ExxonMobil's biggest bribe pays dividends in divisiveness

The National Science Teachers Association has turned down an offer for 50,000 free dvds of the global warming documentary, An Inconvenience Truth, expressing "concern that other 'special interests' might ask to distribute materials, too; they said they didn't want to offer 'political' endorsement of the film; and they saw '"little, if any, benefit to NSTA or its members' in accepting the free DVDs" according to this editorial by one of the film's producers.  A little digging finds something more interesting...

Science a la Joe Camel - washingtonpost.com:

Still, maybe the NSTA just being extra cautious. But there was one more curious argument in the e-mail: Accepting the DVDs, they wrote, would place "unnecessary risk upon the [NSTA] capital campaign, especially certain targeted supporters." One of those supporters, it turns out, is the Exxon Mobil Corp.

That's the same Exxon Mobil that for more than a decade has done everything possible to muddle public understanding of global warming and stifle any serious effort to solve it. It has run ads in leading newspapers (including this one) questioning the role of manmade emissions in global warming, and financed the work of a small band of scientific skeptics who have tried to challenge the consensus that heat-trapping pollution is drastically altering our atmosphere. The company spends millions to support groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute that aggressively pressure lawmakers to oppose emission limits.

It's bad enough when a company tries to sell junk science to a bunch of grown-ups. But, like a tobacco company using cartoons to peddle cigarettes, Exxon Mobil is going after our kids, too.

And it has been doing so for longer than you may think. NSTA says it has received $6 million from the company since 1996, mostly for the association's "Building a Presence for Science" program, an electronic networking initiative intended to "bring standards-based teaching and learning" into schools, according to the NSTA Web site. Exxon Mobil has a representative on the group's corporate advisory board. And in 2003, NSTA gave the company an award for its commitment to science education.

So much for special interests and implicit endorsements.

ExxonMobil's not the only ones in this game of supporting "science education" to avoid criticism from those who would know better.

Science a la Joe Camel - washingtonpost.com:

NSTA's list of corporate donors also includes Shell Oil and the American Petroleum Institute (API), which funds NSTA's Web site on the science of energy. There, students can find a section called "Running on Oil" and read a page that touts the industry's environmental track record -- citing improvements mostly attributable to laws that the companies fought tooth and nail, by the way -- but makes only vague references to spills or pollution. NSTA has distributed a video produced by API called "You Can't Be Cool Without Fuel," a shameless pitch for oil dependence.

The war on terror and the "partisanship" debates have actually continued to cloud that which was easily seen 10 years ago: the real enemy of America is it's establishment of corporatism. The religious right can try to influence the decisions of government all they want, but they will only be able to do so as long as their "beliefs" don't interfere with big business making big money. When those two divide, the party attached to both will fall.

But fortunately for big business, the other party is perfectly willing to take big business money for big business handouts just as the first party is.