Sychophants and Coordinators

For a real glimpse into industrial propaganda machine you can try the American Coal Council and it's organ American Coal Magazine. They find people with academic credentials and set up some fancy sounding organization for them to represent like the "Property and Environment Research Center" or the "Free market Law Clinic". They then have these stooges write articles blending libertarian economics, patriotism and pseudo-populist techno-faith in service to coal corporation profits. What is striking, when you start to dig deeper, is just how many of these industry front groups there are, Councils and associations and Institutes all lobbying and think-tanking and spinning away as they defend the American Way of Life from enviros and liberals and other subversive types. In each article they make the same arguments based on "cost" and "price", insisting coal is "cheap" and soon, with future technological breakthroughs, clean. Well, coal is not cheap if we consider the cost to the earths ecosystems, a cost not represented by the price. The future technology argument ranges from the nutball to the prosaic. Remember Foster "chemtrail" Gamble and his free energy machine which would allow us all to Thrive! (He is still around!) Then there is ex-Montana governor Brian Schweitzer, out selling the promise of next generation batteries and the benefits of Keystone XL. We are just waiting for the Market to determine they are "cheaper". Some of these types are hucksters, some ideologues. But some are trained academics prostituting themselves by cherry picking data, creating specious, deceptive arguments, all while stirring up a dangerous nationalist/populist resentment. For these devils I have no sympathy.