Category: Politics

In a nutshell: Never vote for politicians who accept big money from corporations or the rich.

We would all prefer politicians who answer only to the people, and not to wealthy special interests. Solving that is a tough problem; this article explains one aspect of it. As a scientist might put it, this element is necessary, but not sufficient to solve the problem.

What is that element? To put it simply:

Any politician who accepts big money from the rich, ends up serving the rich, instead of the people who elected them.

Politicians (especially the ones who love getting big donations from the rich) will claim that they’re not biased by those donations.

Give me a damn break. Rich people aren’t going to donate to a candidate if those donations aren’t going to do them any good. They want something in exchange: favorable laws, streamlined regulatory approval, or any of the other forms of legalized bribery that our system allows.

We’ve tried imposing rules on political donations from above, but the rich have so much money that they’ve essentially bought themselves immunity from those laws, mainly by way of pro-rich-people court decisions like Citizens United. We can’t stop rich people from, in effect, donating all the money they want to politicians.

But we can stop politicians from accepting that money. More accurately, we can support politicians who refuse to accept that money. Organizations like the Richmond Progressive Alliance only support candidates that don’t take corporate money. Individual voters can be taught to follow this principle, and if enough of them do so, corporate politicians will have a harder and harder time getting elected.

What, no money?

Strictly speaking, a candidate could accept money from a corporation or rich person, as long as it’s not disproportionate. That means they won’t accept a donation that’s larger than what the average voter could manage. So a candidate might establish (for example) a $500 cap, and refuse any donations from any individual source over that amount.

A blue-collar family, if they really believed in a candidate, could probably scrape together that much to donate. A big company or rich family could easily do so. But since the cap is low enough so that any one donation doesn’t have a big impact on the campaign, the candidate is not beholden to the donor, regardless of whether they’re a single family or a billion-dollar company.

Obviously the cap needs to be small, and even smaller in very localized or small races; if your entire campaign budget is a few tens of thousands of dollars (say, for a city council campaign in a small town) then you might set a per-contributor cap of $100.

Whatever the number, the principle remains the same: do not let anyone have disproportionate influence on the candidate. This extends beyond just cash campaign donations; any kind of influence needs to be handled carefully. A corporation could get around the donation cap by giving money to a candidate’s church, or favorite charity. They could hold a benefit dinner and invite the candidate as a guest of honor.

There are countless ways the rich can use their wealth to manipulate people, and they are very good at doing it. No fixed set of rules can counteract people who do not want to play by the rules. Candidates—and voters—must be eternally vigilant about people with money and power trying to buy influence.

What about competing corporate candidates?

Here’s the monkey wrench: Say you’ve got a local race, with one corporate-free candidate and one corporate-backed candidate. Because the corporate-backed candidate has no compunctions about being a minion of the rich, they’ll happily take all the money and influence the corporation will give them. And because of that, they can probably out-earn and out-spend the corporate-free candidate.

This is why the individual belief principle is so important. If a voter really believes that they should never vote for a corporate candidate, then it doesn’t matter how much money the corporate candidates spend: they will not get that person’s vote.

It won’t be easy. Everyone is susceptible to propaganda, and big money buys a lot of propaganda. Corporations and their candidates will try very hard to hide their associations with one another, or confuse voters with lies about who gets money from where.

And a given election might have dozens of races; it can take a lot of time for a voter to get up to speed on everyone who’s running, not just to find out if they’re corporate-free, but what their intended governing policies are.

This is why organization and training are so important. Communities of voters who understand these principles, and how important it is to know who you’re voting for and why, can go a long way toward breaking the power of corporate candidates.

Everyone likes to think that advertising doesn’t affect them. “I’m too smart,” they say. “I know their tricks. I’ve never seen an ad and then felt compelled to rush out and buy that product!”

This misses the true purpose of ads. Ads aren’t mainly intended to convince you to buy a specific product. They’re intended to normalize a particular worldview via extreme repetition: specifically, the view that you have a problem, and spending money can solve it. And ads are extremely good at this. Nobody is immune to their impact. My wife and I can still sing ad jingles we learned forty years ago as kids, from commercials we haven’t seen since the last millennium.

What our kids taught us

When we moved into our house, we declined to start up a cable TV subscription. We’d had one at our old apartment, but we’d realized we hadn’t been watching much TV lately, so we decided to simply forgo cable TV for a while. There was plenty to entertain us online, and streaming was starting to become a thing; plus we spent a lot of time playing video games.

Our children were growing up in this same timeframe. A couple of years later, when our older boy was 6, we asked him what he might like for birthday gifts.

He had no idea. There were no particular toys he wanted; he didn’t ask to go to Disneyland or have a birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese. Nothing came to mind. We eventually resorted to taking him to Toys ‘R’ Us and following him around the aisles to get an idea of what might be interesting to him. So ultimately we got him a few things, and his grandparents bought him a bunch of toys too.

He never even played with half of them, and most of the rest he played with a little bit, before being relegated to the corner of his room where they collected dust. Instead, he spent a lot of time waving a cardboard paper towel roll around, making explosion noises and pretending to fight aliens or dragons.

This repeated itself year after year, and our younger son later followed the same pattern. We eventually figured it out: neither of them had grown up being exposed to TV advertising on a regular basis. They might occasionally see ads on TV at the grandparents’ houses, or at a restaurant or doctor’s office, but they lacked the constant exposure to commercials that my wife and I took for granted as part of our childhoods. So they never badgered us to go to McDonald’s, or to buy the latest movie tie-in toy. They never got the message that buying stuff is what makes you happy.

This really hit home when my wife and I began to realize, after several years of also not seeing much in the way of ads, that when we did see ads, it made us viscerally angry. How dare they speak to us like this, with their blatantly manipulative language and imagery?

Every election season I see people complain about how they’ve seen a million ads for this ballot proposition, or against that candidate. I sit there thinking about how I’ve barely seen any such ads; most of the ones I do encounter are on billboards or bus shelters, because you really can’t avoid seeing those if you go out in public. (I do make an effort to look away as soon as I realize what I’m looking at.) And I feel bad for people who still subject themselves to advertising.

Ads aren’t free

There’s a saying: If you’re not paying for something, you’re the product. The canonical example of this is that people who watch TV aren’t the customers; the advertisers are the customers, and the viewers’ attention is the product. (In point of fact, even if you are paying for it, you might still be the product; companies love collecting data about their customers and selling it to people. but usually when you do pay out of pocket, you at least can avoid having to see ads.)

The early Internet trained us all to think that websites should all be free. But websites cost money to run, and they’ve got to get that money from somewhere. Academia has long knows how much ads can distort a person’s decision-making abilities, but the general public is convinced that they’re too smart to be affected by it.

They aren’t. You aren’t. Stop accepting that advertising is something you just have to deal with, and start taking steps to erase it from your life.

A tiny number of people control almost all the wealth and power in this country. There are fewer than a thousand billionaires in our country of over 340 million people, but they control around 80% of the wealth, leaving crumbs for the rest of us.

These billionaires wield vast power over every part of our lives: not just owning the companies we work in (where they can lay off entire divisions at a whim), and the news outlets we trust to keep us informed (which only tell the kinds of stories that they want us to hear), and the entertainment companies we get our TV and movies and video games from (which embed the billionaires’ worldview in every product), but the very fabric of the government as well (since the billionaires are allowed to spend unlimited amounts of money to buy politicians and elections).

The main story we’re raised to believe—and that the media sources owned by those billionaires tell us—is that if you work hard, you’ll get to be rich. That’s what they call “the American Dream.” But here in reality, almost nobody who works hard gets to be rich. The people who are rich almost universally inherited their wealth, or started in a position of high privilege that gave them a far better chance of being inducted into that elite class.

Where did all that concentrated wealth come from in the first place, then? Go back in time, and you’ll find the ultra-wealthy capitalists of an earlier age got their wealth by exploiting the labor of their workers. To put it simply, think about a typical company that has a single owner. The owner has a hundred employees and pays each of them a fixed wage. The employees in turn do work that generates income for the company. The total income they all generate has to exceed the amount they’re paid, or the company loses money.

The excess income is profit, and all of it goes to the owner, even if the owner does no work. There are countless companies where the owners do not do any work; instead they hire someone to run the company, and then sit back and collect the profits. And since they don’t do any work, they have lots of free time and lots of money that they can spend on things like buying news outlets and lobbying government officials. The workers can’t afford to do these things—at least, not individually.

The billionaires who own the media outlets use them to distract and divide us. They distract us with floods of entertainment, convincing us that we absolutely must see the next Marvel movie, or the next NFL game, or the next episode of Real Housewives. They divide us by owning news outlets on all parts of the political spectrum, which scream at each other about divisive wedge issues like abortion and gun control, while never mentioning the exploitation of labor that allowed them to gather so much money and power in the first place.

And the owners invariably use a good chunk of that money and time to convince the government to pass laws that further benefit the owners, making it easier for them to continue stealing their workers’ labor. It’s a vicious cycle that leads to ever-increasing amounts of wealth consolidation in the hands of a few, and has led us to where we are now: a tiny class of oligarchs who spend their time concocting new ways to exploit us and pit us against each other.

Other articles here go into detail on these ideas, and what you can do to change your perspective on how the world works. We can’t fight the power if we don’t understand it.

The tl;dr

If you don’t know who owns your news outlets, then you’re getting propagandized to and you will not be well-informed.

Key points

• Every news outlet reflects the goals, biases, and motivations of its owners.
• Most media outlets are either directly owned or indirectly controlled by billionaires and oligarchs.
• Those outlets therefore reflect the goals, biases, and motivations of the billionaires and oligarchs who own them.
• If you don’t know who the owner of a news outlet is, then you don’t know whose motivations are being represented by that outlet, and you are leaving yourself open to manipulation.
• You are not “too smart” to be fooled by respectable-seeming news outlets with a hidden agenda. No one is.
• Finding out who owns a given news outlet is super easy, barely an inconvenience. For all the big ones, you can just look at Wikipedia, and trace their ownership up the chain to their parent company (or family, or individual). For smaller outlets, try checking out their website.
• Protect yourself: Get in the habit of looking into who owns a news source before reading any news they produce.

Necessarily the News

We’ve all had a blind spot for a long time: We believed that The News was respectable, simply because it was… The News. Sure, big news outlets—papers like the New York Times, national TV news broadcasts like NBC, cable news like CNN—didn’t always get everything right, and didn’t always exactly share our political views. But it’s The News. Surely those major, professional outlets are an okay place to get news from. Right? They wouldn’t deliberately misrepresent reality in order to support the goals of their billionaire owners… right?

Regardless of your place on any political spectrum, it’s easy to see that if you don’t know who owns the news you consume, you’re leaving yourself wide open to effectively invisible manipulation. Sure, knowing who the owners are doesn’t magically immunize you against manipulation; but at least once you know, you can figure out what the owners want, and view their news stories in that context.

This means that if you’re only getting your news from one or two sources, then you’re only getting a very limited view of things. You’re only seeing the kinds of stories those sources want to tell, and only from the perspectives of those sources. Spreading your news consumption around is critical if you want to be well-informed.

Yes, it’s work. But if you’re not doing it, then what you’re getting isn’t broad and accurate. It’s focused propaganda, and you’re not even aware of it. Knowing who owns your news, and getting your news from multiple independent sources, is the only way to have a chance to get the full picture.

All news—all human communication of any kind—has some amount of implicit bias. That’s okay! The problem isn’t that we get our news from sources that have bias. The problem is when we don’t know what that bias is, or worse, think there is no bias.

And getting all your news from sources with the same biases—for example, sources all owned by billionaires—is just as dangerous. Ideally you want news from multiple sources with different biases. One source might run stories about topics another source won’t touch. Some sources provide context for events, while others act as little more than stenographers for official press releases.

Trusting the Big Names in news to keep us informed hasn’t worked out. It’s up to all of us to take an active hand in being well-informed, and knowing who owns your news is the first step.