Will Senator Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Prosecution of Climate-Denying Companies like Exxon?

One of several Frontline videos discussing the blockbuster release of internal Exxon documents showing that global warming could well be real and that Exxon was worried about the effect of this knowledge on their business

by Gaius Publius

I've been writing recently about the blockbuster report by Inside Climate News that Exxon knew, as early as 1977, that climate change was very likely real and that continuing to burn fossil fuels would disrupt the livability of the planet. The main page of the ICN report is here. My initial discussion is here.

Prior to those revelations, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (see below) and others were calling for RICO civil suits against companies financing climate deniers to determine if these companies are guilty of defrauding the public in the same way the tobacco companies were guilty of defrauding the public. This piece is about those calls for RICO lawsuits, in particular, Sheldon Whitehouse's.

Bottom line first, to keep the timeline clear:

• Before it was known that Exxon knew (before the full release of their internal documents), Senator Whitehouse and others thought companies funding deniers may be defrauding the country in the same way tobacco companies defrauded the country and their customers.
   
• Whitehouse and others have already called for a federal RICO (racketeering) lawsuit to investigate the allegation and, if proved, to stop the lying and the fraud and seek damages.
   
• One of the hurdles for a RICO conviction (as opposed to a lawsuit or investigation) involves proving that the companies knew they were lying. In the case of tobacco companies, pre-trial discovery overcame that problem. Subpoenaed internal company documents showed they knew.
   
• Now Inside Climate News has released a treasure trove of internal Exxon documents going back to 1977, documents that appear to show the company knew, internally, that global warming was real and that the likely cause was carbon (CO2) emissions. ICN has also, with Frontline, interviewed many of the participants in Exxon's then study of global warming. This evidence is strongly against Exxon's claim that global warming is "uncertain" or unrelated to burning fossil fuel, its main product.
   
• In light of this new information, will Sen. Whitehouse renew his call for a federal RICO investigation? Will others?
   
• Will climate-aware voters call for Democratic political candidates to go on the record about RICO investigations?

The last two bullets above represent next steps. Care to help?

Now the details.

Sheldon Whitehouse Wants to Sue Fossil Fuel Companies For Climate Fraud

Back in late May, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a former prosecutor, wrote an op-ed calling for RICO investigations into companies engaged in and financing climate denial, likening these practices to the fraudulent practices of tobacco companies, who were similarly sued. (Hat tip to Daniel Marans at the Huffington Post, who wrote about the op-ed and from whom I borrowed this section's heading.)

Whitehouse starts by discussing the case of the tobacco companies (my emphasis throughout):

The fossil-fuel industry’s campaign to mislead the American people

by Sheldon Whitehouse

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are funding a massive and sophisticated campaign to mislead the American people about the environmental harm caused by carbon pollution. Their activities are often compared to those of Big Tobacco denying the health dangers of smoking. Big Tobacco’s denial scheme was ultimately found by a federal judge to have amounted to a racketeering enterprise.

The Big Tobacco playbook looked something like this: (1) pay scientists to produce studies defending your product; (2) develop an intricate web of PR experts and front groups to spread doubt about the real science; (3) relentlessly attack your opponents.

Thankfully, the government had a playbook, too: the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO. In 1999, the Justice Department filed a civil RICO lawsuit against the major tobacco companies and their associated industry groups, alleging that the companies “engaged in and executed — and continue to engage in and execute — a massive 50-year scheme to defraud the public, including consumers of cigarettes, in violation of RICO.”

Tobacco spent millions of dollars and years of litigation fighting the government. But finally, through the discovery process, government lawyers were able to peel back the layers of deceit and denial and see what the tobacco companies really knew all along about cigarettes.

In 2006, Judge Gladys Kessler of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia decided that the tobacco companies’ fraudulent campaign amounted to a racketeering enterprise. According to the court: “Defendants coordinated significant aspects of their public relations, scientific, legal, and marketing activity in furtherance of a shared objective — to . . . maximize industry profits by preserving and expanding the market for cigarettes through a scheme to deceive the public.”

Notice that Whitehouse is not accusing the carbon (fossil fuel) companies of having different ideas than most climate scientists. He's accusing them of fraud. You'll hear cries of "criminalizing ideas" from professional climate deniers if this lawsuit moves seriously forward. Far from having differing ideas, however, a successful suit will prove that the carbon companies, like the tobacco companies, have the same ideas the public and most scientists have ... and that they lied about what they knew. That's not prosecuting ideas; it's prosecuting ... well, fraud, something the government frequently does (except in the case of Wall Street investment banks) and should do as part of its job. 

Whitehouse: Fossil Fuel Companies Are Acting Like Tobacco Companies

Whitehouse documents considerable similarity between the tobacco industry's funding of claims it knew to be wrong — that smoking was safe, or at best, its harm was "unproven" — and the funding of similar claims by the carbon companies. For example:

The shape of the fossil fuel industry’s denial operation has been documented by, among others, Drexel University professor Robert Brulle. In a 2013 paper published in the journal Climatic Change, Brulle described a complex network of organizations and funding that appears designed to obscure the fossil fuel industry’s fingerprints. To quote directly from Brulle’s report, it was “a deliberate and organized effort to misdirect the public discussion and distort the public’s understanding of climate.” That sounds a lot like Kessler’s findings in the tobacco racketeering case.

There's more to back up his assertions in the op-ed. This is just part of the evidence he cites.

Whitehouse Wants to Use Discovery to See if Carbon Companies Are Guilty of Lying

At the time he wrote the op-ed, May 2015, Whitehouse wasn't sure — he didn't have the evidence — that the carbon companies were guilty in the same way the tobacco companies were. He didn't know, in other words, whether they knew they were lying. In the case of the tobacco companies, it took the "discovery" phase of the lawsuit to uncover the proof:

The tobacco industry was proved to have conducted research that showed the direct opposite of what the industry stated publicly — namely, that tobacco use had serious health effects. Civil discovery would reveal whether and to what extent the fossil fuel industry has crossed this same line. We do know that it has funded research that — to its benefit — directly contradicts the vast majority of peer-reviewed climate science. One scientist who consistently published papers downplaying the role of carbon emissions in climate change, Willie Soon, reportedly received more than half of his funding from oil and electric utility interests: more than $1.2 million.

To be clear: I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion. Perhaps it’s all smoke and no fire. But there’s an awful lot of smoke.

Thanks to the ICN report, we now appear to have that information.

Will Sheldon Whitehouse Renew His Call for RICO Lawsuit in Light of the Exxon Documents?

Above, Whitehouse wrote (and I bolded): "I don’t know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don’t have enough information to make that conclusion." I think any interpretation of Exxon's own internal documents is a strong indicator of real concern and guilty knowledge on their part.

For example, from the initial ICN report:

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

"Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

Other documents and company actions show Exxon took Black's warning very seriously. ICN is writing analyses of the documents it has released (document repository here, if you want to lookat them for yourself). For example, read "Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models". In it you'll learn that in 1979 a researcher told company executives that "unless fossil fuel use was constrained, there would be 'noticeable temperature changes' and 400 parts per million [ppm] of carbon dioxide (CO₂) in the air by 2010, up from about 280 ppm before the Industrial Revolution." We're at 400 ppm today. The company spent millions studying global warming, including funding a then-state-of-the-art supertanker to take sea and air temperature readings.

This is explosive information. Will Sheldon Whitehouse renew his call for the government to file a RICO lawsuit against Exxon and others like them who finance climate denial in order to continue their profits? He should, in my view. Who knows what other documents will be uncovered by aggressive "discovery" and subpoenas?

If you recall, the tobacco companies lost their case, lost it big, and paid a heavy price. Isn't it time the carbon companies — Exxon, the Koch companies, BP and Shell — paid a price for their misdeeds as well? Just because we may have crossed some lines, reached some tipping points (peak water in California) doesn't mean we can't act now to prevent even worse consequences (multi-meter sea level rise in this century, as much as 240 feet when all ice melts).

James Hansen would call this a moral obligation. So would I.

It's Going to Take Force

I'd like to close with something I wrote earlier: Don't be confused. It's going to take force to defeat the fossil fuel companies. We're not in a debate with them, we're in a battle. It will take an exercise of power to make the Kochs and the Exxons stand down. Battle means weapons — the weapon of public opinion, yes, but stronger ones too, the strongest we can find.

A multi-billion-dollar federal lawsuit, one with every chance of succeeding, would count as force in my book. Would Senator Whitehouse, Senator Sanders or candidate Clinton be willing to call for one? Perhaps it's time to ask them.

(Updated to reflect the fact that the government's RICO tobacco suit was a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution.)

GP

They Knew: Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago

Reporter Neela Banerjee on Exxon and climate change | FRONTLINE

by Gaius Publius

An explosive story reported by Inside Climate News, an award-winning climate organization, and Frontline, reveals that Exxon knew as early as 1977 that earth's climate was being seriously disrupted, and would continue to be disrupted, by carbon dioxide emissions, and yet in the 1980s they pivoted to financing an aggressive climate denial effort anyway.

That denial effort continues to this day, financed through the American Petroleum Institute and fronted by actress Brooke Alexander (whom I've called "Lying Pantsuit Lady").

Actress Brooke Alexander, API's iconic spokesperson. Here she proudly says the U.S. is the number one producer of methane, a greenhouse gas that, when burned, converts to CO2, another greenhouse gas (commercial here).

The report, the first of a series, is described this way by Inside Climate News:

After eight months of investigation, InsideClimate News presents this multi-part history of Exxon's engagement with the emerging science of climate change. The story spans four decades, and is based on primary sources including internal company files dating back to the late 1970s, interviews with former company employees, and other evidence, much of which is being published here for the first time.

Here's just a bit from that lead report at ICN (my emphasis):

Exxon: The Road Not Taken

Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago

Top executives were warned of possible catastrophe from greenhouse effect, then led efforts to block solutions.

By Neela Banerjee, Lisa Song and David Hasemyer

At a meeting in Exxon Corporation's headquarters, a senior company scientist named James F. Black addressed an audience of powerful oilmen. Speaking without a text as he flipped through detailed slides, Black delivered a sobering message: carbon dioxide from the world's use of fossil fuels would warm the planet and could eventually endanger humanity.

"In the first place, there is general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels," Black told Exxon's Management Committee, according to a written version he recorded later.

It was July 1977 when Exxon's leaders received this blunt assessment, well before most of the world had heard of the looming climate crisis.

A year later, Black, a top technical expert in Exxon's Research & Engineering division, took an updated version of his presentation to a broader audience. He warned Exxon scientists and managers that independent researchers estimated a doubling of the carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentration in the atmosphere would increase average global temperatures by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius (4 to 5 degrees Fahrenheit), and as much as 10 degrees Celsius (18 degrees Fahrenheit) at the poles. Rainfall might get heavier in some regions, and other places might turn to desert.

"Some countries would benefit but others would have their agricultural output reduced or destroyed," Black said, in the written summary of his 1978 talk.

If you think this adds up to "They knew," you'd be right. They knew back in 1977, in fact. And they acted like they knew:

Exxon responded swiftly. Within months the company launched its own extraordinary research into carbon dioxide from fossil fuels and its impact on the earth. Exxon's ambitious program included both empirical CO₂ sampling and rigorous climate modeling. It assembled a brain trust that would spend more than a decade deepening the company's understanding of an environmental problem that posed an existential threat to the oil business.

At the time, they saw a business reason, as well as an "ethical" one, for the proactive and pro-science stance they were taking:

In the early 1980s Exxon researchers often repeated that unbiased science would give it legitimacy in helping shape climate-related laws that would affect its profitability.

But that came to an end:

Then, toward the end of the 1980s, Exxon curtailed its carbon dioxide research. In the decades that followed, Exxon worked instead at the forefront of climate denial. It put its muscle behind efforts to manufacture doubt about the reality of global warming its own scientists had once confirmed. It lobbied to block federal and international action to control greenhouse gas emissions. It helped to erect a vast edifice of misinformation that stands to this day.

As noted, the number of documents the reporters accessed was very large. More on those files:

This untold chapter in Exxon's history, when one of the world's largest energy companies worked to understand the damage caused by fossil fuels, stems from an eight-month investigation by InsideClimate News. ICN's reporters interviewed former Exxon employees, scientists, and federal officials, and consulted hundreds of pages of internal Exxon documents, many of them written between 1977 and 1986, during the heyday of Exxon's innovative climate research program. ICN combed through thousands of documents from archives including those held at the University of Texas-Austin, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The documents record budget requests, research priorities, and debates over findings, and reveal the arc of Exxon's internal attitudes and work on climate and how much attention the results received.

Many of those documents are available here.

As I said, this is explosive and detailed. I haven't touched on the degree to which Exxon financed its own research, including the outfitting of a state-of-the-art supertanker to take air and sea temperature measurements, or the assembly of "a team of climate modelers who investigated fundamental questions about the climate's sensitivity to the buildup of carbon dioxide in the air."

I want to send you instead to ICN for the full piece. It's well written, detailed and easy to grasp. If you're at all concerned about climate change, this is a must-read, and it will get you set up for the follow-up reports.

For more from the report, watch the brief Frontline video below:

Are Lawsuits a Possibility?

If they knew, they still know. They've certainly knowingly misled the public, lied and done harm for financial gain. Do you think this has lawsuit written all over it? After all, this worked:

Climate win: Appeals court in Oregon rules state court must decide if atmosphere is a “public trust”

If they misled the public, have they misled, and perhaps defrauded, their investors as well? I've privately heard of at least one well-placed and climate-aware congressperson who wondered if federal RICO prosecutions might be an option, though the (next) President would have to be very aggressive-minded to consider them — or the next Attorney General, in case we return to the pre-Bush era of independent attorneys general.

I'll have more on this story, including Exxon's response. I've said it's going to take force. This opportunity, if it's taken, counts as force.

GP

Why Isn't Congress In The Business Of Making Life Better, Not Worse, For Everyday Americans?

A few days ago we mentioned how musicians who get catastrophically ill-- when they don't die from lack of medical care-- are often driven to financial ruin. We talked about benefit concerts-- more often than not in tiny clubs-- spaghetti dinners and raffles as ways to raise money to save lives. At the same time, Llewellyn Hinkes-Jones was publishing an OpEd in the NYTimes about the other end of the spectrum: gala balls and donor drives to fund drug research-- i.e., the privatization of scientific research.

Tuesday I went to my local pharmacy to refill some prescriptions. The last time I had refilled one was December 8 and the cost was $3.89. Tuesday the exact same generic and the exact same quantity was $77.80. It was one of half a dozen prescriptions I had to refill and their prices had all shot through the roof. When I called Humana to ask what the mistake was, they told me that's how Medicare Part D works. Medicare Part D, the Bush plan that shows exactly what Republican health care is all about. I don't like paying them but I can afford those prices. What do people do who can't? Hinkes-Jones wrote that "instead of decisions about the fate of scientific funding being made by publicly oriented institutions, those decisions are being put in the hands of anonymous philanthropists and ostensibly benevolent nonprofits."

There is nothing to stop pharmaceutical companies from creating their own philanthropies, funding research with tax-exempt dollars and then selling themselves the rights to the intellectual property. Without price controls on the final product that come with public funding, the potential costs of the resulting medicines are limitless.

So far, there is no effort to extend government price controls to venture-philanthropy-derived research. The Cystic Fibrosis Foundation did little to lobby for lower prices on the drugs that were developed from the research it funded. As a result, Kalydeco, a cystic fibrosis medication it funded, is one of the most expensive drugs available, at $300,000 a year.

The idea of a public-private research transfer is not without precedent. In 1980, Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act, which allowed publicly funded universities to sell off exclusive licenses on their research to private industry. The act was intended to drive funding for academic research and innovation.

But the resulting race for private funding has created perverse incentives to research blockbuster drugs, even if they are not the most imperative from a public policy standpoint. The impetus to produce more and more profitable research has also driven down the quality of academic work, promoting ghostwritten papers, sloppy peer review and the burying of unfavorable clinical-trial results. Venture philanthropy builds off the model created by Bayh-Dole, but with tax exemptions and a sheen of generosity on top of the lucrative payoff.

One argument in favor of venture philanthropy is that it creates a way to sustain small foundations that study rare diseases that, from a for-profit point of view, aren’t worth investigating.

But while Big Pharma might be faulted for funneling billions of dollars into erectile-dysfunction drugs and off-label drug marketing, researching extremely rare diseases may also represent a misuse of public and private funds. Efforts to cure, rather than treat or prevent, obscure diseases can be expensive, diverting investment from more common afflictions. The high costs of focusing on rare diseases are then eventually pushed onto the health care system by way of egregiously high drug prices. Such a choice involves an incredibly complex moral calculus, one that is best processed by democratic public institutions.

To make medical advancements truly philanthropic, the profit motive needs to be removed from the equation. If the intent is to cure rare diseases, then we should be increasing the budget for the National Institutes of Health and other research initiatives. Instead of gala balls and donor drives, higher taxes on the same rich benefactors could be used to fund the research that isn’t already being supported. Biotech patents developed through venture philanthropy should not have exclusive rights attached to them.

This would allow generic versions of drugs onto the market, which would go a long way toward keeping health care costs down and not driving the uninsured into debt.

When the House voted on Bush's Medicare Part D scheme on November 22, 2003, it only passed by 5 votes-- 220-215. 25 Republicans joined nearly the entire Democratic conference to oppose it. The 25 Republicans who opposed it, are against all forms of government involvement in healthcare. And the 16 Democrats who backed the Bush proposal were almost entirely reactionary Blue Dogs, only two of whom, Colin Peterson (MN) and David Scott (GA), are still in Congress-- and still voting for Republican policies that wreck the lives of ordinary working families. The rest were all subsequently defeated or forced to retire to avoid being defeated. As Xavier Becerra explained Tuesday on the House floor, "Congress should be in the business of making life better, not worse, for everyday Americans."

For government officials, is anything more important than making the boss(es) look good?

by Ken

This story is left over from late last week, but I don't think that, in the time it has taken me to get around to it, it has lost its topicality. It got a certain amount of attention, but it needs more.

It's one of those periodic stark reminders of how the world so often doesn't run quite the way we naively think it does, or at least should. And it puts me in mind of a plot line last season on Blue Bloods involving Police Commissioner Reagan's daughter, Erin (Bridget Moynahan), who's an ADA in the Manhattan District Attorney's office.

Erin, coming from a police-saturated family (including not just a father but a grandfather who was the commissioner), is naturally a criminal-justice straight arrow, who sees her job as a prosecutor as serving the ends of justice and integrity and all those good things, until she finds herself suddenly being fast-tracked for Big Things in the office by a new superior, which is great until she's faced with compromising a case because, as the boss explains to her, nothing in her job is more important than making the boss look good.

It had a really uncomfortable ring of reality to it, and probably all of us who pay any attention at all to the workings of government have caught glimmerings of this mentality: that making superiors look good is not only a part of the job of many (most?) government officials, but sometimes almost seems as if it is the job. And it seems to me well to remember that, given the hierarchical nature of government structures, while most people have subordinates they can look to to make them look good, they also have superiors whom they have to make look good.

I think this item from the Washington Post's "In the Loop" column speaks quite well for itself. Since it was the lead item of the column, I'm guessing it was written by Loop-master Al Kamen, but the column was bylined "Al Kamen and Colby Itkowitz."

HHS official pens a caustic resignation letter

Frustrated by a federal government bureaucracy that was "profoundly dysfunctional" and that left him "offended as an American taxpayer," the director of a Department of Health and Human Services agency detailed his grievances in a pointed resignation letter.

For two years, David Wright ran the Office of Research Integrity, responsible for reviewing any misconduct in research projects. But Wright, in a letter obtained and published by ScienceInsider, said the role was "the very worst job I have ever had" the majority of the time.

Wright describes his inability to obtain approval to spend $35 to convert old cassette tapes to CDs. He tried to fill a vacancy in his office, but an HHS deputy secretary said there was a secret priority list and couldn't tell him where his open job fell.

Wright asserts in the letter, addressed to Assistant Secretary for Health Howard Koh, that government officials care more about their own advancement than the public good:

"Since I've been here I've been advised by my superiors that I had 'to make my bosses look good.' I've been admonished: 'Dave, you are a visionary leader but what we need here are team players.' Recently, I was advised that if I wanted to be happy in government service, I had to 'lower my expectations.' The one thing no one in OASH [Office of the Assistant Secretary of Health] leadership has said to me in two years is 'how can we help ORI better serve the research community?' Not once."

Wright alleges in the letter that Koh himself described his office as operating in an "intensely political environment."

No comment so far from OASH, HHS or the White House on Wright's takedown.

In an admittedly quick search, I found a number of outlets that had picked up the story, but I still didn't find any comment from OASH, HHS, or the White House.

#

Exposé From A Longtime Beltway Operative

I've known him for many years, through many campaigns and he would lose his job-- and his ability to get jobs-- if he were to use his real name. So this guest post, a message to grassroots candidates, is by "Anonymous Operative." I didn't change a word, although we've tackled this topic in the past.

It’s A Sad, Pathetic Racket
By Anonymous Operative

It’s a shame that so many Democratic donors are quick to contribute their hard earned money to the wrong cause. Cycle after cycle I hear donors tell strong progressive candidates “you sound like a great Democrat, but we just give our money to the DCCC and trust them to use it to win back the House.”

I continually wish that I-- not the candidate-- was the recipient of this cop out because I would offer the simple response: “well how’s that going for you?”

The DCCC and organizations of the like operate under a model similar to the vile financial corporations that single handedly destroyed our economy. While basic macro economic principles promote national economic growth to ensure a nation’s long run economic success, Wall Street is allowed to destroy our national economy to benefit short-run business interests.

So, what is the actual operating model of the DCCC if it is not to actually win back-- or in the oddest of times-- protect a majority? That question could be answered by the Wall Street villains because it is the same concept as they operate under: as long as the organization can continually raise/earn incredible amounts of money and keep share holders-- or in the case of political operations, consultants-- happy, the cycle is a success.

One needs only to look at the DCCC’s payroll/operating expenditures over the course of multiple election cycles to understand the racket that is being run. In one cycle, a slew of names fill positions referred to as “regional service director,” or “regional finance director.” It is the job of these individuals to strategically set up candidates’ campaigns across the country to enhance their ability to win.

Part of this operation entails placing consultants (mail vendors, polling firms, and media buyers who are retained on campaign budgets) who theoretically offer advice that has been proven to win House races. On the surface this sounds great, which is why candidates willingly offer to raise thousands upon thousands of dollars to pay these firms. However, as one continues to analyze the DCCC expenditures over the course of multiple cycles, an interesting trend emerges.

The individuals-- often the sons and daughters of high dollar DCCC donors-- who one cycle are the “regional directors” in charge of hiring consultants miraculously change form the following cycle and become consultants on House race budgets.

Meanwhile many individuals who cycles earlier were the consultants, are now the regional director hiring consultants. If we, as Democrats, won, I suppose we could credit this model. However we don’t win. We lose year, after year, after year. Meanwhile, the DCCC and similar organizations continue to raise millions of dollars and the individual consultants get richer and richer.

This is in deed a well-hidden racket. The average donor watches the Sunday political talk show on a weekly basis and listens to commentary from folks who are referred to as Democratic strategists. These donors assume that their $1,000, $10,000, or $50,000 DCCC contribution goes to paying these specialists for robust strategy that can be implemented to achieve our goals.

This thought process is akin to saying Larry Summers will fix our economy because he has been proven to understand economic behavior. We all know what a bad joke that is…

So for candidates out there who wonder why the DCCC and similar organizations continually maneuver in ways that seem detrimental to winning, I offer the simple question:

If your campaign has limited money [as most do] and you want to do one activity but the DCCC says “no, just stay back in the office and keep raising money,” why do you think that is?

You, the candidate, are not the important chess piece. Your budget is. As long as you continue to raise money to pay the consultants, your campaign will be deemed a success and you will in deed waste a year to two years of your time. But maybe, you will be recruited to run the next cycle…

From today's Washington Post-- and believe me, there's a connection

UPDATE: A Word From Danny Goldberg On Research

Danny and I were in the music business together. Like Beltway politics, there was a tendency to allow consultants to take over, or to at least get very, very wealthy. And like with Beltway politics, there was absolutely no correlation between money spent on these crooks and records sold. In 2008, Danny wrote a brilliant post on the topic for DWT. I recommend you read or re-read the whole thing, but here are some excerpts:

Wherever the winds of political conventional wisdom blow, the word “research” is sure to be in the air. As someone, like Howie, who has made my living in the music business, I am very familiar with the value-- and the limitations-- of focus groups, polling and other forms of research. A friend of mine who has done focus groups for dozens of rock radio stations as well as for two network news divisions put it succinctly “looking at research is like looking in the rear view mirror.”

Pollsters will always caution clients that their work product is just a tool. However, for many politicians, public interest group leaders and funders, the security blanket of "data” is processed as "reality." Good research can indeed provide valuable insight into the attitudes of one particular group at one particular time generated with one methodology but treating research as the complete truth about public opinion is just as silly as ignoring it altogether.

To use research for every single political problem as akin to using antibiotics for every health problem. Polling is much better at measuring past views than future ones. Focus groups cannot replicate every kind of environment in which people are exposed to.

What does this have to do with politics?

Well,although no one wants to admit it publicly, it is widely known that many Democrats were inclined to vote against the Iraq War resolution in 2003 but were persuaded to vote for it by “pragmatists” sporting “research.” John Kerry might be President today if he had resisted, and Hillary Clinton certainly would be the presumptive nominee if she had.

After the 2004 election there was widely published pseudo research showing that Bush was re-elected primarily because of the “moral issue.” In this wake, “pragmatists,” convinced most Democrats not to argue vigorously with Republicans about the absurd Terry Schiavo legislation, depriving Democrats of a strong identification with opposition to the Republican bill, of what turned out to be 80% of Americans.

In 2006 a lot of activists had an intuitive sense that Joe Lieberman was vulnerable. Professional politicians and their funders did polling that made it seem like Lieberman was unbeatable. I am sure than many of them looked at Ned Lamont’s primary victory wishing that they had taken the plunge. And when Lamont proved unable to compete with the savvy Lieberman in a general election, many of us wished a more experienced progressive had run. How different the Senate would have been the last year and a half if someone like Rep. Rosa De Lauro had been in the Senate instead of Lieberman!

Looking through a rear view mirror and determined to avoid negatives, many research driven consultants told Democratic congressional candidates in 2006 to avoid talking about the war. Two who appeared to be influenced by such “pragmatic” advice, Lois Murphy in Pennsylvania and Francine Busby who ran for Duke Cunningham’s seat in San Diego narrowly lost. Others who defied the conventional wisdom and campaigned as anti-war candidates, Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, Jerry McNerney in California, John Hall in New York, Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire, and Bruce Braley in Iowa were among the winners who gave the Democrats their first majority in a decade. Obviously each race had unique characteristics but these examples are a cautionary tale on the real life limits of the conventional wisdom.

Comedy Tonight: Salut! Skoal! Bottoms up! Here's to you, Japanese researchers!

Of course, one person's "moderate drinking"
might be another person's drunken binge.

by Ken

The folks behind FactsHub.net are pretty singleminded in their mission. On their website, such as it is, you won't find much more than a statement of purpose ("Do facts interest you? If so, we will provide an intriguing historical fact, daily, delivered directly to your inbox!"), backed up by two claims:

* All facts are screened by our staff to assure accuracy.
* We are confident that you will learn something new everyday!

And then there's a box in which to enter your e-mail address to sign up. That's it. Amazingly, they don't even try to sell you anything. You just get not one but two facts every day. (I don't know about you, but two new facts in a day is about as much as I can handle.)


That said, I'm still mulling Tuesday's Fact #2, reproduced here. There's no link, but then, the FactsHub.net staff has screened this fact to assure accuracy, so I guess we don't have to worry about that. Of course, it might be useful to know what exactly the Japanese researchers mean by "moderate drinking." I'm guessing they don't have in mind the traditional American beer-belly diet of barrelfuls of Bud.

Also, one presumes the Japanese researchers weren't going by how much smarter drinkers feel when under the influence.

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Infecting Unsuspecting Poor People With Syphilis-- The Aftermath

Which GOP clown keeps strutting around beating his chest and bellowing that he'll never apologize for the U.S.A.? Mittens, I think, although it could be Newt or Perry or any of the seven dwarves. Last year President Obama was big enough to apologize on behalf of the United States. He apologized for secret "medical" experiments carried out on over two thousand Guatemalans in the 1940s. This even predates the U.S. backing for a fascist dictator in the 1950s who, as we saw last week, brutalized the people interested in emancipation. The experiment involved ethicless medical American researchers working for the U.S. infecting hapless Guatemalan prisoners, soldiers, mental patients, orphans and others with syphilis, something like what the government did earlier-- and later-- to black Americans in Tuskegee. Many died.

"The sexually transmitted disease inoculation study conducted from 1946-1948 in Guatemala was clearly unethical," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said in a statement.

"Although these events occurred more than 64 years ago, we are outraged that such reprehensible research could have occurred under the guise of public health. We deeply regret that it happened, and we apologize to all the individuals who were affected by such abhorrent research practices," the statement said.

Guatemala condemned the experiments and said it would study whether there were grounds to take the case to an international court.

"President Alvaro Colom considers these experiments crimes against humanity and Guatemala reserves the right to denounce them in an international court," said a government statement, which also announced the creation of a commission to investigate the matter.

Guatemalan human rights activists called for the victims' families to be compensated, but a U.S. official said it was not clear whether there would be any compensation.

President Obama called Colom to offer his personal apology for what had happened, a White House spokesman said.

Apologies are one thing; paying compensation to the victims, something else entirely. A new report issued Thursday by a presidential bioethics commission looked into the current protections for human subjects in a review triggered by evidence of unethical behavior in the Guatemalan experiments.

The commission earlier this year concluded that U.S. government researchers must have known they were violating ethical standards at the time of the experiment, shortly after World War II. They have also called for a better system to compensate medical research subjects.

Nothing like the horrors of the Guatemala study could take place under U.S. government watch now, the panel said in a report released Thursday.

But the lags in how federal agencies collect and store data about their research involving human subjects offers no assurance that all unnecessary injuries or unethical activity are prevented.

U.S. government agencies last year supported more than 55,000 projects, mostly health-related, involving human subjects. The presidential commission asked 18 agencies that do most of such research to provide basic data about it, such as location of study sites, lead investigators, number of subjects involved and amount of funding designated.

PRI and the BBC reported on the new findings Thursday and I listened on my car radio as I was thinking about my upcoming trip to the region where the experiments were conducted. I'll be on the Mexican side of the border that encompasses the Mayan heartland that has been so brutally treated by our country. The report starts off with a mistake: that 1,300 people were infected with venereal diseases; it was over two thousand.

In the late 1940s, a team of American researchers conducted a disturbing experiment in Central America. They deliberately infected 1,300 Guatemalan people-- prisoners, sex workers, and soldiers-- with sexually transmitted diseases. Only 700 of them received treatment.

The subjects in the study did not give informed consent. In fact, they didn’t even know they were being infected.

When the Guatemalan study came to light last year, President Obama apologized on behalf of the United States. He also asked a Presidential Commission to investigate if safeguards are in place to make sure such unethical experiments could not be repeated.

On Thursday the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues released its findings.

“It was bad science, and it was bad ethics,” says Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania and chair of the commission. “The commission is confident that what happened in Guatemala in the 1940s could not happen today.”

Gutmann says that today there are measures in place to protect human subjects from unethical treatment. For example, volunteers must give informed consent, and institutional review boards oversee the ethics of research projects.

But the commission couldn’t tell how well these rules were followed in every study. Gutmann says when it comes to federally funded research, there needs to be more transparency and accountability.

When the bioethics commission asked the government to submit information on studies it had funded last year, some departments struggled.

“The Pentagon for example required more than seven months to prepare information on specific studies supported by the Department of Defense,” says Gutmann. “They did not have a central database to which they could refer, and they told us that it was very difficult for them to gather all the information that we requested.”

In its new report, the presidential commission recommends the government set up a website with information about the human subject studies it funds.

Another issue raised in the report is what to do when volunteers are injured or otherwise harmed in the course of research.

Larry Gostin is a bioethicist at Georgetown University who was not on the commission. He says compensation is a real issue.

“You have to remember that human subject research is just that-- it’s a medical experiment,” he says.

The commission recommends that the federal government develop a clear policy to compensate participants who are harmed.

Gostin supports that recommendation. He points out that most developed countries have such policies.
“The United States is behind the curve on compensation,” he says.

The Guatemalan citizens who were experimented on without their knowledge never received compensation. Five of those Guatemalans who are still alive are suing the U.S. government.

Their lawyer, Terry Collingsworth, says that before filing the lawsuit in March he reached out to the government and asked for a compensation for his clients. He says he has yet to receive a response.

The presidential commission did not address the issue of whether the Guatemalans who were experimented on in the 1940s should be compensated.

The report didn't address the question of what would Mitt do. Or Newt. The news report below is pretty horrifying:

From the DWT Science Desk: Just because you think you're awake doesn't mean all of your brain really is

Well, whose brains did you expect them to test? Right-wingers'? The researchers needed brains that function somewhat like human ones.

"Such tired neurons in an awake brain may be responsible for the attention lapses, poor judgment, mistake-proneness and irritability that we experience when we haven't had enough sleep, yet don’t feel particularly sleepy. Strikingly, in the sleep-deprived brain, subsets of neurons go offline in one cortex area but not in another -- or even in one part of an area and not in another."

-- U. of Wisconsin neuroscientist-psychiatrist Giulio Tononi

by Ken

"Tired neurons caught nodding off in sleep-deprived rats" is the headline on the release issued yesterday by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH, one of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH), the source of the above quote from the audaciously adorable Dr. Tononi. The subhead is: "Performance decline belies seeming wakefulness -- NIH-funded study."

(Dr. Tononi and his colleagues report their findings in the April 28 issue of Nature, of which only an asbtract is available free online. Curious how much it would cost to buy the article, I clicked on the link, only to discover that I would have to register for a free account to get any further information. For laughs I tried to register, but got only gibberish for the choices of required information like Affiliation/Employer, Job Title, and Industry. Could their e-form really tell that I'm not really a serious-type person?)

Now I don't suppose the mental defectives of the Right, whose lives are consecrated to never understanding anything, would understand why the NIH would be funding such a study. Hey, who gives a rat's behind about rat's brains, after all? But then, they could hardly have done the study using, say, right-wingers' brains. They need brains that function somewhat like human ones. (I wouldn't be surprised to learn that right-wingers are especially touchy regarding research into compromised brain function.)

For the benefit of people who actually have some interest in understanding human beings and the world around us, and not least our brains, which are our only means of understanding that world around us, here's how the NIMH release encapsules the study findings:

A new study in rats is shedding light on how sleep-deprived lifestyles might impair functioning without people realizing it. The more rats are sleep-deprived, the more some of their neurons take catnaps -- with consequent declines in task performance. Even though the animals are awake and active, brainwave measures reveal that scattered groups of neurons in the thinking part of their brain, or cortex, are briefly falling asleep, scientists funded by the National Institutes of Health have discovered.

This should make it all clear, I think. (You can click on it to enlarge it a bit, if you think that'll help.)

It should hardly come as a surprise that sleep deprivation is a bad thing, a very bad thing. Scientists have been trying to drum that into us for ages now, warning that a lot more than just those of us with diagnosed sleep disorders are suffering varying degrees of sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation seems to have become a normal state in our go-go-go modern world. What's new here, as far as I can tell, is some appreciation -- at least in the rat brain -- of the brain mechanism whereby parts of it may go sleepytime when the contraption as a whole is officially "awake."

"Previous studies had hinted at such local snoozing with prolonged wakefulness," the NIMH release says. "Yet little was known about how underlying neuronal activity might be changing."

To learn more, the researchers tracked electrical activity at multiple sites in the cortex as they kept rats awake for several hours. They put novel objects into their cages — colorful balls, boxes, tubes and odorous nesting material from other rats. The sleepier the rats got, more subsets of cortex neurons switched off, seemingly randomly, in various localities. These tired neurons' electrical profiles resembled those of neurons throughout the cortex during NREM or slow wave sleep.

And yet, going by their EEGs and their behavior, the little dickenses were awake. This "neuronal tiredness," the report insists, is not to be confused with "more overt microsleep – 3-15-second lapses with eyes closing and sleep-like EEG — that is sometimes experienced with prolonged wakefulness." The researchers consider it "more analogous to local lapses seen in some forms of epilepsy." And "having tired neurons did interfere with task performance":

If neurons switched off in the motor cortex within a split second before a rat tried to reach for a sugar pellet, it decreased its likelihood of success by 37.5 percent. And the overall number of such misses increased significantly with prolonged wakefulness. This suggests that tired neurons, and accompanying increases in slow wave activity, might help to account for the impaired performance of sleep-deprived people who may seem behaviorally and subjectively awake.

The researchers are speculating that "tired neurons might nod off as part of an energy-saving or restorative process for overloaded neuronal connections."

It seems to me that there are potentially large implications for the knowledge that "being awake" doesn't necessarily mean what we've normally taken it to mean, and the hope is that with increased understanding will come some notion of how to deal with it.

Already an alarm has sounded for NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel:

Research suggests that sleep deprivation during adolescence may have adverse emotional and cognitive consequences that could affect brain development. The broader line of studies to which this belongs, are, in part, considering changes in sleep patterns of the developing brain as a potential index to the health of neural connections that can begin to go awry during the critical transition from childhood to the teen years.

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The Limits of Research by Danny Goldberg

Danny Goldberg is an old friend and colleague and I'm thrilled that he's written a piece for DWT today. Danny is the author of the book Dispatches From the Culture Wars and the forthcoming book Bumping Into Geniuses. He now runs Gold Village Entertainment which manages the careers of Steve Earle, and Tom Morello among others. Earlier in his career he was President of Atlantic Records, and there was no music company better versed than Atlantic for its advanced uses of research. I asked Danny, whose interest in progressive politics, is as strong as anyone's in the business community, to take a look at the uses of polling and research in politics and how it compares to the entertainment business. Danny's report:

Wherever the winds of political conventional wisdom blow, the word “research” is sure to be in the air. As someone, like Howie, who has made my living in the music business, I am very familiar with the value-- and the limitations-- of focus groups, polling and other forms of research. A friend of mine who has done focus groups for dozens of rock radio stations as well as for two network news divisions put it succinctly “looking at research is like looking in the rear view mirror.”

Pollsters will always caution clients that their work product is just a tool. However, for many politicians, public interest group leaders and funders, the security blanket of "data” is processed as "reality." Good research can indeed provide valuable insight into the attitudes of one particular group at one particular time generated with one methodology but treating research as the complete truth about public opinion is just as silly as ignoring it altogether.

Most rock radio stations in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties used “passive research” to determine what their core demographic liked, which produced a series of “corporate rock” hits by bands of varying degrees of talent such as Styx, Kansas, Journey, Boston and Foreigner.

Passive research aimed at finding out the taste of less passionate fans who contributed to ratings-- the equivalent of “swing voters” in the political context. Such research was very good at finding out what songs fringe or marginally interested listeners didn’t like or have gotten sick of. It was not very good at finding out what artists or songs the trendsetting audience of active fans did, or would, love. In the real world, the “actives” often had to listen more than once to work up enthusiasm for new sounds but when they did, their passion frequently had a ripple effect that transformed the wider audience and created new superstars.

Meanwhile a tiny handful of programmers such as Kid Leo at WMMS in Cleveland had the talent to balance music that sounded like what was already popular with new sounding artists who did poorly when researched but who would prove to be dominant superstars. Thus Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie were very successful in Cleveland, while research slaves in the rest of the country ignored them (only to embrace them a year after the fact). Leo was not a mere patron of the arts who lacked pragmatism. For years WMMS got better ratings than any other major market rock station.

Two other show business examples illustrate the value and power of intuitive leaders who occasionally over-rule research: All in the Family's pilot episode rated below average in research tests conducted by both ABC and CBS and the show saw the light of day only because of producer Norman Lear’s personal credibility and a leap of faith by CBS President Robert Wood. The song "Over the Rainbow" tested badly in preview screenings so it was cut out by MGM middle executives. Only later, at the insistence of Louis B. Mayer, was the song reinserted. And of course two years of research preceded the disatrous decision of the Coca Cola Company to launch “New Coke,” in 1985.

To use research for every single political problem as akin to using antibiotics for every health problem. Polling is much better at measuring past views than future ones. Focus groups cannot replicate every kind of environment in which people are exposed to.

What does this have to do with politics?

Well,although no one wants to admit it publicly, it is widely known that many Democrats were inclined to vote against the Iraq War resolution in 2003 but were persuaded to vote for it by “pragmatists” sporting “research.” John Kerry might be President today if he had resisted, and Hillary Clinton certainly would be the presumptive nominee if she had.

After the 2004 election there was widely published pseudo research showing that Bush was re-elected primarily because of the “moral issue.” In this wake, “pragmatists,” convinced most Democrats not to argue vigorously with Republicans about the absurd Terry Schiavo legislation, depriving Democrats of a strong identification with opposition to the Republican bill, of what turned out to be 80% of Americans.

In 2006 a lot of activists had an intuitive sense that Joe Lieberman was vulnerable. Professional politicians and their funders did polling that made it seem like Lieberman was unbeatable. I am sure than many of them looked at Ned Lamont’s primary victory wishing that they had taken the plunge. And when Lamont proved unable to compete with the savvy Lieberman in a general election, many of us wished a more experienced progressive had run. How different the Senate would have been the last year and a half if someone like Rep. Rosa De Lauro had been in the Senate instead of Lieberman!

Looking through a rear view mirror and determined to avoid negatives, many research driven consultants told Democratic congressional candidates in 2006 to avoid talking about the war. Two who appeared to be influenced by such “pragmatic” advice, Lois Murphy in Pennsylvania and Francine Busby who ran for Duke Cunningham’s seat in San Diego narrowly lost. Others who defied the conventional wisdom and campaigned as anti-war candidates, Patrick Murphy and Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania, Jerry McNerney in California, John Hall in New York, Carol Shea-Porter in New Hampshire, and Bruce Braley in Iowa were among the winners who gave the Democrats their first majority in a decade. Obviously each race had unique characteristics but these examples are a cautionary tale on the real life limits of the conventional wisdom.

It’s not hard to understand the appeal of an apparently rational method for making political decisions. In addition to its devastating portrait of Richard Nixon, Rick Perlstein’s brilliant book Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America chronicles the awful self-destructiveness of many on the left in the late nineteen-sixties and early seventies. Following the debacle of the McGovern campaign many Democrats and progressives who wanted to win, searched for ways to compete with shrill but ineffective voices that had weakened the left, and Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 campaign was run, in part, by pollster Pat Cadell. In recent years many progressive organizations became increasingly dependent on foundations which have tried to adapt business-like ways of measuring the value of various programs (“metric” is a ubiquitous buzzword).

Obama’s recent moves “to the middle” may have been re-statements of his long held views or may be the result of the same higher intelligence that has gotten him this far but it does have eerie echoes of past failed general election campaign assumptions about how to win. The Hillary Clinton campaign, run by research guru Mark Penn demonstrated that the security blanket of a rear view mirror doesn’t always work on the winding roads of current discontent.

There is a corny old joke in which a man sees his best friend crawling around on his hands and knees in front of a streetlight late one night.

“What are you doing,” the man asks.
“Looking for my keys,” the friend answers.
“Where did you drop them?” the man asks,
“About half a block north.”
“Then why,” the man asks,” aren’t you looking where you dropped them?”
“Because,” his friend answers, “there is no street-light over there.”

Some political and communications decisions can indeed be “tested,” and derive results that can be illuminated by the streetlight of science and statistics. And only fools or masochists would ignore facts that are clearly illuminated. But sometimes the keys to certain political results are in the dark and require the messy groping of the occasional creative risk.