Whatever you might think of Michael Bloomberg otherwise, his corporate empire, including Bloomberg News, was built on the insight that big-time investors would be willing to pay top dollar for information that was directly tailored to their needs.
You always want to know your core customers and so it doesn’t surprise me to see the editors at Bloomberg View come out with guns blazing for New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
What did Schneiderman do to arouse the ire of the Bloomberg Empire?
He allegedly issued a subpoena to Exxon Mobil asking them to produce documents going back to the 1970’s that might indicate that they knew that burning fossil fuels was harmful and yet failed to warn their investors that profits might be negatively impacted.
This could be seen as akin to nailing Al Capone for tax evasion, since Exxon/Mobil is guilty of sponsoring phony science and deceptive media campaigns intended to mislead not just investors but politicians, regulators, judges, customers, and the general public.
Holding them accountable for just the investors part of that fraud seems like a slap on the wrist and possible justice for the least sympathetic of their victims.
But even this is too much for the Bloomberg editors:
[Schneiderman’s] grounds seem pretty thin. Much as one may sympathize with Schneiderman’s desire to encourage stronger action on climate change, this is not the way to go about it.
Exxon’s critics have argued that the company’s own researchers believed, as far back as the 1970s, that carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels were causing climate change. Yet, as they point out, Exxon has long opposed strong action on emissions, and until a few years ago gave financial support to researchers and campaigners that cast doubt on the scientific consensus.
The company later acknowledged that this was unwise: In 2007, it said it would stop funding such groups. The earlier practice deserved no prizes for good corporate citizenship — but failing to be a good corporate citizen isn’t lying, and isn’t a crime. Not yet anyway. Unless the company deliberately misled its investors, it’s hard to see why its scientific and public-relations efforts should be any concern of New York’s attorney general.
I hope I don’t need to engage here in a semantic debate about the meaning of the word “lying.” And I’ll leave it to lawyers and judges to decide how to delineate the difference between sponsoring false science and media campaigns for the purpose of deceiving the public vs. the purpose of deceiving your investors.
The folks at Bloomberg have their own moral and legal standards:
Regulating emissions is a job for politicians — and they’re failing. That’s frustrating, and in the absence of effective government action, there’s an added moral obligation on companies to act.
Even so, engaging in scientific research and public advocacy shouldn’t be crimes in a free country. Using the criminal law to shame and encumber companies that do so is a dangerous arrogation of power.
See? All they did was engage in research and advocacy!
How could that be a crime?
Damn! If THAT is the best rationalization that the billionaires can come up with, then I can only surmise that there must be some pretty damning evidence lurking just below the surface here.
Their definition of “scientific research and public advocacy”,as a defense, is right up there with the Clinton classic, “It depends on what the meaning of “IS” is.
Of course there is. Since the 80’s at least it’s been clear to anybody paying attention and not delusional that global warming is a massive threat to both human civilization and the natural world. Exxon has been massively and expensively involved in a disinformation campaign to muddy the waters, showing they knew the waters needed to be muddied for their profits. There will be plenty of memos showing they knew the score and were intentionally risking the destruction of civilization to improve their bonuses. On top of that the memos will be emotionally revolting and insulting to the general public.
It’ll be just like Enron, where when the internal memos came out it was actually worse than even the wildest conspiracy theorists were saying.
I actually think Bloomberg is not so much trying to comfort their audience as to get them worked up to oppose it. CEOs are generally pathological liars and serious application of Sarbanes-Oxley would probably send the majority to jail. They’ll jump to try to interfere with this because if successful it threatens their own scams.
Bloomberg: Unless the company deliberately misled its investors, it’s hard to see why its scientific and public-relations efforts should be any concern of New York’s attorney general.
But isn’t trying to find out whether Exxon/Mobil deliberately misled its investors exactly the stated purpose of the investigation? If so, what am I missing here? What could their objection possibly be?
Oh.
That.
Kbai.
Reporting coming out that Exxon will be the first in a BigEnergy series. Actually this seems like a pretty savvy first door to break down.
Like a good “liberal” Republican or conserva-Dem, Michael Bloomberg is comfortable directing attention to the poor, personal choices many individuals make and using government to make those choice more costly and not the institutions and corporations that profit from those “poor choices.”
Schneiderman thanks Bloomberg for the free political advertising.
I was recently brought to task by Errol for a comment that I made on Booman’s recent post White Angst Presents an Opportunity. I had stated that the alarming decline in white working class health and general sanity has a great deal to do with something that I call “gene sink”…the gradual depletion of good genetic material in a given societal system by the progressive siphoning of of its best people to more profitable systems that is sometimes called brain drain.
TarheelDem answered “Might be wise to take a course in current understanding of genetics and evolution before going down this well-worn path,” and I countered by saying:
Errol chimed in, basically making me sound as stupid and anti-science as Ben carson.
I responded:
And now this thread.
Same same.
Same same w/the VW emissions boondoggle.
On another level, same same w/that coporate-owned rat Michael Hayden lying to Congress…not Congress actually, because they were all well aware of the lies, more accurately to the American people…about the extent of NSA surveillance. On an entirely other level, Obama’s, HRC’s and Kerry’s string of lies about everything and anything that they decide is important enough…and threatening enough to the PermaGov…to warrant even more lies.
The string of lies is fraying now. Too much weight on it. People who were fat and happy oblivious during the lie-supported prosperity years are now getting lean, mean, and angry. They’re no smarter, really…witness the rise of Trump and Carson…they’re just pissed off.
Dumb and mad.
And dangerous.
So it goes.
Exxon?
Just another drop in the lie bucket.
Bloomberg?
Just another PermaGov hustler. A purveyor…an aggregator, really…of lies.
So that goes as well.
Will the whole house of lying cards come tumbling down eventually?
I think maybe.
You know what Alice said:
Watch.
It’s gonna happen eventually.
Watch.
AG
https:/www.newscientist.com/article/dn23109-stress-can-affect-future-generations-genes
Whether that amounts to your suggestion of self-selectivity for failure, however, is still open.
I think the most appropriate response to this idea that scientific consensus should somehow comport with “independent sense” in order to be credible would be an observation from one of my favorite Physicists of all time, Richard Feynman.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
I am not leting myself be fooled by anybody, least of all by a scientific establishment that lives right smack in the pocket of Big Academia and Big Government, both of which are owned lock, stock and funded microscope by Big Corp. Inc.
i come to my own conclusions and I bet my life on them.
Consistently.
Day by day and year by year.
You?
“Scientific consensus?”
On what level?
Exxon level?
Anti-Exxon level?
Who is funding those research efforts?
Cui bono applies here, as does that old gem “Follow the money.”
Bet on it.
I reserve judgement on things that I can neither prove nor disprove to my own satisfaction.
In my long and active life on hard streets the world over I have witnessed gene sink after gene sink and lived in the midst of several as well. Have you ever witnessed what happens to a thriving several-generational city Italian neighborhood when most of the kids move out? Been there, lived that in the late ’60s/early’70s in Manhattan’s Little Italy and Brooklyn’s Red Hook…the home of Jimmy Breslin’s “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight.”
Even the gangsters devolve.
I call things as I see them, and corporate-owned science be damned.
As my own scientific advisor 138th St. Papo might say:
Like dat.
AG
well, there we have it.
Bloomberg …guns blazing. Hey, it worked every other time Schneiderman made a PR announcement of what he was going to do. Put the bought out judges on notice that this there was a high-profile case coming.
Because they know that Schneiderman pulls punches.
Even a gang of attorneys generals have an uphill fight against corporations. Just look at the tobacco suit of 20 years ago.
The case really isn’t that much about the science as much as the fact that Exxon did not disclose the science they accepted in risk analysis of the future earnings. Some Wall Street types think there is a case for fraud here (the legal term for wilfully lying).
Gosh, that puts Exxon in the same situation as Monsanto, Bank of America (and the other mortgage derivative fraud banks), and VW. Apparently there’s no law against it. Caveat emptor. Caveat everybody.