Foreign dictators and US public relations corporations

The dictator shakes hands with the dictator wannabe in 2019 --

they really do see eye to eye and share a love for unrestrained power

Context

For most businesses, the business of business is business, i.e., profit. For the most part, the morality of business is profit. In theory, the business of the US government is protecting the public interest, which includes protecting the environment and business interests. Government is a balancing act. For the most part, business is a really big bulldozer that only moves toward profit and flattens or weakens things that get in the way, e.g., environmental regulations. Of course these days, the business of government is mostly business because business has mostly bought government. 

Obviously, that is just my opinion, but there is evidence to support it. It is not just made up mindless crap like "Argggh!!! The election was stolen!!!" or "GADZOOKS!!! The Democrats are a bunch of lying, cannibalistic pedophilic lizard people who are going to take our guns away and force us into re-education camps and turn us into GODLESS atheists!!!" The point here is simple: Money, protected as free speech, can and does buy influence in government and society. It does not matter if the free speech is pure crap, lies and anti-democratic nonsense. Dark free speech gets just as much protection as honest speech, and these days arguably somewhat more.  

And, in case anyone is unsure about it, the business of US propaganda companies is business, i.e., profit, not defense of democracy, liberty, truth or civility.

One way to influence government and society is to hire professional propaganda (public relations) companies to make up lies, crackpot conspiracies and outrageous nonsense and then help spread that poison as truth. Interests who hire these propagandists include foreign dictators. The New York Times writes on how this is playing out in real time in the US:

Former Vice President Mike Pence turned up in Hungary last month to speak to a conference on conservative social values hosted by the far-right government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban.

Jeff Sessions, the former attorney general, was another recent visitor. Tucker Carlson did his Fox News show from Hungary for a week this summer. The American Conservative Union is planning a version of its CPAC gathering in Budapest early next year.

Those are among the more visible recent fruits of a well-funded campaign by Mr. Orban in the United States that stretches back a decade and now stands as a case study in how governments around the world seek to shape policies and debates in Washington, sometimes raising concerns about improper foreign influence in U.S. politics.

Carried out by a network of government offices, Washington lobbyists, Hungarian diaspora groups, educational institutions and government-funded foundations, the effort’s main impact has been to bolster Mr. Orban’s image as a conservative leader on the world stage — and to counter his reputation as an authoritarian nationalist who is cozying up to Russia and China.

It has also notched some tangible, if fleeting, policy victories for Mr. Orban, including the withdrawal during the Trump administration of a State Department grant to nurture independent news media in Hungary and the securing of a long-coveted Oval Office meeting for Mr. Orban in 2019 with President Donald J. Trump.

Much of what the Hungarian network has done is legal and standard operating procedure in Washington. But some of its activities touch on gray areas, including transparency requirements for those acting on behalf of foreign interests, concerns arising from overseas efforts to sway presidential campaigns, and the ethics of think tanks accepting money from governments or their proxies.

That is more evidence of the anti-democratic authoritarianism of the modern FRP (fascist Republican Party). Prominent Republican politicians, political groups and media entertainers (Carlson) have bought in on the dictator's lies about what a great thing his brand of kleptocratic dictatorship is and it should be installed here in the US. A few Democrats also like Orban's dictatorship, but that party has tried to distance its self from them.

Questions: 

1. Is this relevant evidence that (i) professional US propaganda companies are happy to work for anti-democratic dictators, and (ii) the FRP is more than just sympathetic to dictatorship, e.g., actively supporting dictatorship in the US and abroad?

2. Should US companies that work for anti-democratic dictators he taxed more heavily, e.g., as a sin tax for fighting against democracy and truth, sort of like a heavy tax on cigarettes? What about the FRP, higher tax on it due to its anti-democracy ideology and rhetoric?

Chapter review: Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-Making

Handicapped by History: The Process of Hero-Making is chapter 1 of historian James Loewen's 2018 edition of his book, Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. This is another of those eye-openers. It is one thing to say, 'Yeah, my history in school wasn’t so good. Too much got whitewashed or omitted' or something like that. It is a quite different thing to read the details about just how bad the problem was and still is, and why it was and is that way. Chapter 1 gives a nice summary. Lowen is an expert on American history school textbooks and has written one himself.

In the introduction, Loewen makes this rather interesting observation: “Chapter 13 looks at the effects of using standard American history textbooks. It shows that the books actually make students stupid.”

That’s an interesting start to a book. Lowen argues that the stupidification of students by standard American history education includes boring them to death. Lowen hated reading the main textbooks, in large part because vibrant history and personalities gets crushed into dull, bland pulp, myths and lies.

Heroification and American myths

The main themes of chapter 1 relate to heroification and American myths that shoot through and poison history textbooks in American public schools. It also poisons the minds of children and adults who cling to the heroes and myths. Heroification is, as one would expect, treating venerated persons in history as mythic heroes rather than real people. Real people have strengths and flaws, and good and bad traits. Heroes don’t. Lowen sees heroification as a degenerative, reality distorting process about historical figures akin to calcification, resulting in a state on mind where “we cannot think straight about them.”

The rationale for heroification that Lowen describes amounts to a desire to protect children. Textbook writers and publishers want to leave children with a mental framework that posits historical figures as people who are usually uniformly good and wise. Heroes are people to be emulated and inspired by. 

Lowen builds chapter 1 mostly based on two historical figures, Hellen Keller (1880-1968) and Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924).[1] He points out that teaching about Keller ends with her heroic effort to overcome being deaf and blind. Textbooks uniformly ignore the last 65 years of her life and the fact that she was not the first person to do what she did to overcome her handicaps. Keller herself was aware that stories about her life would focus on her fight to learn to speak and write, while ignoring her later life, which she really wanted the world to understand. 

Public school history textbooks (and the mainstream media) ignore the fact that Keller wanted to use her experience to help others with similar handicaps. In the process of doing that she found that those people were usually poor and lived in literally stinking squalor. That led to her political radicalization. She came to publicly support socialism, labor unions, the NAACP, and Eugene Debs as the socialist candidate for US president. She co-founded the American Civil Liberties Union to fight for free speech rights for poor people. She openly admired and supported the rise of Communism in Russia. 

Lowen points out that American history textbooks ignore Keller’s later life because of her radical socialist politics and her belief in this radical heresy, which she wrote in 1929: 

“I had once believed that we were all masters of our fate -- that we could mould our lives into any form we pleased. .... I had overcome deafness and blindness sufficiently to be happy, and I supposed that anyone could come out victorious if he threw himself valiantly into life’s struggle. But as I went more and more about the country I learned that I had spoken with assurance in a subject I knew little about. I forgot that I owed my success partly to the advantages of my birth and environment. .... Now, however, I learned that the power to rise in the world is not within the reach of everyone.”

Keller directly attacks the great American myth of equal opportunity. Lowen comments on Keller's epiphany:

“Textbooks don’t want to touch this idea. ‘There are three great taboos in textbook publishing,’ an editor at one of the biggest houses told me, ‘sex, religion and social class.’ While I had been able to guess the first two, the third floored me. .... Reviewing American history textbooks convinced me that this editor was right, however. The notion that opportunity might be unequal in America, that not everyone has ‘the power to rise in the world,’ is anathema to textbook authors and to many teachers as well. .... [Authors, editors and educators] leave out her adult life and make her entire existence over into a vague ‘up by the bootstraps’ operation. In the process, they make this passionate fighter for the poor into something she never was in life: boring.”

Lowen argues that heroification is potentially crippling to children because people like Keller are treated like bland children devoid of the complexities and vibrancy of the fascinating adults they usually are. Those myths are unrealistic Disneyland role models. In addition to that Lowen writes: 

“Students also develop no understanding of causality in history. Our nation’s thirteen separate incursions into Nicaragua, for instance, are surely worth knowing about as we attempt why that country embraced a communist government in the 1980s. Textbooks should show history as contingent, affected by the power of ideas and individuals. Instead, they present history as a ‘done deal.’”

Once again, one sees the endless battle raging between facts, truths and sound reasoning against deceit, misdirection, emotional manipulation and ideology-inspired motivated reasoning. 

Question: Should American history be taught more honestly, or would that damage children somehow, e.g., by turning them into cynics and/or inspiring them to want to do some or all of the bad things that famous people do?  

Footnote: 

1. To shorten this review, the following comments briefly summarize the importance of Wilson and how history fails to deal competently with him. Wilson sent US troops into Mexico, Latin America and 

Russia many times. The US fought on the side of the anti-communists in Russia and that held usher in the cold war and intense distrust of Western nations. Wilson talked a lot about self-determination and democracy, but at his core he was a crude racist, White Supremacist, colonialist, anti-communist and a shockingly intolerant authoritarian. Wilson rebuffed Ho Chi Minh’s appeal to the US to help it reach self-determination, setting up its gradual move toward communism. History textbooks whitewash all of that. But Wilson also signed some major pro-democracy legislation into law, e.g., some safety net protections. Lowen writes: 

“American needs to learn from the Wilson era, that there is a connection between racist presidential leadership and like-minded public response. .... Wilson vetoed a bill that would have abolished Espionage and Sedition Acts. .... Neither before nor since these [pro-WW I federal government propaganda] campaigns has the United States come closer to being a police state.” 

Lowen wrote that in 2018. One can wonder if he still feels that way. Probably so, given how close to being a police state the US was under Wilson. Lowen helps put America’s currently bad political situation into a useful historical context.

KNOCK IT OFF!!

 My assessment of the debacle that is unfolding over the Democrat's inability to get Joe Biden's agenda over the finish line is pretty much echoed by the following opinion piece, because folks, I simply couldn't have written it any more concisely than the following:

Dick Polman: Are Dems going to get their act together or what?

Back when my kids were little and I was always schlepping them hither and yon, they’d squabble in the back seat at ever-increasing decibels until I would inevitably unleash my most fervent Dad-ism:

“I don’t care who started it, just knock it off!”

Well, Dad is even more pissed these days at the House and Senate Democrats. Do they somehow not understand that failing to enact President Biden’s sweeping infrastructure and social spending packages – at least in some form, with wise compromises – would be tantamount to political suicide? That their voters will dismiss them as do-nothings and stay home in droves during the 2022 midterm elections, to the delight of the galvanized MAGA hordes?

I don’t care which faction – the “centrists” or the “progressives” – has the better grievances. Just knock it off.

The centrists think the $3.5-trillion social reform price tag is too big? Well, guess what: That money would be spent over a period of 10 years, and it totals roughly 1.2 percent of the economy.

The progressives don’t want to compromise by perhaps shaving that price tag a bit? Well, guess what: The facts of life on Capitol Hill require compromise, because the Democratic majorities are thinner than dental floss and, given the unified Republican opposition, nothing will pass unless virtually every Democrat of blue and purple hue is brought on board.

That’s because Biden, despite his solid victory, had no coattails. The Democrats lost 12 House seats, and eked out a no-wiggle-room Senate majority only because Stacey Abrams ginned up grassroots turnout in Georgia.

This is not the New Deal or Great Society era, when Democrats had power in numbers. In the words of commentator Jeff Greenfield (a former Democratic operative), our current era requires “an honest embrace of what the politics of the moment will accept. It recognizes the wisdom of Ronald Reagan’s aphorism that ‘my 80 percent friend is not my 20 percent enemy.’ It argues for the kind of result that gives Democrats the only reasonable chance to wage a midterm fight where they will be weighed down by Republican perfidy in gerrymandering and voter restrictions…Without visible evidence of the Democrats’ core (agenda) – without (universal) pre-K, some form of expanded health care, some steps toward a fairer tax system – Democrats will go into next year with one or both hands tied behind their back.”

Or, as House Democrat Jim McGovern, chairman of the Rules Committee, reportedly said the other day, “If we can’t deliver on this, God help us in the next election.”

Biden staked his candidacy on the promise of leveraging his Washington experience in order to get things done – most notably, things that are long overdue (lowering prescription drug prices, expanding child tax credits, fighting climate change, repairing roads, broadening Medicare to cover dental, vision, and hearing, and much more), but it won’t help his case, or the party’s, if the squabbling rank and file makes our legislative process even more dysfunctional than it already is. If the party of government can’t prove that it can govern – and this particular week is crucial, with a looming Sept. 30 deadline to avoid a federal shutdown – then what’s the remaining alternative? The cult that doesn’t give two figs about governing?

On policy, in fact, Democrats have public opinion on their side. A recent national poll found landslide support for Biden’s infrastructure bill (65 percent yes, 28 percent no), and landslide support for the $3.5-trillion social reform package (62 percent yes, 32 percent no).

In a sense, they’ve already won the argument.

The only road forward is to deliver something substantive, even if it falls short of the most sweeping ambitions. That way Democrats can go to the voters in 2022 and say, with empirical proof, that “we’re making a positive difference in your lives, and the Republicans opposed every single thing.”

That’s a whole lot more palatable than blowing their best opportunity in years to fix so much of what’s broken. All of them surely must realize that with democracy itself now hanging in the balance, failing to deliver is not an option.

https://www.pressherald.com/2021/10/01/dick-polman-are-dems-going-to-get-their-act-together-or-what/?rel=related

NOW IF the Dems DO deliver, I will be happy to revisit this thread and eat my hat, but till then................................................. they need to KNOCK IT OFF!

Touching base with liar fascist Republican elite tactics

The Washington Post writes in an article, Koch-backed group fuels opposition to school mask mandates, leaked letter shows:

It is motivated, the author explains, by a desire to “speak up for what is best for my kids.” And it fervently conveys the author’s feelings to school leaders: “I do not believe little kids should be forced to wear masks, and I urge you to adopt a policy that allows parental choice on this matter for the upcoming school year.”

But the heartfelt appeal is not the product of a grass roots groundswell. Rather, it is a template drafted and circulated this week within a conservative network built on the scaffolding of the Koch fortune and the largesse of other GOP megadonors.

That makes the document, which was obtained by The Washington Post, the latest salvo in an inflamed debate over mask requirements in schools, which have become the epicenter of partisan battles over everything from gender identity to critical race theory. The political melee engulfing educators has complicated efforts to reopen schools safely during a new wave of the virus brought on by the highly transmissible delta variant.

The document offers a rare glimpse into the inner workings of a well-financed conservative campaign to undermine regulations that health authorities say are necessary to contain the coronavirus. The frustration of many parents who want a greater say is deeply felt, school superintendents say. But their anger is also being fueled by organized activists whose influence is ordinarily veiled.  

The letter was made available on Tuesday to paying members of the Independent Women’s Network, a project of the Independent Women’s Forum and Independent Women’s Voice that markets itself as a “members-only platform that is free from censorship and cancellation.” Both are nonprofits once touted by their board chairman and CEO, Heather Higgins, as part of a unique tool in the “Republican conservative arsenal” because, “Being branded as neutral but actually having the people who know, know that you’re actually conservative puts us in a unique position.”

Tennessee parents make threats after school board mandates masks: ‘We will find you’

Implication: We will murder you

Last March, the New Yorker wrote about the billionaire radical right Koch propaganda Leviathan's money-drenched tactics that necessarily[1] dominate the fascist Republican Party's elites' approach to politics:

In public, Republicans have denounced Democrats’ ambitious electoral-reform bill, the For the People Act, as an unpopular partisan ploy. In a contentious Senate committee hearing last week, Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, slammed the proposal, which aims to expand voting rights and curb the influence of money in politics, as “a brazen and shameless power grab by Democrats.” But behind closed doors Republicans speak differently about the legislation, which is also known as House Resolution 1 and Senate Bill 1. They admit the lesser-known provisions in the bill that limit secret campaign spending are overwhelmingly popular across the political spectrum. In private, they concede their own polling shows that no message they can devise effectively counters the argument that billionaires should be prevented from buying elections.

A recording obtained by The New Yorker of a private conference call on January 8th, between a policy adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell and the leaders of several prominent conservative groups—including one run by the Koch brothers’ network—reveals the participants’ worry that the proposed election reforms garner wide support not just from liberals but from conservative voters, too. The speakers on the call expressed alarm at the broad popularity of the bill’s provision calling for more public disclosure about secret political donors. The participants conceded that the bill, which would stem the flow of dark money from such political donors as the billionaire oil magnate Charles Koch, was so popular that it wasn’t worth trying to mount a public-advocacy campaign to shift opinion. Instead, a senior Koch operative said that opponents would be better off ignoring the will of American voters and trying to kill the bill in Congress. 

Kyle McKenzie, the research director for the Koch-run advocacy group Stand Together, told fellow-conservatives and Republican congressional staffers on the call that he had a “spoiler.” “When presented with a very neutral description” of the bill, “people were generally supportive,” McKenzie said, adding that “the most worrisome part . . . is that conservatives were actually as supportive as the general public was when they read the neutral description.” In fact, he warned, “there’s a large, very large, chunk of conservatives who are supportive of these types of efforts.” 

As a result, McKenzie conceded, the legislation’s opponents would likely have to rely on Republicans in the Senate, where the bill is now under debate, to use “under-the-dome-type strategies”—meaning legislative maneuvers beneath Congress’s roof, such as the filibuster—to stop the bill, because turning public opinion against it would be “incredibly difficult.” He warned that the worst thing conservatives could do would be to try to “engage with the other side” on the argument that the legislation “stops billionaires from buying elections.” McKenzie admitted, “Unfortunately, we’ve found that that is a winning message, for both the general public and also conservatives.” He said that when his group tested “tons of other” arguments in support of the bill, the one condemning billionaires buying elections was the most persuasive—people “found that to be most convincing, and it riled them up the most.” 

McKenzie explained that the Koch-founded group had invested substantial resources “to see if we could find any message that would activate and persuade conservatives on this issue.” He related that “an A.O.C. message we tested”—one claiming that the bill might help Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez achieve her goal of holding “people in the Trump Administration accountable” by identifying big donors—helped somewhat with conservatives. But McKenzie admitted that the link was tenuous, since “what she means by this is unclear.” “Sadly,” he added, not even attaching the phrase “cancel culture” to the bill, by portraying it as silencing conservative voices, had worked. “It really ranked at the bottom,” McKenzie said to the group. “That was definitely a little concerning for us.”  

With so little public support, the bill’s opponents have already begun pressuring individual senators. On March 20th, several major conservative groups, including Heritage Action, Tea Party Patriots Action, Freedom Works, and the local and national branches of the Family Research Council, organized a rally in West Virginia to get Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat, to come out against the legislation. They also pushed Manchin to oppose any efforts by Democrats to abolish the Senate’s filibuster rule, a tactical step that the Party would probably need to take in order to pass the bill. “The filibuster is really the only thing standing in the way of progressive far-left policies like H.R. 1, which is Pelosi’s campaign to take over America’s elections,” Noah Weinrich, the press secretary at Heritage Action, declared during a West Virginia radio interview. On Thursday, Manchin issued a statement warning Democrats that forcing the measure through the Senate would “only exacerbate the distrust that millions of Americans harbor against the U.S. government.”

Aw, jeez. It was "a little concerning" that ruthless Republican fascist propagandist polling research indicated that an intentionally divisive and deceptive label such as cancel culture wasn't persuasive enough to do the job of deceiving and ripping American society apart to the satisfaction of corrupt anti-democratic, autocratic Koch lies, deceit and misdirection. 

What a shame. /s

Presumably, most fascist Republican elites are thankful for Joe Manchin, their fascist champion in the Democratic Party.

Questions: 

1. Is the Koch propaganda Leviathan more democratic than anti-democratic? 

2. Is the Koch propaganda Leviathan not influential enough to bother mention by the MSM, so it is just the Koch propaganda pipsqueak minnow?

3. Is it possible that political and economic propaganda induce adult Americans to actually participate in public in this kind of deranged lunacy, or is it just harmless ranged lunacy?:

Valiant anti-mask patriots at a school board meeting:

Yeah!! Our kids deserve oxygen!!

Yeah!! Make breathing great again!!

Yeah!! Masks murder children!!

Yeah!! Slaughter all pedophile Democrats, meaning all Democrats!!

(or is at least some of this unfair and/or over the top?)

Footnote:

1. Necessarily because the FRP (fascist Republican Party) has known for decades that it cannot win majority public support, majority votes and/or autocrat/plutocrat-level power on the basis of honest debate, real acts or transparency. So, it has to rely on cheating such as unwarranted opacity, lies, slanders, unwarranted emotional manipulation, partisan motivated reasoning and other anti-democratic means to win votes and power. 

They hate masks, really

A faltering business model: Profit on cheap, abused labor and cheap goods

NYT: Paige Murdock, a manager, went weeks without getting a day off or seeing her family but, as a salaried employee, did not receive overtime pay. The company limited the hours she could give to her staff, she said, which often meant she was running the store short-handed. 

When a manager said Ms. Murdock, 44, couldn’t take her previously approved vacation week to help her daughter, who is in the military, move to Texas, she decided to quit. “If you look at my résumé, I am a very loyal employee,” Ms. Murdock said. 

“I will work my heart out. .... I don’t ask for much.”

Oh yeah, you asked for too much, so bugger off, you lazy ingrate. 

As the Donald would say, YOU'RE FIRED!!

By now, it is clear to anyone paying any attention that as a general rule capitalism does not care about anything except profit. Perks are necessary public relations (propaganda) measures needed to retain employees. Concerns such as human misery, environmental degradation, and low worker wages with non-existent benefits, or nearly non-existent, do not amount to things that lead to significant improvement. Sometimes those things lead to campaign contributions and fees to public relations companies (professional deceivers and liars) for corporate protection. They do not lead to protection for customers. 

That's just business as usual for most companies, most of the time, in most places. 

The New York Times writes:

Sandra Beadling was fed up with the 70-hour workweeks, the delivery trucks running days behind schedule, and the wear and tear on her knees from all the stooping to restock the bottom shelves.

The manager of the Dollar General store in Wells, Maine, Ms. Beadling, 54, had tried to hire more help. But that was a tough sell when Walmart was offering $16 an hour and her store was paying $12.

Ms. Beadling had spent long stretches this summer as one of only a few workers in the store, tending to the register and trying to help shoppers. She had pleaded with her managers to allow the store’s part-time workers to have more hours, but to no avail.

Dollar stores, which pay among the lowest wages in the retail industry and often operate in areas where there is little competition, are stumbling in the later stages of the pandemic.

Sales are slowing and some measures of profit are shrinking as the industry struggles with a confluence of challenges. They include burned-out workers, pressure to increase wages, supply chain problems and a growing number of cities and towns that are rejecting new dollar stores because, they say, the business model harms their communities.

The troubles follow a year of soaring profits and a period of staggering growth in the industry. Roughly one in every three stores that have been announced to open in the United States this year is a dollar store, according to Coresight Research, a retail advisory firm, a sign of how well the industry did in 2020.

The business model, which relies on relatively cheap labor and inexpensive goods, is designed to flourish even when its core customers are hurting financially. The strategy was honed during the high unemployment and wage stagnation of the Great Recession of 2008.  

In a statement, Dollar General said, “We pay competitive wages, which are determined based on several factors including the relevant labor market.” The company added that “our operating standards are designed to provide stores with sufficient labor hours, and it is not our expectation that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week.” 

Part-time workers sometimes encounter the opposite problem of not having enough work. As a store manager, Ms. Beadling said, she was constantly trying to find additional hours to give to her employees who needed the money, including one worker who was living in a tent because she couldn’t afford rent.

But the allotted hours for the store were limited by higher-up managers, she said.

This summer, social media buzzed with photos of dollar stores, from Lincoln, Neb., to Pittsburgh and beyond, where employees had taped up signs in the front door announcing that they had walked off the job.

“Capitalism will destroy this country,” read one sign in the window of a Dollar General in Eliot, Maine, this spring. “If you don’t pay people enough to live their lives, why should they slave away for you?”

DG's statement that it is not a “corporate expectation” that store managers should work 70 to 80 hours per week is public relations (a lie). Regular people's real world expectation that such a statement is corporate bullshit, a/k/a/ public relations, a/k/a lies and deceit.

a/k/a/ = “also known as” in legal jargon

A hungry lizard, poor thing, just looking for food

in its natural environment and being harassed by cruel 

cowboys with guns 

Eons ago in August of 2019, back when cowboys with six-shooters were wrangling grumpy but emaciated T. rex lizards on the prairies (and elsewhere) in defense of rich people and campaign donors (tied for first and second), God third, nation fourth and average people maybe 7th or 8th, I posted a discussion about an alleged nascent social consciousness among major corporations. At the time I dismissed that squeak of corporate moral concern like this: 

That is aspirational, but vague to the point of being meaningless.

Other people also questioned the motives of a strange corporate burp of social conscience, as discussed here last August: 

“But do people like [USB Bank chairman Axel] Weber really believe this stuff? .... The idea that banks were selling ESG [environmental, sustainability, green, etc.] products seemed a little like priests in the medieval Catholic church selling ‘indulgences’ .... the noise in the system was concealing a more important area of silence.

The issue at stake revolved around risk management. If you listened to the noise around ESG, it seemed that the movement was all about activism: vocal campaigners were calling for social and environmental change, and companies and financial groups were shouting about what they were doing to support this. But if you looked more closely at ESG, with an anthropologist’s lens, it was clear that there was a second factor at work that was less openly discussed: self-interest.

So, once again, money talks and real people, the environment and everything else, e.g., democracy, and civil liberties walks. Unless ignoring those disgusting non-profit things ding profits too much, they get ignored, denied, or spun into faux realities by public relations professionals, a/k/a dividers, liars, and/or deceivers. 

Questions: Are low paid American workers just spoiled whining wuss? Does pay reflect what the market will bear and if you don't like, quit and get a better job? Is this yet another bucket of worms where American government is neutered and unable to respond so that uncaring market forces, i.e., insatiable profit lust, are in control? How meaningful are civil liberties if you are so poor and tied to your job that you are generally unable to exercise them, e.g., insufficient time to vote or become informed, insufficient time to get vaccinated, etc?

Corruption and anti-democratic rot in the two-party system

ProPublica reported on how one provision of the December 2017 tax cut for rich people and big corporations law came into being:

In November 2017, with the administration of President Donald Trump rushing to get a massive tax overhaul through Congress, Sen. Ron Johnson stunned his colleagues by announcing he would vote “no.”

Johnson’s demand was simple: In exchange for his vote, the bill must sweeten the tax break for a class of companies that are known as pass-throughs, since profits pass through to their owners. Johnson praised such companies as “engines of innovation.” Behind the scenes, the senator pressed top Treasury Department officials on the issue, emails and the officials’ calendars show.

Within two weeks, Johnson’s ultimatum produced results. Trump personally called the senator to beg for his support, and the bill’s authors fattened the tax cut for these businesses. Johnson flipped to a “yes” and claimed credit for the change. The bill passed.

The Trump administration championed the pass-through provision as tax relief for “small businesses.”

Confidential tax records, however, reveal that Johnson’s last-minute maneuver benefited two families more than almost any others in the country — both worth billions and both among the senator’s biggest donors.

Dick and Liz Uihlein of packaging giant Uline, along with roofing magnate Diane Hendricks, together had contributed around $20 million to groups backing Johnson’s 2016 reelection campaign.  

The expanded tax break Johnson muscled through netted them $215 million in deductions in 2018 alone, drastically reducing the income they owed taxes on. At that rate, the cut could deliver more than half a billion in tax savings for Hendricks and the Uihleins over its eight-year life.

That speaks for itself: Quid pro quo. Pay-to-play. Corruption parading as free speech. 

In another ProPublica article, Republican anti-democratic rage over the 2020 election is still white hot. It appears to be intensifying in at least the some places, not softening. ProPublica writes:

HOOD COUNTY, Texas — Michele Carew would seem an unlikely target of Donald Trump loyalists who have fixated their fury on the notion that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president.

The nonpartisan elections administrator in the staunchly Republican Hood County, just an hour southwest of Fort Worth, oversaw an election in which Trump got some 81% of the vote. It was among the former president’s larger margins of victory in Texas, which also went for him.

Yet over the past 10 months, Carew’s work has come under persistent attack from hard-line Republicans. They allege disloyalty and liberal bias at the root of her actions, from the time she denied a reporter with the fervently pro-Trump network One America News entrance to a training that was not open to the public to accusations, disputed by the Texas secretary of state’s office, that she is violating state law by using electronic machines that randomly number ballots.

Viewing her decisions as a litmus test of her loyalty to the Republican Party, they have demanded that Carew be fired or her position abolished and her duties transferred to an elected county clerk who has used social media to promote baseless allegations of widespread election fraud.

That speaks for itself: Anti-democratic American-style fascism that demands loyalty to the fascist Republican Party, not loyalty to democracy, voting rights, or election integrity. And this is from rank and file Republicans, not national elites.

Finally, multiple sources have reported that Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has received significant campaign contributions from the pharmaceutical industry. She is one of two conservative Democratic Senators who are blocking passage of two infrastructure bills. She refuses to give reasons for her opposition other than to say the bill she opposes is too big at $3.5 trillion. The reconciliation bill imposes a requirement for the government to negotiate drug prices instead of letting companies charge whatever they can get away with. Based on those facts, (campaign contributions, her silence, and corporate profits at stake) one can reasonably conclude that Sinema is giving pay back to the pharma industry for their generosity.

Salon writes:

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the controversial Arizona Democrat who threatens to derail President Biden's legislative agenda, received more than $750,000 in donations from the pharmaceutical and medical device industries. After that, she announced her opposition to a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs.

Sinema told White House officials that she opposes House and Senate bills that would allow Medicare to negotiate drug costs, sources told Politico this week. Democrats estimate these bills would save $450 billion over the next decade and thereby pay for a large portion of President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion spending plan.  

Sinema is a longtime favorite of the pharmaceutical industry and now appears ready to undermine Biden's entire agenda as Big Pharma wages a lobbying blitz in hopes of torpedoing the bill, which nearly 90% of voters support. Sinema and several House Democrats who oppose the drug pricing plan have received major financial support from the industry. Given a 50-50 Senate and a narrow House majority of 220 to 212 (with three seats currently vacant), their opposition could sink the proposal or even the entire budget bill.

Sinema has received $519,988 from PACs and individuals in the pharmaceutical industry throughout her political career, according to data from the Center for Responsive Politics. She brought in more than $120,000 in pharma contributions between 2019 and 2020 even though she is not up for re-election until 2024. Sinema has also received $190,161 from donors in the pharmaceutical manufacturing space and $62,797 from the medical supplies industry.

That speaks for itself: Quid pro quo. Pay-to-play. Corruption parading as free speech. Contrary public opinion be damned.

Questions: Is our two-party system seriously corrupted by campaign contributions? Is democracy under serious attack by an American style fascism or authoritarianism?