Thanks to your thousands of calls and letters, we took a major step forward this week in the fight for Internet freedom.
A bipartisan majority on the House Judiciary Committee yesterday passed the “Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act” — a good bill that would use antitrust law to protect Network Neutrality. Special thanks to those of you who called the key members who cast the deciding votes.
The question before us is simple: Will the Internet remain in the hands of users and innovators? Or will a handful of telephone and cable companies determine which Web sites you see and which you don’t? Yesterday’s vote — a milestone for our movement — would have been unthinkable just three weeks ago. But we’ve shown once again that organized people can defeat powerful corporations.
Our opponents spent untold millions on high-priced lobbyists, slick ad campaigns and fake grassroots groups. But the voices of hundreds of thousands of citizens — your voices — made the difference.
The SavetheInternet.com Coalition led by Free Press now boasts nearly 700 groups that span the political spectrum, including MoveOn.org, the Christian Coalition, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Gun Owners of America, Consumers Union, and the American Library Association. Thousands of blogs have taken up our cause. Yesterday, the coalition’s petition drive surpassed 750,000 signatures.
Our top priority is increasing the number of people who know about this threat to Internet freedom.
One thing you can do right now: Get five friends to join the fight
The struggle in Congress isn’t over. The full House will take up the bipartisan Judiciary bill (H.R. 5417) — as well as the massive rewrite of the Telecom Act — after they return in June. The Senate is also considering major legislation that currently fails to protect Net Neutrality, though a bipartisan group of Senators are lining up behind the excellent Snowe-Dorgan bill (S. 2917).
Our work is not done. But momentum is on our side.
We couldn’t have done it without you.
Onward,
Josh Silver Executive Director Free Press www.freepress.net
You can do more:
1. If you haven’t done so already, sign the SavetheInternet.com petition
2. Check out the latest news on the SavetheInternet.com blog
3. Learn the facts. Read our new report: Why Consumers Demand Internet Freedom
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http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/29/opinion/29krugman.html?th&emc=th
Swiftboating the Planet
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed: May 29, 2006
A brief segment in “An Inconvenient Truth” shows Senator Al Gore
questioning James Hansen, a climatologist at NASA, during a 1989 hearing.
But the movie doesn’t give you much context, or tell you what happened to
Dr. Hansen later.
And that’s a story worth telling, for two reasons. It’s a good
illustration of the way interest groups can create the appearance of doubt
even when the facts are clear and cloud the reputations of people who
should be regarded as heroes. And it’s a warning for Mr. Gore and others
who hope to turn global warming into a real political issue: you’re going
to have to get tougher, because the other side doesn’t play by any known
rules.
Dr. Hansen was one of the first climate scientists to say publicly that
global warming was under way. In 1988, he made headlines with Senate
testimony in which he declared that “the greenhouse effect has been
detected, and it is changing our climate now.” When he testified again the
following year, officials in the first Bush administration altered his
prepared statement to downplay the threat. Mr. Gore’s movie shows the
moment when the administration’s tampering was revealed.
In 1988, Dr. Hansen was well out in front of his scientific colleagues,
but over the years that followed he was vindicated by a growing body of
evidence. By rights, Dr. Hansen should have been universally acclaimed for
both his prescience and his courage.
But soon after Dr. Hansen’s 1988 testimony, energy companies began a
campaign to create doubt about global warming, in spite of the
increasingly overwhelming evidence. And in the late 1990’s, climate
skeptics began a smear campaign against Dr. Hansen himself.
Leading the charge was Patrick Michaels, a professor at the University of
Virginia who has received substantial financial support from the energy
industry. In Senate testimony, and then in numerous presentations, Dr.
Michaels claimed that the actual pace of global warming was falling far
short of Dr. Hansen’s predictions. As evidence, he presented a chart
supposedly taken from a 1988 paper written by Dr. Hansen and others, which
showed a curve of rising temperatures considerably steeper than the trend
that has actually taken place.
In fact, the chart Dr. Michaels showed was a fraud – that is, it wasn’t
what Dr. Hansen actually predicted. The original paper showed a range of
possibilities, and the actual rise in temperature has fallen squarely in
the middle of that range. So how did Dr. Michaels make it seem as if Dr.
Hansen’s prediction was wildly off? Why, he erased all the lower curves,
leaving only the curve that the original paper described as being “on the
high side of reality.”
The experts at www.realclimate.org, the go-to site for climate science,
suggest that the smears against Dr. Hansen “might be viewed by some as a
positive sign, indicative of just how intellectually bankrupt the
contrarian movement has become.” But I think they’re misreading the
situation. In fact, the smears have been around for a long time, and Dr.
Hansen has been trying to correct the record for years. Yet the claim that
Dr. Hansen vastly overpredicted global warming has remained in
circulation, and has become a staple of climate change skeptics, from
Michael Crichton to Robert Novak.
There’s a concise way to describe what happened to Dr. Hansen: he was
Swift-boated.
John Kerry, a genuine war hero, didn’t realize that he could successfully
be portrayed as a coward. And it seems to me that Dr. Hansen, whose
predictions about global warming have proved remarkably accurate, didn’t
believe that he could successfully be portrayed as an unreliable
exaggerator. His first response to Dr. Michaels, in January 1999, was
astonishingly diffident. He pointed out that Dr. Michaels misrepresented
his work, but rather than denouncing the fraud involved, he offered a
rather plaintive appeal for better behavior.
Even now, Dr. Hansen seems reluctant to say the obvious. “Is this treading
close to scientific fraud?” he recently asked about Dr. Michaels’s smear.
The answer is no: it isn’t “treading close,” it’s fraud pure and simple.
Now, Dr. Hansen isn’t running for office. But Mr. Gore might be, and even
if he isn’t, he hopes to promote global warming as a political issue. And
if he wants to do that, he and those on his side will have to learn to
call liars what they are.
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“Our German forbearers in the 1930s sat around, blamed their rulers, said ‘maybe everything’s going to be alright.’ That is something we cannot do. I do not want my grandchildren asking me years from now, ‘why didn’t you do something to stop all this?” –Ray McGovern, former CIA analyst of 27 years, referring to the actions and crimes of the Bush Administration
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