Lies the Oligarchs Tell Us

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.

CNN’s Subversive Climate Marathon

[To skip to the principal post on oligarchs’ lies, click here.] Erratum: An earlier version of this commentary erroneously reported CNN’s climate-crisis program as allotting seven hours per candidate, rather than seven hours in all. I regret the error, which has been corrected below. Readers may be wondering why this blog has had no comment on CNN’s seven-hour marathon “town hall” on climate change. The short answer is that the spectacle was a travesty and perversion of both “news” and political reporting. How bad was it? Let me count the ways, as briefly as I can. First of all, few but paid political operatives are going to watch seven hours of political blather, let alone in a single continuous sitting. Voters have to work, eat, sleep or (if still students) study and attend classes. Instead of emphasizing the importance of fighting climate change, this spectacle trivialized it. It implied that climate change is just a show that you can tune into and out of from time to time, until the Earth heats beyond the range in which our species evolved. Second, there really isn’t that much to be said—at least that much both true and important—about climate change as a political issue. It’s an existential threat to our civilization and even our species, as much or more than nuclear proliferation. It’s going to require an “all hands on deck” approach, i.e., far greater global cooperation than our species has ever attempted, let alone achieved. We should have started decades ago, so we have to start now with instantaneously Herculean effort. The US is well-positioned to lead the process in wealth, research, technology, and communication; but we’re stymied by a president and his rabid base who believe the whole thing is a hoax. Leading a global response to these challenges offers the leading nation(s) and people advancement, if not supremacy, in jobs, science, technology, business, infrastructure, and ultimately economic dominance. That’s about all you need to know to evaluate climate change as a political issue. You probably took less than minute to read the previous paragraph. So what could seven hours of obsessive focus on the subject add? The answer is my third point. By forcing each candidate to devote excessive time to the subject, CNN increased the chances for gaffes, misstatements, exaggerations, and less thoughtful replies, which CNN then could use (and repeat endlessly) as “gotchas.” CNN swept these gotchas up and presented them as twisted “summaries” of the candidates’ views. If you doubt this, just take a look at CNN’s “key takeaways” page. Ironically, for Elizabeth Warren the “key takeaway” itself contained implied criticism of the whole focus-on-trivia fiasco: “Warren said that conversations around regulating light bulbs, banning plastic straws and cutting down on red meat are exactly what the fossil fuel industry wants people focused on as a way to distract from their impact on climate change.” Other candidates the “takeaways” merely caricatured with such peripheral issues: e.g., Julián Castro (poor people taking the brunt of storms), Kamala Harris (prosecuting the oil and gas companies), Beto O’Rourke (helping people in flood zones move to higher ground), and Cory Booker (letting people eat meat despite the fact that meat agriculture produces a lot of methane and CO2). The depreciation of Booker was particularly egregious: his “key takeaway” should have been his support for nuclear power, which could be a major help in slowing global warming if made safer. This is not “news” or “reporting.” It’s propaganda and manipulation of the public, pure and simple. While I’m happy that CNN appears to have anointed Elizabeth Warren, the candidate I prefer, as the most serious, I think that allowing a commercial enterprise and the oligarchs who run it to slant the playing field like this sucks. The final irony: we the people had to pay to be propagandized. To watch this climate fiasco, whether on the air or on line, you had to subscribe to a cable service or an online service that pays CNN for access. If determined to watch for free, you could have chosen “Play Station Vue’s” free five-day trial. But then you would have had to remember to cancel before the end of the five days, in order to avoid paying a subscription fee in perpetuity. In the end, CNN’s climate marathon shows how our media oligarchs make money while controlling and manipulating public opinion. It was a fulsome endurance trial for viewers, bearing no resemblance to any serious and focused discussion of vital issues. It allowed CNN to select what it wanted from nearly seven hours of blather. Then CNN used those juicy tidbits to sensationalize and caricature each candidate, the Democratic Party, and the very importance of climate change. And for this disservice to the public and our democracy, CNN raked in money from its share of subscription fees and from commercials during seven hours of TV and online transmission. (While I’m not privy to CNN’s accounting, I would be astounded if advertisers didn’t pay far more per minute for this highly touted special event than for a normal minute of CNN’s talking heads “treading water” making 24 hours worth of “news” seem important on a dull day.) One last, dismal point. If anyone wants to see how much CNN distorted the public impression of this marathon “town hall,” she or he would have to review a recording of the whole seven hours. And guess who owns the copyright in that recording: CNN or one of its corporate affiliates. So just in order to have the information to second-guess CNN’s selective reporting, you would have to have CNN’s permission and probably pay a fee. If you set out to devise a way for a private, for-profit corporation to wax rich while controlling “news” and our democracy, you could hardly do a better job. Footnote: From the very first commercial “exclusive” on an American political debate that this blog reviewed—the one owned by ABC on the January 2012 Republican primary debate—I have never been able to find a full, clean feed of the proceedings online, let alone for free. CNN’s climate extravaganza was no exception. Not only are we letting private commercial ventures tell us what to look at and thereby what to think. We are also letting them own history. It’s as if the legendary Library of Alexandria had been owned and run by an LLC formed by the Pharaoh and his cronies.

Workers don’t need unions
The US has the world’s best health care
More guns mean more safety
The majority rules
What to do about it

1. Workers don’t need unions. In the last half-century, skilled workers in the US have fallen from grace and prosperity. The heady postwar days of suburban homes with two cars and reliable, well-paid, lifetime work are gone.

Whole factories have closed. Small towns that built them have dried up. Skilled work is scarce and getting scarcer. Over 399,000 people died from opioid overdoses from 1999 to 2017. The doctors and drug dealers that oversold this poison bear lots of the blame. But people don’t take pain killers unless they’re in pain.

This fall from grace and prosperity for the middle class closely tracks the decline in union membership over the same years. A graph of US union membership [open full report and scroll down] shows fluctuations from its peak in 1945 through the early 1960s—the postwar boom years. Since then union membership has declined steadily, from its peak of 35.5% in 1945 to a private-sector rate of 6.6% in 2012. It’s even lower now.

Two things broke unions in the US. The first and most important was globalization. The oligarchs transferred skilled work to factories in places like China, Mexico and Bangladesh. Then they told their US workers, in effect, “take less pay and don’t bargain for better conditions, or we’ll transfer your factory overseas, too.”

The second factor was transferring US factories from the North and Midwest to the South. There, so-called “right to work” laws broke unions, making lower wages and helplessness of workers an attraction to investors from abroad. Foreign car makers like BMW and Toyota built auto factories in the South, drawn by local make-workers-helpless laws.

In essence, the oligarchs broke US unions by playing foreign workers and workers from less-developed US states against those who had enjoyed fine jobs and pay in the US North and Midwest. These ploys worked brilliantly. Today we have less than half the rate of private-sector unionization we had in 1935, the year the National Labor Relations Act permitted and regulated collective bargaining.

Think all this might have something to do with the desperate condition of skilled workers today, and their stagnant pay since the 1970s? The United Auto Workers, while still a force to be reckoned with, once made “outsourcing” of jobs a big issue in its bargaining with the “Big Three” auto makers, until the oligarchs broke it. The oligarchs argued that foreign car makers were undercutting the Big Three, while building new factories down South, in make-workers-helpless states. [For how unions could organize online now, click here.

2. The US has the world’s best health care. This claim is flatly untrue. Here’s are the facts for the most recent years with the most complete data [click on category under “Health Status,” “Communicable Diseases,” or “Cancer” at left and scroll to right]:

Recent Rankings for US on Selected OECD Health Measures
Measure	Countries Ranked	US Ranking	Some Lower Ranked Countries
Life expectancy 2017	35	27	Mexico, Turkey, Slovak Republic
Maternal and infant mortality (deaths per 1,000 live births, 2017)	33	31	Mexico, Turkey
Cancer incidence per 100,000 population, 2012	35	31	Australia, Denmark, Norway
Incidence of Hepatitis B, 2017	32	27	Chile, Turkey, tied w/ Spain
Incidence of pertussis per 100,000 population, 2017	33	16	Australia, Netherlands New Zealand, Norway

What is true is that the US has highly innovative and up-to-date health technology. For example, in 2017, the US ranked fourth out of 31, after Japan, Australia and Iceland, in the number of CAT scanners (42.64) per million population, and second after Japan in the number of magnetic resonance imagers (37.56) per million population.

The problem is that this “miracle” technology is available mostly in big cities, and not at all to the poor or poorly insured. So citizens of the United States pay approximately twice the average of OECD citizens for health care and suffer outcomes, on average, near the back of the pack, simply for lack of universal health insurance.

The bottom line is clear. Health care is great in the US if you’re rich or middle-class and well insured. Otherwise, for you US health care sucks, and it sucks on a global scale.

3. More guns mean more safety. This canard is so self-evidently wrong as to blow one’s mind. How in Hell does filling our streets with assault weapons that can kill 100 people in a minute or so make us all more safe? Wouldn’t we all be safer if no one except the police and military had that kind of killing power?

As more guns end up in more hands, don’t they eventually fall into hands ruled by unstable, diseased, and delusional minds? Isn’t that precisely what’s happening today, with alarming regularity?

The only reason I can see why any sane person would believe this lie is the way Hollywood treats gunplay. When an embattled Western sheriff or a soldier for the good guys shoots, he makes every shot count. Every time the bad guys shoot, they miss.

Real life isn’t like that. If you’ve got a revolver than can shoot one round a second max, and the bad guys have AK-47s that can shoot ten rounds a second, your chances of surviving a battle, on average, are approximately one in ten times the number of AK-47-armed bad guys. If there are three, you’ve got a one-in thirty chance of surviving. Thats 3.33%.

So one time out of thirty, you end up like the hero of the movie. Twenty-nine times out of thirty, you end up dead or maimed, maybe paralyzed for life. Would anyone in real life take those odds?

Since more guns on our streets makes us less not more safe, you’d think there might be an economic reason for spreading all these deadly weapons among people not trained to use them, criminals and homicidal maniacs. But you would be wrong.

According to the firearm industry’s own trade association, the total economic impact of the civilian firearms industry in the United States is less than $52.1 billion. That amount includes the industry’s direct impact, impacts on suppliers, and “induced” impact.

But the US GDP is $21.06 trillion, as of the first quarter of 2019. So the civilian firearms industries, whose products killed 38,600 people in 2016 (including 22,900 suicides), account for 0.247 % of the national economy.

Yes, you read that right: not even a quarter of one percent. If the entire industry went bankrupt overnight, no one but its suppliers, customers and all those who would otherwise be killed or maimed would notice the difference. The stock markets wouldn’t even twitch.

There are more than 390 million privately-owned guns in the United States, or 1.2 for every living man, woman and child. But surveys show that only about 40% of American own these weapons. About 60% of Americans own none. You would think that every strong supporter of gun rights owns one. If so, that 40% marks the limits of gun ownership (and coincidentally, probably Trump’s base).

Forty percent is not even close to a majority. So how does this base of gun enthusiasts rule us on these issues, when large majorities of the public favor universal background checks and banning assault weapons and large magazines?

The short answer is that the Republican party panders to gun owners. Why? Because many of them appear to be single-issue voters. If they vote solely or mostly against restricting “gun rights,” they don’t have to worry about (or understand) any other issue.

So why do the oligarchs, who reside in and control the Republican Party pander to gun enthusiasts? Do they share their fetish for guns?

Not hardly. As near as I can tell, the oligarchs are much like the rest of us. They feel and are safer because they travel in private limousines, which are often bullet proof, and private planes and yachts. Once in a while, they might go to a big public performance, a place of worship, or a car stop, or their children might visit a public school, where they might be sitting ducks for lunatics with automatic weapons, just like the rest of us.

Surely they’re smart enough to know this. So why do they persist in making gun enthusiasts’ agenda their own? The answer is simple. Gun issues distract from oligarchs’ creeping theft of the nation’s substance and creeping control over its government. Every gun massacre increases the distraction, while the public’s appalled reaction increases the gun enthusiasts’ intransigence and loyalty to the GOP. With 40% of the voters in their pockets, the oligarchs need to delude only 11% of the rest of us to own a majority.

It’s not even that the gun-factory owners belong to the oligarchs’ social class. Mostly they don’t, but that’s not the point.

The more the oligarchs support the firearms “base’s” enthusiasms, the more they have a loyal Trump-sized base of voters—a good start at a perpetual majority. And the more massacres there are, with more controversies over gun rights, the more the oligarchs can be sure they have a good working distraction to keep the people from watching while they steal the country’s substance right out from under our noses.

4. The majority rules. When you want the truth about long standing myths, read the Brits. They have no dog in our many fights, and our Revolutionary War against them came too long ago to leave lasting scars today.

In a 2014 news item, here’s what Britain’s BBC headlined: “Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy.” This wasn’t an editorial judgment or analysis. It was a report of an American academic study.

The study looked at 1,779 separate public policy issues from 1981 to 2002. It concluded that, “[w]hen a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the US political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favour policy change, they generally do not get it.”

As often happens, a careful academic study just confirms the obvious. Take two of the most burning issues of today: (1) unlimited gun “rights” leading to regular massacres, and (2) the wide loss of work for skilled workers.

For decades, universal background checks for gun sales and banning the sale of assault weapons have enjoyed majority support among citizens. The most recent figures are particularly striking: 86% of Americans support universal background checks, and 90% support a ban on assault weapons. Yet we have neither, and not much chance for getting either.

As for jobs, Trump won the presidency by promising to bring back closed factories that one employed millions of skilled workers in the Upper Midwest. Like most of Trump’s promises, that one proved a little harder to keep than he let on.

But there’s a much easier way to get good jobs for unemployed and underemployed skilled workers. Our own American Society of Civil Engineers says we need to invest $2 trillion in our crumbling, Grade D+ infrastructure. Doing that would create millions of good jobs for skilled labor, which can’t be outsourced. So what did Trump and the GOP do instead? They passed a bill to give tax cuts that mostly enriched the already rich and big corporations. And they ran up $1.5 trillion in debt to fund those cuts.

No true democracy in America would have failed the majority so badly on either of these points, let alone both together.

Our government produces absurd results like these not just because the oligarchs have bought and captured our pols. Our government has an absurd structure. In our Senate, the nine most populous states together have more than half our nation’s total population (166,644,015 out of 331,883,896) but only 18 votes out of 100. Under our constitution, this absurd condition can’t be changed without every state’s consent.

Add to this Senate filibusters, Senate “holds” called by individual Senators, the so-called “Hastert Rule” in the House, under which the GOP would not move any legislation without approval by a majority of its caucus (not a majority the whole House, which might include Democrats). With all these impediments to majority rule, you can see how far our government is from the kinds of simple parliamentary democracies that exist in Britain, India and many other foreign countries.

But that’s still not all. Pols in power by virtue of these structural perversions of majority rule are still not satisfied. They are trying to stack the deck further by gerrymandering and suppressing votes. By stealing a Supreme-Court appointment from President Obama, they managed to procure a ruling that no federal court will disapprove gerrymandering, no matter how extreme.

So if you really think a majority rules in America, you’ve got a whole lot of explaining to do. As Bernie told us in 2016, our system is “rigged” against ordinary people, even a majority. It’s been that way ever since our Founding, when the Great Compromise, which was designed to preserve slavery and its economic benefits for the South, gave us a Senate badly skewed by population even then.

5. What to do about it. Suppose you want to do something about all this. Suppose you want to do it peacefully, without starting a second civil war.

Then there is something you can do, and it has a good chance of working. But like every bit of magic, it requires you to give something up. You have to abandon all vestiges of racism. If you’re not among our African-Americans, you have to support their voting in the coming election cycle as if they were your family.

That’s not really much to ask. They are part of our American family, but the deck has been stacked against them far more than against any other group, and for far longer. Try 350 to 400 years.

What you get for your support is more of the most loyal and consistent Democratic and progressive voters. As one report noted: “[African-Americans] have voted 85% or more Democratic in every presidential election since 1964[.]”

Think about that. Can you name any other group—let alone one whose votes have been systematically suppressed—with an 85% level of support for Democrats?

Arithmetically, what that means is that, for every 10 new African-American voters you register and get to vote, on average you get better than eight votes for Democrats—a four-to-one-advantage. No wonder Southern GOP pols try so hard (and often illegally!) to keep them from voting.

There’s more. If those new votes help swing Florida, Georgia and North Carolina, they can give the Democrats a demographic lock on the presidency, with 273 electoral votes, regardless of what Trump’s bastion in the Upper Midwest does.

There’s now a good chance to make this dream reality. African-Americans comprise a far greater proportion of the population in the South than in the rest of the country. Together with Hispanics, they approach 40% in the three key states. Encourage them to register and let them vote, and add a fraction of progressive non-Hispanic whites who account for around 15% of voters, and you get a whole new South and a whole new nation. Then the Senate’s and Electoral College’s malapportionment won’t matter so much.

Supporting your favorite Democratic candidates is also a good idea. But they’re not the problem. Democrat Stacey Abrams would probably be governor of Georgia today if the very GOP guy who gained hadn’t worked to discourage African-Americans and stop them from voting.

So send some of your political donations to Black Voters Matter and/or Stacey Abrams’ own voter-liberation group, Fair Fight Action. If you’re worried about security, donate through Act Blue, the online donation site for Democrats and progressive causes, which has strong online security and keeps good records. That’s what I did.

I don’t see anything more important or more strategic that Democrats and progressives can do this election cycle than give the strongest, most loyal, steady and persevering group of Dems a better chance to vote. The democracy and the future you save might just be your own, or your kids’.

Permalink to this post