2
Meet the Shadowy Global Network Vilifying Climate Protesters - Feddit.it
feddit.itcross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/2154671
[https://slrpnk.net/post/2154671] > https://archive.ph/wip/cLxsz
[https://archive.ph/wip/cLxsz] > The Atlas Network describes itself as “a
nonprofit that aims to secure the right to economic and personal freedom for all
individuals” through its global network of think tanks. But before it was a
network, it was just one think tank: the U.K.-based Institute of Economic
Affairs, or IEA, founded by a man named Antony Fisher. > > Fisher was born into
a wealthy mining family. After service in the Royal Air Force during World War
II—where, legend has it, he watched his brother plummet to his death after his
plane was shot down—he was inspired to fight for a freer and more prosperous
world in order to end war. Shocked that the British public elected the Labor
Party in their first postwar election, Fisher decided he must make sure people
voted the right way next time around. He was further inspired by conversations
with Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who blamed socialism for all of
society’s ills. Fisher considered running for office in the early 1950s, but
Hayek told him to forget about getting into politics himself and to engage
instead in a “war of ideas” by targeting the intellectual class. > > After
starting the IEA in 1955, Fisher landed the think tank’s first big corporate
donor in the early 1960s: Royal Dutch Shell. BP soon followed suit, and suddenly
the IEA started to have some real impact. > > In its early years, the IEA “would
get these professors to write short, digestible articles, often around things
like currency conversion or, sort of, things that were fairly technical to the
noneconomists,” said Jeremy Walker, a senior lecturer at the University of
Technology Sydney, longtime Atlas Network researcher and author of the book More
Heat Than Life: The Tangled Roots of Ecology, Energy and Economics. “But then
they would have these wealthy donors to the IEA who would buy copies and send
them to all the schools and the universities.” > > Not disclosing their
corporate donors was a key to IEA’s success too. “The think tank method allowed
corporations to say things that they couldn’t say themselves without appearing
to be merely speaking to their own profit motives,” Walker said. These tactics
allowed the IEA to amass influence in the U.K. and to help spread conservative
free-market ideology in British politics throughout the 1960s and ’70s. > >
Given the IEA’s growing success in quickly pushing U.K. politics to the right,
Fisher decided to take the show on the road. In 1970, he did a speaking tour in
the U.S. with the Institute for Humane Studies—an organization funded by Charles
and David Koch, early on in what would be a decades-long career in massively
reshaping American politics for industry’s benefit. In those U.S. talks, Fisher
encouraged American businessmen to fight back against the social movements of
the 1960s. In 1974, Fisher traveled to Canada, co-founding his first think tank
outside Britain: the Fraser Institute. The same year, the IEA loaned one of its
leaders, Nigel Vinson, to rising conservative politician Margaret Thatcher to
start a sister think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies in the U.K. > > Fisher
then traveled to Australia, where Rupert Murdoch helped him found the Centre for
Independent Studies in 1976. Back in the U.K., Fisher co-founded the Adam Smith
Institute, another IEA copycat, in 1977. In 1978, he returned to the United
States, where he co-founded the Manhattan Institute in 1978 and the Pacific
Research Institute in 1979, again with help from the Koch brothers and the
extractive industry. By this point, his work with the IEA and the Centre for
Policy Studies had succeeded in getting Margaret Thatcher elected. Famed “free
market” economist Milton Friedman would later say that “the U-turn in British
policy executed by Margaret Thatcher owes more to Fisher than any other
individual.”
> > Fisher wanted to connect all the IEA-style organizations he’d started into a
network so that they could more easily work with each other, and asked Hayek for
introductions to his “friends in Houston”—oil executives—for funding. The Atlas
Network, which launched in 1981, initially only included the first dozen or so
think tanks Fisher had helped to found himself, but quickly expanded to include
hundreds of like-minded member organizations, including all the Koch-affiliated
think tanks in the U.S. (The Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, the
Heritage Foundation, and the American Legislative Exchange Council—some of the
most influential forces shaping U.S. conservative politics—are all members.)
> > … > > U.K.-based Atlas member think tank Policy Exchange, meanwhile, put out
a report in 2019 describing Extinction Rebellion, an organization famous for
shutting down parts of London to call for aggressive climate action, as “an
extremist organization seeking the breakdown of liberal democracy and the rule
of law.” As happened in Germany, several U.K. politicians and conservative media
outlets have since repeated that framing. It wasn’t long before people began
cold-cocking Extinction Rebellion activists as they blocked roads or staged
other forms of nonviolent, disruptive protest. Four years later, during a speech
at Policy Exchange’s annual summer garden party in 2023, U.K. Prime Minister
Rishi Sunak thanked Policy Exchange members for “helping us draft legislation”
that significantly criminalized various forms of protest, increased police
power, and created the criminal offense of “willful obstruction of the highway”
to curb protests that block roads. In the wake of the law’s passage and several
arrests and court cases, Extinction Rebellion announced it would no longer
engage in disruptive protest.
Cross-posted from: https://feddit.it/post/2614883
Original link: https://www.adk.de/de/news/?we_objectID=65559
You must log in or register to comment.