Posts tagged Plutocracy
Save Net Neutrality!
Aug 5th
Open Left have joined with Free Press to produce and distribute a hip, creative video to promote support for net neutrality. (Essentially, that means protecting by law equal access to bandwidth. Preventing big corporations like Comcast, ATT, Verizon, Google, etc. from pricing structure to shut out and potentially shut down ordinary citizens, political and social activists, and small business owners.)
Anyone who knows me or has followed my posts in various places knows that I’m a deep believer in this cause. But I am not a fan of this video. Watch it first, then my comment below will make sense, whether you agree with me or not:
This video is creative and hip. Sheesh, it’s got Mythbuster Adam Savage! How good does it get? So what’s the problem?The video seems aimed at a younger audience, and that’s good. Young people need to be involved. But young people are not the only ones who need to be involved, and I think it does young people themselves an injustice to suggest that the most important projects they create or enjoy are videos of cute cats.
Is this why we need to save the internet? To save cute cat videos? Young people played a key role in the 2008 election, and they did it in significant part via the internet. The internet allows both young and old to become entrepreneurs. It allows young and old to hold politicians accountable for what they say and do. Same for the lying liars on Fox and Hate Talk radio.
Yes, I like cats and cute cat videos. But I like what’s left of American democracy even more. It’s the latter I’m fighting for. And I hope other thoughtful persons will join the contest.
GOP demands that GOP policies not be adopted. Demand it!!
Aug 4th
This really has to start showing up in Democratic ads!
Gimme, gimme, gimme…
Jul 31st
Deadlines come and go. Some are no doubt important immediately (federal matching fund type stuff). Others are important indirectly: You raise money and meet your goals, then you look viable to the secret donors who control the serious money. Still others are just the meaningless equivalent of a TV spiel: “But wait! If you call right now! within the next 15 minutes! we’ll double the offer.” Total bullshit.
Here are a sample of the email appeals I’ve received just today. One day! A representative sample, mind you, not an exhaustive inventory. Now, anyone even remotely familiar with me or what I do and write will know that I belong to the Democratic Party, and I support strongly liberal/progressive social, economic, and political values. I’m on lots of mailing lists. (Not telephone lists, but I hang up on them.) I’m sure that Republican friends who mirror my profile receive their own inventory of solicitations, each and every day.
Place these individual, “little guy” appeals in the context of the Citizens United SCOTUS decision. Too complicated a phenomenon to be dealt with meaningfully in a short post. Read the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Or, if you prefer documentary films, rent and watch The Corporation, based on/inspired by the book. But if you have a really short attention span, here’s your executive summary:
- Corporations began as associations of persons, chartered for a limited time and for a limited purpose (like building a highway or digging a canal).
- Later (with collusion of conservative “activist judges”) corporations appropriated the right to be treated, not as associations of individually responsible private persons, but as imaginary, abstract “persons” in and of themselves.
- The salient implications? (a) The owners (stockholders) and the managers of these imaginary “persons” risk almost nothing, apart from an obvious fraud like Enron. (b) The corporate (pretend) person is required by its charter to promote private profit above all else. Ethics? Morality? Public interest? National interest? Piffle! If behaving morally and ethically earns you money, then cool. Otherwise? Fuck ‘em!
Remember that these are mostly multi-national corporations who “squat” in whichever nation best protects them from paying fair taxes and accepting legitimate liability. (Check the places where the “players” in the most recent BP environmental rape are chartered. Owners of the lease. Owners of the drilling equipment. Owners of the drilling platform. These are not U.S. corporations. They don’t care Jack Shit about U.S. citizens.)
- Fast forward to the Citizens United decision. Effectively, it means corporate pretend “person,” either international or floating from one temporary legal anchorage to another, as corporate self-interest dictates, are free to buy U.S. elections. Secretly. With no accountability.
Oh, did I mention? The Corporation book and documentary stipulate that a corporation is a “person,” as the SCOTUS insists. Then they measure the behavior of these corporate persons by a standard behavioral checklist: one that determines a person’s sanity. Result? Corporate “persons” are psychopaths. Scary! Still, these psychopaths can contribute as much as they wish toward buying elective office for their political puppets. Anonymously. Either directly or through front groups like the so-called “Freedom Foundation.”
Keep that in mind as you consider the appeals:
In respect to business, how small is “small”?
Jul 30th
I’ve written about this before, but I was stimulated to return to the topic by what Mike Pence said in defense of continuing the disastrous Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest fraction of our population:
I wrote the following as a comment to the blog entry where I found his remarks on Crooks and Liars:
The casualness with which the term “small business” is tossed around does everyone a grave disservice.
Let’s play George Lakoff’s little game. I say, “Quick! Don’t think of a small business!” In your mind’s eye you immediately see a small business. Now here’s where it get’s interesting: I ask you to describe what you’re seeing.
The great majority of persons would describe something like my friend Scott’s small deli, or the mom and pop optical shop where I get my glasses, or the hardware franchise with its 8-10 employees where I shop for nuts and bolts and shovels and such.
But compare that typical image to the U.S. government’s definitions of “small business.” Couple of examples. Depending on the field a “small business” might…
• have 1000 employees
• do $35.5 million in business per year
• have a net worth of $175 million
No conscientious person should ever use the term “small business” without qualifying what she or he means by it.
Republicans say: If you’re unemployed, it’s your fault!
Jul 20th
Good news! The Democrats finally got the unemployment bill passed.
The rich get richer. What a shock!
Jul 12th
Last survey I read about suggested that the vast majority of tea baggers fall in that middle fifth, the light blue line. So where do they focus their blame and resentment? On the top 1% or top fifth? No, of course not. They resent those who been worst off in this economy, right along.
Well, there are theories to explain this.
Has the time finally arrived?
Jul 8th
I tend to be pessimistic. Nevertheless, call the effort futile if you wish, but I’m gonna keep on trying. I hope others will join me.
“We create our own reality.”
Jul 8th
I purchased from Amazon the book Merchants of Doubt by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway. (For the record, I spread my custom among many merchants, focusing on the little guys rather than the chains.) The subtitle speaks for itself: “How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming.”
Amazon kept nagging, and finally I agreed to write a review. I was teased into doing so by a New Yorker cartoon, where a guy was boasting to friends about how five people had found his review helpful. So I thought it would be a lark. I gave the book 4 stars out of 5. It seriously impressed, but didn’t provide an orgasm.
Here’s the review:
In 2004 Ron Suskind quoted a White House aide as saying that guys like Suskind belong to “the reality-based community”; that is, persons who “believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality.” But, the aide continued, “That’s not the way the world works anymore.… We create our own reality.” (http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/17/magazine/17BUSH.html)
That would make a dandy epigraph for this book.
Oreskes and Conway fully document the way a-political scientists and ingenuous progressives have trusted that “discernible reality” would speak for itself. Meanwhile, corporations and their conservative political allies have been undermining that “discernible reality” and creating their own substitute. Successfully.
In short, the corporations and movement conservatives have eaten the lunch of the overwhelming majority of scientists. Ironically, to steal the lunch they have used a select group of their own cat’s paw scientists. These are legitimate and in some cases highly accomplished scientists. So what’s the problem?
These select scientists have acted on the basis of political persuasion, personal grudges, and generous funding of their work by industry and politically financed front groups. (At the very least this is a serious conflict of interest.) Not infrequently they have testified on topics well beyond their areas of specialization, and in some cases have continued to do so long after they had ceased to do active, peer-reviewed research.
A source of satisfaction for the wealthy and politically conservative. A call to action for the majority of scientists and of political progressives. Worth reading, regardless of persuasion.
