On the Impact of Political Rhetoric: From “Global Warming” to “Climate Change”

Words matter in politics. The side that can frame a question by definitively naming it in the public mind enjoys a subtle though often decisive advantage in the debate and thus in any resulting public policy as well. For example, “pro-choice”privileges the pregnant woman, while “pro-life” defines the abortion debate around the fetus. Similarly, “global warming” implies a human impact, whereas“climate change” defines the issue around nature. Even though the shift from“global warming” to “climate change” is more in keeping with the evolving science and won’t be bumped off by a cold winter, political players have been the driving force—language hardly being immune to ideological pressure.

Regarding the weather shifting popular perception on the issue, research published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 2011 claimed that a bad winter can indeed discredit the “global warming” label.[1] The Washington Policy Center claimed two years later that the heavy snowfall during the latest winter had led to “climate change” replacing “global warming.”[2] The cold refusing to relent in March of 2013 and hitting North America hard in January of 2019 seemed to undercut or repudiate the scientific “global warming” hypothesis even though meteorology, a empirical science,  always demands long-term data.

However, in looking back at the name-change, we must consider the influence of political actors, who are prone to manipulate the public's perception in part by using words to frame the debate. In 2002, for example, Frank Luntz wrote a confidential memo to the Republican Party suggesting that because the Bush administration was vulnerable on the climate issue. The White House should abandon the phrase “global warming,” he wrote, in favor of “climate change.”[3] As if by magic, although “global warming” appeared frequently in President Bush’s speeches in 2001, “climate change” populated the president’s speeches on the topic by 2002.[4] In other words, the president’s political vulnerability on the issue was answered by changing the label to reframe the debate. Not missing a beat, critics charged that the motive was political in downplaying the possibility that carbon emissions were a contributing factor.[5] Both Bush and Cheney had ties to the oil and gas industry. In fact, Cheney's through Halliburton may have played a role in the administration's advocacy in favor of invading Iraq under the subterfuge that it had been involved in the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in 2001. 

The Obama administration likely went with “climate change” rather than "global warming" because the former was less controversial. The corporate Democrat tended to hold to the center politically; after all, Goldman Sachs had contributed a million dollars to his first presidential campaign in 2008. In September 2011, the White House decided to replace the term “global warming” with “global climate disruption.”[6] The administration subsequently annulled its own decision. 
So much attention on the matter of a mere label indicates that just how important what you call something is to its outcome. Labels are not always neutral. For instance, the term "African American," was making inroads whereas "Black American" was hardly ever heard. "African" slips in ethnicity whereas "Black," or negroid, refers to race. Changing the axis on which the controversy had hinged was in favor of the race-now-ethnicity. Meanwhile, the American public didn't notice the artful conflation of ethnicity (i.e., culture) and race. Obama used the ethnic term and applied it to himself even though his mother was Caucasian. He also claimed Illinois as his home state even though he moved to Chicago after college. He could benefit politically from the support of Black Americans and Illinoisans. 
Similarly, Obama could benefit politically from adopting "climage change." As the academic journal Public Opinion Quarterly reported in 2011, “Republicans are far more skeptical of ‘global warming’ than of ‘climate change.’” Whereas the vast majority of Democrats were indifferent to the label being used.[7] With “global warming” carrying “a stronger connotation of human causation, which has long been questioned by conservatives,” Obama stood to gain some republican support simply by changing how he refers to the issue.[8] That support was part of the president's ability to straddle the center in American politics. 
Given the effort that has gone into labels, it is amazing that more time in the Congress has not gone into debating labels. I am also curious why the American people did not realize that they were being manipulated by the choice of label. If "climate change" allows for the contention that human-sourced carbon emissions into that atmosphere have not been a cause of the warming of the oceans and air, then it is possible that the very survival of the species could be in jeopardy because of  the choice of a label for short-term economic and political reasons.

1. Tom Jacobs, “Wording Change Softens Global Warming Skeptics,” Pacific Standard, March 2, 2011. 

2. Washington Policy Center, “Climate Change: Where the Rhetoric Defines the Science,” March 8, 2011.

3. Oliver Burkeman, “Memo Exposes Bush’s New Green Strategy,” The Guardian, March 3, 2003.

4. Ibid.

5. Washington Policy Center, “Climate Change: Where the Rhetoric Defines the Science,” March 8, 2011.

6. Erik Hayden, “Republicans Believe in ‘Climate Change,’ Not ‘Global Warming’,” The Atlantic Wire, March 3, 2011.

7. Tom Jacobs, “Wording Change Softens Global Warming Skeptics,” Pacific Standard, March 2, 2011.

8. Ibid.

American Businesses as Police-States: The Case of Hilton Hotels

Days before Christmas in 2018, Jermaine Massey was on a phone call with his mother. It being personal, he was in a remote area and was thus not disturbing anyone—that except for Earl, Doubletree’s security guard. Massey subsequently accused Earl of harassment. While the video that Massey took of the guard during the altercation shows Earl to be quite calm, the passive aggression was doubtless off the charts. The incident points to a growing problem at the time as American businesses were increasing their security presence, at the very least in terms of exposure, and last but not least, with considerable discretion and thus power. The incident shows that guards were well aware of how to mask personal power with the air of staid professionalism.  This only makes the latent authoritarian mindset more dangerous to the public.

After Massey had relocated to another hotel (without a refund from Hilton/Doubletree as of that time), he wrote on social media that while he had been talking with his mother, Earl approached. “He said that I was a safety threat to the other guests and that I was trespassing and said that I was a disturbance because I took a personal phone call from my mom in a more remote area of the lobby.”[1] Even if Massey had been too loud in his phone conversation, considerable overkill is involved in stretching noise to a safety “issue.” Additionally, Earl presumed that Massey was trespassing even though the latter had his room key (with the envelop indicating the room and date!) visible. That Earl refused even to admit the possibility that the key might be valid points to a serious lapse in Earl’s mind. What could prompt such a distortion well in the scope of Earl’s duty?

Friedrich Nietzsche would say that the pleasure of power is the underlying culprit. Earl was simply too weak to resist his over-extended need for power, and his tendency to assume the worst in people—common, I suspect, among police—only fed his need. That Earl had handcuffs and a metal “badge” that doubtless had been designed to mimic a police badge only enabled his predisposition to act even beyond the functions of a guard. For instance, a guard does not have the authority to arrest—so why the cuffs?

Making the problem of the over-extended guard worse, the hotel’s manager on duty enabled Earl by taking Earl’s decision that the police should be called on Massey as something that should and cannot be overridden. Earl used a walkie-talky to communicate his decision to the manager, then told Massey that the police would be there to escort him off the property. Even though Massey insisted that he had a room at that hotel, Earl countered with a tone of being the person in charge there, “Not anymore.” Even though the manager followed Earl’s instruction to call the police, Massey claimed that the manager only asked him—after having called the police!—what had happened. Luis, the young manager, was derelict in subordinating his authority to a guard—taking the guard’s side as the full story. And yet Luis and Earl would presume to call the customers guests. After being a customer of Hilton Hotels (Doubletree), Massey would be well within proper behavior to laugh out loud at the sheer presumption, for who treats a guest as Earl and Luis had treated Massey?  

In conclusion, this case strongly suggests that managers should not just take the word of their respective security guards, who likely have their own agendas (i.e., power-trips). It is the absolute power that businesses allow or enable guards to have that is so dangerous. What if the police had arrested Massey? A bad situation could have gotten much worse (with a police record). Significantly, the Portland, Oregon police did not even talk to Massey; they too took the guard’s side for objective truth. An axis can be drawn from Earl to Luis to the local police: the axis of absolute power that businesses enable. At the very least, businesses should not permit their guards to wear handcuffs or police-like badges. Once I saw this in a Target store and asked a cashier about it. “I know; it is over the top. They can’t even use those cuffs.” I asked why the show. “To intimidate customers,” she answered matter-of-factly. Target would go on in following the other herd-animal retailers to call customers guests. Intent to intimidate guests—nice!


For more on Nietzsche applied to managers, see On the Arrogance of False Entitlement, available at Amazon. For more on business ethics, see Cases of Unethical Business.

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1. Keith Allen, “Hotel Employees Who Asked Black Guest to Leave Fired,” Cnn.com (December 29, 2018).

Nature's Racial Melting-Pot: The American Empire

The 2010 U.S. census reignited the question of racial identity among multi-racial residents.  “I can’t fit in a single box on the census form” was the typical refrain among the fastest growing segment of the US population.  According to The New York Times in February, 2011, "when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand." The number of mixed-race Americans was at the time rising rapidly, largely on account of increases in immigration and intermarriage. In 2010, for example, one in seven new marriages was interracial. Politically, some racial interest groups believed that the use of a catch-all category marginalized minority races in particular. As a result, the Census Bureau created 63 categories of possible racial combinations (a typical bureaucratic solution to a political problem).

Regardless of how the U.S. Government slices the deck, the reality on the ground was that the United States were finally turning the corner on racial-bonding in the beginning of the twenty-first century; the U.S. had gone from some states outlawing miscegenation (i.e., the mixing of different racial groups through marriage, cohabitation, or sexual relations) as late as the 1960s to the multiracial segment of the population being the fastest growing.  America in the late twenty-first century would undoubtedly look rather different than how it looked even at the turn of the twenty-first century. We should not be surprised at nature having overflowed the laws that  were designed to keep the races separate, and thus “pure.” What a strange adjective to apply to something like race!

The lesson here is that life is a fluid thing. The naturalist ethic in line with the flow of life tends to have the last word, even though particular laws can seem daunting in their hayday. Any generation can expect that the world it knows will be morphed by life's forces into yet another world even if it takes a few centuries. As strong as they may seem, governmental restrictions in the face of natural forces are doomed to fail, like sandcastles fending against a rising tide. In other words, nature has the last word. In terms of race, nature's instinct can be called a naturalistic ethic because it is in the direction of attraction rather than hatred.

That the multiracial “category” is the fastest growing in the American census can be regarded as the natural solution to racial problems that have plagued North America since the time of the colonies.  Whereas Cortez and his followers in New Spain quickly mixed the Indian, Black and Caucasian races, the British colonies further north quite intentionally kept the three groups separate and distinct. In spite of having some members out of parts of New Spain, the United States followed the British tradition until well into the second half of the twentieth century.

The courageous people who risked pain and even death in the Freedom Ride cracked the societal shell that had enabled the artificial laws to hold nature temporarily at bay. By the 1970s, attitudes in most of the United States were shifting, such that by the turn of the next century race relations in general bore scant resemblance to those back in 1960. Beyond changed race relations, a growing multiracial segment was tasked with making sense of themselves in the new society.

Cheryl Contee, for example, wrote in a CNN opinion piece in 2010, “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot. I can’t ignore the pale skin of my white forebears, the slanted eyes of my Indian relatives nor the full lips and curly hair of my African blood.”  However, because there are many white Africans (e.g., in South Africa), her distinction of “white” and “African” is a false dichotomy.  She is treating two different categories as though they were one.  Better stated, Cheryl has Caucasian, Black, and Indian ancestors, hence she is multi-racial.  She puts it as follows: “When I look in the mirror each morning, my face epitomizes the American melting pot.”  Her melting pot constitution is something for her to be proud of because it instantiates the natural, rather than the governmental, solution to what has been an intractable problem in the U.S. for centuries. Looking forward, her situation is one of transition; her great grandchildren may look back at old pictures of Blacks and Whites as strange book-ends.

Sources:

Cheryl Contee, “I Can’t Fit in a Single Box on a Census Form,” CNN Opinion, March 30, 2010.

Susan Saulny, “Counting by Race Can Throw Off Some Numbers,” The New York Times, February 9, 2011.

Reefer Madness: One of Nixon's Dirty Tricks

Journalist Dan Baum wrote in the April cover story of Harper’s about how he interviewed Ehrlichman in 1994 while working on a book about drug prohibition. Ehrlichman provided some shockingly honest insight into the motives behind the drug war. From Harper’s:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Is States' Rights in the E.U. Racist?

Thousands of Romania’s Roma people (also known as Gypsies) headed for the wealthier Western E.U. states, setting off a clash within the European Union over just how open its “open borders” really were. Migration within the 27 states of the E.U. became a combustible issue during the economic downturn. The Union’s expansion that brought in the relatively poor states of Romania and Bulgaria in 2007 renewed concern that the poor, traveling far from home in search of work, would become a burden on the state governments of the wealthier states. The migration of the Roma also raised questions about the obligations of Romania and Bulgaria to fulfill promises their governments had made when they joined the Union. Romania, for instance, mapped out a strategy for helping the Roma, but financed little of it.

Nicolas Sarkozy of the E.U. state of France demanded in 2010 that the Romanian state government do more to aid the Roma at home. He vowed to keep dismantling immigrant camps and angrily rejected complaints from E.U. Commission officials that the French authorities were illegally singling out Roma for deportation.

Sarkozy, being oriented to state politics, tried to revive his support on the political right by deporting thousands of them, offering 300 euros, about $392, to those who go home voluntarily, and bulldozing their encampments.[1] The European Commission threatened legal action against the state of France over the deportation, calling it disgraceful and illegal. Perhaps it could also be called racist. If so, might Sarkozy’s action be comparable to a Southern state in the U.S. trying to kick black people out. That is, might Sarkozy’s action evince state rights perpetrating racism? Arizona’s immigration law requiring people being investigated by the police to show I.D. pales in comparison.  Might the association of state rights and racism have shifted from the U.S. to the E.U.? If so, it is doubtful that state rights would be marginalized in the E.U. as it has been in the U.S. on account of the association; the state governments in the E.U. enjoy more than enough loyalty by their citizens to defeat it.

More generally, this case illustrates the problems that the E.U. has had in enforcing compliance of the terms of the accession talks of new states. Prime facie, the case showcases the difficulty involved in integrating Europe, particularly as states such as Italy, Spain, France and Denmark have striven to keep out immigrants from Africa. The case of the Roma could be just the tip of the iceberg in how state rights may be fueled by racism to keep certain groups out. In other words, there could be a rather troubling pattern here, and Europeans may have been torn—looking to the E.U. to thwart the racism while supporting their state governments in keeping out “troubling” groups. It is part and parcel of the checks and balances in modern federalism that member governments can be called on their sordid policies even when they are popular within the particular states.

1.Suzanne Daley, “Roma, on Move, Test Europe’s ‘Open Borders’,” The New York Times, September 16, 2010.