Liberal professors urge Obama to target climate change skeptics with RICO act while ignoring mafia tactics of Monsanto, Big Pharma

(NaturalNews) You can always tell a liberal from a constitutionalist: the latter believes in the nation's founding principles and the rule of law as is; the former wants to use laws, statutes, courts or presidential authority to force others to accept their point of view.

That is the only way to explain why left-leaning university professors are pressing President Obama to use his executive authority to punish anyone who does not accept at face value so-called "climate change science" that has been manipulated, changed, and intentionally skewed in the past, all to support a specific de-growth, anti-capitalist agenda.

Climate Change Dispatch, a website dedicated to spreading the word about climate hoaxes and faulty climate data, reports that although there has been no real rise in global temperatures for nearly two decades, about two dozen scientists from major universities are pressing Obama to punish climate skeptics using RICO laws – the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act statutes passed in 1970 to combat organized crime (such as the old Mafia).

In a letter addressed to the president, U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch and Office of Science and Technology Policy Director John Holdren, the group of scientists wrote that they "appreciate that you are making aggressive and imaginative use of the limited tools available to you in the face of a recalcitrant Congress."

Tobacco-like cover-up?

However, "one additional tool" – which has been proposed by liberal Democrat Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island – is to conduct a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations they charge have knowingly deceived the American public about the so-called risks of climate change "as a means to forestall America's response to climate change," they wrote.

The scientists charged that critics' actions have already been documented in other publications.

"The methods of these organizations are quite similar to those used earlier by the tobacco industry. A RICO investigation (1999 to 2006) played an important role in stopping the tobacco industry from continuing to deceive the American people about the dangers of smoking," the scientists said.

"If corporations in the fossil fuel industry and their supporters are guilty of the misdeeds that have been documented in books and journal articles, it is imperative that these misdeeds be stopped as soon as possible so that America and the world can get on with the critically important business of finding effective ways to restabilize the Earth's climate, before even more lasting damage is done," they wrote.

No smoke

In a Washington Post commentary piece last year, Whitehouse charged that the fossil fuel industry was out to deceive the American public, and as such, he argued that such activity amounted to "a racketeering enterprise."

He alleged the "parallels between what the tobacco industry did and what the fossil fuel industry is doing now are striking," adding that the tobacco industry – which indeed hid the ill health effects of smoking – "joined together in a common enterprise and coordinated strategy."

"The fossil fuel industry, its trade associations and the conservative policy institutes that often do the industry's dirty work met at the Washington office of the American Petroleum Institute," the senator wrote.

"A memo from that meeting that was leaked to the New York Times documented their plans for a multimillion-dollar public relations campaign to undermine climate science and to raise 'questions among those (e.g. Congress) who chart the future U.S. course on global climate change.'"

Whitehouse was finally forced to admit that he was doing nothing but slinging allegations because he had no real evidence to offer.

"To be clear: I don't know whether the fossil fuel industry and its allies engaged in the same kind of racketeering activity as the tobacco industry. We don't have enough information to make that conclusion. ... But there's an awful lot of smoke," he wrote.

Using the law to punish political opponents

Meanwhile, despite the dearth of scientific evidence that global warming/climate change/climate disruption even exists as the Left claims it does, there is real evidence to suggest that climate scientists have indeed manipulated their climate data in order to "prove" that global warming was real and that human activities were causing it.

NASA scientists have also been caught manipulating data by climate skeptic Paul Homewood.

Then, there is the fact that no one on the Left – or in Congress in general – is recommending using RICO to punish bio-ag giant Monsanto and Big Pharma for using Mafioso tactics to strong-arm critics and whistleblowers, as Natural News has reported.

There are definitely cases where U.S. racketeering laws are appropriate, but not in cases where those who call for them are only trying to silence and/or punish political opponents.

Sources include:

ClimateChangeDispatch.com

ClimateDepot.com

IGES.org

WashingtonPost.com