No, wait. Hold on a sec. This is the umpteenth segment in the saga of why our political system is so messed up.
Its one of those things where when you really get it, its all you can do to keep your head from exploding like a tea-kettle.
Its like an elephant in the room. And that’s why people who see it seem so shrill to those who can’t. They seem to always be speaking in capital letters: “CAN’T YOU SEE HOW WRONG THIS ALL IS?!!”
But as I often write in my journals, nothing makes sense without a context, and when your context is sufficiently divergent from that of your audience, you either seem irrational, or you have to spend a good deal of time establishing the context for your actual content to make sense. Sometimes, that part takes up the lion’s share of your argument. But if you omit it, you do so at your own peril, and you run the risk of coming off as some sort of nutcase, or perhaps worse.
Gore Vidal has a great quote related to that: “apparently ‘conspiracy theory’ has become synonymous with ‘unspeakable truth'”.
It is an unspeakable truth.
The big secret is that the consipiracy is not entirely invisible. Parts of it operate within plain view. And they give you this vague sense of unease that something is very wrong, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it.
For example, there’s this fellow, Robert Scaife. He’s a billionaire descendent of the Mellons. Never earned an honest dime in his life, but very interested in public affairs. Except for the public part I guess. Most people have never heard his name. His name will not be mentioned at all on certain networks.
Back in the 90’s he funded numerous so-called “charitable” organizations, who in turn hired armies of lawyers and private investigators who basically bribed, threatened or just plain made up stories about the Clintons.
For example, one of his operatives, a reporter by the name of Christopher Ruddy, working for a minor newspaper in Pittsburgh that happened to be owned by Scaife opened a non-profit organization with an anonymous donation of $3 million. This organization’s only activity was apparently the spreading of innuendo and falsehood about Vince Foster’s death. Remember that?
The man apparently committed suicide, and two familiar characters were very thoroughly misinformed. At the time, spouting “inside” leaks and information that can, in almost every instance, now be traced back to Scaife. These two creatures were Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly. It’s easy to forget how low and despicable these two beings are.
See this article. Don’t actually read it, just look at it, maybe count the pages, and so on, to gauge the magnitude of the bullshit factor.
But these creatures are only the most obvious, bombastic and vituperative of the chain of misinformation that permeates our society like a cancer.
Its a matter of public record how these so-called “think tanks” are funded. Scaife is only the most obviously doctrinaire of many wealthy individual and corporate donors, all of whom have a a particular point of view.
Now this is a democracy, and an individual is entitled to a point of view. One man, one vote. Right?
But since the Buckley v. Valeo decision (one of Justice Rhenquist’s first) that the expenditure of money is a form of free speech right, those with lots of money get much more than their fair share of air time, and benefit from an immense and unprecedented electoral advantage. In other words, one dollar, one vote.
See this article at the nation. This one you should really read.
Its kind of obvious when you think about it. Even if they played fair, and stood up for themselves, and said, “this is what I believe. I’m going to shout it from the moutaintops until everyone hears me.” Or perhaps “I’m going to broadcast my opinions across the airwaves until everyone agrees with me. And I use these same tools to destroy anyone who opposes me.” Then at least we’d know what we were dealing with.
But of course they don’t play fair. First of all you usually don’t even know their names. But more insidiously, they have begun a very conscious and concerted effort to influence if not control public opinion. It has taken some time, but it is beginning to take effect, like a kind of plague or madness. And those of us who perceive it feel like the survivors in a science fiction movie like the invasion of the body snatchers, where once reasonable people are turned into slavish servants of unseen masters.
As just one example of many, let’s consider these so called “think tanks.”
Everyone is familiar with how “think tanks” are consulted for supposedly objective and reasoned opinions on matters of public policy. We have all heard references to organizations like the Brookings Institution, the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. What’s less obvious is the relationship between these supposedly objective sources of knowledgeable opinion, and shadowy doctrinaires like Scaife.
See http://www.fair.org/extra/9805/think-tanks.html
Now, the labeling (or lack thereof) of these organizations studied in this report is bad enough. Labeling, when present is partly subjective. A well known organization like the Heritage Foundation might not require a label to an informed washington reporter. But to most folks, its not clear that this organization has a very specific agenda, to promote right-wing causes. Their charter includes phrases like “principles of free enterprise, individual freedom, traditional american values and a strong national defense” which are as unobjectionable as they are vague. To be fair, other organizations like the American Enterprise Institute the Cato Institute and the Hoover Institution are much more extreme, and to most americans would on reflection be considered very far right wing, if not radical. There really is no apt word for what they are, since labels like left and right wing are too linear and subjective, relative to one’s own point of view. Briefly, they believe the right to property is supreme. And all individual viewpoints follow from that. We need a strong national defense primarily to protect property, and so on. They talk about freedom, and limited government, but their actual opinions rarely focus on individual liberties and limiting government. Just consider: Reagan, GHW Bush and GW Bush all espoused the views of the Heritage Foundation and the AEI. Both Dick and Lynne Cheny are attached to the AEI, Lynne still is a senior fellow there. Ask yourself: have individual liberties increased under these administrations? Has government gotten smaller?
But returning to the subject of funding, between 1985 and 2001, the Sarah Mellon Scaife Foundation, a tax exempt entity under the control of Richard Mellon Scaife, donated $15,860,000 to the Heritage Foundation. As always with such donations, there are ample claims of independence and “no strings attached.” But those who have been living in the real world understand that the relationship between substantial contributors, especially strong-willed individual contributors like Scaife and the non-profit organizations they fund is more subtle and complex than that.
See http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=Scaife_Foundations
Now because of the Buckley decision, the expenditure of wealth to influence political discourse is afforded essentially unqualified first amendment protection. Thus wealthy people like Scaife have a lot of free speech (in the form of money) to throw around.
Sometimes the numbers are so big, its really hard to fathom just how much free speech people like Scaife have at their disposal. Just try to get your head around this: 1% of the population of the U.S. controls forty percent of the nation’s wealth. That’s about as much aggregate wealth as the bottom 60% of folks.
Now 1% is still a fair number of folks, maybe as many as 3 million, but also consider a lot of wealth is effectively concealed in trusts and corporations controlled by those folks, and that this number includes children and dependents. So the people effectively weilding that wealth are fewer, by perhaps 1/4. Ok. Say less than 1 million. Also remember that the curve turns sharply up. The top 1/2% controls 37% of the stock, about 30% of country’s the total wealth.
See http://www.endgame.org/primer-wealth.htm
But let’s say just for the sake of argument that Mr. Scaife is worth about $1 billion. We know that the lowest quintile of households in 2000 had a median net worth of just $7300. That year, the census bureau tells us the us had about 104 million households, and a population of about 285 million souls (obviously about 2.8 folks per household), so that comes to about $2600 net worth per person.
So Mr. Scaife enjoyed the same free speech rights as about 383,000 of the poorest of his fellow countrymen. Its something to think about.
See http://www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/p70-88.pdf and
http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2003/200324/200324abs.html
Ok, at this point, I’m even sick of myself. Have I gone off the deep end? Maybe so. But does that make me wrong? Nope.