File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9802, message 489


Date: Fri, 27 Feb 1998 14:35:15 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Wise Use


WISE USE

The term wise use was coined by Ron Arnold in the late 80's for what he
admits is "it's ambiguous soundbite quality." Arnold, a disgruntled Sierra
Club member moved to the hard right in 1981 co-authoring AT THE EYE OF THE
STORM, an anti-environmental book over flowing with endorsement of then
Interior Secretary James Watt. In 1989 Arnold teamed up with the premier
Right-wing Fund raiser Alan Gottlieb, and together they began funding the
Wise Use Movement and it's three basic tenants: 

--Removing present environmental protections.

--Preventing future environmental legislation.

--To benefit the economic interests of it's members. 

Wise Use is not an organization, but an umbrella movement networking over
400 individual anti-environmental organizations many of which masquerade as
pro-environmentalists to both confuse the issues and to get contributions
from people who are unaware of what they are really up to. So be careful
where your environmental donations are going. Do some research. 

The most well known spokesperson for Wise Use is a piggish radio
propagandist who has spent literally thousands of hours on the air defining
environmentalists as Marxists out to destroy capitalism, democracy and the
American way of life. The hum of the attacks dwell on the new pejorative
concerning the word watermelon: Green on the outside Red on the inside.
This keeps it all in step with the overall conservative outlook; anyone who
cares about anything other than themselves is defined as a communist
anti-American God hater. 

Their next ace in the hole was Limbaugh's mentor, the now dead premier
anti-environmentalist in America, Dixy Lee Ray who once headed the Atomic
Energy Commission and one time governor of Washington State. Her books and
speech titles portend a pro-environment outlook while the body of her work
is always in unwavering defense of the timber, mining, chemical, cattle,
corpo-farm and fishery industries. 

There is a great deal of similarity between Wise Use and creation science,
though the latter is based upon anti-science and the former on
pseudo-science, their common denominator is they attack science/scientists
by painting them as evil know-nothings in a conspiracy to destroy the
American way of life. 

Ray, Limbaugh and a host of conservatives dwell on two aspects concerning
the environment in the same way Creation Science advocates use. Just as
scientists cannot prove evolution in the absolute, neither can science
prove the actual mechanism of global warming or ozone depletion in the
absolute. Then they both use the anti-scientific method to come to their
already arrived at conclusion; evolution, global warming, and the ozone
hole are not only lies, but nonsense. 

I am sure many of you, like myself, have never heard of Wise Use before,
but it's largest most successful and most funded facet you see most
everyday. Full page glossy ads in magazines, major spots on television and
PBS funding credits from the most grievous polluters on the planet all
telling us how environmentally aware they are. They sink a million in
publicity to help some single cause while doing billions of environmental
damage in a hundred other areas. These large corporations also feed so much
propaganda and fear of environmentalism into their millions of employees,
that they too have become anti-environmentalists in the hopes of hanging on
to their jobs, when by far their greatest worry should be losing those jobs
when the corporation kicks them out the door on their asses to move the
operation out of country. 

How can the intelligent American public fall for all this crap? Is it
beyond your comprehension that this propaganda campaign works? The idea of
Wise Use hit the right-wing think tanks with Reagan and Watt in the early
80's, it became an organized entity in 1989, and reached the billion dollar
mark in funding in 1991. Here follows what I hope is the blow you away fact
of their success: 

TIME/CNN POLL Have environmentalists gone too far?  

1991 17% answered yes.  

1992 51% answered yes.

Follows a partial list of some of the national players and their funders,
beware there are many more local and national hard-core anti-environmental
organizations flying the banner of environmentalism to confuse the American
public. 

--  THE ABUNDANT WILDLIFE SOCIETY - Cattle
--  ALLIANCE FOR AMERICA - Timber/chemical/mining
--  ALLIANCE FOR RESPONSIBLE CFC POLICY - CFC makers
--  AMERICAN FREEDOM COALITION - Unification Church
--  AIM - Reed Irvine - Timber/chemical
--  CATO INSTITUTE - Libertarian Timber/chemical
--  CITIZENS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT- Timber/chemical
--  Christian COALITION - Pat Robertson
--  COMMITTEE FOR CONSTRUCTIVE TOMORROW - Nuclear
--  CONSUMER ALERT - Timber/chemical/mining front group
--  ENVIRONMENTAL CONSERVATION ORG. Land developers
--  FRIENDS OF THE RIVERS - Off road vehicles
--  EVERGREEN FOUNDATION - Champion Paper
--  GLOBAL CLIMATE COALITION - Myth of Global warming
--  HERITAGE FOUNDATION - Coors, chemical, GM, GE
--  INFORMATION COUNCIL ON ENVIRONMENT - Mining
--  INSTITUTE FOR JUSTICE - Land developers
--  KEEP AMERICA BEAUTIFUL - Packaging
--  LYNDON LAROUCHE - Rabid Anti-environmentalism
--  NATIONAL WETLANDS COALITION - Land developers
--  PEOPLE FOR THE WEST! - Mining/cattle
--  PUTTING PEOPLE FIRST - Rabid Animal Rights haters
--  THE REASON FOUNDATION -Libertarian anti-environmental
--  SAHARA CLUB - Off road vehicles
--  SEA LION DEFENSE FUND - Alaskan fisheries 

Footnote: Many of the facts in this column came from a lengthy full issue
report in PROPAGANDA REVIEW #11, Bdg D, Fort Mason Center, San Francisco,
CA 94123

Copyright (c) 1993-95 -- Rack Jite - September '94 - volume 16 

CONSERVATIVELY INCORRECT - POB 845 - Seabrook, TX 77586  




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