ulterior motives be capable of? If the reason the vast majority of people have ever even heard of the Koch Network behind this propaganda machine is pretty much entirely because they broke class solidarity and attacked their "liberal" peers in the media, what happens when the mass murdering billionaire liars *don't* break class solidarity and both "sides" of the mainstream media agree that the proles don't need to know?

If this group of right wing billionaires can deploy a whole disinformation campaign to drown Greta's words out in waves of angry bullsh*t in a matter of days, what might *other* groups of wealthy, powerful and influential people be doing with their time and money that you never, or rarely ever hear about?

Could the Democratic Party, elite donors and dozens of friendly in-pocket media puppets come together to smear the burgeoning American labor class left and rig a nomination contest for a crooked rich white lady? Could the editorial staff at the Washington Post meet and agree they were only going to print stories that portrayed left wing American politicians and activists working against Jeff Bezo's class interests in a negative light? Could an influential "liberal" think tank bring together a coalition of elite party officials, media figures, wealthy donors and even 2020 Dem Primary candidates to plot how to stop a seemingly imminent Bernie Sanders presidency? Could a secret liberal media Slack channel be used to quickly disseminate a fake Iowa poll and create a narrative of inevitability for Liz Warren? Could that same media Slack channel and preexisting relationships with a variety of liberal "activist" organizations be used to recycle a 2008 smear campaign against Obama supporters and widely promote the idea that working class leftists who won't vote for neoliberals are secretly racist, sexist Bernie Bro scum who're really a lot like the fascist right except in some ways worse?

The answer to all of these questions is of course yes and if you've been reading independent media or writers who openly support Sanders, you've heard about every single one of these real stories - even if the vast majority of liberals and labor class folks who aren't plugged into politics have not. This is of course a huge part of the problem but the honest truth here is that it's only the tip of the iceberg because you *can* still read about these demonstrably true, real life plots against left wing, labor class voters *someplace* on the internet.

What should really keep you up at night frankly, is the realization that there are almost certainly thousands if not an infinite number of horrifying and impossible to comprehend plots against the labor class that you have never even heard of - no matter how plugged in you are. After all the only real requirements involved here are money, access to a public megaphone of some type and a seething animus for people who ask you to share some of your ill-gotten wealth with the poorest members of society; and almost every rich person in the western world is all stocked up on those three key ingredients.

In a society where the difference between a conspiracy theory and a conspiracy fact pretty much comes down to whether or not the truth damages the ruling class in some manner, it's the rich man's open conspiracies that you *don't* know about or are never reminded about, that represent the greatest threats to us all.


- nina illingworth





Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus.

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog.

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook.