The Hightower Report

Hiding the Facts on Global Climate Change

Let's quote the experts on the matter of global climate change: "The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied."

That does not come from some lefty environmental group but from a 1995 report by scientific and technical experts working for the Global Climate Coalition. Who? The GCC was a front group organized and funded by Big Oil, automakers, utilities, and other major greenhouse-gas polluters.

Throughout the 1990s, this coalition was desperately trying to debunk assertions by most environmental scientists that, indeed, the pollutants emitted by these industries were causing Earth's drastic climate change. The coalition ran a multimillion-dollar PR and lobbying campaign to create doubt that global warming was even happening, much less that its members had any responsibility for it.

Yet, internal coalition documents have now been released, revealing that the GCC's own expert advisory committee told the corporate interests nearly 15 years ago that 1) climate change most certainly was happening, and 2) they were a central cause of it. When the advisory committee's 1995 report was issued, however, this inconvenient finding was deleted, allowing the industries and their political enablers to keep insisting that the scientific community was "divided" on the causes of climate change, thus forestalling any governmental action on the worsening problem.

This is the same ploy that the tobacco giants used for decades, to deny any link between smoking and cancer. These corporate interests have learned that they don't have to prove their innocence but just puff up a "scientific" smokescreen to dupe the media and government. You might remember this ploy the next time you hear any corporate interest spouting science to defend its abusive practices.

Lloyd Blankfein's Big Hair

Saying that such-and-such is the greediest bank on Wall Street is like someone claiming to have the biggest hairdo in Dallas – the competition is fierce.

Goldman Sachs, however, is a front-runner. It has profited enormously from the big bank bailout by us taxpayers, yet it has hardly expressed gratitude. Indeed, Goldman has been downright huffy about the limits on pay that bailed-out banks can give to their top executives. So now CEO Lloyd Blankfein has snapped that he wants to pay back the $10 billion he took and get the government out of his business.

That's the old rugged, free-enterprise spirit, right? Not exactly. Mr. Go-It-Alone fails to mention that he'll still be clinging to several other backdoor bailouts he got from those meanies in Washington. For example, when insurance giant AIG was rescued from total collapse, $12 billion from its bailout was quietly slipped to Goldman Sachs. Blankfein is not returning that money.

Then there's $28 billion he got in special low-interest loans guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. Not only is he keeping this government subsidy, but he says he'll probably ask for $7 billion more. He has also taken more billions' worth of low-cost loans from the Federal Reserve – we don't know how much because the Fed and the bank say that's "proprietary" information, not for public disclosure, even though it's public money.

So, Blankfein is a $50 billion-plus bailout baby. Except for that first $10 billion, none of the rest comes with any limits on executive pay. Interestingly, Goldman Sachs has just announced that it is setting aside nearly $5 billion to be distributed at the end of the year as compensation for its executives, including payment for outlandish bonuses to those at the top.

It takes a lot of arrogance to create a hairdo that big. Blankfein shows us that Wall Street's sense of entitlement is as strong as ever.