Category: Media

SHORT TAKES ON IMPORTANT STORIES #7

Here are short takes on three important stories that have gotten little attention in the mainstream media. Each provides a quick summary of the story, a hint as to why it’s important, and a link to more information. They range from encouraging responsibility in the media to a major victory for workers to the corruption of our economy and politics by a billionaire.

STORY #1: I urge you to sign the Media and Democracy Project’s open letter to news organizations demanding that they cover the upcoming elections in a substantive and meaningful way while making the threats to democracy clear and actively exposing and discrediting disinformation. The Media and Democracy Project describes itself as a non-partisan, grassroots, civic organization engaging in actions in support of more informative, diverse, independent, and pro-democracy media operating in the public interest. It is urging news organizations to follow a detailed set of guidelines summarized by these three principles: [1]

  1. Cover elections like they matter more than sports scores (stop the “horse race” analysis).
  2. Make the threats to democracy clear.
  3. Protect Americans from disinformation.

STORY #2: In a stunning victory for workers, 73% of Volkswagen workers at a Chattanooga TN plant voted to join the United Auto Workers union (2,628 to 985). This is the first major successful union vote in the South and the first at a foreign-owned auto plant in the U.S. (However, every other VW plant in the world is unionized indicating how far behind the U.S. is in supporting workers and the middle class.) Not only had plant management opposed the union, but six southern state governors had issued a joint statement attacking unionization as a threat to liberty and freedom.

This is major step in the rebirth of the labor movement, which had been languishing since 1980. Public approval of labor unions is close to 70%, the highest level in 50 years. The last couple of years have seen a resurgence of union organizing and successful bargaining efforts, including by Hollywood writers, UPS employees, health care workers, university employees, and auto workers, among others.

In the 1950s, one out of every three private sector workers belonged to a union. Today, it’s only one out of every 16 workers. This decline in union membership has caused a decline in the bargaining power of workers, the reduction of wages and benefits, and the decline of the middle class. Corporate America’s war on unions and on workers included changes in government policies that supported unionization, global trade agreements that pitted American workers against foreign labor, and financial deregulation that allowed corporate takeovers, private equity’s vulture capitalism, and abuse of bankruptcy laws to undermine workers and their benefits, particularly retirement benefits. [2]

STORY #3: The ability of billionaires to corrupt our political and economic systems was in evidence as former president Trump reversed himself on whether TikTok should be banned in the U.S. after a recent meeting with Jeff Yass, a billionaire who owns 15% of TikTok’s Chinese parent company, Byte Dance. Yass’s investment company is also the biggest institutional investor in the shell company that merged with Trump’s Truth Social online media company. This merger provided Trump with a windfall profit at a time when he apparently badly needs cash. [3]

As-of March 2024, Yass is also this election cycle’s biggest donor to non-candidate, Republican-affiliated Political Action Committees, having given over $46 million. [4] Yass is also a big donor to right-wing groups in Israel that have supported Netanyahu’s efforts to weaken Israel’s democracy and Palestinian’s rights.

[1]      Hubbell, R., 4/15/24, “Biden’s steady hand, part II,” Today’s Edition Newsletter (https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/bidens-steady-hand-part-ii)

[2]      Reich, R., 4/22/24, “The stunning rebirth of the American labor movement,” Robert Reich’s daily blog (https://robertreich.substack.com/p/the-rebirth-of-the-american-labor)

[3]      Kuttner, R., 3/27/24, “The corrupt trifecta of Yass, Trump, and Netanyahu,” The American Prospect blog (https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2024-03-27-corrupt-trifecta-yass-trump-netanyahu/)

[4]      Open Secrets, retrieved 3/28/24, “2024 top donors to outside spending groups, “ (https://www.opensecrets.org/outside-spending/top_donors/2024)

SHORT TAKES ON IMPORTANT STORIES #6: GOOD NEWS!

Here are short takes on five important good news stories that have gotten little attention in the mainstream media. Each provides a quick summary of the story, a hint as to why it’s important, and a link to more information.

STORY #1: States Newsroom, the country’s largest state-focused non-profit news organization, now has a full-time presence in all 50 state capitals. Its network has 39 freestanding newsrooms and, in the other 11 states, partnerships with state-focused, non-profit news organizations. It has 220 full-time employees and an annual budget of over $22 million. Statehouse policy and politics are the major focuses of its reporting, with full-time reporters covering every state legislature. It does not accept any corporate funding and publicly discloses all contributions of over $1,000. In addition to news, it publishes commentary that is clearly labeled as such, is completely separated from its news reporting, and is pro-transparency and pro-democracy. It does not publish commentary from current office holders or candidates. [1]

STORY #2: A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute updated a previous analysis from 2016 of the performance of the U.S. economy under Democratic and Republican presidents. [2] It confirmed and extended the finding that the economy consistently performs significantly better under Democratic presidents across a wide range of economic indicators. This is true for market-based data that are not affected by government supports or subsidies, dispelling the contention that the superior economic performance is due to Democratic spending on safety net programs. The report acknowledges that these findings cannot claim to prove there’s a cause-and-effect relationship between the party of the President and economic outcomes. It also acknowledges that the President has limited control over the economy and that luck plays a role. In terms of luck, it notes that both Obama and Biden inherited depressed economic conditions where the economy had been damaged by severe shocks, and, nonetheless, the strong economic performance under Democratic presidents persisted.

Examining economic data both from 1949 to the present and from 1981 to the present finds that economic performance under Democratic presidents was noticeably better on:

  • Growth in Gross Domestic Product,
  • Job growth,
  • Wage and income growth,
  • Unemployment,
  • Business investment,
  • Inflation, and
  • Interest rates.

At the growth rate typical under Democratic presidents, per capita living standards would double every 28 years, while with the growth rate typical under Republican presidents, per capita living standards would take 56 years to double. Moreover, income growth is much more equitable under Democratic presidents than Republican ones, with much higher income growth for those with higher incomes under Republican presidents.

STORY #3: In a major antitrust settlement, Visa and Mastercard, the two dominant corporations in the credit card business, have agreed to limit the fees they charge merchants for purchases using their credit cards. It’s estimated that this will save merchants at least $6 billion a year. Some of these savings may be passed on to consumers. Currently, the typical 2% credit card fee costs merchants over $100 billion a year.

Merchants are also now allowed to charge consumers differentiated fees depending on the credit card they use for their purchase. This incentivizes consumers to use lower cost cards.

The antitrust case has been in the courts for almost 20 years and five years ago Visa and Mastercard paid roughly $6 billion to merchants in what was, at the time, the largest settlement ever in a class action lawsuit. [3]

STORY #4: The Biden administration has taken a stand for safety and workers with a new federal regulation requiring most freight trains to have two-person crews. Ever since the February 2023 toxic train derailment and fire in East Palestine, Ohio, train safety and working conditions have been under intense scrutiny. However, little has changed and the railroad safety bill in Congress has stalled. The Biden administration has been working on this new regulation for two years. The process garnered 13,000 public comments with only about 60 in opposition to two-person crews. Nonetheless, the big railroad corporations have lobbied hard against it and have now gone to court to block the new regulation. The typical train these days is about a mile long (5,300 feet) with roughly 100 cars; some are three miles long. Despite the railroad corporations’ stated commitment to safety, particularly since the Ohio derailment, they are strongly opposing two-person crews and there are currently an average of almost three derailments every day. [4]

STORY #5: As an update on a previous post, Please sign this petition to reduce the Medicare Advantage rip off, the Biden administration held the line on the proposed 3.7% increase in Medicare Advantage payments despite intense lobbying by the insurance industry, which sponsors and makes big profits off Medicare Advantage plans. As a result, Medicare’s payments to Medicare Advantage plans are expected to increase by over $16 billion in 2025, to a total of over $500 billion. In the past, the federal government has usually succumbed to industry lobbying and upped the annual Medicare Advantage increase from the initially proposed amount. Although some advocates were disappointed that the Biden administration didn’t reduce the proposed increase or do more to rein in the abuses by Medicare Advantage plans, this shows that advocacy can change past precedent and result in at least a first step in reining in the for-profit rip off of Medicare Advantage plans. [5]

[1]      Joseph, C., 4/5/24, “This nonprofit has newsrooms in all 50 state capitals. Is it the future of state journalism?” Columbia Journalism Review (https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/states-newsroom-local-politics-policy-model.php)

[2]      Bivens, J., 4/2/24, “Economic performance is stronger when Democrats hold the White House,” Economic Policy Institute (https://www.epi.org/publication/econ-performance-pres-admin/)

[3]      Smith, P., 3/27/24, “Visa, Mastercard reach $30 billion deal with US retailers,” The Boston Globe from Bloomberg News

[4]      Funk, J., 4/3/24, “Freight railroads must keep two-person crews,” The Boston Globe from the Associated Press

[5]      Corbett, J., 4/2/24, “Campaigners beat ‘greedy’ insurance giants exploiting Medicare Advantage,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/news/medicare-advantage-plans)

STORIES CENSORED BY CORPORATE MEDIA Part 3

A central purpose of my blog posts is to share information that is under-reported by the mainstream, corporate media. This post and the previous two (here and here) share highlights of the top ten under-reported stories of 2022 from the annual State of the Free Press report from Project Censored. The media – print, TV, on-line, and social media – have undergone a dramatic corporate consolidation over the last 40 years. They are now a handful of huge, for-profit corporations, often owned and run by billionaire oligarchs. Through bias and self-censorship, this has restricted the content and quality of the information reported, skewing the terms and content of public debate and decision making. Project Censored works to hold the corporate news media and their owners accountable. (See this previous post for more detail.)

(Note: If you find my posts too much to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making.)

The under-reported stories highlighted by Project Censored’s report mean that the media are failing to provide citizens and voters important information, which threatens our democracy. This also undermines progress toward of a just, fair, and inclusive society. My previous post summarized numbers five through seven of its top ten stories for the year. Here are summaries of the last three. [1]

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #8: CIA’s plans under Pompeo and Trump to kidnap or kill Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange. Such plans were seriously considered in late 2017 according to September 2021 investigative reporting by Yahoo News based on interviews with over 30 former government officials. Pompeo and others wanted vengeance against Assange for Wikileaks online publishing of documents from the CIA’s top secret hacking division. Apparently, resistance from England (where Assange was in refuge in an embassy), from the U.S. National Security Council, and from the U.S. Department of Justice kept these plans from being undertaken. Despite some coverage in non-mainstream media of the Yahoo News reporting, very little, if any, coverage occurred in the mainstream, corporate media.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #9: Efforts to prevent disclosure of election campaign donors. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision (and others) that have reduced regulation of and limits on campaign spending, the role of money whose true donor is unknown (so-called “dark money”) in our elections has exploded. Republican legislators at the national and state levels are promoting legislation that would make it illegal to require non-profit organizations engaged in political spending to disclose their donors.

At the state-level, legislators are using model legislation developed by the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to ban such disclosure and have passed such laws in nine states. ALEC brings together corporate lobbyists and corporate-friendly legislators to draft and promote legislation favorable to corporations and right-wing interests. ALEC is part of the sprawling political influence network funded by right-wing billionaires, such as the Kochs and Bradleys, both of whom use dark money non-profits to conceal their political spending.

At the federal level, the 2022 fiscal year budget bill included a rider exempting politically-active non-profit organizations that self-identify as promoting the social welfare from having to report their donors. Another rider prevents the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from requiring corporations to disclose political and lobbying spending.

There has been very little coverage in the corporate, mainstream media of these efforts to protect and expand dark money in election campaigns, let alone the role of ALEC and its collaborators in such efforts at the state level.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #10: Lobbying against online privacy protections is, in part, funded by the mainstream media. “Surveillance advertising,” which collects a user’s data from online activities to tailor advertising to that individual, generally without the user’s knowledge, is ubiquitous and essential to profiting from online advertising. It is extremely profitable for social media apps and platforms, including Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, etc. The mainstream media also depend on online advertising revenue, including the New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, Time, the Washington Post, Fox TV, and many others.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is working on regulations for the collection and use of data on online users. However, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and its lobbyists are opposing such regulation. The IAB is funded by and represents the interests of online media outlets (including the mainstream media) and data brokers. The personal user information collected online (including from minors) is not only used to target advertising by the app or platform being used, it is typically sold to data brokers. These data brokers create predictive models of users’ online behavior and then sell them to advertisers. These predictive models also allow manipulation of the public’s perceptions of political issues. This occurred during the 2016 presidential campaign: the British firm, Cambridge Analytica, used the personal date of Facebook users, without consent or permission, to craft and target political ads and propaganda.

The importance of revenue from online advertising is huge; it has grown from $32 billion in 2011 to $152 billion in 2020 (almost five times the previous amount). Meanwhile, hardcopy advertising revenue has declined roughly one-quarter from $125 billion in 2011 to $90 billion in 2020. The mainstream corporate media increasingly rely on extensive privacy violations to generate badly needed revenue from online advertising, while the public relies on them to report on this – obviously a huge conflict of interest. While there’s been some reporting of the FTC’s efforts to protect users’ privacy, the corporate media have been largely silent on the push by the FTC and in Congress to ban or severely regulate surveillance advertising. And they have been totally silent on the fact that the industry organization they fund, the IAB, is lobbying against privacy protections for online users as well as against limitations on surveillance advertising.

CONCLUSION: The overarching theme of these under-reported stories is the failure of the mainstream corporate media to educate the American public about the power and influence of wealthy corporations and individuals. The success of these wealthy special interests in influencing government policy and the enforcement of laws is something every voter needs to be well aware of in order to make informed decisions.

This blog can only scratch the surface of the issue of stories under-reported by the mainstream corporate media. For reporting on such stories (and many others), please see the free, reader-supported media that I recommended in this previous post.

[1]      Rosenberg, P., 1/3/23, “Project Censored, Part 2: Billionaire press domination,” The American Prospect, (https://prospect.org/power/project-censored-part-2-billionaire-press-domination/)

STORIES CENSORED BY CORPORATE MEDIA Part 2

A central purpose of my blog posts is to share information that is under-reported by the mainstream, corporate media. This post and the previous one share highlights of the top ten under-reported stories of 2022 identified by the annual State of the Free Press report from Project Censored. The media – print, TV, on-line, and social media – have undergone a dramatic corporate consolidation over the last 40 years so they are now a handful of huge, for-profit corporations, often owned and run by billionaire oligarchs. Through bias and self-censorship, this has restricted the content and quality of the information reported and, therefore, skewed the terms and content of public debate and decision making. Project Censored works to hold the corporate news media and their owners accountable. (See my previous post for more detail.)

(Note: If you find my posts too much to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making.)

By failing to provide citizens and voters important information, the under-reporting highlighted by Project Censored’s report undermines democracy, the public interest, and the promotion of a just, fair, and inclusive society. My previous post summarized the first four of its top ten issues for the year. Here are summaries of the next three. [1]

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #5: A network of right-wing “dark money” organizations is undermining democracy in multiple ways. Dark money organizations are politically active groups organized as non-profits so they don’t have to report their donors. A network of them, including the Judicial Crisis Network, The 85 Fund, and the Donors Trust, has been funding election deniers, the January 6 insurrectionists, and campaigns for and against Supreme Court nominees. They have funded support for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominees and opposition to President Biden’s nominee. The billionaire Koch brothers (although one of them has passed away) have their own network of groups that funnel money to political causes, including through the Donors Trust. These dark money groups are also closely link to the Federalist Society of right-wing lawyers and judges and its co-chair Leonard Leo.

This network of dark money groups has been set up to obscure the sources of funding for right-wing political activities. In 2020, these dark money groups provided the Federalist Society and related groups over $52 million, primarily to promote the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Barrett. In 2020, they provided over $37 million to entities that played a role in the January 6 insurrection. They previously had spent tens of millions of dollars promoting the confirmations of Trump-nominated Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. They gave tens of millions to groups promoting lies about the 2020 election. Members of the Federalist Society played key roles in the various schemes to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the confirmation of Biden as President. For example, 14 of the 18 Attorneys General who filed suit to throw out election results in key states are Federalist Society members.

Despite the size and scope of this dark money network supporting right-wing political, anti-democracy activities, the corporate media have left the story of the connections and coordination of these funders almost totally unreported. Although the media have covered specific right-wing activities, they have not provided the context of the network of funders of these activities. Therefore, the impact and threat of these dark money funders and the need to address the overarching issue of dark money remain unknown to most of the public and most voters. If nothing else, this minimizes public understanding of the level of the threat to our democracy, to our elections, and to trust in our governments. This undermines democracy by failing to educate voters about the extent of the network of funders and the coordination among the right-wing extremists’ organizations.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #6: Corporate consolidations and the marketplace power that this creates are key drivers of “inflation.” The mainstream, corporate media have reported extensively on the current surge of inflation. However, they rarely report on the price gouging by huge, monopolistic corporations that has been a key cause of inflationary price increases. When they do report on it, it’s usually to dismiss it as a cause of inflation. Corporate consolidation leading to the marketplace power to engage in price gouging has occurred in many industries in the U.S. and globally, from railroads to pharmaceuticals to ocean shipping. The food industry, which has engaged in price gouging causing high inflation in grocery prices, is a great example. Three corporations own 93% of the carbonated soft drinks sold, three other corporations own 73% of cereals, and four or fewer firms control at least 50% of the market for 79% of groceries. The four big meat suppliers have paid over $225 million to settle suits related to price fixing and other market manipulation.

Because of price increases across the whole economy, U.S. corporations’ profits are at the highest levels in 70 years. Fifty to 60 percent of “inflation” is going to increased profits, which are being used to pay big dividends to investors and to buyback over $20 billion of corporations’ own stocks in 2021 alone. (See previous posts here, here, and he re for more information on corporate consolidation and price gouging that causes “inflation.”)

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #7: Gates Foundation gifts of well over $319 million to the media and related entities. The identified gifts (the true total is undoubtedly far higher) go directly to the media, to the coverage of specific topics, and to journalism training programs and associations. These gifts raise serious questions about journalistic independence and conflicts of interest. U.S. recipients include CNN, NBC, NPR, PBS, and The Atlantic. International recipients include the BBC, Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, The Financial Times, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel. An example of funding for coverage of a specific topic is the Gates Foundation’s $2.3 million grant to the Texas Tribune to increase public awareness and engagement in education reform. Given Gates’ longstanding advocacy for charter schools, which many educators and political leaders see as an effort to privatize public education and undermine teachers’ unions, this grant could be viewed as an effort to generate pro-charter school stories that appear to be objective news reporting.

The Gates Foundation, a tax-exempt charity that frequently trumpets the importance of transparency, is often very secretive about its finances and gifts. Not included in the $319 million figure are gifts to academic journals and research targeted at producing journal articles that often end up getting reported in the mainstream media. For example, at least $13.6 million has been spent on creating content for the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet.

Major corporate media have not covered this story, despite a 2011 Seattle Times article noting that the Gates Foundation’s gifts to media organizations were blurring the line between journalism and advocacy.

My next post will summarize the last three stories that Project Censored had in its top ten list of those censored by the corporate media in 2022.

[1]      Rosenberg, P., 1/3/23, “Project Censored, Part 2: Billionaire press domination,” The American Prospect, (https://prospect.org/power/project-censored-part-2-billionaire-press-domination/)

STORIES CENSORED BY CORPORATE MEDIA Part 1

A central purpose of my blog posts is to share information that is under-reported by the mainstream, corporate media. This post and the next one will share highlights from the State of the Free Press report from Project Censored, which annually identifies its list of the most important issues that were under-reported by the corporate media. The corporate consolidation of the media – print, TV, on-line, and social media – into a handful of huge, for-profit corporations, often owned and run by billionaire oligarchs, has restricted the content and quality of the information reported and, therefore, skewed the terms and content of public debate and decision making. Project Censored works to hold the corporate news media accountable.

(Note: If you find my posts too much to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making.)

Over the years, Project Censored’s State of the Free Press report has identified under-reported issues involving climate change, corporate corruption, campaign financing, poverty, racism, and war. In addition, the report’s diverse contributors advocate for press freedom and media literacy as necessary to hold powerful interests accountable and to promote a just, inclusive, and democratic society. The authors note that, “History shows that consolidated media, controlled by a handful of elite owners, seldom serves the public interest.”

The corporate media’s owners filter the news they report through a class-driven frame, which they may be oblivious to. They overlook or ignore conflicts of interest between their ownership, their investors’ and their advertisers’ interests and the interests of the public that they are supposedly serving with objective news coverage. The concentration of corporate wealth and power skews or distorts what they report and, therefore, what the public learns or doesn’t learn about our society, our economy, and our policy making.

The corporate media’s self-censorship of certain stories and topics does not occur through explicit, blanket bans on reporting them, but through omission or under-reporting due to bias based on the personal perspectives of owners, some editors, and some reporters who tend to be white, male, and economically well-off. Although specific incidents of, for example, corporate corruption may be reported, the overall underlying pattern, scope, and scale of stories are often not presented. This reporting is what is referred to as “episodic,” i.e., about a specific episode or example. It lacks the context that would allow the public to truly understand the scope and scale of the issue or topic. The lack of what’s referred to as “thematic” reporting means the consumer of information is not given a complete picture or understanding of what’s happening in society, and what can and perhaps should be done to address problems, such as corporate corruption.

As a result, citizens and voters in our democratic society are under-informed, in particular about the role of government policies in shaping our economy and society. Therefore, they are ill-equipped to be knowledgeable citizens and voters in a democracy and “government based on the consent of the governed is but an illusory dream.” [1]

An overarching element of many of the under-reported stories is corporate power and sometimes outright corporate corruption. A secondary theme is the exercise of corporate power in influencing government policy making and functioning.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #1: Public subsidy of the fossil fuel industry is over $5 trillion per year worldwide. The subsidy is largely indirect and reflects externalized costs, i.e., costs of using fossil fuels that the industry doesn’t pay. These costs include the health costs of deadly air pollution (42% of the total), damages from extreme, climate-change-driven weather events (29%), and costs of traffic accidents and congestion (15%). Two-thirds of the subsidy occurs in just five countries: the United States, Russia, India, China, and Japan. No national government sets fossil fuels prices at a level that would cover the external costs of fossil fuel use. These were key findings of an International Monetary Fund study of 191 countries published in September 2021 that was ignored by the mainstream, corporate media.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #2: U.S. employer wage theft from workers is billions of dollars annually and goes largely unpunished. In 2017, the Economic Policy Institute released a study of one form of wage theft: minimum wage violations. It estimated that workers lose $15 billion each year to this type of wage theft, which is rarely reported by the corporate media. For the sake of comparison, street crime is heavily reported by the media, even though its financial impact is less – an estimated $14 billion in 2017 according to the FBI.

Nonetheless, employers are seldom punished for minimum wage violations that steal workers’ pay. A Center for Public Integrity report in 2021 found that over 15 years only one in four employers who were repeat offenders were fined and only 14% of those were required to pay a penalty to the aggrieved worker beyond paying the back wages they owed.

Employer wage theft also includes not paying overtime, requiring workers to work hours “off-the-clock” that they’re not paid for, and withholding tips. Most wage theft is from low-come workers, including, disproportionately, workers of color as well as immigrant and guest workers.

Another form of wage theft is misclassifying workers as independent contractors instead of employees. This has occurred with port-based truck drivers for years and has become an epidemic with the growth of gig workers in recent years. A 2014 study by the National Employment Law Center estimated that California port truckers have $800 million to $1 billion in wages stolen annually through misclassification.

Both federal and state enforcement of wage and labor laws are weak and underfunded. The Wage Theft Prevention and Wage Recovery Act of 2022 is designed to address enforcement issues but is unlikely to pass in Congress.

Given its scale, wage theft is dramatically under-reported by the corporate media. When it is covered, the reporting is episodic, focusing on a specific employer and specific employees. Thematic reporting that includes the scope of the problem, the weak enforcement, and the light punishment of offenders is very rare indeed.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #3: EPA failed to make reports on dangerous chemicals public. In January 2019, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stopped publicly releasing legally required reports about chemicals presenting a substantial risk of harm to health or the environment. By November of 2021, the EPA had received at least 1,240 reports of substantial risk of harm, but only one was publicly available.

In January 2022, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility filed a lawsuit to force the EPA to make the reports publicly available. Within a few weeks, the EPA announced it would resume the public release of the reports. There was essentially no reporting of any of this in the corporate media.

UNDER-REPORTED STORY #4: At least 128 Members of Congress have investments in the fossil fuel industry. At least 100 U.S. Representatives and 28 U.S. Senators have investments in the fossil fuel industry. Despite detailed reporting of this in non-corporate media in late 2021, this story has been virtually ignored by the mainstream corporate media. The Senators’ investments add up to roughly $12.5 million with Senator Manchin (D-WV) topping the list with up to $5.5 million in industry investments. (Most reporting is in ranges not specific dollar amounts.) In the House, Representative Taylor (R-TX) topped the list with investments of up to $12.4 million.

Notably, many of the Members of Congress with fossil fuel investments sit on committees that have jurisdiction over energy-related policies. Therefore, they have substantial conflicts of interest as elected legislators supposedly acting in the public’s interest. By the way, the fossil fuel industry spent at least $40 million on congressional campaigns in the 2020 election cycle and spent almost $120 million on lobbying in 2020.

My next post will summarize the six other stories or topics censored by the corporate media that Project Censored had in its top ten list for the year.

[1]      Rosenberg, P., 1/2/23, “Project Censored, Part 1: Billionaire press domination,” The American Prospect, p. 1, (https://prospect.org/power/project-censored-part-1-billionaire-press-domination/)

GIVING THANKS FOR FREE, READER-SUPPORTED MEDIA

I give thanks for news and information sources that are not-for-profit, reader-supported, and free, given that the mainstream media are large, for-profit corporations. Unconstrained by a corporate, for-profit mindset and dependence on advertisers for revenue that both skew “news” toward infotainment to attract attention and capitalistic viewpoints to please corporate bosses and advertisers, reader-supported media provide valuable information and perspectives that go unreported by the mainstream media.

(Note: If you find my posts too much to read on occasion, feel free to read just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making.)

The mainstream media are NOT liberal on economic issues, despite the decades of assertions by the right-wing that they are. They may be liberal on social issues such as abortion rights, LGBTQ+ issues, and gun violence reduction, but they are NOT liberal on economic issues such as business and Wall St. regulation, taxes, workers’ rights, economic inequality, and enforcement of antitrust laws.

My favorite progressive (or liberal if you like), print (hardcopy and online), non-profit, free, reader-supported publications with a focus on news and public policy are presented below. I’m sure there are others but these are more than sufficient to keep me busy and informed with in-depth, accurate information, thoughtful perspectives, and expert policy analysis. You can sign-up for daily or weekly emails from them that highlight their current content.

Take even a quick look at any of these sources of news, information, and analysis and I believe you’ll quickly agree with me that the mainstream media are NOT liberal or progressive!

Common Dreams: Founded in 1997, it lists its mission as: “To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.” Its website further states: “We are optimists. We believe real change is possible. But only if enough well-informed, well-intentioned – and just plain fed up and fired-up – people demand it. We believe that together we can attain our common dreams.” It only publishes online and delivers daily or weekly emails with summaries of and links to its relatively short articles covering current news.

The Hightower Lowdown: This entertaining, irreverent, progressive populist newsletter is written by Jim Hightower. Hightower worked in Congress, was twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner (1983 – 1991), and “has long chronicled the ongoing democratic struggles by America’s ordinary people against rule by its plutocratic elites.” The Lowdown is available in print, online, and on the airwaves.

The American Prospect: In my opinion, this magazine and website deliver the best and most comprehensive progressive policy content. Its stated mission is “to tell stories about the ideas, politics, and power that shape our world.” It is “devoted to promoting informed discussion on public policy from a progressive perspective.” It identifies “policy alternatives and the politics necessary to create [and enact] good legislation.”

The Nation: It publishes progressive, independent journalism that “encourages debate, foments change, and lifts up the voices of those fighting for justice.” Founded by abolitionists in 1865, it believes that provocative, independent journalism can bring about a more democratic and equitable world. It provides thoughtful and investigative reporting that “speaks truth to power to build a more just society.” It’s available both online and in print.

Mother Jones: Founded in 1976, it’s “America’s longest-established investigative news organization.” Its mission is to deliver “reporting that inspires change and combats ‘alternative facts.’” It provides in-depth stories on a wide range of subjects including politics, criminal and racial justice, education, climate change, and food and agriculture. Its fellowship program is one of the premier training grounds for investigative journalists. It is available in print, online, and via videos and podcasts.

ProPublica: It was founded in 2007 with the beliefs that investigative journalism and informing the public about complex issues are crucial for our democracy. Its mission is “to expose abuses of power and betrayals of the public trust by government, business, and other institutions, using the moral force of investigative journalism to spur reform through the sustained spotlighting of wrongdoing.” With more than 100 journalists, it covers topics including government, politics, business, criminal justice, the environment, education, health care, immigration, and technology with in-depth, detailed articles.

If you prefer video content to print, I recommend Inequality Media. Its vision is “a United States where active participation by informed citizens restores the balance of power in our democracy and creates an economy where gains are widely shared.” Its mission is “to inform and engage the public about inequality and the imbalance of power” in U.S. society. Founded in 2015, its short videos are “entertaining and easy to understand [with] graphics, photos, and animations.”  It focuses on current news and explains it in a way that ties it to the larger story of needed social change to create a more equitable economy and a more stable democracy.

I urge you to read and, if you can, support financially one or more of these organizations. In the current hyper-capitalistic, plutocratic economic and political environment in the U.S., we need these sources of non-profit, reader-supported journalism to support a well-informed citizenry, democratic governance, and the relatively level economic playing field democracy requires. Today’s mainstream media are simply not performing these responsibilities of the media in a democracy. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis stated, “we can have democracy in this country or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of the few, but we can’t have both.”

THE POWER OF THE GUN INDUSTRY

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

The gun industry has a powerful influence on policy making in the US as well as in shaping judicial rulings on gun laws and the discussion of guns and gun violence.

Part of the gun industry’s power and influence comes from its size and its ability and willingness to spend on political campaigns and lobbying. It produces roughly 10 million guns per year, resulting in sales revenue of about $12 billion. With profits of approximately $1 billion annually, it has spent $120 million on lobbying over the last ten years. In the two-year 2020 election cycle, the advocacy groups associated with the gun industry spent over $18 million on election campaigns. While the National Rifle Association (NRA) was the source of $5 million of this spending, it has been declining in membership and financial clout. However, other gun advocacy groups have been picking up much of the slack. [1]

For example, the organization Gun Owners of America has been increasing its activity. It opposes the U.S. House passed Protect Our Kids Act as well as the emerging bipartisan Senate proposal to address gun violence. It has “concern” about expanded waiting periods on gun purchases and red flag laws that would allow courts to remove guns from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others. It opposes the proposal to ban untraceable “ghost” guns and is spreading misinformation about what it would do. [2]

Another piece of the gun industry’s power comes from its shaping of the discussion of guns and the Second Amendment. It has shifted the discussion from a well-regulated militia, e.g., the National Guard, to an individual right to ownership of any and all types of guns. It also shifted the discussion from the security of the state to personal self-defense. (See this previous post for more detail.) This shift in language, especially to an individual’s supposed right to own a gun (including a semi-automatic assault weapon), is pervasive in the media, widespread in the court system, and even echoed by Democrats and President Biden.

The 2008 Supreme Court’s 5 to 4 decision that created an individual right to possess a firearm, District of Columbia vs. Heller, overturned 217 years of interpretation of the Second Amendment and numerous court precedents allowing restrictions on an individual’s possession of a gun. It was described by former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens (appointed by Republican President Gerald Ford) as “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench,” which extended 35 years from 1975 – 2010.

Former Chief Justice Warren Burger (appointed by Republican President Richard Nixon) called the gun industry’s and the NRA’s promotion of this interpretation of the Second Amendment “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.” These two statements by conservative, former Supreme Court Justices underscore the hypocrisy of the supposed originalism of the supporters of this interpretation, who ignore the first two phrases of the Second Amendment: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Nonetheless, the media, the courts, essentially all Republicans, and even most Democrats speak of the individual right to bear arms as an unquestioned constitutional right. Questioning this interpretation of the Second Amendment or citing Justices Stevens’ and Burger’s statements about it are almost completely absent from the discourse. Based on this manufactured right, the Supreme Court seems all but certain to make a ruling this month that will find unconstitutional a New York law, in place since 1913, that requires someone carrying a concealed gun in public to have a permit.

It appears that the originalist judicial philosophy (supposedly underlying this interpretation of the Second Amendment as creating an individual right to bear arms) was invented as an intellectual smokescreen to justify this and other radical, reactionary judicial rulings. The originalists claim that the Constitution’s language, including on rights, freedom, and liberty, should always and forever be interpreted with the meaning they had in 1791 (when African Americans were slaves) or in 1868 when the 14th Amendment was passed (when women had no rights and almost all schools were segregated). [3] Such a claim seems ludicrous on its face and the Supreme Court rulings by its adherents are radical, reactionary, and inconsistent. The failure of the media and Democrats to point out these facts is hard to understand.

The gun industry also displays its power on the Internet and social media, which have certainly played a role in fomenting the American gun culture and even gun violence. Given that most TV networks, magazines, and newspapers banned gun ads years ago, digital advertising via Google and other Internet sites is essential to the gun industry’s marketing.

In 2004, based on Google’s corporate value “don’t be evil” and as a matter of ethics, Google’s cofounder Sergey Brin announced that gun ads would be banned. Nonetheless, Google’s ad systems have provided billions of views of gun makers’ ads since then. A study by the independent, non-profit, investigative journalism organization ProPublica found that between March 9 and June 6, 2022 (90 days), the fifteen largest gun sellers in the U.S. placed ads through Google that produced 120 million impressions (i.e., the displaying of an  ad to a viewer). [4] This is an average of roughly 1.3 million views of a gun ad per day.

Every time an ad is viewed, Google earns a small fee. Some of the gun ads have appeared on Google’s own sites, a clear breach of Google’s stated policy. However, the vast majority of them are placed via a long-standing and well-known loophole in Google’s policy. Although Google bans gun ads on its own ad network and on sites it owns, ads sold by partners but placed using Google’s systems are not restricted by Google.

Gun makers and sellers can use Google’s advertising system to place gun ads on websites that allow gun ads. This is where the vast majority of gun ads show up.

Although a website owner can theoretically ban certain types of ads, such as gun ads, Google’s ad systems’ enforcement of such a ban has loopholes. Most notably, if a person has visited a gun maker’s website, Google’s tools facilitate the tracking of that person as they browse other sites. When that person is at another website, one that may ban gun ads, this tracking and targeting tool can display a gun ad. This retargeting (as it’s called) of a person is a loophole Google purposefully built into its advertising system over a decade ago.

For example, although Publishers Clearing House does not accept gun ads, in a recent three-month period roughly 4.6 million views of ads for Savage Arms guns occurred on the Publishers Clearing House website. Gun ads have also been documented as showing up on websites such as The Denver Post, Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, the Britannica, U.S. News & World Report, Ultimate Classic Rock, Parent Influence (on an article about “How to handle teen drama), and on Baby Games (amid brightly colored kids’ games), as well as on recipe sites and quiz game sites.

Google makes money on each of the hundreds of millions of views each year of gun ads. Note that Google dominates the digital advertising world with 28.6% of total digital ad revenue in the U.S.; Facebook has 23.8% and Amazon 11.3%, giving the big three an overwhelming 63.7% of the market. Therefore, gun ads via Google’s advertising systems are important both to the gun industry and to Google’s revenue.

[1]      Siders, D., & Fuchs, H., 6/10/22, “The NRA isn’t the only group advocating for the Second Amendment,” Politico (https://www.politico.com/minutes/congress/06-10-2022/more-than-just-nra/)

[2]      Giorno, T., 6/14/22, “Gun Owners of America pushes back on bipartisan gun control legislation,” Open Secrets (https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2022/06/gun-owners-of-america-pushes-back-on-bipartisan-gun-control-legislation)

[3]      Mogulescu, M., 6/6/22, “It’s time for Democrats to stop agreeing that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms,” Common Dreams (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2022/06/06/its-time-democrats-stop-agreeing-second-amendment-protects-individuals-right-bear)

[4]      Silverman, C., &Talbot, R., 6/14/22, “Google says it bans gun ads. It actually makes money from them.” ProPublica (https://www.propublica.org/article/google-guns-ads-firearms-alphabet-advertising)

FACEBOOK KNOWS IT PROMOTES MISINFORMATION AND WILL CONTINUE TO DO SO WITHOUT GOVERNMENT REGULATION

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

Facebook’s promotion of low-quality, right-wing content and disinformation has been clearly documented. For example, in April 2021, The Daily Wire, a bigoted, sexist, anti-immigrant, far-right website that produces no original reporting and a low volume of articles had by far the highest distribution / engagement on Facebook. Second highest was the British tabloid, the Daily Mail, followed by Fox News. Four of the top six sources of content engagement on Facebook were right-wing publishers of disinformation. Credible media got much less engagement due to Facebook’s content promotion algorithm. For example, for April 2021: [1]

  • The Daily Wire (1st)          74.9 million Facebook engagements based on 1,385 articles
  • CNN (4th)                         23.1 million Facebook engagements based on 4,765 articles
  • NBC (7th)                         18.7 million Facebook engagements based on 2,596 articles
  • New York Times (8th)      18.6 million Facebook engagements based on 6,326 articles
  • Washington Post (14th)   12.3 million Facebook engagements based on 6,228 articles

Facebook’s reality, driven by its content promotion algorithm, is NOT the reality outside of Facebook. The Daily Wire is NOT more popular than CNN, NBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post in the world outside of Facebook, let alone more popular than all four of them combined – and the almost 20,000 articles they publish per month compared to the less than 1,400 articles of The Daily Wire, none of which contain original reporting. Facebook promotes this alternative reality because it maximizes its profits. (See this previous post for more detail.)

The election-related disinformation that flourishes on Facebook is a global crisis. There are 36 national elections in countries around the globe in 2022 and many of them will be affected by disinformation on Facebook. Some may be affected to an even greater degree than what has occurred in the U.S., where a strong case can be made that disinformation on social media (with Facebook as a major if not the major player) led to the election of Trump in 2016.

Facebook (and its parent Meta) know how to stop the proliferation of disinformation and have done so for short periods of time at least twice. Meta refers to these instances as “break the glass” emergencies, but the emergency is not short-term and specific incident related, it’s long-term and endemic.

For five days after the 2020 U.S. national election, Facebook’s News Feed and other features operated very differently. Facebook adjusted its content promotion calculations, i.e., its algorithm, to more strongly promote credible news sources. By implication, it deprioritized or down ranked sources publishing disinformation and divisive or hateful content. Facebook did this to slow the spread of disinformation about election fraud and the presidential election being stolen. However, it was too little and too late, lasting only five days in the face of many months of spreading lies about the election. Nonetheless, during the life of the adjusted algorithm, Facebook engagement for credible sources such as the New York Times, CNN, and NPR spiked up and the engagement dropped for the extreme right-wing sources, as well as for hyper-partisan left-wing sources.

Some Facebook staff pushed to make the algorithm change permanent, but were overruled by Facebook’s senior management, including Joel Kaplan, a Republican operative who had previously intervened on behalf of right-wing sources and the Facebook algorithm that promotes them. Moreover, as Facebook returned to “normal” operation, Facebook also eliminated its civic-integrity unit.

After the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Meta and Facebook again “broke the glass” and instituted more preferential promotion for credible news sources, but again, only for a few days.

Many concerned people from across the globe and from all walks of life – from policy makers to advocates to marginalized people – are calling on Facebook (and other social media platforms, including Instagram [also owned by Facebook’s parent Meta]) to take three steps: [2]

  1. Be transparent: disclose business models, algorithms, and content moderation practices; and release internal data on the effects and harms of the current mode of operation. This would allow independent verification of whether content amplification and moderation are effectively combatting disinformation, protecting elections and democracy, and keeping people, especially young people and children, safe.
  2. Change content promotion algorithms: stop preferential promotion of the most incendiary, hateful, and harmful content to the most vulnerable audiences.
  3. Protect all people equally: bolster content moderation to protect all people, especially marginalized and vulnerable groups, in all countries and all languages.

Facebook and the other social media companies won’t do this on their own. Without government regulation, they will continue to put profits before social responsibility . We must take steps to reduce the disinformation and divisiveness spread by Facebook and other social media platforms. Doing so is critical to the well-being of all of us, especially our children, and to the well-being of society and democracy. Government regulation clearly has to be an important part of the answer.

I encourage to you contact President Biden and your Congress people. Tell them you want strong regulation of Facebook and other social media platforms, including requirements to implement the three steps outlined above. (See this previous post for more on fixes for the harmful behavior of Facebook and other social media platforms.)

You can email President Biden at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments or you can call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 or the switchboard at 202-456-1414.

You can find contact information for your U.S. Representative at  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your U.S. Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

[1]      Legum, J., 5/6/21, “Facebook’s problem isn’t Trump – it’s the algorithm,” Popular Information (https://popular.info/p/facebooks-problem-isnt-trump-its)

[2]      Change the Terms Coalition, retrieved from the Internet 5/2/22, https://www.changetheterms.org/

FACEBOOK KNOWS IT PROMOTES MISINFORMATION AND DOES SO TO MAXIMIZE PROFITS

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

Facebook promotes misinformation. It knows this is harmful, it knows how to fix it, but it does it anyway – for the sake of profits. This is true across the full range of content from racist and misogynistic disinformation to Russian propaganda. It is true globally and across languages with the worst abuses probably occurring outside the U.S. and in languages other than English.

Facebook undermines democracy and promotes divisiveness and hate (as do other social media platforms such as Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube) based on conscious decisions by senior management. (See this previous post on the harm being done by Facebook and other social media platforms.)

The reason that Facebook (and other social media platforms) refuse to effectively control (i.e., “moderate”) content is that profits come first. In 2021, Facebook made $39.4 billion in profits primarily from advertising exquisitely targeted to its almost three billion users.

Perhaps the ultimate confirmation of this is that Facebook and Instagram (both owned by Meta) have been blocked in Russia after the invasion of the Ukraine, but Facebook and Instagram are still publishing and promoting Russian propaganda around the world. Although they claim to be moderating disinformation from Russia, 80% of disinformation about U.S. biological weapons has been posted without being flagged or blocked. [1]

Currently, Facebook’s only incentives to moderate the content it allows and promotes are to avoid government regulation and to not be so offensive that advertisers pull their ads. In an effort to address concerns about content moderation – which admittedly sometimes requires making difficult, judgmental decisions that will be unpopular with some people – Facebook created an “Oversight Board” in 2019 to review its moderation decisions. Facebook claims the Board is independent and recruited an impressive set of individuals to serve on it. [2]

Roughly a year ago, the Board issued its first major report, a 12,000-word review of Facebook’s decision to indefinitely suspend Donald Trump from Facebook. The Board affirmed the decision to suspend Trump, but stated that it was inappropriate to make the suspension indefinite.

The Board said Facebook should either make the suspension permanent or set a specific length of time for it. The Board noted that Facebook management was seeking to dodge responsibility and that it should impose and justify a specific penalty.

The Board also posed questions to Facebook management whose answers it felt were essential to enabling it to do its oversight job. However, Facebook management refused to answer questions and failed to provide information on:

  • The extent to which the Facebook’s design decisions, including algorithms, policies, procedures, and technical features, amplified Trump’s posts.
  • Whether an internal analysis had been done of whether such design decisions might have contributed to the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
  • Content violations by followers of Trump’s accounts.

The Board noted that without this information it was difficult for it to assess whether less severe measures, taken sooner, might have been effective in solving the problem of Trump’s violations of Facebook’s standards.

As the Board suggests, the central issue is not simply Trump’s posts, but Facebook’s amplification of those posts and others like them. In other words, the real issue is the nature of Facebook’s content promotion algorithm and whether it promotes posts from Trump and from people expressing views like or in support of Trump’s posts. However, the Board’s jurisdiction, as defined by Facebook management, excludes oversight of Facebook’s algorithm and business practices. Furthermore, the Board has no power to compel Facebook management to abide by its decisions and recommendations – or even to simply answer its questions. It will be effective only to the extent that Facebook management voluntarily cooperates, which would mean reducing profits – not something they will do voluntarily.

Although Facebook founder and now chief executive of its parent Meta, Mark Zuckerberg, once stated: “At the heart of these accusations is this idea that we prioritize profit over safety and well-being. That’s just not true.” The data clearly show that this is true – and hardly anyone believed Zuckerberg when he said it wasn’t.

My next post will provide documentation of Facebook’s promotion of disinformation and divisiveness, as well as its conscious decision to do this and its ability – and occasional willingness – to change this. The post will also include steps that can and should be taken to force Facebook and other social media platforms to change their behavior.

[1]      Benavidez, N., & Coyer, K., 4/17/22, “Facebook ought to be protecting democracy worldwide every day,” The Boston Globe

[2]      Legum, J., 5/6/21, “Facebook’s problem isn’t Trump – it’s the algorithm,” Popular Information (https://popular.info/p/facebooks-problem-isnt-trump-its)

STOP SUPPORTING FOX TV WITH MONEY FROM YOUR CABLE BILL

National Fox “News” TV [1] is a major contributor (if not THE major contributor) to the disinformation, divisiveness, hate, and lack of civility that are undermining our society and democracy. It also drives the nationwide hyper-partisanship and the gridlock in Congress. Since its debut in 1996, Fox TV’s primetime viewership has grown to 2.5 million, with evangelical Christians as its most reliable audience. Its penetration and impact have been facilitated by its claim to be news and, moreover, to be fair and balanced. It has grown increasingly radical and extreme over time, including noticeably more so since 2019. Its core themes have been:

  • Stoking racism and the belief that anti-white bias is a serious problem (most recently and notably in its constant, withering, distorted attack on critical race theory),
  • Fanning the flames of “culture wars” against same sex marriage, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, etc. as a fight against evil with white evangelical Christians as a key target, and
  • Promoting the belief that “liberals” are literally trying to destroy the country.

As national Fox TV consciously strives to generate outrage based on white resentment and supposed threats to Christianity, Trump and his acolytes in the Republican party have provided a reinforcing feedback loop that amplifies and exacerbates the disinformation, divisiveness, hate, and lack of civility. There is no mechanism for slowing this runaway train. [2]

Although social media play a critical role in amplifying disinformation and fostering divisiveness and other negative outcomes, much of the misinformation originates with national Fox TV. The content of other extremist channels like One American News Network (OANN) and Newsmax raise similar concerns but their audiences are minimal when compared to Fox TV’s audience. (See the Defenders of Democracy Against Disinformation website and this page about Fox TV in particular for more information.)

A significant portion of Fox’s revenue comes from the fees it receives from cable TV providers like Verizon and RCN, which transmit Fox programming to more than 100 million consumers every day.

Therefore, if you are paying Verizon or RCN (or any other provider that includes Fox TV) for your TV service, you are providing revenue to Fox, possibly as much as $2 per month. I do not want to provide one cent to Fox, but when I contacted Verizon multiple times to say I didn’t want to pay for the Fox channel, I was told that Fox can only be removed from my cable package if ALL news channels are removed. Verizon includes Fox in its News Bundle and it is inseparable from the other News channels. RCN customers have had a similar experience. This is unacceptable, in part because Fox isn’t news – it’s disinformation and propaganda. Therefore, it shouldn’t be in the News bundle to begin with.

I’m contacting senior executives at Verizon (see contact information and a sample letter below) to ask that Fox be removed from the News Bundle so that I don’t have to pay for Fox’s propaganda. I do want access to credible news on my TV but I don’t want to give money to Fox. Two of the four executives I’m targeting have email contact forms on the Internet. The other two (as far as I can tell) are only available by regular mail. I’ve also included contact information below for the CEO of RCN for those of you who are RCN subscribers. If you have another cable TV provider, please do an Internet search to find contact information for senior executives.

I encourage you to join me in contacting executives at your cable TV provider to ask that Fox be dropped from your service so we don’t have to give it money as part of our cable bills. I’ve drafted a letter to Hans Vestberg, the Verizon Chairman and Chief Executive Officer (see below). Please feel free to modify it as you see fit – particularly, of course, if you have a different cable TV provider but have the same Fox problem. Please send it by regular mail to him and to the Corporate Social Responsibility officer listed below at the address provided. Please email it to the other two executives using the webpage links for them presented below.

If you would like to call Verizon’s corporate headquarters, the number is 212-395-1000.

Senior executives at Verizon
Hans Vestberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Rose Stuckey Kirk, Corporate Social Responsibility Officer
Jim Gerace, External Communications and Media Relations, email form: https://www.verizon.com/about/our-company/leader/contact/916685
Manon Brouillette, Verizon Consumer Group, email form: https://www.verizon.com/about/our-company/leader/contact/922789

Chief Executive Officer at RCN
John Holanda, Chief Executive Officer
RCN
PO Box 11816
Newark, NJ
07101-8116

Sample letter to Verizon CEO

April 24, 2022

Mr. Hans Vestberg, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Verizon
1095 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY
10036

Dear Mr. Vestberg,

We have been Verizon customers for many years. We are very unhappy that we have to pay money each month through our Verizon bill to Fox TV. We have called and asked multiple times to have Fox removed from our cable TV package but have been told that it’s part of the News Bundle and cannot be removed unless all news channels are removed.

Fox TV is NOT news. Much of its content is inaccurate information and could more properly be described as propaganda. It fuels divisiveness and hate. We do NOT want our money supporting an organization that undermines our democracy and civility in our society.

If a resolution to this issue cannot be provided by Verizon, we will consider changing or eliminating our cable TV service, along with our Internet and landline services that are currently bundled with our cable TV service.

Please let us know what you are doing to stop forcing your customers who want good, informational news channels from paying money to Fox TV. If we don’t hear from you, we will assume nothing is being done and will pursue alternatives to our Verizon FIOS service.

Thank you for your time and attention to this important matter.

<Note: I’d recommend signing your letter by including your name(s), address, phone number, and an email address to indicate that you are serious and want an answer.>

[1]      I put News in quotes because Fox TV delivers more disinformation than news. Hereafter, I will refer to it as Fox TV and drop “News” because I don’t want to imply that it provides news. I also use “national” before Fox TV to make clear that my focus is on the national programming and not the programming of local Fox affiliates.

[2]      Drum, K., Sept.-Oct. 2021, “The real source of America’s rising rage,” Mother Jones   (https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/07/american-anger-polarization-fox-news/)

FIXES FOR INSTAGRAM AND FACEBOOK

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

The evidence that Facebook and Instagram are harmful, especially to teens and young people, goes back to 2006 and has been growing consistently more definitive over the last fifteen years. (See my previous post for more detail.) The pressure from the public, especially parents, and most recently from Congress to address this problem is mounting.

In response, in mid-March, Meta Platforms (the new parent corporation for Facebook and Instagram) made an announcement of some new and coming parental supervision tools for Instagram. Note that teens will have to consent to their parents’ use of supervision tools! Furthermore, teens will know what their parents are seeing about their account and activity. Rather than building in universal safety controls, Meta claims it wants to enable parents to control teens’ social media activity because parents know their teens best and teens have different maturity levels. This sounds to me like a classic blame the victim – and the victim’s parents – strategy.

Moreover, Meta knows that many parents aren’t tech savvy and/or won’t have the time and energy to effectively control teens’ social media activity. It also knows that teens tend to be far more tech savvy than their parents and will often be able to evade parental controls. It could easily institute universal strategies to eliminate or greatly reduce the potential for harm from its platforms. Finally, it knows that teens’ vulnerability changes over time and that having harm protections in place by default would be much more effective than relying on parents to recognize and quickly react to teens’ changing vulnerability.

Here’s what Meta announced about new parental supervision tools for Instagram: [1]

  • A Family Center providing information to teach parents how to talk about social media with teens.
  • An ability for teens to invite a parent to supervise their social media account.
  • Parental ability to see how much time their teens are spending on Instagram, whom they are following, who is following them, and when they complain to Instagram about another user. However, a parent will have to have an Instagram account themselves to do so.
  • Future plans for:
    • Parental ability to limit when teens can use Instagram (e.g., not during school or after bedtime),
    • Blocking of access to inappropriate content by parents and/or based on ratings by the International Age Rating Coalition, and
    • Parental supervision tools for its Oculus Quest virtual reality program, where parents, experts, and the British government have raised concerns about exposure to violence and harassment.

Meta acknowledged in its statement that many parents are not on social media and are not tech savvy – meaning that these parental controls are often meaningless. Furthermore, many of these controls, including the future plans, seem like controls that should have been put in place years ago and before these products ever went on the market, i.e., they’re too little too late.

A bipartisan bill has been introduced in Congress, the Kids’ Online Safety Act (KOSA), requiring Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms to provide parents with more control over their children’s online interactions. The bill reflects months of congressional investigations and a history of failures by the social media platforms to respond to their documented harmful effects on young users. [2] Congress last passed legislation to protect children when they’re online, including their privacy, 24 years ago. [3] Needless to say, much has change since then and the current business model of Facebook, Instagram, and the Internet as a whole is simply not healthy for kids and teens.

KOSA would require social media platforms to provide “easy-to-use” tools to limit screen time, protect personal data, and keep kids under 16 safe. It holds the online platforms accountable by establishing an obligation for them to put the interests of children first and to make safety the default. It requires them to prevent the promotion of bullying, sexually abusive behavior, eating disorders, self-harm, and other harmful content. The bill mandates an annual independent audit of risks to minors, steps taken to prevent harm, and compliance with KOSA. [4]

The bill would require the social media platforms to be transparent about how they operate. It would require giving parents the ability to disable addictive product features and modify content recommendation algorithms to limit or ban certain types of content. It would require the social media platforms to provide researchers and regulators with access to company data to monitor and investigate actual and potential harm to teens and children. This would allow parents and policymakers to assess whether the online platforms are actually taking effective steps to protect children.

The root of the problems with social media platforms is that there is greater profit in promoting unsafe behaviors, creating animosity, encouraging extremism, and fueling pseudo-science than there is in creating a safe place for civil discourse based on facts. Our system of capitalism and the deference to and alignment of our policymakers with large corporations has allowed this business model that commodifies and exploits human attention to explode unchecked. In the world of social media, you, your time and attention span, and your clicks are the products that are being sold – to advertisers. This means the social media business is a race to the bottom; an enterprise based on stimulating, titillating, and capturing our most base emotional and subconscious responses. Social media’s ability to do harm to individuals, our society, and our democracy is well-documented and endemic to the current business model. Without strong and effective public oversight and control, the social media platforms will continue to inflict substantial harms.

I urge you to contact President Biden, as well as your U.S. Representative and Senators, to let them know that you support the Kids’ Online Safety Act and additional actions to regulate social media platforms.

You can email President Biden at http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments or you can call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 or the switchboard at 202-456-1414.

You can find contact information for your U.S. Representative at  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your U.S. Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

[1]      Peng, I., 3/17/22, “Meta adds parental tools to Instagram,” The Boston Globe from Bloomberg News

[2]      Zakrzewski, C., 2/17/22, “Senators introduce children’s online safety bill after months of hearings,” The Boston Globe from the Washington Post

[3]      Monahan, D., 3/22/22, “Diverse coalition of advocates urges Congress to pass legislation to protect kids and teens online,” Fairplay (https://fairplayforkids.org/march-22-2022-diverse-coalition-of-advocates-urges-congress-to-pass-legislation-to-protect-kids-and-teens-online/)

[4]      Blumenthal, Senator R., retrieved 2/16/22 from the Internet, “Blumenthal & Blackburn introduce comprehensive Kids’ Online Safety legislation,” (https://www.blumenthal.senate.gov/newsroom/press/release/blumenthal-and-blackburn-introduce-comprehensive-kids-online-safety-legislation)

THE HARMS OF INSTAGRAM, FACEBOOK, AND SOCIAL MEDIA

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

The news that Facebook and Instagram are harmful, especially to teens and young people, is not new. In 2006, a college professor, Joni Siani, whose class on Interpersonal Communications had access to Facebook a year before the public, found almost immediately that the Facebook experience was stressful and depressing for her students. Her class effectively became a Facebook group therapy session. That’s the beginning of a story I’ll come back to in a minute. [1] (By the way, Facebook and Instagram are now part of a new corporate entity, Meta Platforms. This name change seems to me to be an effort to obfuscate responsibility and accountability for the harms caused by Facebook and Instagram.)

In 2019, the docudrama The Social Dilemma came out, which highlights the manipulation and harms of social media. I encourage you to watch the film (on Netflix) or at least watch the 2 ½ minute trailer that’s available on the website. I urge you to explore the website; there’s a wealth of information under the button “The Dilemma” and a variety of ways to pushback under the “Take Action” button.

The Social Dilemma was created by the Center for Humane Technology, which was founded in 2013 by a Google design ethicist. The Center’s website provides terrific resources for understanding the effects of social media platforms and how to use them intelligently. It has modules for parents and educators on how to help teens be safe, smart users of social media.

Last fall, a former Facebook employee, Frances Haugen, blew the whistle on Facebook’s practices with testimony to Congress, an appearance on 60 Minutes, and a trove of inside documents that the Wall Street Journal reported on extensively. (Blogger Whitney Tilson in one of her posts provides links to Haugen’s interview on 60 Minutes and to the Wall St. Journal’s investigative articles based on documents provided by Haugen. Tilson also wrote a letter to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg that’s part of her blog post.)

Haugen documented that Facebook is a threat to our children and our democracy. Furthermore, she made it clear that Facebook knows this but fails to take steps to reduce the harm because doing so would hurt profits. I previously wrote about the threats of Facebook to our children and our democracy here and what can be done about them here.

Instagram, a Facebook partner under the Meta Platforms umbrella, says it only allows users on its platform who are 13 or older, but its age verification tools are weak. Its algorithm (i.e., its decision-making processes) for what information to direct to individual users has been shown to promote harmful content to youth who are particularly susceptible to such messages, such as material promoting eating disorders. Instagram was developing a separate product targeting children under 13 until criticism and pushback from parents and child advocacy organizations caused it to announce that it had paused (but not terminated) development.

A resource for responding to social media’s threats to children is an organization called Fairplay and its website. Formerly the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, Fairplay has been fighting for years to protect kids from the manipulation and harm from commercial advertising and social media platforms. If you want to get updates from Fairplay, click on “Connect” under the “About” button to sign-up. Fairplay helps parents manage kids’ screen time and provides alternatives to screen time. It sponsors a Screen-free Week every spring. It has established the Screen Time Action Network to support parents concerned about the effects of screen time and social media platforms on their children.

Returning to the story of that college professor, Joni Siani, who in 2006 saw the harm that Facebook did to her college students, in 2013, she wrote a book about the love-hate relationship between users and their digital devices titled Celling your soul: no app for life. And she started an organization called No App for Life.

In 2021, Siani and No App for Life partnered with Fairplay and its Screen Time Action Network to create three podcasts titled The Harms. They present three stories of parents who lost a child due to social media platforms’ harmful impacts on their children. One describes the ruthless assaults of social media “friends” that led to a suicide. One describes how “fun” online challenges can lead to horrible results. And one describes how drug dealers sell their products on social media, even posting ads amongst all the other ads seen on social media constantly. These horrific examples are from strong families who were trying to do everything right in managing their children’s social media activities but were overwhelmed by the power of social media.

My next post will summarize Meta Platforms recent announcement of new and planned parental supervision tools, as well as the bipartisan Kids Online Safety Act, which has been introduced in Congress.

[1]      Rogers, J., & Siani, J., 3/6/22, “What do I do now? Unthinkable stories Big Tech  doesn’t want to tell,” Fairplay’s Screen Time Action Network and No App for Life Podcasts (https://fairplayforkids.org/harms-podcast/)

GOOD AND BAD ECONOMIC NEWS YOU MAY NOT HAVE HEARD

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

The mainstream media continue to downplay extraordinarily positive economic news, not to mention the successes of the policies of the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats. In case you didn’t hear this, the number of Americans needing unemployment benefits fell to a 52-year low, i.e., the lowest number since March 1970. The unemployment rate is quite low at 4.0% and employers added 467,000 jobs in January. The estimates of job growth in November and December were revised upward by a combined 709,000 jobs. (Note: In the Boston Globe, this great economic news was not presented until page 6 of the second section and only warranted a short article, written by the Associated Press, that was about half of one column in length.) [1]

Employers added a record 6.4 million jobs in 2021, in good part due to actions of Democrats and the Biden Administration. Spending authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA), which was passed in March, boosted economic activity. Vaccination programs and other steps to control Covid allowed businesses to reopen and workers to go back to work.

Economic growth for all of 2021 was 5.7%; the highest since 1984. This continues the historical pattern over the last 100 years of the economy performing better under Democratic Presidents than under Republican ones. (See this previous post for more details.)

There are two pieces of bad news from recent economic data. One is that consumer prices are increasing; more on that below. The other is that while unemployment is down overall, unemployment is higher and falling more slowly for non-White workers than for White workers. This is especially true for Black women. As-of the end of 2021, unemployment rates and their declines since October were as follows: [2]

  • White workers: 2% unemployed (down 20%)
  • Asian American workers: 8% unemployed (down 11%)
  • Latino / Hispanic workers: 9% unemployed (down 14%)
  • Black workers: 1% unemployed (down   9%)

Consumer prices have increased 7.5% over the last year; the highest rate since 1982. Although Covid-related supply chain problems and growing consumer demand are responsible in part, growing attention is focusing on price gouging by large corporations. The extreme capitalism that our policies have allowed to flourish over the last 40 years has resulted in a dramatic decrease in competition in many industries and markets. (See this previous post for more details.) The lack of competition and monopolistic control of markets has allowed huge corporations in many industries to raise prices and increase profits more than a competitive market would allow (i.e., to engage in price gouging [3]). This has been evident in the prices of gasoline, food, and many consumer products due to large, monopolistic corporations in everything from trans-oceanic shipping to oil and gasoline production to food production.

Analysis of car prices shows that dealers are engaging in price gouging in the face of growing demand and limited supply. Manufacturers’ prices to dealers for new cars are up only 2% over a year ago but consumers are paying 12% more than they did a year ago. Edmunds, a car-shopping research company, found that 82% of consumers paid more than the manufacturers’ suggested retail price (MSRP) in January 2022, compared with just 3% in 2021 and almost no one in 2020. Profits for large car dealer networks have, not surprisingly, skyrocketed. [4] Prices for used cars and trucks are up 40.5% from a year ago. This is another indication that car dealers are price gouging. [5]

The Federal Trade Commission is investigating the market behavior of the large oil and gas corporations. [6] Gasoline prices in January (i.e., before the Ukraine war) had jumped 40% over a year earlier to $3.49 a gallon from $2.49. Natural gas prices were almost four times what they were a year ago. Costs are not driving these price increases; the oil and gas corporations are taking advantage of the pandemic to increase profits by price gouging.

The Federal Maritime Commission is examining the large shipping corporations for price gouging. There are three alliances of nine trans-oceanic shippers that transport 80% of all seaborne cargo (up from 40% in 1998). The price of transporting a standard shipping container from China to the U.S. has increased from about $2,000 before the pandemic to $20,000 last August and roughly $14,000 in January. The shippers’ profits in 2020 were around $25 billion; it’s estimated that their profits were 12 times as much, $300 billion, in 2021. This is a clear indication that the increases in shipping prices are price gouging. [7]

As a final example, the handful of huge slaughterhouses and meatpackers that control the market for beef, poultry, and pork have tripled their profit margins during the pandemic. The Justice Department is investigating them for price fixing. The four biggest meatpacking corporations (Cargill, JBS, Tyson Foods, and National Beef Packing Co.) control over 70% of the market for beef. The price of beef is up 16% over the last year, significantly higher than the already high rate of increase of 7.5% for food in general. Cattle ranchers filed an anti-trust lawsuit against the four big meatpacking corporations in 2019; food retailers and wholesalers sued them in 2020. Ranchers now receive only 39% of the retail price of beef; down from 45% in 2017. JBS previously paid $52.5 million to settle a lawsuit over beef price fixing. [8] Again, these are clear signs that the increases in meat prices are price gouging.

[1]      Ott, M., 2/25/22, “Jobless aid numbers now lowest since 1970,” The Boston Globe from the Associated Press

[2]      Broady, K., & Barr, A., 2/11/22, “December’s jobs report reveals a growing racial employment gap, especially for Black women,” Brookings (https://www.brookings.edu/blog/the-avenue/2022/01/11/decembers-jobs-report-reveals-a-growing-racial-employment-gap-especially-for-black-women/

[3]     Price gouging refers to when businesses take advantage of spikes in demand or shortages of supply and charge exorbitant prices for necessities, often after a natural disaster or another type of emergency.

[4]      Elizalde, R., 2/23/22, “Car prices are above MSRP because of price gouging rather than inflation,” Forbes (https://www.forbes.com/sites/raulelizalde/2022/02/23/car-prices-above-msrp-reflect-price-gouging-rather-than-inflation/?sh=61d09cabb60a)

[5]      Shen, M., 2/13/22, “Used cars cost 40.5% more than last year as gas prices rise. New car prices also climbing,” USA Today

[6]      Tankersley, J., & Rappeport, A., 12/25/21, “As prices rise, President Biden turns to antitrust enforcers,” The Boston Globe from the New York Times

[7]      Khafagy, A., 2/2/22, “The hidden costs of containerization,” The American Prospect (https://prospect.org/economy/hidden-costs-of-containerization/)

[8]      Puzzanghera, J., 2/19/22, “Why are beef prices so high? Some ranchers and White House say it’s more than just inflation,” The Boston Globe

Good economic news ignored / downplayed by the mainstream media

Numbers released yesterday by the Bureau of Economic Analysis show that the U.S. economy grew by a 6.9% annual rate from October to December 2021 and 5.7 percent for all of 2021. That’s the fastest full-year growth since 1984. The U.S. economy also added 6 million jobs in 2021, bringing the unemployment rate below 4%. This growth is the outcome of dramatic changes in economic policy initiated by the Biden administration through measures like the American Rescue Plan and the bipartisan infrastructure law. Pay for workers is also growing.

Nonetheless, the mainstream media continue to downplay the extraordinary success of the economy, the Biden administration, and Democratic policies. Instead, they focus on the negatives. The Washington Post ran a story that began: “Even as the U.S. economy grew at its fastest pace in decades in 2021, the recovery has more recently flashed troubling warning signs, with soaring inflation, whipsawing financial markets and slowing consumer spending complicating the rebound.” What a surprising way to introduce a story on the best economic growth since 1984! The NY Times story’s headline was “Growth is surging in Biden’s economy. Why don’t voters feel better?” The answer is because the mainstream media aren’t reporting all the good news and even when they do, they highlight a negative spin! Read more at Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters from an American” blog post of January 27 here: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/january-27-2022

HOW TO REIN IN FACEBOOK’S THREATS TO OUR CHILDREN, OUR DEMOCRACY, AND ALL OF US

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

Facebook IS a serious threat to our children, our democracy, and all of us, as my previous post documented. Facebook is finally getting the attention and scrutiny it deserves, with a former insider turned whistleblower being the catalyst. Without government regulation Facebook and other social media sites will facilitate a race to the bottom driven by our basest proclivities and instincts. This will occur because there is greater profit in spurring anger, encouraging extremism and violence, promoting false information, and triggering emotional responses than there is in creating a safe place for people to have healthy relationships and to engage in civil discourse based on facts. [1] Facebook has consistently chosen profits over the health and safety of children, the sharing of factual information, and the public good, so it isn’t going to fix itself. Meaningful action by Congress will take time, so regulatory action by the executive branch is needed now. [2]

Here are possible actions that could be taken to address the problems with Facebook and its harmful behaviors: [3]

  • Require Facebook to publicly share its internal data and algorithms. This transparency would allow independent experts to analyze how its algorithms prioritize and promote content so we would know what messages they are amplifying and if they have toxic effects and bias. This would also allow monitoring of Facebook’s use of consumer data and its adherence to privacy standards. These data are also necessary to be able to design effective regulation. [4] They are also important for monitoring and ameliorating toxic effects on children and for the protection of children’s privacy – areas where Facebook does not have a good track record.
  • Break up Facebook through use of antitrust laws, forcing it to spin off Instagram, WhatsApp, and perhaps other business units, while prohibiting it from making acquisitions of other companies. (See rationale for this below.)
  • Institute a fairness or balance standard requiring Facebook to show users content with opposing views. (Prior to deregulation in the 1980s, there was a “fairness doctrine” that applied such standards to TV and radio stations.)
  • Investigate Facebook for withholding or distorting significant financial information provided to investors.
  • Require Facebook to substantially expand its efforts and meet standards for success in blocking harmful and inaccurate content (i.e., engage in effective content moderation).
  • Strengthen or pass laws regulating Facebook’s pushing of inappropriate content and inappropriate marketing on children, e.g., strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) and pass the KIDS Act.
  • Make Facebook and other social media sites liable for promoting, and perhaps even for allowing users to post, hateful, threatening, violence-promoting, and other harmful content.
  • Create and invest in public Internet sites that provide news and human interaction opportunities as an alternative to Facebook. These public sites would not have profit-driven motives and, therefore, would adhere to consumer and ethical standards, as well as a commitment to serving the public good.

Regulating Facebook and other social media will not be easy and multiple iterations of regulatory steps and efforts will be needed as regulators learn what works and adjust to changes by Facebook and other social media. Given Facebook’s tremendous financial resources, its fight against efforts to control and regulate it will go on in the courts, in regulatory agencies, and in Congress for years.

Breaking up Facebook (and other huge corporations) is necessary to:

  • Reduce monopolistic power and allow the power of the marketplace and competition to rein in harmful practices on privacy, misinformation, manipulation of users, etc.
  • Reduce the almost limitless financial resources of huge corporations, which are used to overwhelm (or buy) our policymaking, regulatory, and judicial processes.
  • Reduce the massive aggregation of consumer data that allows the manipulation of users, including children.

I encourage you to pay at least some attention to the unfolding expose of how Facebook (and social media generally) works and what its effects are, because it has a significant impact on each of us and our families, as well as broad impacts on our society and democracy.

Government regulation of social media is needed to protect children, our democracy, and all of us. Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been skillful at ducking accountability. This must end. For example, Facebook knows of the harm it does to children and how to mitigate it, but it has chosen not to take action because it prioritizes profits over the safety of children (and everything else). Moreover, internal documents disclosed by the whistleblower reveal that in 2020 Facebook studied better ways to market products to preteens, even though it supposedly bars anyone under 13 from having an account. [5]

I encourage you to sign up for the Facebook boycott on November 10 here. Staying off of Facebook and Instagram for a day or two is probably the best way to send the message that we’re not happy with their behavior.

I also urge you to let your U.S. Representative and Senators, along with President Biden, know that you support strong regulation of Facebook (and other social media) to reduce the harm it is doing to us, our children, our society, and our democracy.

You can find contact information for your U.S. Representative at  http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/ and for your U.S. Senators at http://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm.

You can email President Biden via http://www.whitehouse.gov/contact/submit-questions-and-comments or you can call the White House comment line at 202-456-1111 or the switchboard at 202-456-1414.

[1]      Hubbell, R., 10/6/21, “Today’s edition: Progress, at last” (https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/todays-edition-progress-at-last)

[2]      Verma, P., 10/8/21, “What’s next for Facebook,” The Boston Globe

[3]      Bernoff, J., 10/7/21, “Facebook must be stopped,” The Boston Globe

[4]      Ghaffary, S., 10/5/21, “Facebook’s whistleblower tells Congress how to regulate tech,” Vox (https://www.vox.com/recode/22711551/facebook-whistleblower-congress-hearing-regulation-mark-zuckerberg-frances-haugen-senator-blumenthal)

[5]      Boston Globe Editorial Board, 10/12/21, “If Facebook won’t protect kids, Congress should force the company’s hand,” The Boston Globe

FACEBOOK IS AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT TO ALL OF US, OUR CHILDREN, AND OUR DEMOCRACY

Note: If you find my posts too long or too dense to read on occasion, please just read the bolded portions. They present the key points I’m making and the most important information I’m sharing.

This title is NOT an exaggeration: Facebook IS an existential threat to all of us, our children, and our democracy. I’ve been meaning to write a series of blog posts about Facebook and social media in general – and the harm they are doing – for almost a year. I recommend that you watch the award-winning documentary, “The Social Dilemma” (which is free on YouTube until October 31st). It’s produced by the Center for Humane Technology and was an eye-opener for me. (The documentary is 1 hour 34 minutes; there’s also a 2 ½ minute trailer.) The Center provides great resources for parents, teachers, and all of us on how to be intelligent users of social media – and how to protect our children from social media’s potential negative influences.

Facebook is finally getting the attention and scrutiny it has warranted for some time, with a former insider turned whistleblower being the catalyst. The whistleblower, Frances Haugen, had been a product manager at the Civic Integrity unit at Facebook. The unit was dissolved after the 2020 election. She subsequently left Facebook and has shared documents and her personal experiences with the Wall Street Journal, which has done a series of articles based on her information that are called The Facebook Files. She appeared on the 60 Minutes TV show on October 3, 2021. A blog post by Whitney Tilson, an investment professional, includes a series of links to segments of Haugen’s interview on 60 Minutes, links to the Wall Street Journal articles (which are behind a paywall unless you have a subscription or can access them through a library), and a letter from Tilson, as an investor, to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. [1]

I hope you’ve been following, at least at some level, the recent revelations that have laid bare the incredible influence Facebook has on us, including on what we believe and how we feel. We are both the product that Facebook is selling and the customers who are being influenced by the most sophisticated and manipulative marketing strategies and capabilities humankind has ever experienced. [2]

I provide here a very high-level overview of the information about Facebook that’s been uncovered and reported lately, while providing links to the detail. I have written previously about the intentional promotion of disinformation by Facebook, but that is just the tip of the iceberg, as current revelations are making starkly clear.

Facebook is single-handedly controlled by Mark Zuckerberg, who owns the majority of the controlling stock of the corporation. It seems clear that his commitment to generating profits (and increasing his wealth of $134 billion) outweighs everything else. Actions (e.g., likes and shares) and time on Facebook are money in his pocket and the recent revelations indicate that every time a decision was made where accuracy or any other social good was pitted against more clicks and money, Zuckerberg went for the money – despite knowing the  downsides. Facebook’s revenue has soared to $119 billion and the corporation’s market value is up to almost $1 trillion.

Facebook has internal studies and statistics that show, for example, that misinformation gets six times more clicks than factual news and that right-leaning sites produce more misinformation than any other sites. Facebook and Zuckerberg have been promoting misinformation and right-wing sites because more clicks mean more money in their pockets.

Facebook also knows how to elicit emotional responses and how its users respond to likes, shares, clicks on emoji buttons, and other actions on its site. It’s happy to use this knowledge to manipulate its users. Its internal research has concluded that its algorithms, which determine what to promote and show to whom, contribute to mental health and emotional problems among teens, particularly girls. However, it has done nothing to ameliorate this harm. [3]

Facebook seems to be immune to any sense of civic obligation to its roughly 3 billion users. It appears to have no qualms about helping undermine elections and democracies, the free and factual media, and accurate information about Covid and vaccination, which has literally deadly consequences. Zuckerberg has allowed terrorist recruitment, human trafficking, abuses by authoritarian governments, and promotion of hate, violence, genocide, and racism on Facebook. Is it any wonder that in the Russians’ efforts to disrupt U.S. elections and sow discord in our society that Facebook was their most frequently employed tool? [4] Facebook’s negative effects are probably even greater in countries other than the U.S., particularly in authoritarian ones, where the effects may be literally deadly for regime opponents.

Although the concerns that have been raised about Facebook are relevant to all of social media, Facebook is the dominant entity. Its algorithms govern the news we receive and what is promoted and prioritized, which shapes our society and affects our well-being and our democracy. Without government regulation Facebook and other social media will facilitate a race to the bottom driven by our basest proclivities and instincts. This will occur because there is greater profit in spurring anger, encouraging extremism, promoting false information, and triggering emotional responses than there is in creating a safe place for civil discourse and human interactions based on facts and healthy relationships. [5]

My next post will present some options for reining in Facebook, as well as social media in general.

[1]      Tilson, W., 10/5/21, “Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen; An open letter to Sheryl Sandberg,” (https://empirefinancialresearch.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-an-open-letter-to-sheryl-sandberg-come-work-with-enrique-barcelona-pictures)

[2]      Hubbell, R., 10/7/21, “Today’s edition: Nine months of silence,” (https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/todays-edition-nine-months-of-silence)

[3]      Bauder, D., and Liedtke, M., 10/4/21, “Facebook fed Capitol riot, former manager alleges,” The Boston Globe from the Associate Press

[4]      Alterman, E., 10/1/21, “Altercation: The Facebook threat to democracy – and us all,” The American Prospect (https://prospect.org/politics/altercation-facebook-threat-to-democracy-and-us-all/)

[5]      Hubbell, R., 10/6/21, “Today’s edition: Progress, at last” (https://roberthubbell.substack.com/p/todays-edition-progress-at-last)

FACEBOOK KNOWINGLY PROMOTES DISINFORMATION

Facebook (FB) facilitates an accelerating spread of disinformation; this is widely recognized and well-documented. (See my previous post on this.) Facebook allows toxic speech and dangerous misinformation to spread unchecked on its monopolistic platform. This affects and infects our public discourse and knowledge base, undermining the health of our democracy. However, stopping it runs counter to Facebook’s economic interests because increased activity, regardless of its content, is what increases its revenue. [1]

Recently, damning evidence has come to light of Facebook’s manipulation of its News Feed to favor right-wing sources that are known to be deceptive over trustworthy news sources.

In late 2017, Facebook was in the process of making significant changes in the computer programming code or algorithm it uses to determine which of the overwhelming plethora of sources each of us is shown in our Facebook News Feed. It claimed it was working to bring people together and to prioritize trusted and informative news sources.

It was uncovered recently that FB ran experiments with its first iteration of a revised News Feed algorithm that revealed it would dramatically curtail the dissemination of right-wing, less-than-trustworthy sites, such as Breitbart, the Daily Wire, and the Daily Caller. FB’s software engineers were told to modify the algorithm to reduce the negative effects on these right-wing sites.

A second iteration of the new algorithm was ready in January 2018 and its effects were presented to senior executives at FB. The data showed that it reversed the curtailment of right-wing, less-than-trustworthy sites and instead curtailed distribution of progressive-leaning, credible news sources. The presentation included bar charts showing the impact on a dozen or so specific news sources.

This second iteration of the new News Feed algorithm was, nonetheless, put into use, based in part on support from FB’s Vice President of Global Public Policy, Joel Kaplan, and right-wing-leaning employees working for him. (Kaplan would later loudly support his friend Brett Kavanaugh during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings.) This was not the first time Kaplan had acted to promote right-wing disinformation. For example, in December 2016, when an internal investigation found that a group of FB accounts, mostly based overseas, were behind a lot of the promotion of right-wing disinformation, Kaplan objected to disabling these accounts because “it will disproportionately affect conservatives.” He also has defended and protected right-wing sites that violated FB policies, opposing sanctions on them. [2]

The new News Feed algorithm expanded dissemination of content from the right-wing Daily Wire that routinely shares false content and spreads malicious stories such as ones describing being transgendered as a “delusion,”  calling abortion providers “assassins,” and labeling progressive members of Congress as not “loyal to America.” On the other hand, the new algorithm reduced dissemination of content from left-leaning Mother Jones magazine that provides rigorously fact-checked reporting and investigative journalism that has won it numerous journalism awards, including seven National Magazine Awards (three times for General Excellence). It has also been a National Magazine Award finalist 24 other times. In 2017, it won the Magazine of the Year award from the American Society of Magazine Editors.

In the six months after implementation of the changes in Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, FB traffic to trustworthy, left-leaning Mother Jones articles declined 37% from the previous six months. This means that the over one million Mother Jones followers and others on FB saw fewer of its articles in their News Feeds. On the other hand, over the summer of 2020, the deceptive right-wing Daily Wire had more Facebook engagement (i.e., likes, comments, and shares) than any other English-language publisher in the world. [3]

These data belie Zuckerberg’s claim when he announced the News Feed changes in January 2018 that the goals were “bringing people closer together” and fighting “sensationalism, misinformation and polarization.” He didn’t mention that he and FB were tipping the scales to favor less-than-factual right-wing sources.

Why did this happen? Facebook was tweaking its News Feed algorithm because user engagement was falling, which threatened its revenue and stock price. Zuckerberg and FB may also have wanted to avoid antagonizing Trump and the right-wing Republicans in power in the federal government, thereby reducing the likelihood that they would attack FB either verbally or through government investigations and regulations. Right-wing and “conservative” politicians had been criticizing FB for “liberal” bias (without evidence). A former Facebook employee said that it was made clear  that changes to the News Feed algorithm could not hurt Breitbart, Trump-advisor Steve Bannon’s mouthpiece.

Facebook uses its monopolistic power to determine which publishers’ content the public sees. This power of selective partial censorship and propaganda promotion is Big Brother-type power that we all should be concerned about and fear. Free speech in today’s America  is relative; it is based on how much money one has to broadcast one’s voice or on how FB treats you. Zuckerberg’s claim that he supports unfettered free speech is disingenuous given that FB tips the scales to favor certain sources and disfavor others.

FB’s marketplace power and dissemination of harmful disinformation need to be addressed by government policies and regulations. Slowing the spread of  misinformation and malicious content from a handful of the most active and therefore most harmful sites would have a dramatic effect.

Facebook should be held accountable for disseminating false, misleading, or inflammatory content. Regulation is one way to do this and competition is another. As a monopolistic platform lacking competition, FB has no incentive to do anything but pursue profits and/or Zuckerberg’s personal agenda. FB should be regulated like a monopolistic utility as the phone company once was or as private electricity and gas utilities are. Anti-trust laws should be used to stop FB’s anti-competitive practices and its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be reversed. Competition should be facilitated, for example, by creating a not-for-profit, free to users, Internet platform for responsible information sharing and journalism akin to public radio and TV.

I’m not a heavy FB user so my expertise on its on-the-ground operation is limited. Therefore, I welcome your suggestions on how we can send a message to Facebook and Zuckerberg that will be heard loudly and clearly on the issue of the quality of content in its News Feed as well as other issues such as its repeated violations of users’ privacy. Would a one-day boycott where we don’t log into FB be effective? Or would a week where we never click on a FB ad be more meaningful? What else can we do? In addition, of course, to lobbying our elected officials to rein in Facebook and Zuckerberg with regulations and anti-trust laws.

[1]      Alba, D., 10/13/20, “False info thriving on social media,” The Boston Globe from The New York Times

[2]      Bauerlein, M., & Jeffrey, C., 10/21/20, “Facebook manipulated the news you see to appease Republicans, insiders say,” Mother Jones (https://www.motherjones.com/media/2020/10/facebook-mother-jones/)

[3]      Bauerlein, M., & Jeffrey, C., 10/21/20, see above

FACEBOOK’S DISSEMINATION OF DISINFORMATION ACCELERATES

 Facebook’s (FB) spreading of disinformation is accelerating, despite any claims to the contrary. Its CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, repeatedly says that he does not want FB to be an arbiter of free speech, but it is the arbiter of what information or speech FB users see.

Zuckerberg also asserts that the best way to fight offensive bad speech is with good speech. [1] However, this is a false equivalency as good speech that tries to counter bad speech has to mention the bad speech which furthers its presence in our public discourse. This has been shown by research to further embed the bad or false speech in people’s minds. For example, reporting on Trump’s tweets and stating they are false or misleading, still puts Trump’s tweets in front of the viewing or reading audience.

Facebook’s current stated standard is that posts that are not calling for harm or violence, however offensive, should be protected as free speech. Its new policy announced in October will finally ban posts that deny or distort the Holocaust. This is a very small and belated step forward against some of the worst and most obviously harmful disinformation that FB has spread. Almost a quarter of Americans between ages 18 and 39 say they believe the Holocaust either didn’t happen or was exaggerated. It may be difficult to link this directly to FB or to harm or violence but it’s hard to believe there is no linkage. [2]

Facebook allows toxic speech and dangerous misinformation to spread largely unchecked on its monopolistic platform. Engagement with FB posts (i.e., liking, sharing, or commenting on them) that are from sources that routinely publish misleading or false content tripled from 2016 to 2020, exceeding the rate of increase for outlets that uphold traditional journalistic standards.

This affects and infects our public discourse and knowledge base, undermining the health of our democracy. However, stopping it runs counter to Facebook’s economic interests because increased activity, regardless of its content, is what increases FB’s revenue. [3]

Over the summer and early fall of 2020, the Digital New Deal (DND) project examined engagement with posts on FB and analyzed the reliability of the posts’ sources. It partnered with NewsGuard, a non-partisan service that rates news and information sources for their accuracy. (See note on its methodology at the end of this post.) The DND project focused on 721 deceptive information sources and compared them with a selected group of non-deceptive sources. It categorized the sources into three types:

  1. False Content Producers: repeatedly publish verifiably false content (396 sources)
  2. Manipulators: fail to gather and present information responsibly (325 sources)
  3. Trustworthy Outlets (46 selected sources for comparison)

Engagement with posts from type 1 and 2 sources (referred to as deceptive sources) has grown 242% since 2016. Engagement with posts from Manipulators (type 2 sources) represents 84% of all deceptive source engagement and has grown from 390 million engagement actions in the 3rd quarter of 2016 to 1,520 million in the 3rd quarter of 2020 (almost fourfold). The deceptive sources with the most engagement on FB, including the top five in each of types 1 and 2, promote right-wing or “conservative” politics.

These deceptive sources, masquerading as news outlets, are spreading false information, manipulative messaging, and concocted conspiracies that degrade democratic discourse. This harms the health of our democracy because it undermines informed participation by citizens and voters. [4]

The top ten deceptive sources are all of the Manipulator type and account for 62% of FB engagement interactions with deceptive sources, while the other 711 deceptive sites are responsible for 38% of these interactions. Fox was the most frequent source in the Manipulator category. It is rated more positively by NewsGuard than many other deceptive sources because it sometimes does correct errors, avoids deceptive headlines, labels advertising, and discloses its ownership and financing. Other examples of Manipulators are the Daily Wire, Breitbart, and The Blaze.

My next post will provide even more damning evidence that FB’s goal is not to bring people together, to provide accurate information, or to fight sensationalism, misinformation, and polarization as Zuckerberg has said, but rather to maximize user engagement and profits, and perhaps to promote right-wing politics and curry favor with those in power in Washington, D.C. The post will highlight FB’s 2018 changes to its News Feed algorithm that determines what information or disinformation is presented to FB users. It will also present some ways to address FB’s monopolistic power and its dissemination of false and harmful content.

Note on the methodology for rating information sources used in the DND study summarized above: NewsGuard rates online news outlets based on nine criteria of responsible journalism including:

  • Does not repeatedly publish false content (22 points)
  • Gathers and presents information responsibly (18 points)
  • Regularly corrects or clarifies errors (12.5 points)
  • Handles the difference between news and opinion responsibly (12.5 points)
  • Avoids deceptive headlines (10 points)
  • Website discloses ownership and financing (7.5 points)
  • Clearly labels advertising (7.5 points)
  • Reveals who is in charge, including any possible conflicts of interest (5 points)
  • The site provides the names of content creators, along with either contact or biographical information (5 points)

Outlets receive points for passing a given criteria or they receive zero for failing. A total score of less than 60 merits a Red rating, meaning the site fails to adhere to basic journalistic standards.

[1]      The Associated Press, 10/12/20, “Facebook bans Holocaust denial, distortion posts”

[2]      Frenkel, S., 10/13/20, “Facebook bans Holocaust denial content,” The Boston Globe from The New York Times

[3]      Alba, D., 10/13/20, “False info thriving on social media,” The Boston Globe from The New York Times

[4]      Kornbluh, K., Goldstein, A., & Weiner, E., 10/12/20, “New study by Digital New Deal finds engagement with deceptive outlets higher on Facebook today than run-up to 2016 election,” Digital New Deal, German Marshall Fund of the United States (https://www.gmfus.org/blog/2020/10/12/new-study-digital-new-deal-finds-engagement-deceptive-outlets-higher-facebook-today)

WHY OUR MAINSTREAM MEDIA HAVE FAILED IN THEIR COVERAGE OF CLIMATE CHANGE

For decades now, our mainstream media have failed in their coverage of climate change. Earlier this year, Bill Moyers and the Schumann Media Center, which supports independent journalism, announced the creation of the Covering Climate Now project, a partnership of The Nation magazine and the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR). They hope to increase the coverage of climate issues and help journalism live up to its responsibility to connect the dots and tell important stories so that the public can understand them and act on the information presented. As Bill Moyers, the iconic journalist, said in his amazing speech (30 minutes) kicking off the project (there’s a 2.5 minute excerpt on the CJR website if you scroll most of the way down), “Reporting the truth is always the basis of any moral authority we can claim as journalists.” [1]

The first president to mention global warming was President Johnson in a speech to Congress in 1963. However, attention to it in public policy got lost due to a host of other hot issues (no pun intended). The fossil fuel industry, however, was paying attention and undertook a disinformation campaign that continues to this day.

In October 1970, the Mobil Oil Company began paying The New York Times to publish regular Op-Eds, also called advertorials, written by Mobil’s press office. Mobil viewed them as part of a major political campaign to prevent action against fossil fuels due to global warming. By 1983, Mobil’s press office felt they had succeeded in shifting the Times’ editorial positions to those Mobil had been espousing. [2]

Today, it is increasingly common for the mainstream media to present non-advertising “news” content that has been prepared by or for large corporations. For example, The New York Times and The Washington Post have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from fossil fuel companies and organizations, such as ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, and the American Petroleum Institute, to create the industry’s advertorials, which they then publish. [3]

The mainstream TV media haven’t done any better: combined coverage of climate change by the three major networks and Fox was just 142 minutes in 2018, down 45% from 2017. That’s an average of only 41 seconds per week per outlet! Not only have the major TV networks basically ignored this story, but they have failed to counter the false and deliberately deceptive propaganda promoted by the fossil fuel industry. [4] For example, extreme-weather events are linked to climate change, but the mainstream media almost never mention the climate change connection. Local weather forecasters are doing more to report the links between weather and climate change than the national networks.

The fight over climate change featuring environmentalists and scientists versus the powerful fossil fuel industry and its political supporters sounds like a David vs. Goliath story to which the mainstream media would love to give lots of coverage. But that has not been the case to say the least. [5] For example, in our general election presidential debates, the moderators who are from the mainstream media have not asked a single question about climate change in 2016, 2012, 2008, or ever.

The mainstream media, both TV and print, have been brainwashed by the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda to view climate change as a political story rather than a science story. The fossil fuel industry has successfully spread confusion and doubt about the science using the same public relations strategies and even some of the same “scientists” as Big Tobacco did in its campaign to spread doubt about the dangers of smoking. For example, Frederick Seitz, a physicist by training, received $45 million from Big Tobacco to obscure the risks of smoking and then, with funding from the fossil fuel industry, became the prominent US denier of human-caused climate change. [6]

The fossil fuel industry has bought enough politicians’ support through campaign spending and lobbying to make climate change appear to be a political issue rather than a scientific one. [7] The Republican Party in particular has bought into using climate change as a campaign issue (or perhaps it has been bought by the fossil fuel industry). Therefore, the mainstream media cover climate change as an issue of politics and not science.

As a result, the media typically give equal coverage to the scientific consensus that human activity is a major contributor to global warming and the fossil fuel industry’s propaganda that global warming is exclusively due to natural fluctuations in global temperatures and therefore not related to fossil fuel use.

Responsibility for the failure to accurately report and act on climate change goes beyond the mainstream corporate media and the fossil fuel companies. In many ways it includes much of corporate America, for example through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber is supported by most of the large corporations in the U.S. and has aggressively opposed action on climate change with multiple tactics: massive lobbying, substantial campaign spending, and extensive involvement in lawsuits and other legal actions. The Chamber spends roughly three times as much on lobbying as the next most active group. It has spent almost $150 million on congressional campaigns since 2010, when the Citizens United Supreme Court decision unleashed corporate campaign spending. In most congressional election cycles, the Chamber is the biggest “dark money” spender, meaning that it shields the identity of the donors for its spending. This provides corporations with a protective veil; they can oppose climate change action through contributions to the Chamber and no one will know. The Chamber is also active in court cases. In a three-year period during Obama’s presidency, it was involved in over 500 court cases. Although not all these court cases and all this spending is in opposition to climate change action, environmental issues were the third most frequent subject of its court cases and energy and environmental issues are a major part of its lobbying activities. The Chamber’s position on energy and environmental issues inevitably is in support of fossil fuels. [8] It would be hard to overstate the political clout of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the laundry list of major corporations that provide its funding.

In summary, the mainstream media have failed in their coverage of climate change in terms of both quantity and quality (i.e., accuracy) because of:

  • Their conflict of interest due to revenue from the fossil fuel industry for advertising and the preparation of advertorial Op-Ed pieces,
  • Brainwashing by fossil fuel industry propaganda, and
  • Being part and parcel of corporate America.

[1]      Moyers, B., 7/15/19, “What if reporters covered the climate crisis like Murrow covered World War II?” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-media-murrow-boys/)

[2]      Westervelt, A., May 6, 2019, “Why are The New York Times and The Washington Post creating ads for Big Oil?” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/big-oil-pr-fossil-fuel-lobby-herb-schmertz/)

[3]      Westervelt, A., May 6, 2019, see above

[4]      Moyers, B., 7/15/19, see above

[5]      Hertsgaard, M., & Pope, K., 4/22/19, “The media are complacent while the world burns,” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-media-aoc-gnd-propaganda/)

[6]      Hertsgaard, M., & Pope, K., 4/22/19, see above

[7]      Hertsgaard, M., & Pope, K., 4/22/19, see above

[8]      Schumer, C.E., & Whitehouse, S., 11/21/19, “Climate change and dark money,” The Boston Globe

ARE THE DEMOCRATS’ IDEAS RADICAL?

The mainstream media’s frequent characterization of ideas put forth by Democratic members of Congress and Democratic presidential candidates as “radical” or “far left” or “out of the mainstream” is simply inaccurate. Most of the ideas so labeled are policies that:

  • Have previously been in place in the U.S.,
  • Are broadly supported by the American public,
  • Have been seriously considered in the U.S. in the past, and/or
  • Are widely in place in other wealthy countries.

For example, Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s recent suggestion that the income tax rate on income over $10 million be raised to 70% was called “insane.” In addition, it was stated that it would kill our economy.

However, in the 1950s, the top income tax rate was over 90% and our economy did just fine. The top tax rate was 70% on income over $216,000 up until 1980 and the economy continued to do well. In the 1980s, President Reagan slashed the top tax rate. The economy didn’t boom as a result, rather the growth and prosperity of the middle class stalled, workers’ wages became stagnant, and income and wealth inequality in the country began to explode. [1]

The 1950s, 60s, and 70s were a 30-year period with top income tax rates of 70% or more, on incomes of roughly $200,000 and up. This period also had strong economic growth, a growing middle class, and increasing equality. Therefore, a proposal to restore such a rate on incomes over $10 million represents a partial return to a policy with a proven track record of success. It is not “radical” or “insane” to say the least.

Ocasio-Cortez’s idea, therefore, is a sensible proposal to address growing inequality and an economy that is working for the rich (and especially the super-rich), but for no one else. What is out of the mainstream is President Trump’s and Congressional Republicans’ 2018 tax cut for the wealthy, given that 43% of voters say they want taxes raised on incomes over $250,000 (not just $10 million) and 60% say they don’t feel millionaires are paying their fair share of taxes. Furthermore, since 2003, the Gallup Poll has annually asked the public whether taxes on the rich were too high, just right, or too low. Every year, 60% to 70% of respondents have said “too low.” Yet, the mainstream media refer to supporters of the tax cut for millionaires as “moderates” and those who propose doing what a clear majority of Americans support as “radicals.” [2] [3]

Polls of the public also indicate that several other proposals reported as “radical” or “out of the mainstream” by the media are supported by majorities of Americans. Proposals for universal health insurance or Medicare for All are called radical, yet 70% of Americans support this, including a majority of Republicans. Proposals for tuition-free public college are called radical, but 79% of Democrats and 41% of Republicans support this.

In the 1950s and 1960s, tuition at public colleges and universities was free or minimal. Universal health insurance has been a topic of serious discussion in the U.S. on and off since President Franklin Roosevelt proposed it in 1944 as part of his Economic Bill of Rights, which included “the right to adequate medical care.” (See this previous post on FDR’s Economic Bill of Rights for more information.) Former Representative John Dingell, who just passed away at age 92, filed a bill, “The United States National Health Insurance Act,” in the U.S. House every session from 1955 to 2013; it would have created a single-payer health care system. [4]

Multiple polls have found that most Americans (including a majority or near-majority of Republicans) support Senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s proposal for an annual wealth tax of 2% on wealth above $50 million, rising to 3% on assets over $1 billion. [5] Yet, the mainstream media and most pundits are calling her proposal radical.

We currently have a wealth tax; but it’s only on the main form of middle-class wealth – people’s homes. Homeowners pay a property tax, which is typically used to fund local government and schools. Nonetheless, the suggestion that other forms of wealth, ones that are typically owned by the very wealthy, be taxed at a similar rate is branded as radical.

Internationally, of course, the U.S. is the country that’s out of the mainstream. Most other wealthy nations have higher income tax rates than the U.S., have universal health insurance, and have free or near-free post-secondary education. A number of these countries also have a wealth tax – and more would have one if it were established as an international standard so the wealthy couldn’t so easily hide or shift their wealth to another country to escape a wealth tax. (But that’s a whole other topic for another post.)

Here in the U.S., these and many other policy proposals being put forth by Democrats are being labeled as radical, when they are actually anything but radical. They are supported by majorities of Americans (see this previous post for more information) and, in many cases, have been mainstream ideas for generations. Many of them have been pushed out for the mainstream by radical “conservatives” over the last 20 years, building on efforts that began over 40 years ago.

These ideas and policies – for higher income and wealth taxes, for universal health insurance, and for free public college – are being brought back into the mainstream by these Democratic politicians and their grassroots supporters. The election results of 2016 have brought them new levels of attention. Broad public support for the politicians proposing them, along with probable future election results, appear likely to put them squarely back in the mainstream. Resistance from the mainstream media and some politicians will have to be overcome, but it’s becoming clear who the real radicals are and who’s truly in the mainstream.

[1]      Eagan, M., 1/11/19, “There’s nothing ‘extremist’ about social welfare,” The Boston Globe

[2]      Eagan, M., 1/11/19, see above

[3]      Meyerson, H., 1/24/19, “AOC’s achievement: Making American’s progressive beliefs politically acceptable,” The American Prospect Blog (https://prospect.org/blog/on-tap)

[4]      Nichols, J. 2/8/19, “John Dingell kept the faith, from the New Deal to ‘Medicare for All’,” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/john-dingell-obit-medicare-for-all/)

[5]      Kapur, S., 2/9/19, “Warren starts 2020 bid, vows to end system ‘rigged’ by rich,” Bloomberg (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-09/pushing-a-wealth-tax-elizabeth-warren-to-launch-white-house-bid)

THE TRUE STORY OF THE 2018 ELECTION

The dominant narrative of the 2018 election from our mainstream (corporate) media had congealed even before the polls on the west coast had closed. As it turns out, their narrative was wrong.

The narrative goes something like this: there was no blue wave for Democrats; Trump and the Republicans won the election. Furthermore, there was no progressive shift among voters, because even where Democrats won, it was moderates who won; progressive Democrats, like Beto O’Rourke in Texas, lost.

In an attempt to correct the narrative and provide updates on the many races that were not determined by the end of election night coverage, CNN did a novel thing: it held a night of programming a full week after the election that it called “Election Night in America Continued.”

Because of the expansion of mail-in ballots, absentee voting, and early voting, as well as the new use of ranked choice voting in Maine and some very close races, final results have taken longer to tabulate than in the past. A week and a half after the election, two US Senate seats are still up in the air (Florida and Mississippi), as are seven US House seats and two governorships (Florida and Georgia). [1]

The inaccurate story of Democrats losing the election was based on early results from the east coast. Democrats lost a US House seat in Kentucky that had received a lot of attention only because of a scrappy fight in a long-shot race by a woman combat veteran with some advertising that went viral on social media. Democrats also lost a high-visibility US Senate race in Indiana early in the evening. Close races for Governor in Georgia and Florida, and a close Senate race in Florida, all of which are still counting votes but which some pundits prematurely called Republican wins, fueled the Democrats-are-losing story.

Beto O’Rourke’s close loss in the Texas US Senate race, which had received so much attention only because it was so amazing that this race was anywhere near close in deep red Texas, cemented the narrative that the Democrats were losing.

The premature claims of Republican wins are now being used to fuel Republicans’ and Trump’s demand that vote counting stop with claims that these elections are being “stolen.” These false claims are dangerous as they undermine voters’ faith in our democracy and in our voting systems, as well as the commitment to accurately count every vote.

However, as more votes are counted and more results are finalized, especially from the west coast, the blue wave for Democrats is becoming clearer and larger. The Democrats flipped at least 38 seats in the US House. They will have at least 30 more seats than the Republicans. In the US Senate, the Democrats were defending ten seats in states that Trump won but lost only three of them. Meanwhile, Democrats won two Senate seats from Republicans (Arizona and Nevada). [2]

Furthermore, without the gerrymandering and voter suppression done by Republicans, Democrats would likely have won at least a dozen more seats in the US House. For example, in North Carolina, Democratic candidates for the US House got 50% of the overall vote, but only 3 out of 13 seats. With fairly drawn districts, the Democrats would have gotten 3 or 4 more seats in North Carolina alone.

With votes still being counted, it seems certain that in the overall popular vote for US House candidates, Democrats will have at least 7% more votes than Republicans. This would make the 2018 blue wave bigger than the Republicans’ waves in 2010 (President Obama’s first mid-term election) and in 1994 (President Clinton’s first mid-term election). [3]

The mainstream (corporate) media and others who fear a resurgence of progressive values and policies (such as universal health insurance, a $15 minimum wage, and free public higher education) have inaccurately characterized the Democrats’ successes as coming from moderates. They claim that where Democrats ran progressive candidates, they lost. However, to make this argument, they have had to define as moderates many candidates who support progressive policies. [4] For example, of the 60 new incoming Democratic House members, 45 have publicly supported expanding Medicare (including 20 who support Medicare for All), 42 have publicly supported increasing the minimum wage, 49 support campaign finance reform, 48 support reducing prescription drug prices, and 41 support unions.

Overall, 65% of new House members support expanding Medicare or Social Security, while 82% rejected corporate PAC money for their campaigns and / or support campaign finance reform. (Even before the election, the House’s Expand Social Security Caucus had 150 members and the Medicare for All Caucus had over 70 members.) [5]

The Democratic blue wave was also clearly present in state election results. Democrats picked up at least seven governorships (with Florida and Georgia still undecided), three Attorneys General, 50 state Senate seats, and 200 state House seats. There are now 14 states where Democrats hold the governorship and control of both houses of the legislature, up from 8. Republicans hold similar control in 21 states, down from 26. In fourteen states, the parties share control of state government. [6]

Even in deep red Texas, where O’Rourke lost the US Senate race, Democrats picked up two US House seats, two state Senate seats, 11 seats in the state House, and four appeals court judges. In addition, a slate of 17 black women was swept into offices in Harris County. [7]

So, although Democrats and progressives did not win everything they tried for, there was a strong blue wave for Democrats and it had a strong progressive tint to it.

In my next posts, I will provide an overview of the results of the many ballot initiatives that were voted on and then share some thoughts on policy changes that should be high on the House Democrats’ agenda.

[1]      Ballotpedia, retrieved 11/15/128, “Election results, 2018,” https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2018

[2]      Walsh, J., 11/13/18, “Yes, there was a big blue wave last week,” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/midterm-elections-democrats-left/)

[3]      Yglesias, M., 11/13/18, “Democrats’ blue wave was much larger than early takes suggested,” Vox (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/11/13/18082490/blue-wave)

[4]      Walsh, J., 11/13/18, see above

[5]      Green, A., 11/15/18, “The midterms prove it: Progressive ideas are now mainstream,” The Washington Post

[6]      Ballotpedia, see above

[7]      Yglesias, M., 11/13/18, see above

CORPORATE MEDIA THREATEN OUR DEMOCRACY Part 2

Senator Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In  [1] includes a chapter titled, Corporate Media and the Threat to Our Democracy. I summarized its information on the six huge media corporations that control 90% of what we see, hear, and read in my previous post.

Senator Sanders experienced firsthand the control and power the six huge media corporations have when he ran for President. Certainly initially, and probably throughout the whole campaign, his candidacy received less coverage than other candidates. Perhaps this was because many of the issues he raised and discussed were ones that made corporate executives uncomfortable. Senator Sanders summarized his experience as follows: “as a general rule of thumb, the more important an issue is to large numbers of working people, the less interesting it is to the corporate media. … Further, issues being pushed by the top 1 percent get a lot of attention.” (page 421)

As an example, Sanders cites the coverage of the assertion that Social Security’s benefits needed to be cut because, supposedly, money to pay them would soon run out. The financial challenges facing Social Security were exaggerated and solutions other than cutting benefits were largely ignored by the corporate media. Sanders and others organized a broad coalition in opposition to Social Security cuts that included AARP and virtually every other seniors’ organization in the country, the American Legion and every major veterans’ group, the AFL-CIO representing 13 million workers, the largest organizations in the country representing people with disabilities, the National Organization of Women (NOW), and others.

A press conference opposing cuts to Social Security benefits was held by this broad coalition, which represented tens of millions of Americans, along with U.S. Senators and Representatives. It received almost no coverage from the corporate media. Similarly, throughout the presidential campaign, many issues that Sanders raised got little to no coverage from the big media corporations, including economic inequality, poverty, Native American issues, the housing crisis, climate change, fracking, and a single-payer health care system. On the other hand, the topics of how much money each candidate had raised, when Sanders was going to formally announce his candidacy, and when he was going to drop out and endorse Clinton received lots of attention from the corporate media.

The corporate media view politics and elections as entertainment and a way to capture attention (and therefore revenue). They do not take responsibility for helping to build an informed American electorate. They are large corporations whose goal is to make as much money as they can for their shareholders and executives.

These media corporations rely on billions of dollars in advertising from the pharmaceutical, auto, financial, health insurance, and fossil fuel industries (among others). This advertising revenue presents conflicts of interest for the media corporations’ executives’ decisions on the reporting of news. Viewers and readers would be naïve to think that news coverage – or lack of coverage – is not influenced by the interests of large advertisers.

The media corporations have a perspective on what is important and worthy of coverage, and what is not. Few of the journalists who work for them cross the boundaries of the corporate perspective. As Senator Sanders writes:

“Over the course of my political life [roughly 45 years] I cannot recall a mainstream journalist coming up to me and asking what I was going to do to end the scourge of poverty in this country, or how I was going to combat the disgraceful level of income and wealth inequality, or what role I would play in ending the influence of big money in politics. Those, and many similar issues, are just not what the corporate media considers important. And my strong guess is that if by mistake, or in some state of confusion, a reporter for the corporate media started asking those types of questions, he or she would not last long with the company.” (page 436)

Concentrated, corporate ownership of the media limits the points of view and the information Americans receive. It limits cross-cultural and cross-class awareness and knowledge. It tends to break us into factions rather than building community in our diverse country. This is not good for democracy.

Furthermore, mergers are in various stages of consideration that could reduce the six corporate media giants to only three. Therefore, media concentration is likely to increase further in the near future, unless we and regulatory government agencies take a stand against it.

Meanwhile, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has eliminated net neutrality, which gives more market place power to the big media corporations through their control of Internet access.

I encourage you to take action to stop mergers among the giant media corporations and to work to ensure net neutrality. If you want more information about these issues, including how you can take action on them, go to freepress.net. There, you can join with hundreds of thousands of other engaged Americans to fight to save the free and open internet, curb runaway media consolidation, protect press freedom, and ensure diverse voices are represented in our media.

You can also review my earlier post, Our failing mainstream media, that encourages the support of not-for-profit, public or consumer-funded media as a better model for a democracy than the current giant, for-profit, advertising-funded corporations. It identifies six broadcast, on-line, and print media outlets you can patronize and support as good sources of information and good alternatives to the corporate media.

[1]      Sanders, B., 2016, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. St. Martin’s Press, NY, NY.

CORPORATE MEDIA THREATEN OUR DEMOCRACY Part 1

I’ve just finished reading Senator Bernie Sanders’ book, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. [1] The first part (6 chapters) is about the campaign and is interesting if you’re a political junkie.

The second part (10 chapters) is the policy platform that was the basis for his run for the presidency. It includes chapters on health care, education, climate change, criminal justice, immigration, the middle class, an economy that works for everyone, and reclaiming our democracy. These chapters are interesting if you’re interested in any of these issues or in knowing how we can get back to a society that is fair and just and provides equal opportunity for all.

The chapter that had the biggest effect on me was the one titled, Corporate Media and the Threat to Our Democracy. This chapter identifies the six huge corporations that control 90% of what we see, hear, and read. Combined, they have over $275 billion in revenues and are controlled by 15 billionaires. (In 1983, 50 corporations controlled 90% of our media and that was a high level of concentration.) Today’s 6 media corporations, and some key information about them, are:

  • Comcast (Revenue: $56 billion in 2011) It owns NBC, Telemundo, USA Network, New England Cable News, and a portion of A&E, the History Channel, Lifetime, PBS KIDS Sprout, and Hulu, as well as much, much more. It wants to merge with Time Warner (see below).
  • Disney (Revenue: $40 billion in 2011) It owns ABC; ESPN; Marvel; 277 radio stations; music and book publishers; Touchstone, Miramax, and Pixar production companies; and majority stakes in A&E, the History Channel, and Lifetime; as well as much, much more.
  • News Corp (Revenue: $33 billion in 2011) It owns Fox, National Geographic, Dow Jones (which includes The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and Smart Money), the New York Post, TV Guide, the book publisher HarperCollins, Blue Sky Studios, and a portion of ESPN and Hulu, as well as much, much more.
  • Time Warner (Revenue: $29 billion in 2011) It owns CNN, HBO, TMZ, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, 22 magazines (including Time, People, Sports Illustrated, Life, Entertainment Weekly, Fortune, etc.), and much, much more. It wants to merge with Comcast (see above).
  • Viacom (Revenue $15 billion) It owns MTV, Nickelodeon, Comedy Central, Spike TV, BET, Paramount Pictures, and over 160 cable networks that reach over 600 million people, as well as much, much more.
  • CBS (Revenue $14 billion) It owns Showtime; Smithsonian; Simon & Schuster, Scribner, and Free Press book publishing; 130 radio stations; and much, much more.

Currently, Comcast and Time Warner, two of these corporate media giants, are proposing to merge, while two others, Disney and News Corp, are discussing a possible merger, and some shareholders are pressing the final two, CBS and Viacom, to merge. Therefore, media concentration is likely to increase further in the near future, unless we and regulatory government agencies take a stand against it.

These media giants play a huge role in shaping public consciousness and knowledge, and, therefore, affect political beliefs, the public’s understanding (or lack thereof) of policy issues, and election outcomes. Note that there are multiple joint ventures among these media giants, which further limit the variety of content available and provide opportunities for collusion.

Realistically, freedom of the press is accessible only to those who own a press, a radio or TV station, or a cable network, or who produce content distributed by these media outlets. Concentrated ownership of our news media means that a very few human beings, who have significant conflicts of interest (e.g., with advertising revenue), make the decisions about what news is presented and how. More importantly, they make decisions about what is NOT covered or reported.

In my next post, I’ll share some examples that Sanders gives of what’s covered and not covered by the corporate media and why. I’ll also identify some opportunities for action on the power of the giant media corporations and their threat to our democracy.

[1]      Sanders, B., 2016, Our Revolution: A Future to Believe In. St. Martin’s Press, NY, NY.

OUR FAILING MAINSTREAM MEDIA

Our mainstream media are failing our democracy. In the last election, they provided almost no coverage of issues and policies, which should play a significant role in voters’ decisions. Even when issues or policies were mentioned, there was little fact checking or context provided, let alone analysis. Such in-depth reporting is critical to having an informed electorate, which is essential for a successful democracy.

Because the mainstream media are mostly huge, for-profit corporations, their focus is on the bottom line – on profits. Their revenue comes from advertising and is determined by how many people read or view their output. Revenue and readership / viewership are experiencing dramatic competition from on-line media. As the number of mainstream media users declines, the revenue per ad declines, so the ratio of ads to content goes up to retain as much revenue as possible. This detracts and distracts the viewer from the news that is presented.

To attract attention and eyeballs, the mainstream, corporate media have turned more and more to shocking, fear-mongering, or titillating stories at the expense of real news; in other words, to tabloid journalism. The phrase “if it bleeds, it leads,” has become all too true of the mainstream media. Crime, terrorism, violence, and tragedy are typically the leading stories because a story that engenders outrage, anger, or fear is more likely to attract viewers.

During the election, shock value was more salient than facts, in-depth details, or analysis. Coverage was more focused on generating emotional reactions than informing. As CBS’s Chairman put it, the shock value of Trump’s statements “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

This focus on the sensational and lack of depth reflect not only the need to attract viewers, but also the slashing of newsrooms’ budgets. To cut costs and increase profits, our corporate, mainstream media now employ roughly 40% fewer news reporters today than they did 10 years ago; and further cuts are coming. [1]

The mainstream “news” is increasingly what is often referred to as infotainment – a cross between information and entertainment. This means less factual content and more emotional content. For political reporting, this has meant the more shocking, outrageous, and emotion-provoking the statement or story, the better. Information and factual content on issues and policies is pushed aside as too boring and too costly to report. The only facts that seem to be reported are from the horse race perspective – who’s ahead in the latest poll and who has raised more money. Ironically, we now get some of our best political analysis from our entertainers, comedians such as Stephen Colbert, Jon Stewart, John Oliver, and Bill Maher.

The bottom line is that the business model of our corporate, mainstream media is not serving the best interests of our democracy. They are not providing citizens and voters with the information and analysis they need to participate meaningfully in our democracy.

A different business model is needed where news outlets are not huge corporations and are not dependent on advertising revenue. To deliver in-depth, fact-based reporting with context and analysis, not to mention investigative journalism, news outlets will require a significant portion of their revenue to come from public funding and / or readers’ / viewers’ donations. This will ensure that content is free of the coercive effects of advertising or other funders who have a vested, special interest in the news content.

For television and radio, we need our public broadcasting system (PBS). I encourage you to listen to or watch our public broadcasts and to support them financially. I urge you to be on the lookout for and to oppose efforts to cut PBS’s public funding or undermine its independence. It is essential to our democracy and over 40 other countries have highly respected public broadcasting systems, including the BBC in Great Britain and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Canada.

Finding reliable sources for print journalism (hardcopy and on-line) is not easy given all the junk and even fake news that are present on the Internet. For broad-based news coverage that includes coverage of issues of importance to our democracy, I recommend these five sources:

I hope you’ll go on-line and look at one of more of these. You may want to subscribe to their on-line news feeds or to their hardcopy publications (except for Common Dreams which is exclusively on-line). I guarantee you’ll be a better-informed citizen and voter if you do. If you don’t have time to follow one of these regularly, just keep following my blog. I’ll give you the highlights.

[1]      Bauerlein, M., 11/19/16, “How Trump played the media,” Mother Jones (http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/11/trump-media-fail)

PROBLEMS WITH PRIVATIZED PRISONS

The problems with privatized prisons have come to public attention largely due to the investigative journalism of The Nation and Mother Jones. Their reporting underscores the importance and challenges of investigative journalism. It has become relatively routine for targets of investigative journalism to sue (or at least threaten to sue) the journalists and their publishers. Both corporate and government entities have built an ever stronger set of legal protections including employee non-disclosure agreements and other employer protection laws and legal precedents. The mainstream, corporate media have largely abandoned investigative journalism at least in part due to the threat of litigation and because news and reporting budgets have been slashed to increase profits.

When Mother Jones published its report based on a guard’s experiences at a private prison run by the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA, see overview and link below), it received a threatening letter from a law firm on behalf of CCA. It was the law firm that had represented a billionaire and large political campaign donor who had spent 3 years suing Mother Jones over its reporting of his anti-LGBT activities. Although the billionaire lost his case, the legal costs Mother Jones incurred in defending itself were a very serious financial burden. Furthermore, he pledged $1 million to support others who might want to sue Mother Jones over its reporting. [1] Needless to say, this type of aggressive behavior by the subjects of investigative reporting puts a chill on this valuable kind of journalism.

The Nation’s investigative reporting was based on reviewing a large number of documents from the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) in the US Department of Justice. The documents were obtained only after a lengthy and costly process using the Freedom of Information Act to gain access to these public records.

The records showed that the Bureau of Prisons’ monitors had documented, between January 2007 and June 2015, the deaths of 34 inmates who were provided substandard medical care in the BOP’s private prisons. Fourteen of these deaths occurred in prisons run by the Corrections Corporation of America, while fifteen were in prisons operated by the GEO Group. These two corporations are the largest operators of for-profit prisons. [2]

Despite this and other documentation of serious problems at the for-profit prisons, top BOP officials repeatedly failed to enforce the remediation of dangerous deficiencies and routinely extended contracts for the prisons. This was due, at least in part, to a cozy relationship between BOP leadership and the private-prison operators because of the revolving door of personnel between the BOP and the private providers. In 2011, for example, Harley Lappin, who had served as the Director of the BOP for eight years, left to join CCA as executive vice president. There he earned more than $1.6 million in one year; roughly 10 times his salary at BOP. Two previous BOP Directors, J. Michael Quinlan and Norman Carlson, had gone to work for CCA and the GEO Group, respectively. Five BOP employees recalled the former BOP Directors participating in meetings between the BOP and the contractor for whom they worked. The BOP employees felt this influenced decisions that were made and made taking disciplinary action against the contractors difficult.

Mother Jones magazine’s investigative reporting was done by Shane Bauer, a reporter who spent 4 months as a guard at one of CCA’s private prisons in Louisiana. [3] He found that cost cutting was a focus of both the state and CCA. Employee costs made up 59% of CCA’s operating expenses and therefore were a key target for cost-cutting. Starting guards at Bauer’s CCA facility made only $9 per hour while those at public prisons in the state made $12.50. To further save money and increase profits, the CCA facility was typically under-staffed. The facility’s guard towers were unmanned on a regular basis and staffing inside the facility was typically 10% – 20% below standard. Lockdowns, where prisoners can’t leave their wing of the prison, were supposed to be punishments for major disturbances, but they also occurred over holidays and other times when there simply weren’t enough guards to run the prison. Security checks on prisoners were logged as being done even when they weren’t because of understaffing. However, when the state’s Department of Correction was coming for an inspection, guards were required to work overtime so the facility was fully staffed.

As a result of under-staffing and perhaps under-training (another cost-cutting strategy), the use of force or chemical agents, typically pepper spray, occurred more often at the CCA prison than at comparable facilities: twice as often for force and 7 times as often for chemical agents. With 1,500 inmates, 546 sexual offenses were reported at Bauer’s prison in 2014, 69% higher than at a comparable government-run facility. Between 2010 and 2015, CCA was sued more than 1,000 times nationwide, with approximately 3% of the cases involving a death, 6% sexual harassment or assault, 10% physical violence, 15% injuries, 15% medical care issues, and 16% prison conditions and treatment.

Louisiana’s efforts to cut costs and use contractors to run cheap prisons was reflected in the $34 per inmate per day that it paid CCA, while funding for state-run prisons was about $52. In addition, the inflation-adjusted cost per prisoner at the CCA facility Bauer worked at had dropped by 20% between the late 1990s and 2014.

CCA has an incentive to keep prisoners in its prisons in order to maximize revenue. An inmate can be charged with an infraction of the rules and lose credit for good behavior. This can mean that an inmate stays in prison an extra 30 days and that CCA gets paid an additional $1,000.

In Louisiana, the state also had an incentive to keep the prison full because CCA’s contract with the state required that CCA get paid for a minimum of 96% of full occupancy. Occupancy guarantees are common in private prison contracts and are one aspect of privatization that leads to perverse incentives for the state. The state’s incentive to keep the prison full may mean that prisoners who could be released are kept in prison or that the criminal justice system is pressured to arrest and sentence enough people to ensure that the prison is full.

CCA has been very active politically through lobbying and campaign contributions. Since 1998, CCA has spent $23 million on lobbying the federal government. Since 1990, it and its employees have contributed more than $6 million to candidates and other political activity. It has lobbied for high levels of incarceration. It co-chaired the criminal justice task force of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a corporate and conservative think tank that drafts and promotes state-level legislation. Among the pieces of legislation it has promoted are mandatory sentencing laws, punitive immigration reform, and truth-in-sentencing laws, all of which helped fuel the growing prison population of the 1990s.

CCA and other for-profit prison corporations aggressively lobbied Congress in 2009 for a minimum number of undocumented immigrants to be in private detention centers. They succeeded; US taxpayers are required by law to pay for a daily minimum of 34,000 beds in private detention centers. [4] These corporations have also lobbied against bills in Congress that would require private prisons to be subject to public information laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act. Such bills have been introduced at least 8 times in Congress, but have failed to pass each time.

These are examples of the problems and issues with private prisons, and with privatization in general. The problems with the private prisons were severe and intractable enough that the BOP concluded that it had to terminate its use of them. The BOP’s experiences and decision to end privatization should be kept in mind as other privatization efforts are reviewed or proposed.

[1]       Jeffery, C., July/August 2016, “Why we sent a reporter to work as a private prison guard,” Mother Jones (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-investigative-journalism-editors-note)

[2]       Wessler, S.F., 6/15/16, “Federal officials ignored years of internal warnings about deaths at private prisons,” The Nation (https://www.thenation.com/article/federal-officials-ignored-years-of-internal-warnings-about-deaths-at-private-prisons/)

[3]       Bauer, S., July / August 2016, “My four months as a private prison guard,” Mother Jones (http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/06/cca-private-prisons-corrections-corporation-inmates-investigation-bauer)

[4]       Editorial, 8/27/16, “Dump private prisons – all of them,” The Boston Globe

DEMOCRACY IS AWAKENING, BUT NOT IN THE CORPORATE MEDIA

One of the goals of this blog is to provide information on policy and politics that the mainstream corporate media fails to provide. One of the most blatant examples of news ignored by the corporate media is last month’s Democracy Awakening protests.

The Democracy Awakening protests were undertaken to highlight the issues of money in politics and abridgements of voting rights. Starting on April 2 under the banner of Democracy Spring (http://www.democracyspring.org/), over 100 people marched the 140 miles from the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia, where our democracy was founded, to Washington, D.C. In conjunction with Democracy Awakening (http://democracyawakening.org/), a week of protests, meetings with Congress men and women, and civil disobedience in Washington followed. By the end of the week, over 1,200 people had been arrested for civil disobedience, the largest such protests in decades.

The coverage of any of this in the mainstream corporate media was minimal at best. The most covered element of it was that Ben and Jerry (of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream) were arrested for civil disobedience. This warranted one story each on CBS, in the New York Times, and in the Boston Globe. This was the only coverage that showed up in a search of their websites, other than a letter to the editor in the Times. NBC had one story and ABC had three.

Democracy Awakening is a broad coalition of over 100 groups, including organizations representing campaign finance reform efforts, labor, environmental issues, students, and the racial justice and civil rights movements. They have coalesced with a shared belief that progress on the broad range of policy issues they care about will not occur until we combat attacks on voting rights and the corruption of our elections and democracy by big money.

The reason for civil disobedience at the Capitol was that Congress has refused to act on the issues of voting rights and campaign finance despite the overwhelming support of the American public across party affiliation, even including many in the “Tea Party.” Presidents Obama and Clinton made campaign promises to address these issues but did not follow through.

This lack of action by Congress is not because there aren’t bills that would address these issues. Ninety members of the House have signed a letter demanding action on four bills and a resolution that reflect the Democracy Awakening agenda:

  1. HR 12: Makes it easier for citizens to vote and increases the verifiability of voting results. It would require on-line and same-day voter registration, along with early voting and voting by mail. It would require voter-verified paper ballots and audits of voting results.
  2. HR 2694: Makes voter registration automatic.
  3. HR 2867: Restores some of the protections of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court voided in 2013.
  4. HR 20: Provides incentives for small contributions to candidates for Congress and takes steps to reduce the influence of big money in our elections. It establishes a 50% tax credit for small contributions, bans the joint committee fundraising that has led to contributors giving checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to candidates, and improves disclosure by requiring candidates’ financial reports to be electronic.
  5. Resolution 22: Proposes a constitutional amendment that would reverse the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United and other cases that have allowed unlimited campaign spending by wealthy individuals and corporations, and have also given corporations and other organizations rights under the Bill of Rights that were meant for human beings.

Democracy Awakening is part of a broad effort to mobilize voters and increase participation in our elections. In the 2014 Congressional elections, barely a third of eligible voters voted. The current paralysis in Washington, hyper-partisanship, and negative campaign ads have left voters so disillusioned and cynical that they see no point in participating in our democracy and, therefore, disengage.

We need to re-awaken participation in our democracy. Without informed and engaged citizens, and without high levels of participation, our democracy will not be of, by, and for the people, because special interests will take control and bend public policy to their benefit.

I encourage you to learn more about the Democracy Awakening effort and to sign-up to be informed about this effort at its website: http://democracyawakening.org/. I also encourage you to “Follow” this blog (if you haven’t already) and to sign-up for Bill Moyers’ newsletter, where much of the information for this post came from (http://billmoyers.com/; click on “Newsletter” and enter your email address to subscribe).

IMPORTANT ISSUES FOR THE 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

ABSTRACT: There’s no shortage of important issues facing the U.S. today. As candidates announce their intention to run for president, it will be interesting to see which issues they make priorities and which issues the mainstream corporate media decide to cover. Many candidates and the mainstream media are likely to avoid the issues of the struggling middle and working classes and of the growing inequality of income and wealth.

However, MoveOn.org and Robert Reich have teamed up to present 10 important issues for supporting the middle and working classes, reclaiming our democracy from moneyed interests, and saving our planet. Reich does a 3 minute video on each issue.

Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a Democratic candidate for President, has a similar focus. If these issues resonate with you, I encourage you to follow Senator Sanders’ campaign. If you want these issues to be discussed in the campaign, give him some support during the primary.

FULL POST: There’s no shortage of important issues facing the U.S. today. As candidates announce their intention to run for president, it will be interesting to see which issues they make priorities. It will also be interesting to see which issues the mainstream media – the big corporate media – decide to cover. Many candidates and the mainstream media are likely to avoid the issues of the struggling middle and working classes and of the growing inequality of income and wealth. However, there are efforts to explicitly put these issues in the spotlight.

MoveOn.org and Robert Reich [1] have teamed up to present “10 Big Ideas to Save the Economy.” These are 10 important issues for supporting the middle and working classes, reclaiming our democracy from moneyed interests, and saving our planet. The corporate media and many candidates will avoid them. Therefore, MoveOn and Reich are using social media to try and bring these ten issues to voters’ attention. The issues are:

  • Enacting a $15 minimum wage
  • Supporting working families through equal pay for women, predictable work schedules, quality child care, and paid leave
  • Expanding Social Security
  • Reining in Wall Street
  • Reinventing education
  • Ending corporate welfare
  • Strengthening workers’ bargaining power through stronger unions
  • Increasing the estate tax
  • Implementing a carbon tax to cut pollution and address global warming
  • Getting big money out of politics

I’ve done blog posts on the first five and will do posts on the others soon. In the posts, I include a link to the 3 minute video that Robert Reich does to explain each one.

There’s one Democratic candidate for President, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, whose campaign has a similar focus on the middle and working classes and on inequality. Although the mainstream (corporate) media tend to describe him as a fringe candidate and highlight his socialist political label, his positions on issues are very well aligned with what the voting public supports. For example, he supports: [2] [3] [4]

  • Providing universal pre-kindergarten – supported by 77% of the public
  • Reducing income and wealth inequality – supported by 63% of the public
  • Fair trade that protect workers, the environment, and jobs – supported by 75% of the public
  • Increasing taxes on the rich – supported by 52% of the public
  • Expanding Social Security – supported by 70% of the public
  • Breaking up the big banks – supported by 58% of the public
  • Making higher education more affordable – supported by 79% of the public
  • Reducing the burden of student debt – supported by 78% of the public
  • Ending tax loopholes for corporations that ship jobs overseas – supported by 74% of the public
  • Closing offshore corporate tax loopholes – supported by 70% of the public
  • Addressing climate change – supported by 71% of the public
  • Getting big money out of politics – supported by over 70% of the public across party lines

If Senator Sanders’ positions on these issues resonate with you, I encourage you to follow to his campaign. If you want these issues to be discussed in the campaign, give him some support during the primary. His campaign website is https://berniesanders.com/.

[1]       Robert Reich was President Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and MoveOn.org is the progressive, grassroots organization promoting participation in our democracy.

[2]       Moyers, B., & Winship M., 6/3/15, “Turn left on Main Street,” Moyers & Company (http://billmoyers.com/2015/06/03/turn-left-main-street/?utm_source=General+Interest&utm_campaign=512c7d35f1-Midweek12171412_17_2014&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4ebbe6839f-512c7d35f1-168350969)

[3]       Cole, J., 5/29/15, “Despite what corporate media tells you, Bernie Sanders’ positions are mainstream,” Common Dreams (http://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/05/29/how-mainstream-bernie-sanders)

[4]       Progressive Change Institute, Jan. 2015, “Poll of likely 2016 voters,” (https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.boldprogressives.org/images/Big_Ideas-Polling_PDF-1.pdf)

WHY GOVERNMENT DOESN’T GET CREDIT FOR ITS SUCCESSES

ABSTRACT: Government rarely gets credit for its successful programs and initiatives in the media or among the public. On the other hand, government failures or shortcomings get lots of attention. One reason is that denigrating government is at the heart of the political strategy of small government proponents and special interests who want large corporations and the wealthy to control our economy. Furthermore, there is no one presenting a forceful argument that government is a necessary part of a functioning society and that government does a lot of good.

Governments are needed, for example, to regulate the economy, protect civil rights, and ensure public safety. There are certain societal functions that only the shared enterprise of government can provide including public education, retirement security, infrastructure such as roads and bridges, a criminal justice system, and a safety net for those who experience life’s misfortunes.

A series of events over the last 50 years has divided the country and created resentment and mistrust of government policies. These experiences have been in sharp contrast to the unifying nature of the recovery from the Great Depression, World War II, and the widespread economic prosperity of the 1950s.

The active and purposeful government-denigrating forces have spent the last 35 years undermining government effectiveness. By under-funding and weakening government programs, the positive effects of government have been lessened and failures made more likely.

Among the public, the benefits of government are often taken for granted, seem to be going to other people, or are invisible or not visibly connected to government. Even direct government benefits are often taken for granted, including unemployment payments, Social Security and Medicare, public education, student loans for higher education, and the income tax deduction for interest on one’s home mortgage. Many people who have received such benefits say they have never benefited from a government program.

The media should cover government success stories with at least the same level of attention they give to stories of government shortcomings and should reject fear mongering and government bashing that is political and unfounded. The American public needs balanced coverage of government, including reporting of all the good government does.

FULL POST: Government rarely gets credit for its successful programs and initiatives in the media or among the public. On the other hand, government failures or shortcomings get lots of attention. [1] There are a range of reasons for this phenomenon. One is that denigrating government is at the heart of the political strategy of small government proponents and special interests who want large corporations and the wealthy to control our economy.

Furthermore, there is no one presenting a forceful argument that government is a necessary part of a functioning society and that government does a lot of good. Governments are needed, for example, to regulate the economy, protect civil rights, and ensure public safety. There are certain societal functions that only the shared enterprise of government can provide including public education, retirement security, infrastructure such as roads and bridges, a criminal justice system, and a safety net for those who experience life’s misfortunes. However, there is no organization or political group with anywhere near the clout of the government bashers that is promoting the good things government does and should do in well-functioning society.

Faith in government has been falling in polls for 50 years. A series of events has divided the country and created resentment and mistrust of government policies, including:

  • Resurgent racism over the Civil Rights Movement and the War on Poverty of the 1960s;
  • Disenchantment with the Vietnam War in the 1970s;
  • Disillusionment over the Watergate political scandal in the 1970s;
  • The small government, pro-corporation, and anti-labor rhetoric and policies beginning in the 1980s;
  • The North American Free Trade Treaty of the 1990s;
  • The Iraq War of the 2000s; and the current
  • Racial bias evident in law enforcement and incarceration;
  • Unjustified barriers to voting in some states; and
  • The slow economic recovery and growing inequality.

These experiences have been in sharp contrast to the unifying nature of the recovery from the Great Depression, World War II, and the widespread economic prosperity of the 1950s.

The active and purposeful government-denigrating forces have spent the last 35 years undermining government effectiveness. They say that taxes – government revenue – can be cut without reducing government services or benefits. Unfortunately, the American public has been willing to believe this promise of a free lunch. Until recently, it hasn’t noticed the deterioration in government services and supports, as well as the decaying of public infrastructure that has inevitably resulted from reducing government revenue. By under-funding and weakening government programs, their positive effects have been lessened and their failures made more likely. And the anti-government crowd is all too happy to point the finger and say, “See, government doesn’t work,” when the then inevitable shortcomings become evident. As a result, the public’s perception of government has been undermined as well.

This makes it hard for those who support the positive role of government because they have to criticize the weak, poorly performing government programs to make their argument for strengthening them. This criticism often just adds to the negativity surrounding government.

Among the public, the benefits of government are often taken for granted, seem to be going to other people, or are invisible or not visibly connected to government. For example, the government’s successful response to the Ebola crisis was taken for granted by many, seemed remote and as benefiting other people to others, and was connected to hospitals and medical personnel not to the government that had funded and supported them. The public isn’t left with a strong, positive impression of government when it acts to avoid a worse outcome, as in the Ebola crisis or the response to the 2008 financial collapse and recession. In particular, with the economic recovery, it is hard to get the public to acknowledge that things are better than they might have been when they are still not great. Let alone to give kudos to government for a job well-done in such a situation.

The Affordable Care Act is an example of where the immediate benefits for most people were hardly noticeable. Most people already had health insurance and for those who didn’t, the benefit of having health insurance is clear only when you are sick and need it. Therefore, requiring everyone to have health insurance, which has a great societal benefit and a long-term personal benefit, can feel, in the short-term, like a burden to those who are healthy. Similarly, the benefit of the ban on denying coverage for a pre-existing condition only becomes evident when one has to change one’s health insurer, which may not happen immediately. Moreover, when it does happen, the ability to get new health insurance is often taken for granted.

Other government benefits that are taken for granted, and only get attention when there is a breakdown or failure, include public safety, roads, and bridges. Even direct government benefits are often taken for granted, including unemployment payments, Social Security and Medicare, public education, student loans for higher education, and the income tax deduction for interest on one’s home mortgage. Surveys indicate that 60% of the people who have taken the home mortgage interest deduction say they have never benefited from a government program. Similarly, many people who have received student loans or unemployment benefits say they have never benefited from a government program. And virtually no one who has attended public schools, driven on our public roads, or felt safe in public recognizes that they have benefited from a government program.

The media should cover government success stories with at least the same level of attention they give to stories of government shortcomings and should reject fear mongering and government bashing that is political and unfounded. The American public needs balanced coverage of government, including reporting of all the good government does. Unfortunately, that is not the case with current media coverage.

You can contribute to achieving a better balance in the media coverage of government by writing letters or emails to the editors of media outlets with stories of government successes and posting them on social media. You can also write to criticize negative stories and the lack of balance and objectivity in the coverage of government. A democracy requires an accurately informed public and the media today are not doing a good job of providing accurate information about the role government plays.

[1]       Cohn, J. Spring 2015. “Why public silence greets government success,” The American Prospect (Much of my post is a summary of this article.)

GOVERNMENT SUCCESSES RARELY GET ATTENTION

ABSTRACT: There are many examples of successful government programs and initiatives but they rarely get much attention in the media or among the public. On the other hand, government failures or shortcomings get lots of attention. The media, and in particular right wing talk radio and Fox, along with “conservative” and libertarian politicians, fan the flames of supposed government failure at every opportunity.

Remember the Ebola crisis of last fall? The right wing media and politicians severely criticized the government for not reacting appropriately, stated that government could not be trusted to handle the situation, and predicted an epidemic here in the U.S. There was no epidemic here. The few patients were treated in facilities funded, designed, and/or supported by our government with great success. However, this success of government policies and facilities got very little attention or acknowledgement.

As another example, the largely successful U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial debacle almost certainly prevented a worldwide depression. It softened the recession here and put the U.S. on a better track toward recovery than has happened in Europe. However, the government got little credit for keeping us out of a depression or a much worse recession.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), tens of millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before. Many of these families are now avoiding financial distress and bankruptcy due to medical bills because they have health insurance. The ACA has probably contributed to the slowing of the increase in health care costs and it clearly hasn’t generated the runaway inflation in health care costs that its critics predicted. Despite the tangible and significant successes of the ACA, the media coverage of it is largely negative as is a large portion of the public’s perception of it.

FULL POST: There are many examples of successful government programs and initiatives, but they rarely get much attention in the media or among the public. On the other hand, government failures or shortcomings get lots of attention; they are blasted across the headlines and blared out by talk radio and social media. [1] It seems that every member of the public has a story of a government failure on the tip of his or her tongue, but has a hard time identifying something positive to say about government.

The media, and in particular right wing talk radio and Fox, along with “conservative” and libertarian politicians, fan the flames of supposed government failure at every opportunity (including contrived ones). From President Reagan’s statement that government isn’t the solution it’s the problem to today’s Tea Party and the undermine-President-Obama-at-any-cost Republicans, denigrating government is in the forefront of these politicians’ political strategy.

Remember the Ebola crisis of last fall? The right wing media and politicians severely criticized the government for not reacting appropriately, stated that government could not be trusted to handle the situation, and predicted an epidemic here in the U.S. Fear mongering ran rampant. But what happened? There was no epidemic here; every one of the small handful of people who contracted the disease in the U.S. recovered, along with a number of others with the disease who were evacuated to the U.S. from Africa. Patients were treated in facilities funded, designed, and/or supported by our government. However, this success of government policies and facilities got very little attention or acknowledgement. The critics didn’t apologize and admit they were wrong, let alone thank the government for a job well-done. The media didn’t cover this success with anywhere near the attention it gave to the criticism and fear mongering.

As another example, the largely successful U.S. government’s response to the 2008 financial debacle, caused by irresponsible behavior by large Wall Street corporations, almost certainly prevented a worldwide depression. The bailout of the financial corporations prevented a full blown collapse of the financial sector worldwide. The economic stimulus bill, formally the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, created about 3 million jobs and kept the unemployment rate 2% lower than it would have been according to most economists. (See my blog post of 9/13/12 for more detail.) It accomplished this despite political opposition that limited the dollar amount of the stimulus and, consequently, its beneficial effects. Nonetheless, it softened the recession here and put the U.S. on a better track toward recovery than has happened in Europe. The slow but steady recovery has also been supported by the policies of the Federal Reserve.

However, the government got little credit for keeping us out of a depression or a much worse recession. It is interesting to note that Congress people who vociferously criticized the stimulus in Washington would tout the jobs it had created when they were at home in their districts.

Under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), often called Obama Care in an effort to politicize it, tens of millions of people now have health insurance who didn’t before. (This number would be substantially higher if Republican Governors and legislatures had cooperated with the ACA. See my blog post of 8/13/14 for more detail.) Thanks to the ACA:

  • Millions of young adults in their early twenties can and do now stay on their parents’ health insurance;
  • Millions of people with pre-existing health conditions can now change jobs, go back to school to further their education, or start their own businesses because they can’t be denied health insurance if they switch insurance providers; and
  • Many families are now avoiding financial distress and bankruptcy due to medical bills because they now have health insurance to pay them.

Furthermore, the ACA has probably contributed to the slowing of the increase in health care costs and it clearly hasn’t generated the runaway inflation in them that its critics predicted.

Despite these tangible and significant successes of the ACA, the media coverage of it is largely negative as is a large portion of the public’s perception of it.

Another example is the arrival of tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors at the Mexican border last summer. Right wing media and politicians blamed the Obama administration for causing the problem and failing to respond appropriately. This crisis was a major news story. In reality, the problem was caused by a spike in violence in three Central American countries and weak, disrupted economies in part due to the NAFTA trade treaty and other long-standing issues. The Obama administration responded with an improved and expedited process for handling the immigration of these children, as well as diplomacy and economic support to address the issues in the three countries. Within three months, the arrival of unaccompanied minors dwindled and the crisis was solved. But coverage and acknowledgement of this success was, for the most part, nowhere to been seen or heard.

My next post will go into more detail on why the government rarely gets credit for or acknowledgement of its successes.

[1]       Cohn, J. Spring 2015. “Why public silence greets government success,” The American Prospect (Much of my post is a summary of this article.)

OUR ELECTIONS ARE ALL ABOUT THE MONEY

ABSTRACT: Although the next presidential election is over 20 months away, there is already media attention focused on who can and who is raising the most money. The top lobbyists / bundlers raise over $1 million for candidates’ campaigns. If this isn’t a blatant way of buying influence, I don’t know what is. A Washington, D.C., lawyer and political activist formed a super PAC that raised $145 million for Romney’s campaign in 2012. Presidential candidate Jeb Bush is holding $100,000 per person fundraisers. He plans to hold 60 fundraisers before April 1, an average of nearly one per day.

The money race is the real race; the actual courting of voters and voting is secondary. The savvy, hard-working, profit-driven individuals making large campaign contributions are looking for a return on their investment. And they get it through government actions that benefit their interests. This, in a nutshell, is the legalized corruption of the political system of our supposed democracy.

We must reform our system of financing election campaigns. Two essential elements are:

  • Reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United and related decisions, and
  • Establishing campaign financing systems where small contributions to viable candidates are matched by public funds so candidates can be competitive based on support from every day citizens and voters instead of being dependent on wealthy individuals and interest groups.

 

FULL POST: Although the next presidential election is over 20 months away, it is already getting quite a bit of media attention. Little of that attention is focused on the policies that the possible candidates support. Much of the attention is focused on who can and who is raising the most money.

On the Republican side, Romney’s decision not to run has set off a scramble among other possible candidates to win over his financial backers. Romney’s top five lobbyists / bundlers each raised over $1 million for his campaign. These lobbyists for powerful corporate interests solicited campaign contributions from multiple individuals and political action committees (PACs) and presented them in aggregate (i.e., a bundle) to Romney’s campaign. If this isn’t a blatant way of buying influence, I don’t know what is. The top lobbyist / bundler was Bill Graves, president of the American Truckers Association and former Governor of Kansas.

Announced presidential candidate Jeb Bush has been aggressively wooing the Romney fundraisers and others. He began active fundraising last November, two years before the election. In a recent week, he held a $100,000 per person fundraiser in New York, two fundraisers in Washington, D.C., and two in Chicago. He told his audience of lobbyists, CEOs, and corporate industry group representatives that he plans to hold 60 fundraisers before April 1, an average of nearly one per day. Charlie Spies, a Washington, D.C., lawyer and political activist, who formed a super PAC that raised $145 million for Romney’s campaign is now working with a newly formed super PAC supporting Bush. [1]

The money race is the real race; the actual courting of voters and voting is secondary. Is this really the way we want to be selecting candidates for President (or any office) in a democracy? Is this really how we want our candidates to be spending their time? Is this really what we want the media to be reporting about the candidates – how many fundraisers they are having, how much money they are raising, and who is providing them with huge amounts of money? Do we really want our candidates courting and being indebted to these wealthy individuals and interest groups?

The savvy, hard-working, profit-driven individuals making large campaign contributions are looking for a return on their investment. And they get it through government actions that benefit their interests. As one example of such a return, the Koch brothers spent in excess of $100 million in the 2014 federal election, primarily, if not exclusively, in support of Republican candidates. The new Republican-controlled Congress just happened to fast-track a vote on a bill mandating the construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline. The Koch brothers and their corporations lease oil rights on more than a million acres of land in the Alberta tar sands region from which the pipeline would transport oil. The construction of the pipeline would increase the value of their leases by an estimated $100 million! [2] This is just one example of the kind of payback wealthy campaign donors get. And the Koch brothers have just announced their intention to spend close to a billion dollars in the 2016 elections.

This, in a nutshell, is the legalized corruption of the political system of our supposed democracy. We are well down the road to a plutocracy (where the wealth elites rule) or a corporatocracy (where the corporations rule). I’m not sure there’s much difference, actually. (See my post on 7/21/14 for more detail.)

We must reform our system of financing election campaigns or we will lose our democracy – government of, by, and for the people. Reforming campaign financing will not be easy or quick. Two essential elements are:

  • Reversing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United and related decisions that equate money with speech and give corporations the free speech rights of the Bill of Rights (see my post on 1/11/15 for more detail), and
  • Establishing campaign financing systems, such as those in Arizona, Maine, and New York City, where small contributions to viable candidates are matched by public funds so candidates can be competitive based on support from every day citizens and voters instead of being dependent on wealthy individuals and interest groups (see my post on 7/25/14 for more detail).

[1]       Viser, M, 2/14/15, “Bush pressing to lock in Romney’s donors,” The Boston Globe

[2]       Hightower, J., 12/14, “Koch Kongress: The best money can buy,” The Hightower Lowdown (http://www.hightowerlowdown.org/)

WHERE O WHERE HAS INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALISM GONE?

ABSTRACT: Investigative journalism, especially by the mainstream media, is rare these days. Yet it is critical to an informed citizenry, which in turn is critical to a successful democracy. On a recent Bill Moyers TV show, “The lies that lead to war,” Moyers and his guest, investigative journalist Charles Lewis, explore the value of investigative journalism and the reasons for its scarcity. Currently, Lewis says, the media largely just report what those in positions of authority and power tell them, with very little analysis or commentary.

Part of the reason for this is that the corporate, for-profit mainstream media have cut the budgets and staffing of news operations and investigative journalism. The media also have a conflict of interest: they don’t want to alienate elected and corporate officials because they want them as sources for stories and appearances on TV shows.

The Obama administration has been very aggressive in discouraging the leaking of information to members of the media. It has prosecuted leakers. The likelihood that leakers will be caught is high given the extensive surveillance that’s in place. In addition, the Obama administration has been very aggressive in prosecuting investigative journalists. Obama has used the Espionage Act against journalists far more than any other president.

We need good and unintimidated investigative journalism. The whole reason for including freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights was so that the media could report information that those in power and with authority might want to keep hidden. Knowledge in the hands of an informed citizenry is essential to the success of democracy.

FULL POST: Investigative journalism, especially by the mainstream media, is rare these days. Yet it is critical to an informed citizenry, which in turn is critical to a successful democracy. Investigative journalism uncovers and publicizes revealing information not available elsewhere that often has been purposely kept from the public.

According to Wikipedia, “Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, such as serious crimes, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. … In many cases, the subjects of the reporting wish the matters under scrutiny to remain undisclosed. … [Investigative journalists work] to discover the truth and to identify lapses from it.” [1]

On a recent Bill Moyers TV show, “The lies that lead to war,” Moyers and his guest, investigative journalist Charles Lewis, explore the value of investigative journalism and the reasons for its scarcity. [2] Lewis’s recent book, “935 Lies: The future of truth and the decline of America’s moral integrity,” documents the lies that led to the Vietnam and Iraq wars. In both cases, there was a pattern of knowing deception and an orchestrated campaign of lies by Presidents Johnson and G.W. Bush and their administrations that led to these wars of choice. And in both cases, the mainstream media failed, for the most part, to engage in the timely investigative journalism that would have exposed the deception.

Lewis states that the failure of the media to expose deception by public and private officials has gotten worse over time. Currently, he says, the media largely just report what those in positions of authority and power tell them, with very little analysis or commentary.

Part of the reason for this is that the corporate, for-profit mainstream media, in the interests of profitability, have cut the budgets and staffing of news operations and investigative journalism. The media also have a conflict of interest: they don’t want to alienate elected and corporate officials because they want them as sources for stories and appearances on TV shows. Therefore, the media avoid asking them tough questions or engaging in reporting that would embarrass them or cast them in a negative light.

The Obama administration has been very aggressive in discouraging the leaking of information to members of the media. It has prosecuted leakers. The likelihood that leakers will be caught is high given the extensive surveillance of phone calls and emails, the ability to track cell phones’ locations, and the thousands of surveillance cameras in Washington (and elsewhere). Leaked information is essential to investigative journalism, so these aggressive anti-leaking efforts make investigative journalism much more difficult.

In addition, the Obama administration has been very aggressive in prosecuting investigative journalists. Obama has used the Espionage Act against journalists far more than any other president. Nixon used it only once, against Daniel Ellsberg who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Obama has used it eight times. Obama says he supports a shield law for reporters that would protect the confidentiality of their sources, but he is criminalizing investigative reporting by prosecuting leakers and the journalists with whom they share information.

Currently, James Risen, an investigative journalist for the New York Times, is being threatened with jail by the Obama administration for refusing to identify a source he used in his book, “State of War,” about the secret campaign against the Iranian nuclear program. Risen, one of only about a dozen reporters that focus on national security issues, co-authored stories about domestic surveillance that won him a Pulitzer Prize in 2005.

The Obama administration wants to prosecute the person who leaked information to Risen. It knows who the leaker is, but it doesn’t want to have to reveal the intelligence and surveillance tools it used to identify him. Those tools may be illegal or may appear to be unseemly ways of monitoring government employees. Therefore, it wants to force Risen to reveal his source.

In the case of Eric Snowden, who leaked the information on the National Security Agency’s (NSA) extensive surveillance of Americans and others, he has had to take asylum in Russia to avoid prosecution. The investigative journalists who have published his material have had to work from and remain overseas, while taking extraordinary steps to keep their phone and email communications, as well as their computers and the leaked files on them, from being hacked into by the NSA and the US intelligence agencies.

We need good and unintimidated investigative journalism. The whole reason for including freedom of the press in the Bill of Rights was so that the media could report information that those in power and with authority might want to keep hidden. Knowledge in the hands of an informed citizenry is essential to the success of democracy.

[1]       Retrieved from Wikipedia on 8/5/14, “Investigative journalism,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigative_journalism

[2]       Moyers, B., with Lewis, C., 6/27/14, “The lies that lead to war,” Moyers and Company (http://billmoyers.com/episode/the-truth-vs-dcs-propaganda-machine/)