Astroturfing

“There is no front because there is total transparency.” --- Prominent public relations operator, Richard Berman publicly stating that he does not set up organizations that are fronts for unnamed special interests posing as real people or groups to advance their own hidden political or economic agendas based on lies, deceit or fake public support

“People always ask me one question all the time: How do I know that I won't be found out as a supporter of what you are doing? We run all our stuff through nonprofit organizations that are insulated from having to disclose donors. There is total anonymity.” --- Prominent public relations operator, Richard Berman privately promising oil industry executives, potential paying clients of his PR firm, that their identities and agendas are never made public

“Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization (e.g., political, advertising, religious or public relations) to make it appear as though it originates from and is supported by grassroots participants. It is a practice intended to give the statements or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection.”

On his Last Week Tonight show a couple weeks ago, John Oliver aired a segment on astroturfing. The practice is everywhere in public life. All kinds of special interests pay to generate lies, deceit and fake public support for various causes, all of which is intended to deceive the public and governments about the real agenda and its financial backers. In some cases, experts are hired to just make things up in testimony before legislatures so that proposed legislation can be supported or opposed by economic or political interests who want to remain anonymous.



In addition to Berman’s wonderfully opaque comments above, Oliver commented that companies hire people, often for roughly $50-$200, to show up at public meetings, demonstrations and so forth to express their support or opposition for whatever they are paid to support or oppose. In one case, the paid shills received the following instructions:
1. Tell nobody you are being paid
2. Tell nobody you are being paid
3. Media will be present, do not talk to them
4. Tell nobody you are being paid
5. If someone approaches you, don't tell them you are being paid

The CEO of one company, Crowds on Demand, stated the shills his company hires do not trick people, but instead ‘engages’ them. In response to that, Oliver commented that Crowds on Demand engages people by tricking them.

Oliver’s point was to argue that this kind of activity is toxic and fosters cynicism, but it cannot be stopped. Oliver’s segment raised a couple of points. First, companies that engage in astroturfing do not care about truth or anything other than their own economic or political interests. Second, the businesses that cater to astroturfers do not care about truth or anything other than their own economic interests. Third, the people who participate as astroturfers do not care about truth or anything other than their own economic interests.

Is astroturfing and/or the people and businesses involved moral, immoral or amoral, or is astroturfing irrelevant to morality? It certainly isn't illegal because astroturfing is a legal commercial activity and the speech (lies, deceit, fake public support, opacity) involved is protected free speech.

One final observation: It is odd that one can often find out more about exactly how politics works by watching comedians skewer it than by listening to traditional information sources. There is no obvious reason to distrust any of the factual content that Oliver used. At least for this topic, he arguably is more trustworthy than most politicians and far more trustworthy than anyone or any business involved in astroturfing.

B&B orig: 8/21/18

Trump Strategy: Start From Good, Make it Worse, Partially Fix It, Claim Victory

The Washington Post writes about president Trump's renegotiation of NATA: “It covers many things, including autos, intellectual property and labor rights. Several trade experts noted that many provisions in Monday’s agreement resemble what was in President Barack Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal Trump pulled out of when he took office.

The deal does not resolve the tariffs the Trump administration put on steel and aluminum earlier this year, taxes that have proved a major sticking point in trade relations and led to Mexican retaliation against U.S. goods. It also does not resolve a broader issue over what are known as “232 tariffs,” taxes on foreign goods the Trump administration has imposed in the name of national security. The administration used that process for the steel and aluminum tariffs, over the strong objections of many U.S. allies and trading partners — including Canada. And Trump is considering 232 tariffs on foreign autos.”

Yet again, Trump starts with a status quo he claimed was the worst ever or something close thereto, i.e., NAFTA, then he guts it, then he comes up with something close to the old status quo but not final, and then claims victory.

Trump arguably is the single most reality-detached, corrupt, lying president that America has ever had.[1]

Footnote:
1. Last January, experts on US presidential history ranked Trump dead last of all American presidents: https://sps.boisestate.edu/politicalscience/files/2018/02/Greatness.pdf

Obviously, most (all?) Trump supporters will reject that as fake news or the like.

B&B orig: 8/27/18

The Ratchet of Politics is Broken: It Mostly Goes Only One Way – Down

After listening to the NPR broadcast of the Senate confirmation hearing on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh for the last hour or so, a thought just sprang up from nowhere. The back and forth between the democrats and the republicans includes references to past Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominees. What is striking about the debate is that each side points to past actions that one side or the other has taken that supports the argument or point a senator is trying to make. The tendency is to use actions of one's own side that support the argument, but when that isn't available, what the other side has done is used.

Stepping away from the back and forth, what seems to be happening is that the direction of partisanship is mostly moving in a direction that reduces transparency. The democrats accuse republicans of an unprecedented refusal by republicans to release documents related to Kavanaugh. That dispute is ongoing now. Republicans respond by arguing that some of the documents are subject to privilege of some sort. Whether some or all requested documents will be released is unclear.

What seems likely is that in the future, if ever a republican (or democratic) president has a nominee before the senate, this fight will be used as precedent for democrats to hide documents about their nominee, if circumstances so dictate. Future republican Senators will point to this dispute as evidence that democrats wanted transparency when they asked for it, so therefore they should have it now. Democratic Senators will point to the same dispute and argue that it was Republicans who established the precedent.

Thinking back, this has not happened in just this context. Disputes and tactical argumentation like this has been going on for years, but the general trend seems to be a slow trend to less transparency. Despite a significant US role in fostering transparency in governance globally, it is not clear that existing transparency is sufficient or is keeping up with relevant social and technological changes.

Campaign finance and lobbyist operations arguably are not transparent enough. Donors can contribute tens of millions to political causes and politicians and hide their identity. Public perceptions of corruption, which necessarily requires opacity and deceit to thrive, have increased dramatically in the last couple of years: “The current US president was elected on a promise of cleaning up American politics and making government work better for those who feel their interests have been neglected by political elites. Yet, rather than feeling better about progress in the fight against corruption over the past year, a clear majority of people in America now say that things have become worse. Nearly six in ten people now say that the level of corruption has risen in the past twelve months, up from around a third who said the same in January 2016.”

So, the question is this: Is intense tribal partisanship fostering a trend toward less transparency, more opacity and more corruption? It feels that way, but feelings are not objective data.

B&B orig: 9/4/18

Our Representative, Representative Democracy

In the Senate confirmation hearing for Brett Kavanaugh yesterday, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE) gave an amazingly honest speech in his opening comments. In essence, Sass argued that congress is inept and does not do its job, and that is why the Kavanaugh hearing is so ugly and personal -- reality detached in Sasse’s opinion. Sasse argued that Supreme Court (SC) judges are not partisans and if they are, they should not have lifetime appointments. As long as Americans misunderstand the role of the SC, confirmation hearings like this will be an “overblown, politicized circus.”

He went on to argue that congress, not the SC or the executive branch, should be the center of American politics, but it is not. The reason that congress is not the center of American politics is because for the last century and increasingly in recent decades, congress has abdicated its legislation role to the executive branch and executive agencies that write regulations. In essence, regulation writing is where a lot of policy making happens.

Congress, not the supreme court or the executive branch, should be where policy is made. That would give voters a chance to hire or fire their representatives, but congress has punted policy making elsewhere. As a result, the American people think that policy making is going on in the SC, and therefore we have this bitter confirmation hearing over judge Kavanaugh. Because congress is not doing its job, political battles and policy making are not being fought in congress, and that leads the SC to become a key political battleground.

Sasse: “. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

Sasse goes on to argue that (1) the technical complexity in modern laws is simply too much for congress to handle and real experts are necessary, but (2) the main reason congress punts so much of its job is to avoid taking responsibility for making controversial and unpopular decisions, so (3) if a legislator’s highest goal is re-election, punting responsibility allows people in congress to side-step the political heat and get re-elected. He asserts that if re-election is your highest goal, then giving away your power is “actually pretty good strategy. . . . . congress has decided to self-neuter. . . . . The important thing is that when congress neuters itself, and gives power to an unaccountable 4th branch of government [executive agencies], it means the people are cut out of the process.”

Sasse points out that when a executive agency passes a rule that makes life difficult, affected people can’t navigate the complexity and thicket of lobbyists to do executive agency lobbying. He asserts that almost all the power is now exerted off stage by unelected bureaucrats. Voters have nowhere to go except the SC to seek political accountability. Under the circumstances, the SC has become a “substitute political battleground. . . . . We look for nine justices to be super legislators. We look to nine justices to try to right the wrongs from other places in the process.”

To fix the mess, Sasse proposes a return to a proper constitutional distribution of power, which in his view, would largely remove the SC as a political battleground and shift it to congress where it belongs.

Some observations:

1. Sasse is right about re-election being the highest goal. Enough has leaked out elsewhere over the years for that to be clear, but hearing it this bluntly and explicitly is almost a miracle. He is also right that the legislation congress writes is sloppy, undefined, and mostly unread. It is also mostly not understood.

2. Sasse may be right about the balance of power being wrong, but there is no chance that our ossified, self-centered two-party system is capable of moving to reform itself over time so that the focus of politics shifts to the congress. That is too threatening to incumbency. Itv simply cannot happen with out two-party system and its corrupt system of financing.

3. Sasse thinks Kavanaugh will be a great SC justice, arguing that, contrary to criticisms, he does not hate women and children or want polluted air or water for the American people. Nonetheless, Kavanaugh will vote in ways that arguably can lead to, or maintain, those situations to some extent. As much as Sasse believes that Kavanaugh will not be a partisan, it is clear that Kavanaugh will be one. Basically, Sasse has argued persuasively that SC justices should not be judges for life (a point I have no opinion about), regardless of how non-partisan they pretend to be.

4. Sasse conveniently ignores one key aspect of Kavanaugh’s legal thinking. Kavanaugh has moved from being a judge who believed the rule of law should apply to a sitting president to one who is uncomfortably close to advocating almost absolute immunity from the law for a sitting president. When Clinton was in power, Kavanaugh advocated not one shred of mercy because the president was not above the rule of law. But in his time in the Bush administration, Kavanaugh did a 180-degree flip and now thinks presidents should be mostly immune from lawsuits and subpoenas. That arguably is out of synch with Sasse’s argument for a ‘proper’ balance of power.

As good as is rhetoric is, Sasse is not persuasive when it comes to the reality of a partisan judiciary or his own assessment of Kavanaugh’s alignment of beliefs with his own. The SC really is a battleground and that is not going to change any time soon. Judges have to be viewed as partisan players because that is what they are to a significant extent. Justice is partisan, and that is how most Americans seem to see this.

NOTE: Sasse is a radical right ideologue who wants to see many or most executive functions of the federal government mostly or completely eliminated. He is deeply antagonistic toward government in general.

B&B orig: 9/5/18

Society & Role Theory: Social Reality Distortion

“. . . . . to live in society means to exist under the domination of society’s logic. Very often men act by this logic without knowing it. . . . . . Roles carry with them both certain actions and the emotions and attitudes that belong to those actions. . . . . Each role has its inner discipline, what Catholic monastics would call its ‘formation’. . . . . It is impossible to exist with full awareness in the modern world without realizing that moral, political and philosophical are relative, that, in Pascal’s words, what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other. . . . . the sincere man is one who believes his own propaganda. . . . . The moral effort to lie deliberately is beyond most people. It is much easier to deceive one-self. . . . . The liar by definition knows that he is lying. The ideologist does not.” sociologist Peter Berger commenting on the power of society and a person’s social roles to shape or distort thinking, beliefs and reality (Invitation to Sociology: A Humanistic Perspective, 1963)

The liberal politics site Crooks & Liars posted a short video clip of a Fox News interview between Mike Wallace and vice president Mike Pence. The short exchange was about an incident that Bob Woodward wrote in his recently published book, Fear: Trump in the White House. In that September 2017 incident, president Trump’s Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn sees a letter on Trump’s desk, reads it and takes it. If Trump had signed the short letter, it would have withdrawn the US from an existing free-trade deal with South Korea. Apparently, Cohn thought doing that would have harmed US interests.

Wallace asked Pence, “do you have any doubt that happened”? The response Pence gave can be fairly called either (1) a rock solid example of what professor Berger was talking about when he spoke of the power of society and social role to dictate reality, or (2) intentional deceit.

Pence replied “I have every doubt that that happened. I really do.” Wallace showed Pence a copy of the letter, and it was what Woodward’s book said it was, i.e., a withdrawal from the trade agreement. Wallace let Pence continue to defend the president. In essence, Pence’s response to being shown the letter was to completely ignore it while continuing to defend Trump, e.g., “this is a president who puts people around the table, around the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office that bring him all of the options. . . . .” In other words, Pence acted as if the letter did not exist and that Cohen did not do what the Woodward book said he did.

Is Pence a sincere man who believes his own propaganda? If one carefully looks at Pence, one can reasonably believe that he is being sincere. He is a blind Christian social conservative ideologue. At this point, one can reasonably believe that in this incident Pence was incapable of mustering the moral effort to lie, or more specifically, to deceive. Personal observation of Pense so far indicates the man is vacuous and in a powerful thrall to Trump. If that assessment is basically correct, then Pence probably did believe everything he was saying about what a great president Trump is. And, he also believed that whatever Cohn did with the letter was something other than what Woodward said about the incident.

That view of Pence living the role of a rigid, blind ideologue arguably is more likely true than the alternative intentional deceit explanation. If that analysis is correct, then one can begin to see why there are at least two incompatible visions of Trump. One is positive enough to support him, and the other is negative enough to disapprove.

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

If professor Berger is right about society’s capacity to induce self-deceit as people live their roles in society, then one question asks which group is more self-deceived, Trump supporters or opponents. Each side will probably generally see the other as self-deceived. And, if Pence’s reaction to the evidence that Wallace showed him is typical, then facts do not seem to carry much weight for at least some supporters. Given that, how one can bridge the gulf in perceptions of reality between the two sides is not at all clear.

But, if nothing else, this is just another situation where two opposing points of view, or competing social roles, lead to incompatible realities. This is probably mostly why many (most?) Trump supporters cannot see the things that his opponents see, and vice versa.

B&B orig: 9/11/18

The Neuroscience of Social Media Addiction

Drug addiction involves brain changes that lead to intense craving for something such as alcohol and a loss of control over its use. Fighting addiction is hard or impossible for almost all addicts. Part of the biology usually involves release of a 'pleasure signal' called dopamine. Current research indicates that the brain feels pleasure the same way. A feeling of pleasure can come from a drug or alcohol, a monetary reward, sex, or a good meal. Feeling pleasure involves release dopamine, a neurotransmitter, in the a cluster of nerve cells underneath the cerebral cortex (the nucleus accumbens). Neuroscientists call this the brain’s pleasure center because dopamine release there is usually linked to feelings of pleasure.

A news article on the effects of social media indicate that dopamine release appears to be part of what makes social media addictive for at least some people. Companies that rely on user attention are becoming more sophisticated at getting it: “The techniques these companies use are not always generic: they can be algorithmically tailored to each person. An internal Facebook report leaked this year, for example, revealed that the company can identify when teens feel ‘insecure’, ‘worthless’ and ‘need a confidence boost.’ Such granular information, Harris adds, is ‘a perfect model of what buttons you can push in a particular person.’”

The article comments: “ One morning in April this year, designers, programmers and tech entrepreneurs from across the world gathered at a conference centre on the shore of the San Francisco Bay. They had each paid up to $1,700 to learn how to manipulate people into habitual use of their products, on a course curated by conference organiser Nir Eyal.

Eyal, 39, the author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products, has spent several years consulting for the tech industry, teaching techniques he developed by closely studying how the Silicon Valley giants operate.

‘The technologies we use have turned into compulsions, if not full-fledged addictions,’ Eyal writes. ‘It’s the impulse to check a message notification. It’s the pull to visit YouTube, Facebook, or Twitter for just a few minutes, only to find yourself still tapping and scrolling an hour later.’ None of this is an accident, he writes. It is all ‘just as their designers intended.’”

In another article, Exploiting the Neuroscience of Internet Addiction, the moral issue is pinpointed: “The leaders of Internet companies face an interesting, if also morally questionable, imperative: either they hijack neuroscience to gain market share and make large profits, or they let competitors do that and run away with the market.

In the Industrial Age, Thomas Edison famously said, ‘I find out what the world needs. Then I go ahead and try to invent’. In the Internet Age, more and more companies live by the mantra ‘create an obsession, then exploit it’. Gaming companies talk openly about creating a ‘compulsion loop’, which works roughly as follows: the player plays the game; the player achieves the goal; the player is awarded new content; which causes the player to want to continue playing with the new content and re-enter the loop.

Many Internet companies are learning what the tobacco industry has long known -- addiction is good for business. There is little doubt that by applying current neuroscience techniques we will be able to create ever-more-compelling obsessions in the virtual world.”

What about politics?: To the extent that players in politics can take advantage of the tricks that social media companies use to play with our minds, there is no reason to think that they are not going full-bore to do the same with partisan politics. It is likely that Russia has deployed this to influence elections in America and other countries. Like other businesses, American politics doesn't generally operate with much or any regard for moral issues, so that is not a significant concern for major players.

But even more fundamentally and aside from social media, can rigid, unshakable belief in a political, economic or religious ideology by itself led to the same or similar biological responses? Is rigid ideology not just blinding and distorting, but also addicting? Maybe.

One study found a correlation between a gene involved in dopamine signalling and certain social circumstances. That study claimed to describe “a specific gene-environment interaction that contributes to ideological self-identification, and it highlights the importance of incorporating both nature and nurture into the study of political preferences.”

Another researcher wrote: “Engagement with electronically mediated information, such as participation with social media, often provides the illusion of democratic freedom. In actuality, social media, as it exists within a neoliberal context, provides what I refer to as dopamine democracy, which entails the appearance of democratic choice that is actually uncritical choice brought about through incentive salience.” Although that links electronic media to politics, it at least elevates dopamine responses to a central role in democratic politics. There is no reason this does not also apply to non-democratic politics to some non-trivial extent.

Another research group writes: “Twin and family studies suggest that political attitudes are partially determined by an individual's genotype. The dopamine D4 receptor gene (DRD4) exon III repeat region that has been extensively studied in connection with human behaviour, is a plausible candidate to contribute to individual differences in political attitudes.”

Again, that is not proof that ideology alone can be an addiction or compulsion. But, it is more evidence that brain biology is relevant to politics. That probably should not be a surprise since brain biology is, or appears to be, relevant to everything that humans experience. Correlations between dopamine responses and religious beliefs[1] have been described, and it is possible that religious extremism can sometimes be seen as a clinical addiction.[2] Based on a limited search of the scientific literature, it is not clear that political ideology alone has been come to be seen as an addiction or compulsion.

Footnotes:
1. “Second, these results may be relevant for behavioural genetics studies looking at the heritability of religiousness. Individual differences in cognitive flexibility, and specifically the WCST, RAT, and AUT Flexibility, have been linked to dopaminergic systems, and so perhaps future behavioural genetic and epigenetic investigations on the heritability of religiosity should investigate the role of genes implicated in dopamine functioning. In fact, an integrative predictive processing framework for understanding religion has been recently proposed, implicating the dopaminergic system in the maintenance of religious and paranormal beliefs.” (citations omitted)

2. “Today one of the main criteria for a diagnosis of drug addiction/alcoholism is: continuing to consume alcohol or another drug ‘despite unpleasant or adverse consequences’ (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). For the Christian martyrs the same criteria would apply. People of that time and place—Rome, 2nd century A.D.—could also say that this new Christianity was like a drug that endangered lives and that being a Christian had all the adverse financial, social, psychological and physical consequences that we now see in the lives of drug addicts and alcoholics. And yet Christians, of all ages, in spite of the consequences, continued to profess their faith… and continued to be eaten by lions.”

B&B orig: 9/14/18