Political Quotes

“I would suggest that it is more than just that we are drifting. I would suggest we are being drifted by politics and by the money in politics, particularly the big money the big polluters can throw into politics, not only directly by giving campaign contributions to people but by flooding money into phony so-called scientific organizations that then parrot their message, but without people being able to say: Wait a minute, this is ExxonMobil telling me; maybe I should be a little more guarded about it. So they launder it through a legitimate-sounding organization--not one, dozens--and we get bombarded with false propaganda. Scientists are not good at propaganda. It is not why they went to graduate school. It is not why they got their Ph.D. It is not what they do when they are out in the field taking measurements. So you put them up against a company such as ExxonMobil with all of its money and its propaganda skills and it is not an even contest. As the Chairman points out, by the time we are looking around and seeing, oh, my gosh, what have we allowed to happen--now we are awake-- we reject the propaganda. We have to do something about this, and it will probably be, as General MacArthur said, too late. That is the great danger. I thank the chairman for his recognition. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.”