WFAA: “Winter storm impacts: Texas leaders demand answers from power regulators as millions remain without”

The Republican Party does not believe in government. Perhaps that is one reason its leader recently tried to kill the government on Capitol Hill. The GOP is about coddling the very rich. The poor babies don’t like being regulated, being made to spend money on the welfare of the people, or being taxed. Who will will take these burdens off the snowflake business classes? Never fear, the GOP is here.

The Republican Party is the victim of magical thinking that the market can solve all problems if only it is unleashed and freed of the shackles of government.

These precepts are ugly, producing an ever ratcheting economic inequality in which much of the country’s wealth is in the talons of a handful of billionaires while millions live in poverty and food insecurity and even many workers are part of the growing class of working poor. Class and race overlap– keeping the billionaires happy at the expense of the rest of us mostly means keeping elderly privileged whites happy. Look at the Forbes 500 some time.

These precepts are also grounded in falsehoods. No, most poor people aren’t poor because they are lazy. No, most millionaires aren’t self-made. And most of all, there are lots of problems that the market does not solve very well, where it would be good to have the government take the situation in hand.

One reason the initial vaccine rollout last December and early January by the Trump administration was such a bust was that Trump would not deploy the resources of the federal government. His officials just shipped the vaccine off to state and local institutions that had no capacity, not even enough trained people, to deliver the doses into arms. President Biden, in contrast, is mobilizing the military and national guard to give the shots. Someone is finally in charge, and willing to deploy government rather than degrading and belittling it.

The electric grid is a piece of key infrastructure that should be nationalized. You will say, gasp, socialism. Meh. Social security is socialism. State universities are socialism, and would be better and less corrupt and would serve the public better if only they were more socialistic. The post office is socialism, and is currently being destroyed by postmaster general Louis DeJoy so as to replace it with more expensive and less efficient private delivery companies.

Would it not be better to have a larger public sector and electricity during ice storms than capitalism and 4 million people without power?

The state’s privately owned power plants have not been weatherized to deal with severe winter storms. The equipment at the electricity plants itself froze and stopped working.

Because the private companies that own the plants did not want to spend the money to weatherize them. Indeed, the deregulation of the electricity grid may have encouraged companies not to weatherize. This, even though severe winter storms hit the Southwest roughly once every 8-10 years. They are not rare.

Officials of the Texas Republican Party were aware of this problem and did nothing. The companies were aware and did nothing. The market does not like investing money to forestall a disaster that may be 8 years away. The market is not nice. Like Rihanna, the market’s lyrics say that B* better have my money” now.

Rather than blame blind worship of the market for the problem, the Republican right actually trotted out the old lie that wind turbines fail in bad weather.

Chris Hayes Debunks GOP, Right-Wing Media Lies About Texas Power Outages | All In | MSNBC

Even Bloomberg, which is itself owned by a billionaire, admitted forthrightly that coal, natural gas and nuclear plants failed at a far greater rate than did wind farms, and that the latter are a tiny part of the problem. (Some did freeze up.)

No surprise here. This is the party that does not believe in science, does not believe in the human-caused climate emergency, and many members of which believe that Hillary Clinton eats children at a Washington, D.C., pizzeria. Trump even peddled the lies that wind turbines cause cancer and the climate emergency is a Chinese hoax and 70 million marks voted for him anyway. Apparently Republicans are so gullible that they will believe almost anything, as long as believing it helps the greediest and least reputable section of our plutocracy.

——

Bonus Video:

Beto: ‘We Are Nearing A Failed State In Texas’ Thanks To GOP Leadership | All In | MSNBC

The word “socialism” has become a trigger word in U.S. politics, with both positive and negative perceptions of it split along party lines.

But what does socialism actually mean to Americans? Although surveys can ask individuals for responses to questions, they don’t reveal what people are saying when they talk among themselves.

As a social media scholar, I study conversations “in the wild” in order to find out what people are actually saying to one another. The method I developed is called netnography and it treats online posts as discourse – a continuing dialogue between real people – rather than as quantifiable data.

As part of an ongoing study on technology and utopia, I read through more than 14,000 social media comments posted on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and YouTube in 2018 and 2019. They came from 9,155 uniquely named posters.

What I found was both shocking and heartening.

Loyalty and fear

Both support for socialism and attacks on it appear to be on the rise.

Socialism can mean different things to people. Some see it as a system that institutionalizes fairness and citizen rights, bringing higher levels of social solidarity; others focus on heavy-handed government control of free markets that work more effectively when left alone. U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, emphasized the right to quality health care, education, a good job with a living wage, affordable housing and a clean environment in a 2019 speech.

A 2019 Gallup Poll found that 39% of Americans have a favorable opinion of socialism – up from about 20% in 2010; 57% view it negatively.

Prominent elected “democratic socialist” officials include six Chicago City Council members, U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders.

These and other advocates point to a version of socialism called the “Nordic model,” seen in countries like Denmark, which provide high-quality social services such as health care and education while fostering a strong economy.

Critics call socialism anti-American and charge that it undermines free enterprise and leads to disaster, often using the unrealistically extreme example of Venezuela.

President Trump has portrayed socialists as radical, lazy, America-hating communists. His son, Donald Trump Jr., has posted tweets ridiculing socialism.

During the 2020 election season, Republican Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell advised that his party could win by being a firewall against socialism. He was on point: Fear of socialism may have been a reason why the Republicans gained seats in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2020.

A ‘tug of words’

Although I wasn’t initially looking for posts on socialism or capitalism, I found plenty of them in my online investigation. Many were what I call a “tug of words” in which people asserted which system was better. People from opposite ends of the political spectrum made pithy observations, posted one-liners or launched strong, emotionally worded broadsides. There was often little dialogue – those who posted were shouting at each other as if using a megaphone.

I also found a large number of short, nonconversational, megaphone-like posts on visual social media like Instagram and Pinterest.

But some people were more circumspect. While they were often reactive or one-sided, they raised questions. For example, people questioned whether business bailouts, grants, lobbying or special tax treatment showed that capitalism’s “free markets” weren’t actually all that free.

And some considered what “socialism” actually means to people, linking that meaning to race, nationality and class.

Overcoming primitive ‘isms’

Amid all the sound and fury of people shouting from their virtual soapboxes, there were also the calmer voices of those engaging in deeper discussions. These people debated socialism, capitalism and free markets in relation to health care, child care, minimum wage and other issues that affected their lives.

One YouTube discussion explored the notion that we should stop viewing everything “through the primitive lens of the nonsensical ‘isms’ – capitalism, socialism, communism – which have no relevance in a sustainable or socially just and peaceful world.”

Other discussions united both left and right by asserting that the real problem was corruption in the system, not the system itself. Some used social media to try to overcome the ideological blinders of partisan politics. For example, they argued that raising the minimum wage or improving education might be sensible management strategies that could help the economy and working Americans at the same time.

New forum for discussions

As America’s post-election divisions fester, my work gives me reason for hope. It shows that some Americans – still a small minority, mind you – are thoughtfully using popular social media platforms to have meaningful discussions. What I have provided here is just a small sample of the many thoughtful conversations I encountered.

My analysis of social media doesn’t deny that many people are angry and polarized over social systems. But it has revealed that a significant number of people recognize that labels like socialism, free markets and capitalism have become emotional triggers, used by some journalists and politicians to manipulate, incite and divide.

To unify and move forward together, we may need to better understand the sites and discussion formats that facilitate this kind of thoughtful discourse. If partisans retreat to echo chamber platforms like Parler and Rumble, will these kinds of intelligent conversations between people with diverse viewpoints cease?

As Americans confront the financial challenges of a pandemic, automation, precarious employment and globalization, providing forums where we can discuss divergent ideas in an open-minded rather than an ideological way may make a critical difference to the solutions we choose. Many Americans are already using digital platforms to discuss options, rather than being frightened away by – or attacking – the tired old socialist bogeyman.

Robert Kozinets, Jayne and Hans Hufschmid Chair in Strategic Public Relations and Business Communication, USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Illustration: ‘Tug-of-words’ posts debating the merits of socialism versus capitalism are all over social media platforms.
pxfuel

Not all CEOs, of course. Flacks for Corporate America would be overjoyed if we kept our focus on top execs like the Texas Roadhouse restaurant chain’s Kent Taylor, a big-hearted boss with a gushing profile in the latest People magazine. Taylor has outfitted workers at his 600 outlets with a full complement of protective gear, avoided pay cuts and layoffs, and donated his annual pay and $5 million of his personal fortune to helping employees with their rent, mortgages, and more.

But you won’t find many Kent Taylors out across the corporate landscape. Much more typical have been execs like Kenneth Martindale, the CEO at GNC, the vitamin and nutrition store chain. GNC filed for bankruptcy June 23. Five days earlier, the company generously handed Martindale a $2.2-million cash bonus. Nearly $2 million more in cash bonuses went to other top GNC execs.

Not a bad haul for an executive team that had been borrowing big bucks to buy back GNC shares of stock on the open market, a maneuver designed to shore up sagging share prices — and pump up the value of the executives’ own stock-based compensation.

This spring, with the pandemic crashing store sales, GNC suddenly found itself unable to pay off the loans that bankrolled the share buybacks. Bankruptcy became unavoidable. The company’s execs now plan to wipe out jobs at 1,200 of its U.S. stores as they search for a new buyer of the mess they’ve created.

The GNC story is repeating all over. Workers in companies tottering on the brink of bankruptcy see pink slips and pension cuts in their future. CEOs at these same firms see a shot at making lots of high-pay hay while the sun still shines.

“Corporate boards are handing out millions to top executives before their companies seek bankruptcy protection,” sums up a New York Times analysis, “and courts can’t do much about it.”

The pre-bankruptcy bonuses involve some of America’s most familiar corporate brands. J.C. Penny’s chief exec, for instance, pocketed $4.5 million in bonus just before the company entered bankruptcy proceedings that are going to leave at least 154 stores shut down.

Top execs at companies not knocking on bankruptcy’s door are playing self-aggrandizing games of a different sort. Their challenge: grabbing the lavish “performance-based” rewards they’ve negotiated into their executive pay deals at a time when a down economy has the vast majority of corporate enterprises struggling to meet their sales and profit targets.

Most executive pay deals at major corporations reward executives with shares of stock — or options to buy stock at a below-market price — if the execs meet various “performance” benchmarks. In a growing economy, with sales and share prices swelling, execs have little problem meeting these performance benchmarks. Their resulting rewards can often swell into the tens of millions.

But these same benchmarks become unreachable when economies turn sour. Executives suddenly see their promised windfalls seeming certain to evaporate — unless the execs can get their corporate boards to exercise a little “discretion,” the corporate codeword for dumbing down performance goals so execs can reap the windfalls they expected and still feel they fully deserve.

Analysts at Willis Towers Watson, a management consulting firm, have recently released a guidance on the “implications of adjusting plan targets.” Corporate decision makers, the guidance warns, need to understand that “mid-course changes will tend to bring added scrutiny from investors, proxy advisors and the press, not all of it favorable.”

But Willis Towers Watson has found — via a “flash survey” of nearly 700 companies — that a number of firms are considering “using discretion” anyway. Reporters at Reuters have identified at least 81 companies now in that category, a list includes corporate giants like Delta air lines, Hilton, and Uber.

A Delta filing, Reuters notes, claims that its performance measures no longer suit the “current reality.” The value of executive incentive pay, Delta insists, has declined by over half since the pandemic hit.

In Corporate America today, can’t have that. “Discretion” to the rescue!

This “discretion” works — for top execs. At Sonic Automotive, a national chain of auto dealerships, a pay deal with CEO David Smith guaranteed him grants of company stock if the company met a set of specific performance targets. Those targets became unreachable after the pandemic pummeled car sales and cost about a third of the company’s workers either lost their jobs or work hours.

CEO Smith lost nothing. Sonic’s board replaced his performance-based stock awards with options to buy Sonic shares at the company’s depressed share price. Those options now have a value of $5.2 million, over four times the value of the performance-based rewards Smith grabbed last year.

Many CEOs have pay deals that do not permit discretionary moves to make “mid-course” pay incentive changes. For worried CEOs, not a problem. Companies can simply put in place new “incentives” that enable execs to recoup whatever windfalls they may have lost when they failed to reach the original incentives. In other words: Heads CEOs win, tails they don’t lose.

All this avaricious corporate boardroom behavior most certainly merits our disgust and condemnation. But does executive pay excess, amid everything else going on right now, also merit our attention?

We have, after all, seldom entered into a summer in such a tumultuous state. We have Covid-19 cases rising. We have the worst jobless rates since the 1930s. We have police brutality finally outraging the nation into a real reckoning on racial oppression.

Not to mention a presidential election that could end in chaos.

So why should we bother paying much attention to still more corporate executive greed?

We really have no choice. We can’t afford to see CEO compensation as merely a distraction from more pressing concerns. CEO pay excess — the continuing corporate executive chase after grand fortune — is fueling the calamities that confront us.

The decades of corporate outsourcing and downsizing that have hollowed out the American middle class — and created an angry constituency for racist demagogues like Donald Trump to exploit — didn’t just happen. Corporate execs plotted that outsourcing and downsizing. They profited royally from it.

The personal fortunes these execs have pocketed have corrupted our politics and turned our legislatures into dysfunctional chambers that can seldom accomplish anything that doesn’t involve enhancing the financial well-being of already wealthy people.

Wealthy execs, in their haste to become ever wealthier, are even privileging their own financial futures over our health. The factories and plants they run are forcing workers to labor without adequate protections or social distancing. The pharmaceutical firms they manage are refusing to share research clues on possible coronavirus cures for fear of losing out on incredibly lucrative patents for vaccines and treatments.

And none of this should surprise us. The outrageous rewards baked into our current executive pay systems give execs an incentive to behave outrageously. The more they exploit, the more they can pocket. We need to thrust upon Corporate America a new pay incentive structure.

One step in that direction would be quick action on legislation that leading House and Senate progressives introduced this past fall. The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act — introduced by representatives Barbara Lee and Rashida Tlaib and senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren — would raise the corporate tax rate on corporations that pay their top over 50 times what they pay their workers.

In 2018, 50 major U.S. corporations paid their top execs over 1,000 times what they paid their most typical workers.

We could do bolder still. We could deny government contracts and subsidies to corporations with wide gaps between executive and worker pay. Our tax dollars should not subsidize — in any way — the exploitation of working people.

Or as an excellent New York Times analysis has just put it: “For the voices of workers to be heard, the influence of the wealthy must be curbed.”

Via Inequality.org

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Robert Reich: “Robert Reich: The 5-Step CEO Pay Scam”

Getting in an early shot is Stephen Moore, long time Cato Institute spokesperson, who said,

“We don’t need another spending bill for sure… We are in the recovery stage and we’re no longer in the contraction stage,” Moore said, touting the BLS report. “The most important thing now is to get rid of the extra unemployment benefits.”

Obviously Moore wants to lock any aid package, but I think it is not gong too far on a speculative limb to suggest that the he would accept another smaller package without the damned extra benefits. That provision along with regular unemployment benefits gave workers a living wage. G

Conservatives complained that this provision created an incentive to skip work and collect the benefit, True enough, but there is another easy answer to this dilemma. Pay your workers a genuine living wage. The productivity of the American workforce has increased steadily since the early seventies but wages in real terms have been stagnant Bosses can afford more, especially when we recognize that higher wages also translated into more demand for goods and services

, These are possibilities Republicans and many centrist Democrats would prefer to hide. Even more dangerous is consideration of what the workplace would be like if the cost of leaving your job were minimal. Such a context could be fostered by a guaranteed annual income or a guaranteed living wage job. There are important differences between these, but both would provide workers significantly more leverage in the workplace. Potentially this leverage could extend to a role in setting wages and salaries, long term capital investment, and design of the workplace Such reorganization is not some pie in the sky fantasy. Corporations embodying these principles have been quite successful in international markets.

Elsie Gould of the Economic Policy Institute comes to different conclusions from the recent data. She writes, “Of particular concern are the public sector job losses. Employment continued to decline in government employment; local government education accounted for most of the decrease, with a loss of 310,000 jobs. Over the last three months, state and local government jobs have declined by 1.6 million, nearly half of them (759,000) in local government education (public K-12). These losses in public K-12 education are large, even when public schools were still in session, albeit from home, during the reference period. Further, it’s important to remember that public sector austerity in the recovery from the great recession meant that public school employment never regained its 2008 levels. Without sufficient relief to state and local governments, more cuts will come.”

Gould’s concerns about long term losses in K-12 education are well taken, especially when we acknowledge the politics surrounding state and local budgets and the future of public education. The former is in the grips of a near religious faith in austerity. State governments are falsely blamed for soaring government deficits brought on by the Covid crisis. Then governments required to balance their budgets cut expenditures, further exacerbating the economic decline. Part of that process is downsizing and degrading public education by the Right’s voucher agenda and broad attack on teachers, the one segment of the labor market with a substantial union presence

One significant aspect of an expanding economy is the way minorities on the bottom are disproportionately elevated even as everyone’s circumstances improve. During previous recoveries there remains a gap between the white and black unemployment rates, but as the economy grows that gap shrinks. . How much it shrinks may depend in part on continued enforcement of anti- discrimination laws. These laws might be less susceptible to the politics of backlash if they are part of broad corporate governance reforms that go beyond evening the playing field for the competition for the few good jobs

. This broad based agenda reflects and helps effect construction of a working class across racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation boundaries. I suspect such a formation is what corporate America most fears.

—–

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

CNBC: “Whats Next For The U.S. Economy: Joseph Stiglitz”

As the devastating impact of Trump’s inaction becomes clear, Americans are discovering a hidden socialist streak.

( Otherwords.org) – Amazingly, America has become a nation of socialists, asking in dismay: “Where’s the government?”

These are not born-again Bernie Sanders activists, but people of all political stripes (including previously apolitical multitudes) who are now clamoring for big government intervention in their lives.

Nothing like a spreading coronavirus pandemic to bring home the need that all of us have — both as individuals and as a society — for an adequately funded, fully functioning, competent government capable of serving all.

Instead, in our moment of critical national need, Trump’s government is a rickety medicine show run by a small-minded flimflammer peddling laissez-fairyland snake oil.

“We have it totally under control,” Trump pompously declared after the first U.S. case was confirmed in January. For weeks, as the pandemic spread out of control, he did nothing. Meanwhile an increasingly anxious public found that they couldn’t even get reliable test kits from Trump’s hollowed-out government health agencies.

Still, he shrugged off all concern and responsibility: “By April, you know, in theory,” he said, “when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” Not exactly a can-do Rooseveltian response to a national crisis!

By March the inconvenient fact of a rising death toll exposed this imposter of a president as incompetent, uncaring… and silly.

That complete absence of White House leadership is why a deadly pathogen is now raging practically everywhere across our land, unknown millions of us are being infected, a “closed indefinitely” sign has literally been hung on the American economy, and even our people’s social and civic interactions — the essence of community life — have been halted.

Right-wing politico Grover Norquist once said he wanted a government so small “I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” Trump has shown us what such a small-minded government looks like. And what it costs us.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Otherwords.org

——

Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

E-Mails Show Trump Squandered Crucial Time To Address Coronavirus: NYT | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC

The fact is, the novel coronavirus has a well-known left-wing bias.

Given the hoaxes perpetrated on the American people by the Right wing for the past few decades, from the laughable Laffer curve (purporting to show that massive tax cuts on the super-wealthy pay for themeselves in increased GDP– bzzt, false), to the myth of the “welfare queen” (as though the poor are living it up), to “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, to the Fox “coronavirus is a hoax,” to the tens of thousands of lies told by Donald J. Trump — Colbert is entirely correct.

The bias of the coronavirus toward the Left is driving the Right wing up the wall, and provoking a new Cold War between the American States.

The Right wing media spent January and February and the first part of March pooh-poohing the novel coronavirus, calling it a hoax, predicting it was a flash in the pan. This is not because most of them are stupid, though a few seem to be galactically dense. It is because it seemed to be in the interest of the corporations that people not be alarmed into abandoning their habits as good little consumers. They peddled a fatal illusion, that if we did nothing, the menace would go away. Ironically, if the Republican-controlled US government had gone immediately to large scale testing in January like South Korea, our present dire straits would have been avoided. It is as though FDR had pretended for two months after Pearl Harbor that there had just been a minor misunderstanding in Hawaii but that the Japanese Empire posed no threat at all and could be safely ignored.

It is notable that while most states closed schools, it is mostly states with Democratic governors that have more effective shelter-in-place decrees. Republican-ruled states may issue cautions, but de facto they are letting people freely circulate, which is to say, they are letting the coronavirus grow exponentially. The Republican party is behaving this way on behalf of the rich and of business, because they believe that social distancing will harm their class interests and because they have made a calculation that your grandmother is expendable.

Americans did this experiment in 1918 during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Famously, St. Louis shut down with the onset of the virus, but Philadelphia insisted on holding its victory parade for WW I. The population of St. Louis experienced far fewer deaths per capita than did Philly.

A graph is worth showing again. Difference in mortality rates in 1918 Spanish Flu in Philadelphia, which went ahead with a public parade, versus St Louis, which cancelled all public gatherings.

I echo my many colleagues who have said “Let’s not be Philadelphia”. pic.twitter.com/I4SDuoOYCA

— Jenny Proimos (@jproimos) March 12, 2020

The Right wing in US politics is not half of the population, or even a third of the population. Its exponents represent the one percent, some 3 million Americans out of 331 million. In some ways they represent only the 0.1 percent. Charles Koch of Koch Industries, who is personally worth $38 billion, is one of the people the US Right supports. He lobbied to cut the budget of the Centers for Disease Control. They want less government regulation (so they can pollute the environment and inflict ailments on us without any restraint). They want government subsidies for planet-wrecking fossil fuels, because they own oil and gas fields and don’t want to forego the trillions of dollars in profits they could earn if only that pesky climate crisis remains unknown or not taken seriously for a few more decades. Hence they use their billions to spread around denialism.

The message of the Right wing is that government can’t do anything right, but that the magical markets and the private sector are close to infallible. How exactly they explain inefficient corporations like Enron or the 2008 Crash is not clear. Mainly, they don’t talk about them. I once went back and read some newspapers from the 1930s. Republican politicians were trying to peddle that crap about the free market being able to fix all the problems right in the middle of the Great Depression. Keynes proved that the only way to get out of a Depression is for the government to spend money, even money it does not have. Once the Depression ended, the Right went to work attempting to rewrite it as a failure of government and to undermine Keynesianism. It isn’t a complex issue. The billionaires don’t like paying taxes, and certainly not to support what they view as the little people. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal created programs like social security and Medicare that give the impression to people that the government does good things for them. The Right wing has been fulminating against them ever since.

The coronavirus (and after it subsides, the climate crisis) is deadly to the Right wing talking points.

We obviously need a vigorous and fairly large government to deal with these big crises. We obviously need to stop tying health insurance to employment and go to medicare-for-all. Because at a time when they most urgently need health insurance, 3 million Americans just lost their jobs in the past week. In states where Republican governors gutted Obamacare, those 3 million are just up the creek if they get sick and need an intensive care unit.

Medicare for all is hated by some of the billionaires because it involves taxing them, and because it interferes in making a profit off people’s sickness, and because it gives the people the impression that they need government and that it can benefit them.

The kind of mass coordination that both the pandemic and the climate emergency require is impossible for the private sector to pull off. This is a job for both the state and federal governments.

We even need international collaboration among the planet’s governments, a true nightmare of the US Right wing.

The Right wing used to make fun of socialism, saying that it was the fear that somewhere, someone was getting rich.

But these planetary crises have turned the tables on this glib bon mot. It now seems clear that capitalism is the fear that somewhere someone is having their basic human needs met.

The nadir of US barracuda capitalism came the day before yesterday when four Republican senators tried to deep-six the government aid program for people and businesses harmed by the coronavirus on the grounds that the bill might allow a few of the laid-off plebs to get more money from the government than they would have earned in their dead-end jobs.

Bernie Sanders, who despite his age is the wave of the future, let them have it. His impassioned speech won’t be the epitaph of the big business- little government crowd, but if they had a modicum of shame and basic human decency, it would be.

——-

Bonus Video:

Guardian: “Bernie Sanders mocks Republicans over coronavirus aid: ‘The universe is collapsing'”

Bernie Sanders has emerged as the Democratic front-runner in the race for the presidential nomination.

Yet even some left-leaning pundits and publications are concerned about what they see as Sanders’ potential lack of electability.

Sanders is a Democratic Socialist. And the label “socialist” is a political liability in American culture. According to a Gallup poll released on Feb. 11, 2020, only 45% of Americans would vote for a socialist.

I am a scholar of American culture with an interest in the relationship between political ideologies and popular culture. In my research, I have found that this antipathy toward socialism may not be an accident: American identity today is strongly tied to an image of capitalism crafted and advertised by the Ad Council and American corporate interests over decades, often with the support of the U.S. government.

Business and government solidarity

In 1942, a group of advertising and industry executives created the War Advertising Council, to promote the war effort. The government compensated the companies that created or donated ads by allowing them to deduct some of their costs from their taxable incomes.

Renamed the Ad Council in 1943, the organization applied the same wartime persuasive techniques of advertising and psychological manipulation during the Cold War years, the post-war period when the geopolitical rivalry between the U.S., the USSR and their respective allies raged. One of their goals: promoting the virtues of capitalism and free enterprise in America while simultaneously demonizing the alternative – socialism – which was often conflated with communism.

Government propaganda at home portrayed the communist USSR as godless, tyrannical and antithetical to individual freedoms. As a counterpoint, America became everything the Soviet Union was not.

This link between capitalism and American national identity was advertised through a sophisticated, corporate effort as efficient and ubiquitous as state-driven propaganda behind the Iron Curtain.

The campaigns used the ideological divisions of the Cold War to emphasize the relevance of their message. In a 1948 report, the Ad Council explained its goal to the public: “The world today is engaged in a colossal struggle to determine whether freedom or statism will dominate.”

Extolling capitalism’s virtues

The campaigns started as a public-private partnership. At the end of World War II, the government worried about the spread of communism at home. Business interests worried about government regulations and about the rising popularity of unions. The Cold War provided both parties with a shared enemy.

In 1947, President Truman asked the Ad Council to organize the Freedom Train Campaign, focusing on the history of America’s political freedoms. Paramount Pictures, U.S. Steel, DuPont, General Electric and Standard Oil provided financial support. For two years the train crisscrossed the nation, carrying original documents that included the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.

The following year, the Ad Council launched a business-led campaign, called “The Miracle of America,” intended to foster support for the American model of capitalism, as distinct from its Western European version, which was more friendly to government intervention. It urged increased productivity by U.S. workers, linked economic and political freedom and, paradoxically, asserted capitalism’s collaborative nature.

“Sure, America is going ahead if we all pull together,” read a brochure. Another flyer, “Comes the Revolution!,” cast its support of American capitalism in the language of global struggle: “If we continue to make that system work…then other nations will follow us. If we don’t, then they’ll probably go communist or fascist.”

In its first two years, the Miracle of America message reached American audiences via 250 radio and television stations and 7,000 outdoor billboards. Newspapers printed 13 million lines of free advertising. The Ad Council boasted that the campaign made over 1 billion “radio listener impressions.”

American factory workers received about half of the 1.84 million copies of the free pamphlet “The Miracle of America.” One-quarter were distributed free of charge to schools, and 76 universities ordered the booklet.

This pro-business propaganda, expressed in the language of Cold War patriotism, had reached roughly 70% of the American population by the end of the campaign.

Cartoon capitalism

The efforts produced more than just print and billboard messages.

In 1946, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, founded by the former head of General Motors, paid the evangelical Harding College to produce “Fun and Facts about American Business,” a series of educational cartoon videos about capitalism, produced by a former Disney employee.

Between 1949 and 1952, Metro Goldwyn Mayer distributed them in theaters, schools, colleges, churches and workplaces.

The films promoted the same messages as the Ad Council campaigns, although they were not part of the project. They continued a decade-long effort by the Sloan Foundation to start, in the words of its executive director, “a bombardment of the American mind with elementary economic principles through partnering with educational institutions.”

To both Sloan and the movement’s backers, business interests were synonymous with the national interest. The free-enterprise system was a shorthand for freedom, democracy and patriotism. Unlike in Europe, the videos suggested, class struggle – of the kind that required unions – did not exist in the U.S.

In the cartoon “Meet the King,” Joe, the archetypal American worker, realizes he is not an exploited proletarian. Instead, he’s a king, “because he can buy more with his wages than any other worker on the globe.”

Conversely, government regulations of, or interventions in, the economy were described in the cartoons as socialist tendencies, bound to lead to communism and tyranny.

“Make Mine Freedom,” and “It’s Everybody’s Business” presented the state as a perpetual threat. A money-sucking tax monster, the government reduces everyone’s profits, crushes private enterprise and takes away individual freedoms: “No more private property, no more you.”

According to an estimate from Fortune magazine, by 1952, American businesses spent US$100 million each year, independent from any Ad Council campaigns, promoting free enterprise.

‘Peanuts’ pushes freedom

In the early 1970s, business responded to rising negativity about corporate power with a new campaign coordinated by the Ad Council.

“The American Economic System … and Your Part in It” was launched alongside the bicentennial national celebrations. It was the largest centralized pro-business public relations project thus far, but only one of many independently run by corporations.

The media industry donated $40 million in free space and air time in the first year of the campaign. The Department of Commerce and the Department of Labor contributed about half a million dollars toward the production costs for a 20-page booklet.

That booklet used data provided by the departments of Commerce and Labor and Charles Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’ comic strips to explain the benefits of America’s economic system. The system was again presented as a foundational freedom protected by a Constitution whose goal was to “maintain a climate in which people could work, invest, and prosper.”

By 1979, 13 million copies had been distributed to schools, universities, libraries, civic organizations and workplaces.

Echoes now?

For four decades, the Cold War provided a simple good-vs.-evil axis that consolidated the association between freedom, American-ness and free-enterprise capitalism.

The business community, independently and through the Ad Council, funded massive top-down economic education programs which shaped American perceptions of business and government and of capitalism and socialism.

The Cold War ended 30 years ago, but its cultural structures and divisions endure – perhaps, even, in the responses of some Americans to Bernie Sanders’ socialism.

Editor’s note: The Conversation has received grant funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy, Associate Teaching Professor of American Studies, Miami University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lloyd Blankfein on April 27, 2010 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
Embed from Getty Images

Democrats of course care more about Blankfein’s money than his vote. That money derives in large part from the financialized capitalism that Blankfein and the Democratic Party helped to build. Following the capitalist crises of the seventies and the Reagan era attack on worker purchasing power, investment opportunities for new plant and equipment were becoming more scarce. Rather than make modest sums through commercial lending to businesses large investment banks earned vast sums via underwriting highly leveraged merger and acquisition strategies. They continued to loan to home buyers, but the largest source of profits came from combining loans into complex securities and selling them. Profits went up and risk —- at least to the issuing bank -— was reduced.

American capitalism was fundamentally transformed to a debt dependent society. General Motors became s finance company that made cars as a sideline. Scholarly models that assumed risk could be precisely quantified and allocated helped fuel a rush to make more loans. Deregulation of financial markets, also promoted by centrist Democrats, further greased these changes. The excesses and outright fraud these policies engendered eventually produced collapse. Nonetheless reforms to the system remain only partial and financial engineering, in the form of corporate stock buybacks, continue. In the process finance came to grow from 10 to 20 percent of total corporate profit.

Blankfein later maintained that he was doing God’s work. Today he says the American character is subverted by a wealth tax. Was the commitment to WW II lessened by a top marginal tax rate, 94% or more than double the top income tax bracket today? And will it destroy our economy? Off course Blankfein is playing the favorite game of Capital Strike -— businesses refusing to invest and thus tanking the economy. It like the bully boy angered at how the game is going. Whether Bully Blankfein taking his ball and going back home destroys the game will depend on how citizens respond. As during WWII our government could issue bonds to stimulate spending on a whole range of green technologies,, products, and public goods such as parks, transit systems, public health clinics that express and strengthen our commitment to our democratic community.

Blankfein may be able to take some cash with him. How much will depend on enforcement procedures. He cannot take our factories, workers, and skills. If anything we must guard against too cautious a reaction as was the case with Obama’s response to the Great Recession.

Blankfein maintains he is just an ordinary guy. He need not spend much time even at the bottom of the economic poll to get a stark contrast to his current life. Perhaps heshould spend some time with “one of the 43% of American households can’t afford a budget that includes housing, food, childcare, healthcare, transportation, and a cellphone.”(A United Way Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed study)

Blankfein is estimated to have 1.3 billion in wealth. If invested conservatively it would yield an annual income of more than 50 million. Employing a back of the envelope calculation, I estimate the Sanders wealth tax would extract about this amount. On a percentage basis it would take a larger bite from those of astronomical wealth. But even after many years of this tax none would be left with less than many hundreds of millions of dollars. The tax is not an attack on extravagant life styles. There will still be a market for the five million dollar yachts serviced on the island where I live. And Mitt Romney will still have more houses than he can remember.

What this tax does do is begin to significantly redress the imbalances in political power as evidenced in the presence of multi billionaires on the Presidential debate stage. Most of these fortunes were based on fraud, corruption, and.or monopoly power. This is certainly true in Blankfein’s case, as Sanders has noted: “Lloyd Blankfein became a billionaire after his investment bank received an $824 billion taxpayer bailout from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department, paid over $5.5 billion in fines for mortgage fraud, avoided paying any federal income taxes in 2008, and lectured Congress to cut Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” Fortunes like Blankfein’s are a continuing threat to democracy as further demonstrated by his willingness to support an aspirational fascist. Fortunately democracy is beginning to fight back.

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

TYT Nation: “Billionaire Lloyd Blankfein Gives Bernie Sanders Another Non-Endorsement Endorsement”

A new University of Pennsylvania study reported by The Washington Post in December 2019 shows that opioid overdoses spiked in communities where automobile factories have closed. According to Atheendar Venkataramani, the study’s lead author and a professor in the university’s Perelman School of Medicine, economic instability can affect people’s mental well-being and drive up the risk of substance abuse.

“Our findings confirm the general intuition that declining economic opportunity may have played a significant role in driving the opioid crisis,” Venkataramani wrote.

The new finding raises a severe challenge. Our hearts may go out to the individuals and families caught in this tragedy. But how can we deal with a public health crisis rooted in modern economics? Aren’t factory shut-downs the result of globalization and accelerating technological change? What can we do about that?

Denmark, Norway, and Sweden have highly successful economic policies that reduce addiction and suicide.

I found good news in researching some small countries that are even more at the mercy of global market forces than we are: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. These countries have highly successful economic policies that reduce addiction and suicide. Although it’s hard to believe considering that the Nordics live through long, dark winters, they even top the charts as “the world’s happiest peoples.” How do they do this?

A century ago they were in such economic trouble that they hemorrhaged their own people, with Scandinavians fleeing to Canada and the U.S. Those who remained decided to innovate, big time. They tried what today’s entrepreneurs might call “creative destruction,” reorganizing their economies to put the people first. Outsiders looking at the Scandinavian innovations as “lab experiments” might find ideas we can use.

Denmark, Sweden and Norway chose in the 1920s and ’30s to invent an alternative economic model that put the well-being of the people first, instead of the well-being of capital; economists call it “the Nordic model.”

The idea was that if a country’s working families were backed by assured health care, free education, good affordable housing and childcare, healthy environments, time for leisure, and job security, they would be productive workers. The money to pay for this investment would come from those with far more money than they needed.

The result was shared prosperity.

On many economic indicators, Nordic social democracies out-performed the countries that adhered to a free-market capitalist approach. Far from the stereotype of becoming “nanny states,” the Nordics have had higher participation in the labor force than the U.S. and higher labor productivity; Norway even has more start-up companies per capita than the U.S.

If an economy isn’t working well, change it!

This experiment worked to produce a lot of “get-up-and-go” workers who, with high rates of unionization and abundant support for technical education, became the “goose that laid the golden egg.”

I interviewed one Norwegian CEO who told me how pleased he is with the system: “I can count on my workers to come through when I promise to meet deadlines, because we’re a team and they’re well-treated and know what they’re doing.” An Inc. Magazine reporter asked a Norwegian CEO who pays about half his yearly income in taxes what he thought about that. “The tax system is good—it’s fair,” he said. “What we’re doing when we are paying taxes is buying a product. So the question isn’t how much you pay for the product; it’s the quality of the product.”

The principle of job security was bedrock. Free vocational training and higher education upgraded the skills of the labor force and supported workers who wanted to move to new jobs. Families had something to count on and could plan their futures. The broken dreams and grim prospects of workers in the U.S. Rust Belt didn’t show up in Scandinavia.

However, by the 1980s the world was changing for Scandinavia, too. Technological development and globalization accelerated. Goods made elsewhere became cheaper than the Scandinavians could make them. Nordic governments found themselves subsidizing local industries in order to prevent factory shutdowns. Yes, they were prioritizing workers ahead of capital, as the model promised, but at an increasing cost to the nation as a whole.

Denmark was the first country to try something different. Borrowing from a Dutch idea and making it more robust, in the 1990s the Danes adopted “flexicurity.” The government would no longer subsidize a factory to keep it open. The factory owners would be free to take their capital and do something else with it. The Danes’ new deal was that if a factory closed, direct support for workers would come from the government.

Flexicurity meant job training for other jobs, a high level of wage maintenance while workers were training and looking for their new jobs, and relocation support if they needed to move. In other words, even for 50-year-olds, job loss did not mean permanent unemployment for the rest of the workers’ lives. For many workers, it meant a fresh start.

It reminds me of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s thinking in the 1930s with his New Deal: If an economy isn’t working well, change it!

Once Denmark adopted flexicurity, Sweden and Norway followed. In 2007 the Council of the European Union took a hard look at results and recommended flexicurity for all the EU member countries.

Although the Green New Deal as it was proposed in 2019 was seen as a way to deal with the climate emergency, it’s sufficiently holistic to be a possible bridge to flexicurity for the U.S. The bottom line is the same: hope for those at risk of being left behind.

The American opioid epidemic and rising suicide rates need an energetic response.

The U.S. is far wealthier than the Nordic countries were when they decided to restructure their economies. The Scandinavians had less to spread around for their vision of shared abundance, but they decided to think big and risk by acting on their deepest values.

Can we be that bold?

Via Yes! Magazine

. Creative Commons License Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

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Bonus Video added by Informed Comment:

Democracy Now! “Sweden Provides Free Higher Education, Universal Healthcare, Free Daycare — Why Can’t the U.S.?”