Diatribes of Jay

This blog has essays on public policy. It shuns ideology and applies facts, logic and math to social problems. It has a subject-matter index, a list of recent posts, and permalinks at the ends of posts. Comments are moderated and may take time to appear.

28 February 2019

The Decline of Rules-Based Civilization


For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Our Species’ Rise under Rules
Today’s Trend
China under Xi
Britain under Brexit
The US under Trump
Conclusion: Our Species’ Possibly Dismal Future

Our Species’ Rise under Rules

The thing that once made Anglo-American society “exceptional” was faithful adherence to written rules.

It all began in the year 1215, with Magna Carta. King John and the Barons had deployed their forces in the fields of Runnymede, ready to rumble. King John saw he was badly outnumbered. So he made a choice: better to bargain and make a deal than submit to a bloody battle he would likely lose.

The “contract” that King John made with the Barons looks strange to us today. It’s all about the rights, responsibilities and future acts of the King, the Barons, other nobles, and the clergy. It didn’t even mention the “common people.” But it was a start.

Magna Carta was a set of agreed rules for people to live by—at least the people who mattered then. And it was in writing. So although people might interpret it differently, no one could credibly lie about it or conveniently “forget” what it said. It prefigured our written American Constitution by 576 years.

Magna Carta was thus a giant leap forward towards rules-based civilization. But it was not the beginning. Written rules go back at least to the Ten Commandments. According to legend, we got them from God between five and six thousand years ago. They prohibit such things as murder, theft, adultery and lying. Their substance, if not their letter, are part of any civilization founded on “law and order” rather than rude force, strength and guile.

There are other rules, too. Extraordinarily insightful people figured out that the “natural” world also has them. Rules or “laws” govern the physical, chemical, biological and social worlds to which we humans belong. Those who “discovered” these rules were some of the smartest thinkers of our species and the noblest contributors to human advancement. Today we call them “geniuses.” We give some of them Nobel Prizes.

Brits were the first people to write down specific rules for their own civilization. (Ancient Greece and Rome had constitutions of a sort, but they were customary, not written.) So not surprisingly, three of the four greatest thinkers about natural rules were also Brits. Isaac Newton co-invented the calculus and discovered the rules of gravity, planetary motion, and the motion of physical objects near Earth. Adam Smith, a Scot, discovered the rules of markets and the rudiments of microeconomics. Charles Darwin discovered the rules by which biological organisms, including us, evolve through natural selection—rules that today we know undergird all of biology.

The only one of the Four Greats who wasn’t a Brit was Albert Einstein. He was a German Jew who became an American to escape the rule-free horror of Nazism. He explained the physical rules that now make solar panels, nuclear power and nuclear weapons possible. He also explained the “general” relativistic effects that underlie long-distance astronomy and cosmology, i.e., how our whole Universe formed and how it’s slowly changing.

Britain has been an amazing society. It’s an island nation, isolated by geography. So is Japan, which has more than twice Britain’s population. Yet Britain, not Japan, gave the world everybody’s favorite second language—with some help from the Roman alphabet. Britain, not Japan, wrote the rules of business, commerce, government and international cooperation that have swept the globe—a tradition continued by Britain’s “daughter” society, the United States. Ever since our species’ most terrible war, rules derived from Britain and the US, widely adopted by consensus and bargaining, have kept the peace and promoted a productive and growing global economy.

Today’s Trend

Rules work well for advancing civilization. So does understanding the “natural” rules that humans can know and exploit but can’t change. But rules don’t seem to be part of our biological evolution. They are part of our social evolution, our tiny recorded history. So they can weaken, recede or entirely disappear in times of war, stress or simple human folly. Ours may be one of those times.

A well-known phenomenon proves that rules are not “natural” or biologically inherent in us. Every human child must be specially introduced and trained to rules. Parents know from hard experience just how relentlessly children break rules, and how cleverly they rationalize doing so. Rules are not “natural” to the human organism, but once children are “broken” to them, as horses to saddles, we can build a truly human civilization.

Sometimes rules can be hard for adults, too. Our global civilization has waxed so powerful that individuals who achieve great wealth and power within it easily develop delusions of omnipotence. When you are über-rich and have multiple homes on different continents, assistants, servants, a yacht, a private plane, and numerous sycophants, it’s easy to forget that it was society’s rules and taxes, which declare and pay for your defense and “law and order,” that enabled you to acquire all those things in the first place. This truth applies all the more if you merely inherited them.

So it’s easy for the wealthy and powerful to push hard to cut rules and taxes. In the long run it’s counterproductive, but it’s perfectly natural. Shortsightedly, the wealthy and powerful prefer to rely on their current status, wealth and power to maintain their good lives and their influence over others.

History shows how dangerous a game that is. Wash away the rules, and everyone’s life, status, wealth and power roll with the dice. If nothing else, the French and Russian Revolutions proved that. So did the great world wars. How did the “elite” fare when Nazism and Communism came home to roost?

Today we are right on the cusp of that sort of catastrophe. When and if it comes, it won’t be confined to a single nation, as in France or Russia during their respective bloody revolutions, Germany during Nazism, or the Soviet Union and its satellites during Communism. This time, the chaos of broken rules is likely to be global.

The reason is simple: rules seem to be going out of fashion worldwide.

In China, Egypt, Hungary, Poland, Russia, Turkey and Venezuela, leaders who found elections and/or existing rules inconvenient have changed the rules. They’ve done so by using rigged “elections,” by co-opting the military and bureaucracy, or by simple guile or force. They’ve extended their own terms, declared themselves leaders for life, changed the rules of government, and weakened or eliminated the separation of powers. They’ve removed, emasculated or co-opted separate legislatures and law-enforcement organs, including prosecutors and the courts. They’ve overcome popular opposition by force, repression, imprisonment and selective assassination.

China under Xi

Because of its huge population and growing economic and military might, China’s changes may be the most consequential. Before Xi Jinping, a nine-member committee ruled China. China’s top two leaders were each limited to two five-year terms. Each also had to serve at least a five-year “apprenticeship” on the committee before assuming either of the two top jobs.

Xi cut the committee to seven members. He declared himself “chairman,” a title unused since Mao. He dropped the time limits on his own term of office and packed the committee with his cronies. All that was not hard to do in China, which, like Britain, has no written constitution.

Today Xi is a talented and skillful leader. But people change, as have Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Powerful men usually age like unrefrigerated eggs or meat, not like wine. Witness Mao, who liberated and unified China in his prime. In his dotage, he nearly destroyed China with bizarre spasms of absurdly destructive policy like the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.

Anyway, succession works best through meritocratic competition. It works worst when a crony gets anointed successor by a discredited old lion such as Mao or Mugabe, let alone as he falls after a long period of failure. Xi’s erasing good rules has almost certainly condemned China’s people to a long period of struggle and suffering, no matter how clever or effective Xi may seem in the near future.

Britain under Brexit

Yet by far the greatest threat to global peace, prosperity and security is what’s happening to rules right now in Britain and the United States. More than any others, these two nations, working together and globally, have helped construct the international rules-based order that has kept the peace among major powers and assured economic progress since 1945. That same global order has raised almost a billion people out of extreme poverty, most of them in China. It has helped make China and the EU what they are today.

But right now, as I write this, Britain and the US are busy dismantling the great gift of rules-based civilization that they have given their own people and mankind. Each is dismantling it in a different way, but both ways are terribly destructive.

Brexit is, of course, Britain’s own way.

Born of war, privation and utter devastation, the European Union is one of mankind’s greatest rules-based achievements, the other being the United States. I’ve devoted two essays (here and here) to outlining just how unusual and important the EU is.

Yet Britain—the prime progenitor of rules-based civilization—now wants out. At least it thinks it wants out, based on a hasty and partly misinformed referendum that its pols, with a dreadful lack of imagination, have taken as a master rule.

If you search the Web and recent history carefully, you will find only two coherent reasons why a bare majority of Brits voted out in 2016. They dislike “too much” immigration by foreigners, and they don’t like foreigners having power to make rules for Brits. The English were happy having rules set by people from four very different cultures—England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales—but now they don’t want to expand the club.

Poke beneath the surface, and these “reasons” begin to feel like an adolescent’s rationale for refusing to do her homework. Border-free migration works both ways. It lets some foreigners take some jobs from some Brits—mostly the jobs that Brits won’t do. But it also gives Brits access to jobs and civilized living in an economy six times bigger than Britain in population and seven times bigger in GDP.

As for the rules of trade, they let goods flow in and out of Britain without customs or other restraint. Curtailing those rules will slow or halt the flow. It will restrain and maybe halt the imports of medicines, fresh fruits, vegetables and flowers, as well as other, less urgent, foods and supplies that Brits have come to expect. It will hog-tie Britain’s exports and puts its native industries at a disadvantage. The more PM May tries to create a “soft-Brexit” that re-creates the EU’s benefits without the burdens, the more complex and impossible her job becomes. And the more understandably recalcitrant become the EU’s other members, who accept the burdens with the benefits because they understand the greater benefits of rules.

But enough of the contradictions and magical thinking that underlie what may be just a transient desire for Brexit, until Brits’ historically clear thinking kicks in. A pundit named Ian Dunt has poked fun at Brexit far more cleverly and thoroughly than I can.

Suffice it to say that the modern nation that has given the world the greatest gift of rules-based civilization from Magna Carta on is having a probably-temporary tantrum of adolescent rebellion in which its people don’t really know what they want, but just want their own way. It’s all a little late, don’t you think, after the Brits lost their Empire, barely survived their World War II “victory” financially, have kept only a handful of globally competitive companies (such as Rolls-Royce, for the jet engines, not the cars), and have been lauded by their own liberal economic spokes magazine, The Economist, for making banking, Russian oligarchs and other immigrants the mainstays of London’s economy?

The US under Trump

However silly or nasty Britain’s temporary insanity may seem, it’s nothing compared to what’s transpiring here in the United States. At least PM May is polite, truthful, civilized, and a hard worker. Our president is not just grousing about a particular set of foreign rules. He’s making a sustained, multi-front assault on the very concept of rules and law.

One of the oldest rules of civilization comes from the Ten Commandments: “thou shalt not bear false witness.” In modern terms, it reads simply: “don’t lie.” Yet according to one of the United States’ few remaining independent newspapers, President Trump has broken this rules 7,645 times in his two-plus years in office.

But Trump’s personal transgressions of written rules hardly stop there. Already in his mere two years in office, he has taken (or planned and threatened to take) our nation out of three painstakingly negotiated sets of international rules: (1) the Paris Climate Accord, (2) the Iran nuclear deal, and (3) the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, a key disarmament pact with Russia. His disdain for the Climate Accord and the climate science underlying it also reflects his consistent disregard for the rules of science that global society—with the Brits, Europe and US in the lead—have built up during the four centuries since Galileo’s near-excommunication.

But that’s still not all. Trump’s Cabinet and sub-Cabinet of ex-lobbyists and lackeys have made a practice of repealing or curtailing regulatory rules protecting the American people and their environment from toxic chemicals and effluent, including rules governing coal-fired power plants. Worst of all, Trump has deliberately and systematically ridiculed and maligned the national organs of intelligence and law enforcement that enforce our rules. He’s repeatedly and relentlessly slandered their officers, including those of the CIA, the DIA, the NSA, the FBI and the DOJ. Why? Because they want to hold him to the rules, too.

As a recent exposé in the New York Times reveals in excruciating detail, Trump’s goal in this sustained assault is to reduce the written rules of law and the written procedures of investigation, in the public mind, to no more than optional and willful political action. He wants to make rules that may have arisen out of politics, but that now govern life every day, seem only aspirational, like a political party’s platform. He thereby hopes to escape impeachment while serving as president, and to avoid indictment for his crimes after he leaves or is forced from office.

Trump is making a concerted and collusive effort to reduce our rules to the appearance of political whim, thereby undermining political and social support for having any rules at all. He wants to take us all back to rule by caudillo, dictator or king, with himself as Number One. And his efforts have had some success among some 40% of our American people.

Sometimes it’s tempting to dismiss Trump’s drunken roundhouse punches at rules as the ravings of the child’s mind that oft seems to inhabit his adult body. But to his mouthpiece Rudy Giuliani, to many Cabinet and sub-Cabinet officers, to his loyal followers in Congress (mostly the House)—and to the 35-40% of American voters whom he has entranced—it’s all a deadly serious business. It’s all part of a design to allow Trump and the GOP to break and evade, without consequence, the rules written and established over the last 250 years, including many in our written Constitution.

In essence, it’s all an attempted coup by short-sighted, selfish and self-centered but now powerful people, who never think of the chaos or revolution to come. Après nous le déluge.

If successful, they will bend our rules-based democracy toward a Mafia-style system in which loyalty to the top dog is the only rule, and his whim is both the law and its rationale. What Trump is doing with his needless Wall on our Southern border is just the first of many silly, useless, wasteful and oppressive things that his Mafia-style system could bring.

Our Species’ Possibly Dismal Future

If that rules-free system ever takes hold here, and if Britain does make Brexit, the world will change forever. The European Union will replace Britain and the United States as the last best hope of mankind. It will become the sole remaining repository of Enlightenment values. Standing alone, without Britain, it will become the bulwark of rules-based civilization.

The rest of our world will descend into precisely the oppressive global dystopia foreseen by George Orwell in his famous novel 1984. It will degenerate into a rules-free free-for-all among Chinese, Russian and American empires, which will crush human rights and aspirations with all the power of nuclear weapons, Big Data, and AI. The EU, whose importance Orwell did not foresee, will become the only significant wild card and the only hope of human civilization, perhaps for a millennium.

Nothing in our species’ history or biology prevents this from happening. We humans have free will, which includes the freedom to be stupid. Only if we Americans and our fellow Brits wise up, and if we both do so in time, does our species stand a good chance of leaping the pitfall that now yawns before us.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

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For analysis of how to save real news and America’s ability to see straight, click here.
For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here.
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For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
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For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017
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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 2/28/2019 04:15:00 AM   0 comments

24 February 2019

Saving Real News

For a brief note on avoiding health lobbying Armageddon, click here.

For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

We Americans are losing a three-front war against disinformation and fake news. We are losing badly.

Lately, we’ve focused our attention on the newest front: foreign fake news served over the Internet by the likes of Russia and Iran. But the two most insidious and longstanding sources of disinformation and fake news are native. They grew up right here at home. And each has been expanding in scope and influence for over two generations.

Fox television and its fellow travelers on right-wing radio together comprise the most effective and insidious political propaganda organ in human history. They pioneered three novel techniques that the propaganda machines of Hitler, Stalin and Mao never conceived.

First, although they sometimes make spectacular mistakes, they don’t, as a rule, dish up original lies. Instead, they repeat others’ lies, including those of our president and corporate propaganda organs. That way, they can credibly claim to be serving up the “news” as others said it. Our “mainstream” media encourage this scam by over-relying on quotations from pols and celebrities, rather than doing original research or consulting less famous but more knowledgeable experts.

Second, Fox and friends make their propaganda “fun” and accessible to their target audience: less-educated, mostly male voters. They do so by hiring entertaining blowhards to present it. Again, this technique is something that the “classic” propagandists of the last century never tried. Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda for Hitler, for example, was so highbrow that much of it went over ordinary Germans’ heads.

Not so Fox. Its blowhards practice mind-melding with their target audience of non-college-educated, overly self-assured males, for which the fictional Archie Bunker was a paradigm. The hired blowhards shout. They rant breathlessly. They gesticulate. They exaggerate. They wax sarcastic. They disrespect and ridicule minorities, especially sexual ones. They gang up on specially selected token opposition, reinforcing the group conformity that defines their target demographic. They predict gloom and doom. In every way, they mimic, blend into, and so co-opt their target audience.

Fox’ and Sinclair’s third technique of propaganda is the most clever and insidious of all. They subtly erase the line between fact and opinion, news and commentary. They blend the two together seamlessly, so that only professional journalists and people outside their target audience can see what they’re doing. Not only do they consistently present their own opinions as fact; in so doing, they also train their audience not to recognize the difference between fact and opinion. (A good example of the method is this composite clip, which shows how Fox used the technique under two different presidents, demonizing Obama and lauding Trump for doing precisely the same thing.)

This assault on real news has been going on for about two generations, ever since Rupert Murdoch’s Fox won the commanding heights of cable-television “news.” Rush Limbaugh and other radio-talk-show blowhards extended the technique into audio. Now Sinclair has broadened the empire of zealous right-wing cant with its nascent monopoly of radio in medium-sized cities.

The second major front in the battle against fake news goes mostly unnoticed as such. It’s the battle with the collective propaganda organs of corporate America, or, as the current euphemism has it, their “advertising and public relations.”

Few today recognize non-news corporations as sources of fake news. They fall under most observers’ radar because they specialize. They don’t try to serve up fake news every day, and they don’t cover anywhere near every news topic. Instead, they focus their effort on shading, denying and refuting specific facts that threaten their profits. They make only irregular contact with the general public and keep a narrow focus on specific products that are under threat from the advancement of science and technology. They use fake news to wind back the clock.

Two spectacular successes of corporate fake news illustrate the phenomenon. Both are so well known as to have become part of today’s social fabric.

For nearly half a century, tobacco companies lied about, obfuscated and denied the health effects of smoking tobacco, even as proof in medical and scientific journals piled up. Today, with deaths from smoking just beginning to decline for the first time (due mostly to a drop in smoking), tobacco still kills more people annually than traffic accidents, terrorist attacks and gun violence combined. Yet as a result of its producers’ fake news, tobacco continues to evade plenary regulation as a dangerous controlled substance.

What makes the tobacco story so unusual is that dying from lung cancer, heart disease or emphysema is hardly an abstract or remote political issue. It’s about as personal as any issue can get. It affects smokers, their families, and the health professionals who treat them in a direct and personal way.

Yet despite the large numbers of smokers and ex-smokers who die every year, the tobacco industries’ fake news has held off a coordinated public response to the scourge for well over two generations. Now the battle has shifted to electronic cigarettes, where fake news about their effects on youth and bystanders continues, and the use of electronic cigarettes to help addicted smokers quit muddies the waters.

The story of global warming is less personal but in some ways worse. Last year the New York Times reminded us, in a special report, that American scientists first rang the alarm in the 1970s. Yet purveyors of coal, oil and gas and their byproducts mounted a spectacularly effective fake news campaign. So effective was it that today, coming on half a century later, the United States is the only nation to have withdrawn from the Paris Climate Accord, and the only major power whose leaders still deny global warming and its source in burning fossil fuels. And it was our own American scientists who had sounded the alarm and had done the leading research in the first place!

A third, more specialized, example of corporate fake news has less longevity. It’s a rare example of positive fake news, as distinguished from the negative fake news that disputes the well established science of cigarette smoke’s assault on human health and carbon dioxide’s assault on our climate. This particular bit of fake news asserts that “clean coal”—in general or in the form of carbon sequestration—is a currently viable technology, rather than a public-relations slogan and a research project.

In fact, there is no such thing today as “clean coal” or carbon sequestration in the real world. The very few carbon-sequestration demonstration projects that have worked at all have proved unsustainable in the long term, as well as much more expensive and polluting than alternative fuels like natural gas.

That’s why private industry in the United States, where “fracking” has made natural gas cheap, has almost universally chosen natural gas as the preferred fuel for generating electricity. Not only is it a cheaper fuel than coal per kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. It also produces far less carbon dioxide (the green house gas), particulate pollution and sulfur dioxide (which cause asthma and other respiratory diseases), and mercury pollution of waterways and fish (which concentrates itself up the food chain and makes sushi inappropriate for pregnant women).

The negative fake news about smoking and global warming tries to disclaim ineluctable, eternal truths—the well-proven long-term damage that tobacco smoke does to human health and that fossil-fuel-caused global warming does to our planet’s climate. In contrast, the positive fake news of “clean coal” may not be false forever. One can never be entirely certain that human ingenuity will remain incapable of solving the problem of carbon sequestration and doing it economically. But no one has succeeded so far, after about a decade of serious research. And there are good practical reasons why succeeding has proven elusive. “Clean coal” remains an expensive research project so risky that private industry will not finance it on its own dime but demands that government foot the bill.

So there you have it. Facts, real news and “truth” are on the ropes in the United States of America. Longstanding and immensely powerful private institutions have battered them bloody, and there is no fully public institution strong enough to defend them. (PBS and NPR, which are hardly dominant in their respective small but significant audiences, are only partly funded by government money.)

All this action on the first two fronts of the fake-news war makes the action on the third understandable. Our political sphere has not yet even recognized, let alone come to grips with, the third kind of fake news. That’s weaponized and individualized fake news, served over social media on the Internet, and prepared over the Internet by mining private data to derive the political and psychological profiles of target individuals. Already foreign spooks (Vladimir Putin and Russia’s Internet Research Agency) and domestic political interests (the Mercer Family working with Cambridge Analytica, a British firm) have used this form of fake news to help elect Trump as our president.

As if all this were not horrific enough, traditional purveyors of real news have suffered yet another harsh reality. Their business model is failing. Facebook and other Internet media have sucked up the advertising revenue that newspapers used to depend on. Today Facebook earns “more ad revenue in a year than all American newspapers combined.” And insofar as this third front is concerned, Facebook is a big part of the problem.

So the traditional vendors of real news are suffering and dying like bees in colony collapse. Local newspapers have been and are failing by the hundreds. A vulture capitalist is buying them up and stripping them of their real property. Not a week goes by without reports of journalists losing their jobs.

Today a cold-blooded, clear-eyed assessment suggests that real news could soon disappear in America, if only for lack of independent, respected firms to convey it. Our society and democracy could develop a culture of fake news offered by the rich, the powerful and the devious, and anyone else with an agenda. Outside of college classrooms and corporate boardrooms, what is “reality” could become what hucksters, self-promoters and con-men like our current president say it is.

What, if anything, can we do? It’s far too late to repeal or modify the First Amendment, and doing so would contravene our national character. So we can’t, as China and Iran are doing and India is reportedly considering, hire tens of thousands to censor the Internet or convey official “truth.” And even assuming Mark Zuckerberg has the motivation, by the time he comes to realize how deeply his greed and negligence have wounded our democracy, let alone to conceive and implement effective countermeasures, our democracy may, for all practical purposes, be dead and buried.

We seem to have only one desperate hope of restoring real news in America anywhere near as quickly as we must to save our Republic and our future as a nation built on realism, practicality, and science. We must re-create something like the universal public respect for professional, real news that prevailed when Walter Cronkite ruled the airwaves and three consummately professional TV news channels informed us: ABC, CBS and NBC.

Whatever modern substitutes we anoint or re-create for these services today must likewise be private. The right wing has done such an effective job of destroying public esteem for government that PBS and NPR—media vilified as “left wing” while only partially sustained by public funding—are unequal to the task, at least without assistance.

There are only two private, professional news organizations with enough resources and prestige to rise to the occasion. Both are “print” media, including online. As print media, they foster a “cooler,” more thoughtful and thorough approach to news than video. They are the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Each of these newspapers has managed to create a sustainable financial model from subscription fees. The Washington Post also has Jeff Bezos’ bottomless financial backing. More important, each paper has the kind of broad and deep team of professional journalists, and therefore the broad coverage, that no TV news organization now can sustain.

There are economic downsides to elevating these two private firms to the high place that the three professional TV news media once occupied. Advertising once supported the three TV networks’ news, including advertising on unrelated network entertainment. That advertising made real news free of charge to the viewer. In contrast, subscribing to both the Post and the Times today will cost each subscriber well over $200 per year after promotional periods. That’s a significant sum for many Americans.

Yet subscribing to both papers is essential for those who can afford it, lest one or the other achieve a monopoly. Those who can only subscribe to one will be locked into a single source of news. And both are, in the final analysis, private firms, with all the partiality that implies in our age of privatization and belittled government.

The hour is late, and there are no alternatives. Real news is on life support in America. We need something—anything—to serve as did ABC, CBS, and NBC TV in the last century. We need honest journalists and their real news to connect us all with a common reality on which we can build our individual opinions.

Without that something, we will morph into a social organism with multiple eyes that see differently in different directions, and we will almost certainly die. Supporting a duopoly in real news, as distinguished from the triopoly of TV news in the old days, is a small price to pay for social and political survival.

Broadcast media can nowise fill the gap. The ones that still survive are rapidly succumbing to the breathless sensationalism of Fox, if not its over-the-top partisanship. Even Rachel Maddow is, though she’s by far the best of the lot. Part of the reason is that video and audio are such much less time-efficient than print, so breathlessness comes with their territory.

Rightly or wrongly, broadcast media are also tarred as partisan themselves. The president and his cronies have tried to tar the Post and the Times with partisanship, too, but the charge has not yet stuck, at least among their educated readership. And both go out of their way to avoid the appearance, let alone the reality, of partisanship.

Both also have robust Internet presences and mobile apps. Both have podcasts which, for listeners driving in cars, are the modern equivalent of the old AM radio broadcasts. Both are experimenting with virtual reality and other leading-edge media.

Due to their successful subscription business models, both have the money to expand into new media as technology evolves. More important, as I have outlined in another post, both make much of their news content available for free, in the form of free daily online newsletters and a limited number of free online stories per month.

Compared to the Post, the Times has several flaws, which I have noted in earlier essays (click here or here). It puts far too much emphasis on the arts and on fashion, and far too little on science and engineering. As a result, it has few reporters who understand the rudiments of technology or quantitative analysis. Many of its reporters appear to be frustrated creative writers: they write news stories (even business and political ones) like short stories, in chronological order, instead of the tightly-organized logical order that news, let alone efficient reading, demands. And the Times has hired reporters like Sheryl Gay Stolberg, who mimic Fox in front-page stories, name-calling all likely Democratic presidential candidates as “far left,” without elucidating the many differences among them.

But in these times such sins are peccadillo. We Americans are badly losing the war to keep news real. Today we are losing the war on all three fronts. Therefore we need to recruit every national news service with professional standards to the cause. Despite its failings the Times meets that rather modest criterion.

So we who care about democracy and the real news that supports it must support both remaining professional national newspapers if we can. We must consider the dual subscription fees as a tiny addition to the substantial taxes that we pay for a government that we hope someday will work again. We must consider those fees installment payments on the survival of our Republic.

A Personal Note. I try to walk the walk, not just talk the talk, on at least the most important things discussed on this Blog. For example, I now am able to drive on the Sun’s power, and not with fossil fuels, at least when residing in Santa Fe, where I keep my Chevy Volt.

And so it is with real news. I’ve subscribed to the Post for about a year now. For years I’ve groused about the Times and its deficiencies, including its reluctance to bite the hand that feeds it—Manhattan’s arrogant and high-handed finance-banking culture. But now I’ve subscribed to it, too, on line, even though my fiancée already has a print subscription that we enjoy together whenever we reside in her home.

Along with our donations to public TV and radio, these are our hopeful subsidies, which we make for the survival of American democracy. They are not so much consumer purchases as partial fulfillment of our patriotic duties as citizens.

Biological organisms that cannot see clearly mostly die. We hope that doesn’t happen to America. But today we Americans are, as a society, well on the way to that sorry fate. Our last hope is to pay the freight to keep real news and real journalism alive.

Avoiding Health Lobbying Armageddon

Today a front-page (print) story in the Times predicted lobbying Armageddon, once again, in America. Apparently every professional specialty and trade association involved in health insurance and even health care—doctors, hospitals, medical groups, pharmaceutical makers and distributors, and (of course!) health insurers—is joining in a single innocuously named trade association to lobby against so-called “Medicare for All.” Revealing how money talks in America, they’ve hired a key operative from Hillary Clinton’s campaign to lead their charge.

The focus of this effort is self-evidently self-interest. Private health insurers want to keep their profits. Their executives want to keep their often obscenely high salaries. Ditto private hospitals, private pharmaceutical companies (virtually all of them), and private hospitals and medical groups. They all fear their private, profit-making enterprises being outlawed by government decree. And they will all put their considerable resources, their time, their social clout, and their bodies on the line to keep that from happening.

It all reminds me of my late favorite uncle, a surgeon. He wasn’t interested in business or paperwork. He wanted to use his medical training to help people. So he spent most of his career in the Navy, on active duty. He and his wife both served in World War II and Korea, and he rose to the rank of Captain (the equivalent of colonel in our ground forces) before retiring. Yet when I spoke to him about Medicare in the early seventies, he fulminated about “socialized medicine” and became uncharacteristically unreasonable.

This is what Bernie and his ilk are up against in seeking to phase out private insurance and private medicine: a huuuuge fight. It’s what their socialist forebears got every time they pushed universal health insurance by outlawing private insurance. They got political Armageddon. They had to fight the most effective, well-financed and relentless propaganda machines in human history.

There is another way. I’ve outlined the approach in another post, which got surprisingly few hits, considering its importance. Maybe my timing was wrong, or maybe most Dem presidential candidates have already made up their minds on this make-or-break issue.

But Armageddon is a bad idea, whether it involves nuclear weapons, foot soldiers or lobbyists. Better to avoid it if you can.

Advocates for universal health insurance can do so simply by pushing “Medicare for All Who Want It,” leaving private health insurance safe and intact. Over time, privately insured patients will migrate to the public system because: (1) it will cost less without private profit and with more efficient administration, (2) it will offer lower premiums because it will have a bigger risk pool than any private plan, (3) it’s independent of employment and so fully portable, and (4) it eliminates the constant annoyance and confusion of self-interested advertising and promotion.

Yes, the lobbyists will fight “Medicare for All Who Want It,” too. But they’ll be fighting without their principal rhetorical and political weapons. There won’t be any coercion: patients will have free choice all the way. The many who want to stay right where they are can do so. The transition to government insurance will be gradual, by attrition; both patients and providers, including insurance companies, will have time to adapt. They could have decades, and those decades will pass without notable enrichment of lobbyists, lawyers and other professional advocates.

Best of all, the new law will not contravene human inertia. Voters who like what they have will not have to spend days researching and considering new insurance plans. Insurers can continue doing what they’re doing. Ditto doctors, hospitals, medical groups and pharmaceutical companies. Even members of Congress won’t have to dispute and write transition rules: natural attrition will do the work for them.

Some people like a good fight. Donald Trump and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez both appear to be among them. But as much as I admire the latter’s spirit and empathy for suffering people, I think she has a lot to learn.

Getting things done without screaming and stress, like “No-Drama Obama“ at his best, is the highest form of politics. I hope that some of our Democratic presidential hopefuls, at least those who haven’t yet committed themselves, will at least take a look at a softer, smoother plan.

Perhaps part of the reason for neglecting a smoother plan is that it would use taxes for financing. Apparently many pols consider taxing the kiss of death. Certainly GOP propagandists have done their best to make it so.

But taxing for health insurance has three distinct advantages, two practical and one political. First, there is no constitutional objection to taxing; our Sixteenth Amendment allowed Congress to tax incomes over a century ago. Even Chief Justice Roberts, in his decisive concurrence, upheld “Obamacare” by interpreting its mandate-penalty as a tax.

Second, there is no apparent impediment to taxing specially for a specific purpose. A tax imposed for “Medicare for All Who Want It” would be nothing more, in substance, than the fees that Medicare insureds pay for their insurance right now. And the tax/fees could be made progressive: richer insureds could pay more, as even now they do.

Finally, attitudes toward taxes are changing rapidly. The vast majority of voters have seen how Trump paid off himself, his social class, and big corporations with undeserved tax cuts. So public sentiment is rising to use taxes for their original and proper purpose: to promote the general welfare. What could do that better than universal health insurance, which protects individuals and, through “herd immunity,” the community and the nation?

If the taxes for health insurance in fact pay most or all of the cost of providing the health insurance, on an insured-by-insured basis, the common sense of tax financing would be hard to deny. Except to the extent the tax/premium payments were progressive, there would be no transfers or redistribution of wealth at all, just payment by individuals for government services.

Links to Popular Recent Posts

 For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, click here.
For analysis of how Facebook scams voters and society, click here.
For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here.
For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here.
For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here.
For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here.
For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here.
For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here.
For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here.
For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here.
For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here.
For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here.
For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here.
For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here.
For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here.
For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here.
For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here.
For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here.
For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here.
For additional reasons, click here.
For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here.
For Democrats’ core values, click here.
The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights?
For how our two parties lost their souls, click here.
For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here.
For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here.
For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here.

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017
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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 2/24/2019 10:43:00 AM   0 comments

19 February 2019

Zuckerberg’s Scam


[For an update on how Zuckerberg scams advertisers, too, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

Sometimes accidents make you smarter. So it was with me and Facebook.

For years after Google’s Gmail started filing incoming e-mails from social media under a separate tab, I never noticed. I had a Facebook account, but I didn’t open, read or post through it more than a few times a year. The reason was mostly lack of time and interest; repetitive password difficulties also figured in.

Facebook’s unsolicited e-mail notifications just kept piling up in my Gmail account, under Google’s social-media tab, unbeknownst to and unread by me. Eventually, that traffic helped drive my Gmail account’s storage toward Google’s generous free-of-charge limit. So I pared down my stored e-mails, in chronological order, focusing on Facebook’s unsolicited messages. That left me with enough stored e-mails from Facebook to make a semi-scientific study of what it had been trying to do.

My collection of 3,093 unsolicited social-media e-mails runs from August 28, 2012 to the present—a span of 6.5 years. The vast majority, well over 90%, are from Facebook. The rest are comments to this Blog, requests from LinkedIn and other professional sites, and random Internet chatter. (I have no Twitter account and, for reasons explained here, never will.)

So over the 6.5 years, Facebook had sent me about three thousand unsolicited e-mails. I now know I could have unsubscribed from them, apparently without closing my account. But I didn’t bother then. Left unread under my social-media tab, they were a tiny, unseen nuisance.

But on average the flow was 1.26 e-mails every day. Every single message was an attempt to drive me back to Facebook’s site.

In the beginning, the “click bait” was lame. For example, the heading from one December 2012 message reads “Jay, you have 6 messages, 21 photo tags and 9 friend requests.”

But Facebook or its algorithms slowly learned what piques people’s interest: other people. By the end of my 6.5-year sample period, almost every Facebook e-mail heading began with one or more people’s names. “So-and-so has added a new photo.” “So-and-so 1 has commented on So-and-so 2’s photo.” “So-and-so 3 has tagged you in a photo.”

Every once in a while, an e-mail heading contained names of people whom I barely knew, or didn’t know at all. At the outset, these headings began with the words “Do you know . . .” Later, they began with the names alone, often six to nine in a row.

At times the appearance of a particular name was downright spooky. I had a close friend—now my fiancée—who lived in different city from me for over thirty years. Three months after we developed a romantic relationship, the name of her future daughter-in-law, a Russian national then living in Moscow, appeared in one of these headings.

I’ve lived a peripatetic life, making a home in thirteen cities around the world. There aren’t enough hours in the day for me to maintain contact with all the people I’ve met or known. Yet there was Facebook, pushing as relentlessly as only software can to reconnect me with all those people—and connect me with all their own friends and contacts. Its inanimate software almost seemed offended by my long absences from its site.

The reason for all this nagging is not hard to understand. Facebook “monetizes” people and relationships among them. It does so regardless of how fleeting, superficial, unimportant, exploitative, damaging, or even life-threatening those relationships may be. (Think of the influence of hateful Facebook posts on recent Hindu-Muslim pogroms in India or on the not-so-recent attempted genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. Think of Charlottesville and how the white supremacists organized their march of terror.)

It doesn’t matter to Facebook what “its” people do on or off the site. As long as they participate and swell the gross number that Facebook can tout to advertisers and paying users, each new name is gold. Every name means a new subject to track, a new regime of privacy to crack through persuasion and evasion, and a new egg to break to make the omelette of advertising, promotion, and whatever, including (lately) spycraft, hateful ideologies, and international political propaganda.

Every name helps Facebook make money. And now it reportedly has 2.2 billion more-than-occasional users, about one-third of our entire human species.

But does Facebook do anything to supervise, control, regulate or manage what those 2.2 billion users do on its site? If governments and others hadn’t pushed hard for some sort—any sort—of supervision, it’s doubtful Facebook would be doing anything even today.

As long as it could, Facebook claimed that it’s just an inanimate “platform,” mechanically transmitting information like a telephone line or cell-phone tower. Some “platform”! I can’t recall my cell phone or LAN ever nagging me—let alone over once a day for 6.5 years—to get back on line.

Even today, Facebook seems to be dragging its heels against supervision as hard as it can. It sends poorly programmed (but cheap!) algorithms to do the hard and expensive work of recognizing and taking down fake news, hate, incitement to violence, conspiracy theories, and other fantasy masquerading as reality.

One man bears responsibility for this: Mark Zuckerberg. Almost unique among corporate chieftains, he owns a controlling share of the voting stock of Facebook, his creation. Everything that Facebook is and does is under his thumb. No corporate baron in human history was ever as powerful: John D. Rockefeller controlled only one part of energy (oil), not information, and that for far less than one-third of our human species.

At the beginning, Zuckerberg’s mantra was reportedly “Move fast and break things.” That he has most certainly done. He has driven relentlessly to amass billions of users without rules or restraint, except where government and social pressure, recently, have forced him begrudgingly to invent and apply some rudimentary brakes. Enforcement of nascent rules is still weak, sporadic and unreliable.

Zuckerberg sanctimoniously claims “good” in bringing virtual strangers together. But where’s the “good” now? Where’s the Arab Spring now? under the oppressive thumbs of El-Sisi, Putin and MBS, that’s where. Where’s the “good” in Brexit now? Where’s the good in our presidency and our divided Congress? Where’s the good in our media, as demagogues, liars, amateurs, kooks and conspiracy theorists steadily replace unemployed journalists, day by day? Where’s the good in our hatefully divided society?

The best analogy I can devise for Facebook is a playground full of 2.2 billion kindergarteners. Facebook’s users are like children because they don’t have the faintest idea how the system works. If Zuckerberg has his way, they never will; he likes his algorithms secret.

Users also have a childlike, naive trust in the people they “meet” on line. Yet unless those people are their own relatives or realspace friends, users mostly have no idea who they are. Unless users are careful with their settings, the sources of their “news” on Facebook can be any one of those 2.2 billion users. And even if they are careful, anyone can reach them if a trusted user forwards or re-posts a juicy tidbit.

That’s the “magic” of “many-to-many” media, of which Facebook is the most used and most dangerous exemplar. Other well-known “many-to-many” media, such as product reviews and public comments on news and opinion articles, are limited in subject matter: the product or the article. Only Facebook has no limits whatever on subject matter, thereby inviting Russian propaganda or hate mail to appear next to a cousin’s wedding or baby announcement.

If Facebook could somehow limit its use to its original “Old Lang Syne” purpose—letting old acquaintances keep in touch—the harm it now does would decrease dramatically. But so would its market and income, and therein lies the rub.

As for Facebook’s users, most will never meet their influential Facebook “news” sources in person, hear their voices or look them in the eye. Many users are completely unaware of the actual sources of what they take as “news” on Facebook—whether real or fake. Many are blissfully oblivious to journalists’ training and mandatory code of ethics, which most posters on Facebook lack. And Facebook has no monetary incentive to inform them.

Kindergarten teachers know full well what they get when they leave their charges on a playground, with no real rules or supervision, for extended periods of time. They get Lord of the Flies. That’s what we have on line now, rapidly expanding worldwide, the faster in the places where Facebook has more users. And the clearest and most notable consequence of this widespread degradation of human civilization is that Mark Zuckerberg has become one of richest and most powerful men in human history, bigger than Genghis Khan.

What a clever scam! It puts the sanctimonious self-enrichment of medieval popes to shame.

Software, artificial intelligence and markets are our new millennium’s substitutes for religion. To most people, they are as dark and mysterious as religion, yet with all the prestige of modern science and technology. Ordinary people and even uninitiated experts are expected to genuflect before them like penitents before a priest or serfs before a lord. Even in the nation’s most progressive city, San Francisco, a monument to software and AI called “The Salesforce Building” now dominates the once-rounded skyline.

Yet however much the institutions, processes and buildings may seem to change, the forces of human motivation underlying them remain the same. Not often are those motives charitable or altruistic. Not often are their impacts wise, even if well-intentioned. Not always do they promote the general welfare as our Constitution’s preamble commands.

In our new third millennium, will democracy control software, AI and markets for the general welfare any better than serfs and vassals controlled religion and monarchy in the second? The outlook so far is not encouraging. Facebook enjoys the mystique of the seemingly supernatural, a hardened monopoly with a deeply entrenched network effect, and the peculiar American reverence for anyone who, by whatever means, got very rich very quickly.

UPDATE: The Scam’s Other Dimension

There is yet another dimension to Zuckerberg’s Scam. It affects the advertisers on Facebook.

Among the 708 advertisers listed in my deactivated account download, over 192 are apparently local small businesses. Most but not all of them sell real property or cars. They have names like Alfa Romeo of Manhattan, ARS/Rescue Rooter - Illinois, Expand Realty Lubbock TX, Mt Hood Realty Team, Porsche South Orlando, Serra Mazda of Birmingham, or Tom Lundy - Orlando Realtor.

I have indeed lived in at least thirteen different cities on three continents. But I’m now 73. Except for sporadic travel, I’ve mostly settled down in two places: Santa Fe, NM, where I have my house, and Berkeley, CA, where my wife-to-be lives.

The places where these 192 small businesses are located are places where I’ve never lived (or lived before the Internet existed) and have no desire to live. The mere prospect of living in some would drive me to seppuku. The chances that I will ever live or shop—let alone for a car or real property—where these small businesses are located lie somewhere between infinitesimal and zero.

So what are these 192 advertisers—over one-quarter of the total—paying for?

This is the “magic” of Zuckerberg’s secret algorithms. Not only are they late, weak and ineffective in preventing bad actors from destroying democracy and civilized society. They are also, apparently, busy scamming innocent small businesses. Do you think maybe it’s time for some advocate for the people—Congress, the FTC, the DOJ, or a special public commission—to peek behind the curtain and take a close look at the Wizard of Oz?

Endnotes

I’m just hours away from deleting Facebook from my computers and my life forever, while keeping a record of my past participation for future study and blog posts. I can’t think of any reason why I would want to continue to participate, i.e., to remain yet one more insignificant sucker in Zuckerberg’s civilization-shaking scam.

Before deleting my account, I successfully downloaded all the data that Facebook helped me download and save from my seldom-used account. The following statistics reveal Facebook’s priorities, if not my own:

Jay’s Facebook Statistics
ItemType/NumberFile Size
Largest FileAdvertisers’ Names205 Kb
Second Largest FileOthers’ Posts on My Timeline60 Kb
Friends52
Advertisers708


Many of the advertisers I’d never heard of, before or since. Among those I had heard of were Americans for Prosperity and several local affiliates—all PACs founded, funded or run by the ultraconservative, fossil-fuel-crazed Koch Brothers, whose political views could not differ more from mine.

Erratum: An earlier version of this post reported only 118 advertisers. I had forgotten that I had counted them in groups of six and remembered only when counting the localized ones. I regret the error.

Might these spare statistics for a seldom-used account reflect the relative importance of various account features to Zuckerberg?

Here’s the e-mail blast I’m sending to my contacts to inform them of my decision to delete Facebook:

Bye-Bye Facebook!

    By this message, I’m notifying all my e-mail contacts that I’m deleting Facebook from my computers and my life.

    I have an account but don’t like Facebook, never took it seriously, and didn’t use it much. Now there are more serious reasons to delete it, including those discussed on my Blog here, here, here, here, and here.

    This is my personal decision. I don’t fault you or anyone else for thinking differently, or for having built a business or part of your online personal life around Facebook—but I hope not the news you consume!

    If you’d like to keep in touch with me, you can always do so at the reply address. It’ll be active as long as I live and Google supports Gmail.

    Best to all, Jay
[For the consequences of Trump’s manufactured border emergency, click here. For a brief note on Colin Kaepernick’s good work and settlement with the NFL, click here. For an outline of universal health insurance without coercion, disruption of satisfactory private insurance, or a trace of “socialism,” click here. For analysis of the Virginia blackface debacle, click here. For an update on how Twitter subverts politics, click here. For analysis of women’s chances to take the presidency in 2020, click here. For brief comment on Trump’s State of the Union Speech and Stacey Abrams’ response for the Dems, click here. For reasons why the Huawei affair requires diplomacy, not criminal prosecution, click here. For how Speaker Pelosi has become a new sheriff in town, click here. For how Trump’s misrule could kill your kids, click here. For comment on MLK Day 2019 and the structural legacies of slavery, click here. For reasons why the partial government shutdown helps Dems the longer it lasts, click here. For a discussion of how our national openness hurts us and what we really need from China, click here. For a brief explanation of how badly both Trump and his opposition are failing at “the art of the deal,” click here. For a deep dive into how Apple tries to thwart Google’s capture of the web-browser market, click here. For a review of Speaker Pelosi’s superb qualifications to lead the Democratic Party, click here. For reasons why natural-gas and electric cars are essential to national security, click here. For additional reasons, click here. For the source of Facebook’s discontents and how to save democracy from it, click here. For Democrats’ core values, click here. The Last Adult is Leaving the White House. Who will Shut Off the Lights? For how our two parties lost their souls, click here. For the dire portent of Putin’s high-fiving the Saudi Crown Prince, click here. For updated advice on how to drive on the Sun’s power alone, or without fossil fuels, click here. For a 2018 Thanksgiving Message, click here. For a list of links to recent posts in reverse chronological order, click here.]

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posted by Jay Dratler, Jr., Ph.D., J.D. @ 2/19/2019 01:09:00 AM   0 comments