Corporate Disinformation Playbook

Just finished an excellent article in the Union of Concerned Scientists’ magazine, Catalyst. It discusses the corporate disinformation tactics that come from a playbook that is intended to discredit science as a basis for policy decisions by government. Very appropriate right now as 45 continues to decimate science advisory committees and appoint decidedly anti-science cabinet members and department heads. And you have to love the football analogies.

The gist of the article is that there are 5 different tactics: “The Fix”, “The Fake”, “The Diversion”, “The Blitz” and “The Screen”.

In the Fix, the corporations simply use their money and connections to influence decisions. Given Runaway Inequality, corporations and their wealthy benefactors have accumulated massive amounts of money to contribute to politicians (thanks “Citizens United”) to ensure that their views will trump (pun intended) science.

The Fake is just what it sounds like – funding fake studies to call into question real science. For example, taking a page directly out of the tobacco companies playbook, Georgia-Pacific funded no less than 13 studies to call into question whether exposure to asbestos was dangerous. Duh!

The Diversion is somewhat similar to the Fake. It involves getting (or in many cases creating) fake groups to create uncertainty about the science or raise other objections, like potential job loss. Coal, oil and gas companies have become experts at this in opposing clean energy policies and climate change science.

The Blitz involves attacking scientists and their organizations. A recent example of this occurred in my home town of Wilmington, NC when a state legislator accused local university scientists, who were analyzing the health threats from a chemical plant, of having a “political agenda”.

Finally, the Screen is a tactic used by very wealthy corporate donors to fund programs or whole schools at major universities, with the real political agenda of influencing the direction their research takes. The Koch Brothers set the table on this one with their funding of the Mercatus Center, a think tank on campus of George Mason University that studies markets and regulation and produces “scholarly” support for their reactionary agenda.

Perhaps this is not news to some, but it’s put together very clearly by the folks at UCS, who are on the front lines in defense of science. They only ask that we spread the word.

More information can be found at www.ucsusa.org/playbook

What if...

What if the Republicans don't really don't care if Congress passes their massive tax cut for the 1%? What if there is a more sinister plot afoot? Conspiracy, no, just the long game of the partisan Republicans.

After all, what political benefit do they think they can gain from passing this massive giveaway to the richest Americans? Public opinion is running 2 to 1 against the bill, and that's before most falks have seen how horrible it really is. Even the stupidest Republican Congressman (well maybe not the stupidest, for example my Congressman) has to realize that this bill will NOT result in increased investment and significant economic growth no matter how much smoke and mirrors they use to sell it.

It doesn't take a Wharton School economics degree to understand that if you keep taking from the middle class and the poor to enrich the 1%, sooner or later almost everyone is going to be maxed out on their credit cards and pay day loans. What happens then in an economy that is based on mass consumption?

I would think that passing this bill, along with the repeal of the ACA, would be tantmount to political suicide. Maybe they actually hope against hope that it will not pass. So why all the fuss?

Part of it undoubtly has to do with appeasing the basest of their base. "Look, we tried to carry out our promises, but the damn Democrats and a few RINOs prevented our success."

But I think there maybe another way they could use the failure to pass this and other reactionary legislation. If you analyze the basic partisan game plan they've been playing for the past 30+ years, the pattern that emerges is simple. For the Republicans to remain in power, they have to surpress the vote.

It has long been accepted that Democrats benefit from large turnouts at the polls and that current demographic trends are highly favorable to the Democrats' electoral chances. The solution, as far as Republicans are concerned, is to keep people from voting, by any means necessary. Voter ID laws, purging voter rolls, cutting down on early voting days and locations, keeping immigrants from attaining citizenship status, gerrymandering and so on are on the agenda of Republicans from the national down to the local levels.

But there is another method of surpressing the vote that can give them more bang for the buck. That is convincing large numbers of voters that the government can't do anything right. It's why having a incompetent narcisist as President doesn't bother them at all. It's why the level of corruption in the Trump administration doesn't bother them at all. And it is why, not being able to pass landmark legislation doesn't really bother them.

Whether out of power or in power, gridlock benefits the Republican ideologues. Cynicism is their greatist ally. And 2017 has been a banner year for that, despite the efforts of the resistance across the country. Combatting that cynicism is the most important task confronting us in the next 11 months.

Understanding Runaway Inequality

If you want to understand runaway inequality, really understand it, you must read Les Leopold's book, aptly titled "Runaway Inequality: An Activist's Guide to Economic Justice".

Leopold, a longtime labor activist, is working to build a national movement around the concepts outlined in the book. The key thing to note about the book is that it explains the concepts in everyday language and simple, clear graphs so that your don't have to be an economist to grasp the ideas. And it shows how runaway inequality is related to the other issues we, ask progressives, care about. As Les concludes "everything is connected to everything else".

I am participating in his "Train the Trainer" workshop this weekend and hope to post a synopsis of the book and the workshop in short order. However, as a teaser, I've copied below a press statement I wrote for the President of the SENC Central Labor Council, based on Les' analysis (and 30 minutes of research on the Internet).

Background - Duke Energy, the largest electric utility in the country and the only one in North Carolina (with the exception, I believe of a couple of very small co-ops) has been storing its waste coal ash in open ponds through out the state. This became an major issue when one of them spilled into the Dan River polluting the drinking water for hundreds of thousands of homes.

Belatedly, Duke has been ordered to clean up some of the ponds. So now Duke has demanded a 17% rate hike to pay for this and future clean ups. To add insult to injury, the way the proposed rate hike is structured it will hit small consumers (working class families) the hardest. The following is the statement read at a press conference and at the rate hike hearing in Wilmington.

Statement by Herb Harton, President, Southeastern North Carolina Central Labor Council.

Duke Energy is demanding a huge rate increase to pay for cleaning up the coal ash ponds, a mess that it created, and for its failure to invest sufficiently in clean energy to prevent future environmental crises.

It’s not that Duke didn’t have the money from its profits over the past ten years. Rather it chose to pay out 17 billion dollars in dividends. It chose to spend billions more to buy back almost one-half of its outstanding stock in 2011, resulting in the value of the remaining stock tripling from $21 a share to $63 a share in just one year. It chose to use its assets to buy Progress Energy for $13.7 billion, paying Progress Energy’s CEO a $44 million golden parachute. Just a note – at the time of the merger, Duke’s CEO stated that it would save customers at least $600 million over 5 years. The 5 years are up, and we’re still waiting!

Who benefited from all these actions. Duke’s CEO and other officers who get paid in stock options on top of their inflated salaries and Duke’s other large shareholders, but certainly not its customers.

Duke claims it needs more money to clean up present and future messes and make necessary investments in infrastructure. They want their customers, working families, most of whom haven’t seen any increase in their meager incomes over the past 10 years, to pony up.

But we have a better idea. Duke needs to start retaining its profits and investing them. If they need more money to invest, they can resell 10% of the 600 million shares of stock they bought back in 2011, which, at current prices, would give them $5 billion cash to invest. That’s what companies would have done 50 years ago, when the growing economy benefitted most Americans, not just a few.

What’s Next for Progressives – A rebuttal

Paul Krugman, in a NYT column on Aug. 7^th, 2017, concludes that Democrats should not take up the fight for single-payer Medicare for All. While his arguments are weak, they still need to be refuted, as they will be taken up by those who oppose any progressive agenda as the way forward for the Democratic Party.

Krugman states that having won a great victory in the battle against “repeal and replace”, progressives should move on to more important issues. More important issues??? WTF. What could be more important than an issue which affects 20% of the economy and every single man, woman and child in the country? An issue that is the largest cause of personal bankruptcy, pain and premature death in the US. An issue which has resulted in spiraling increases in the federal budget.

And since when is a temporary stand-off a great victory? Krugman just declares victory and says, let’s go home. Is it possible that he thinks the Republicans will not come back with a war of attrition, a death by a thousand cuts? I guess he doesn’t read the newspaper he writes for.

The problem he wants us to ignore is that the two main progressive goals for healthcare reform, universal coverage and controlling rapidly rising healthcare costs, were NOT accomplished by the ACA. Simply tweaking it, will not solve these problems. It will leave in place an inefficient and wasteful system with the power in the hands of the private insurance industry and corporate medical providers like Big Pharma.

For some reason (I’ll leave that to your imagination) Krugman wants to leave the insurance industry in control. He supports this by saying that the insurance industry helped save the ACA from Republican plans. Of course, they did; they are not going to bite the hand that feeds them. But they are also not going to resist the changes short of repeal, that the Republicans are likely to enact. Krugman apparently forgets that the insurance industry will always protect its bottom line, not the health of the insured.

On the political level, winning the war over healthcare will require a clear and concise alternative to “repeal and replace”. The goal of “making incremental improvements to the ACA” just doesn’t get it. “Medicare for All” does.

Krugman is right about one thing – getting to single payer will take a lot of work. It will require Democrats to take back the federal government. The actual way in which it will be accomplished needs to be worked out. But as the goal for healthcare reform, it can provide a rallying point (along with several other issues) for Democrats to win back political power.

We are faced with an historic opportunity to fight for the solution to our healthcare crisis. A majority of Americans support the idea that the government should guarantee affordable healthcare insurance to all. The Republicans have been totally discredited; the Democrats have a chance to offer a real alternative.

If we walk away from this opportunity, who knows when it will come again.

Who we honor says a lot about who we are

It is long past the time for our country to come to grips with its history. It has been almost 400 years since the first kidnapped Africans were brought to Virginia against their will, 152 years since the end of the Civil War and the passage of the 13^th Amendment banning slavery, and 63 years since the landmark Brown v Board decision outlawing Jim Crow school segregation. Yet today we still live in a society where separate and unequal define the lives of our black citizens and where racial injustice is defended as “part of our heritage”.

The tragic deaths in Charlottesville and the failure of the President to condemn the white racists and neo-Nazis responsible for the violence is a shocking reminder that we have a long way to go in dealing with our history of systematic racial oppression, our nation’s “original sin”. The promise of America, to affirm the fundamental worth and dignity of ALL people, rings hollow in the ears of millions of our fellow citizens.

To be clear, the Civil War was not about states’ rights, just as opposition to desegregation in the 1950s and 60s wasn’t. The former was about defending a system of chattel slavery, where human beings were treated like property; the latter was about maintaining Jim Crow, which continued the systematic discrimination and hatred that is a fundamental part of our American heritage, both South AND North. That part of our history can only be put behind us when we acknowledge the past and present expressions and thoroughly reject them.

To combat systematic racism, we need to accept that those who fought to maintain this system, regardless of their justification, should not be celebrated as heroes. Robert E. Lee may have been a brilliant general, but he put his skills to work for an immoral cause. To honor him is to celebrate that cause and to support the continuation of the system of racial oppression he fought to maintain.

In fact, we must to do more than just remove those monuments honoring the Confederates who fought to divide our country in order to preserve slavery. In their place, we need to erect monuments to those who fought and died for freedom and equality. They fought for the values that made our country great and are the true heroes in our history. That’s a heritage that we should all celebrate.

LTE Submitted to the StarNews in Wilmington, NC on 8/25/17

WTF – The Empire Strikes Back, Again!

According to a new posting by Common Dreams, 2 tech billionaires have launched an initiative appropriately titled Win the Future (WTF). Apparently Mark Pincus, Reid Hoffman and their corporate elite friends think that the problem with the Democrats is that they are moving away from a “pro-business”, pro-economy” stance and have been pushed too far left.

Wow! History does repeat – the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Is this the new iteration of the Democratic Leadership Council? Are we witnessing an attempt at a corporate coup or, in business parlance, a hostile takeover - well really not that hostile?  Do Pincus and Hoffman intend to patent the “Democratic” brand and sell it. They could call it Republican-lite.

WTF – they got that part right.

Politics and the Upper Middle Class

Interesting review of Richard Reeves' new book in The Nation. Reeves makes an important point that not all inequality is the result of the 1% hogging all the benefits from economic growth. He demonstrates that the upper middle class has also benefited to a great extent. The significance is that this class has a great deal of power, political economic and social, and uses that power to preserve its privileges. Think protecting zoning laws and neighborhood schools; think tax benefits for educational savings accounts; think support for "balanced budgets" to preclude tax increases.

Reeves analysis is worth considering when formulating responses to inequality. The upper middle class is a major force behind the neoliberal "solutions" to inequality, arguing (as unfortunately Reeves himself seems to do) that making competition "fairer" by providing a few rungs to the ladder of success is all we need to do. But doesn't competition always lead to winners and losers? Changing the class, race and/or gender of the winners does nothing to overcome the basic inequality of a system that reserves almost all of its rewards for the few winners.

Yes, competition may drive growth, but growth itself should NOT be the goal of economic activity. Should our society serve the economy, or should our economy serve society? And how can we change the narrative from a liberal (or neoliberal) perspective to a progressive one?

We Are the 99 Percent—Except for the Top 20 Percent of Us

In a new book, Richard V. Reeves argues that members of the upper middle class, not just the ultra-wealthy, are making our society profoundly unequal.

THENATION.COM