A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga Category: American History, Chaos Theory, Elitism, January 6th, Media, Oligarchy, Propaganda

Part 5 of a 10-part Series:

Big Money and the Corporatocracy Captures the Media

Indeed, whether such extreme inequality is or is not sustainable depends not only on the effectiveness of the repressive apparatus but also, and perhaps primarily, on the apparatus of justification.”

Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, (2014)

Gaining a stranglehold on elected representatives, the legislative process, and appointed officials and judges was still not enough. In a democratic system, there is always the danger that the people will tire of working harder for less year after year or otherwise rebel against obscene levels of inequality. Therefore, the elites had to capture the apparatus of intellectual discourse and cultural transmission; i.e., educational institutions and popular media. 

The war on American workers has been going on since the middle 1800s. In the early days, striking workers would sometimes receive sympathetic attention in the press.  The machinery of the U.S. Congress finally responded to the plight of workers when it passed the National Labor Relations Act in 1935. What followed was growth in the American middle class that made it the envy of the world. Although nearly undiscernible at the time, this phenomenon was already starting to wane—guess when?—the middle to late 1970s—as the Powell memo was put into operation.

The full operation of the Powell memo did not become readily measurable until the Reagan Presidency. Reagan launched the first major salvo against labor when he broke the PATCO strike in August 1981. Throughout the 1980s, media coverage of unions grew increasingly negative. The 1980s were also a period where the media and popular culture was promoting a “greed is good” ethos. But, ironically, it was auto workers and teachers—who only wanted to have enough resources to do their jobs and be paid enough to support their families–who were portrayed as greedy (in the bad sense).

Although it had been noted in obscure academic publications and occasional news articles, only around the turn of the 21st century did serious and sustained media attention become focused on the yawning gap of income and wealth inequality. Mainstream economists began to challenge the prevailing “trickle-down” theory of supply side economists, or the notion that allowing a few fat cats to become obscenely wealthy would somehow (??) inure to the benefit of the rest of us. In 1996, the economist Ravi Batra accused his mainstream colleagues of “napping in their ivory towers” for totally missing the “wage blight” that had been afflicting American workers since 1982. Others finally began making a connection between the decline of labor rights and power and increasing inequality.

In 2017, a pair of researchers at the Vienna University School of Economics and Business analyzed how the media framed issues of economic and social inequality “after decades of benign neglect.” How inequality is presented is “not discussed in economics at all, and hardly mentioned in communication studies.” The authors suggest that economic inequality has only recently been “rediscovered,” likely because it has become so extreme—especially in the U.S. They allege that the “interdependencies between economics and the media” exert an important influence over “the contested sphere of preference shaping,” including political opinions.

The scholarship that has examined this issue has found that business and financial news “tends to be framed by pro-market explanations” and rarely, if ever, “question the overarching economic philosophy of free-market capitalism.” Any one of us can conduct our own informal review and easily discern that most stories are framed around the interests of corporations and employer groups. This bias is “further intensified by the growth of public relations, sponsorship, and other subsidized information flows favoring wealth and powerful interests.” 

  • Coverage of poverty is portrayed as a threat to the community, linking the poor to crime, drug and alcohol addiction, reinforcing the trope that the causes of poverty are due to individual faults rather than structural deficiencies.

  • Welfare “reform” is portrayed as something that reduces dependency and fosters self-reliance. Stories seldom cover the “working poor”—the folks who work sometimes two and three jobs and are still unable to make ends meet—because this would not be consistent with the mythology that the poor are lazy and lacking in work ethic.

  • Taxes on wealth—most of which fall on a very small portion of the population—are portrayed as an issue of general concern affecting all Americans. This is tied into meritocratic notions of “deserts,” that individuals should keep what they earn. The stories hardly ever delve into the fact that the very wealthy “earn” most of their income from things like stock options, carried interest, and capital gains rather than the kinds of “work” that most of the rest of us do.

  • In stories about shareholders challenging executive pay, the shareholders are portrayed as “rebels,” although sometimes the executives are shown dining and drinking in luxury. The authors suggest that this “strong conflict frame” ignores wider themes around capitalist structures, austerity, shareholder agency and inequality.

The authors next examine the causes of this bias/neglect. First is the “hegemonic structure” of media ownership, which has become increasingly concentrated (as have many other industries). This concentration has affected both the elite (mainstream) traditional media like newspapers as well as newer online social media platforms.  Added to this are increasing “commercial pressures,” which result in fewer investments in investigative reporting and more sensationalized stories. The authors suggest that information should be “reconceptualized as a public good and not a commodity.”

The authors then address a more controversial issue, which they term “manufacturing consent.” They cite at least one study of stories about tax reform, which found a definite “pro-rich (or pro-corporate) bias” being promoted by “the propaganda function of institutions such as the mass media and advertising industry.” The authors conclude,

“The one-sidedness of sources already came clear in the studies we analyzed….For our topic of economic inequality and redistributional policies, this would presumptively mean that certain ways of talking about economic inequality… [and efforts to remedy it] are disregarded. Marked as unrealistic or utopian, leaving it—once again—to the market, in its wonderful magic, to do the trick, seeing growing inequality only to be explained by meritocracy…”

On one front, the strategy was to simply keep most people’s noses to the grindstone—where they have neither the inclination nor the energy to look up and ask WHY things are the way they are. On a second front was a complete lack of discourse or public consciousness of what was happening to work, wages, tax loopholes for billionaires, corporate welfare, and connection to political power. The third front involved demonizing government—or any form of collective action where working people could assert themselves. The teaching of civics in American classrooms (especially working class and minority classrooms) has been all but abandoned.

The right-wing media ecosystem was more than a platform for the propaganda of billionaires, but fomented divisiveness and distrust that has destroyed any sense of community or solidarity. The very notion of “we the people” was rebranded as “socialism.”  The system is deliberately designed to keep people tired, irritable, broke, and desperate to find a scapegoat. With the help of psychological and social sciences, messages are tailored to induce ever-increasing wants. Other messages are directed at the survival responses of the limbic system, designed to induce fear and rage.  

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga Category: American History, Elitism, Federalist Society, January 6th, Judiciary, Powell Memo

Part 4 of a 10-part Series:

Federalists and Dominionists Take Over the Courts

The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy.

Former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy in Citizens United v FEC

Most of us are no longer surprised by the plutocrat-friendly decisions emanating from the U.S. Supreme Court. Oligarchs like the Kochs have done their part to fulfill Powell’s mandate, sending massive funding to established think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and CATO as well as their own Americans for Prosperity and Freedomworks. The Koch empire funds a huge and interconnected network of right wing PACS, policy think tanks, lobbying groups and media outlets such that it has been given the name “Kochtopus.”   

It wasn’t enough to own the Congress who wrote the laws and flood the policy agenda with lobbyists representing plutocrats and the corporatocracy, but they had to also own (or at least influence) the place where the laws were interpreted—the Supreme Court. During the civil rights era, the federal courts were in the forefront of expanding rights—especially the rights of the previously marginalized such as workers, women, and people of color. Attorneys who represented marginalized clients were encouraged to file their cases in federal courts, which (at that time) tended to look favorably on these new rights.

However, sometime beginning in the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, federal judges became increasingly hostile to plaintiffs with grievances against business. Attorneys representing regular working people injured by defective products, environmental toxins, and employment discrimination were now likely to be better off taking these cases to state courts—notwithstanding broader definitions and expanded damage awards afforded under federal statutes. Some federal judges were openly hostile to these cases/clients. Defendant corporations—represented by expensive “Big Law” firms with armies of lawyers—found ways to have these cases “removed” to federal courts. A cottage-industry sprang up in legal circles on “removal” actions.

In 1976, the Law and Economics Center was established at George Mason University.  The Law and Economics Center is a corporate-funded think tank that sponsored an all-expense paid trip at a Florida resort for judges to “learn” from academic economists. Here federal judges were imbued with the concept that justice always comes at a cost—cost which the judges were required to consider (although there is nothing about this in the constitution or anywhere else) in their decisions. Even former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said she appreciated a lesson on regression analysis. This particular program was shut down in 1999 due to the fact that many of its corporate funders appeared before many of the judges and thus created an all-too-obvious conflict of interest. Yet, a recent study that cross-referenced federal judicial decisions (some 380,000 civil cases and 1 million criminal sentences) found a distinct correlation between judges who attended the Law and Economics training and an “anti-justice, pro-cost” bias. 

Following the Powell memo blueprint, the Federalist Society was founded by a group of students at elite law schools (Harvard, Yale, and University of Chicago) in 1982. Although it purports to stand for a “textualist” and “originalist” interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, its main goal was to promote judges in the Federal judiciary who were anti-regulation, anti-environment, and anti-union. According to the American Bar Association, there are over 1.3 million lawyers in the United States—a number which has been relatively consistent over the past decade.  The Federalist Society estimates that it has about 60,000 members, which includes law students and academics as well as practicing lawyers. But even assuming all 60,000 members were admitted to law practice, this would mean they comprise only 4.6% of practicing attorneys. Yet today six Federalists sit on the U.S Supreme Court. So…the outsize influence of Federalists in the U.S. Court system can be analogized to the outsized influence of big money interests in our politics. And…surprise!…both are interconnected!

It is not just the über-right wing Federalist Society that feeds the pipeline to the Federal judiciary, but a small core of elite law firms. Two of the most well-known of these are Jones Day (with 2,513 attorneys) and Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher (with over 1,600 attorneys). These are large, globe-spanning, corporate-focused law firms who generally recruit only from elite law schools (who themselves tend to recruit from elite or upper-middle-class families and alums). They are known for defending oil companies (most notably, Chevron), as well as corporations generally. These law firms disproportionately feed both the U.S. Supreme Court (former Justice Scalia) and the federal judiciary as well as Presidential cabinet and other high-level positions. Former Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher attorneys include the currently (in)famous Judge Aileen Cannon (in the Mar-A-Lago documents case) as well as current President Biden nominee Jennifer Reardon (who defended Chevron during her time at the firm) for the Southern District of New York—suggesting that elite capture of the judiciary has been bipartisan.

The conservative right has traditionally been the champion of states’ rights, and the essence of federalism is that states should serve as “laboratories of democracy.” That is, the federal government sets the “floor” of mandatory legal protections, but states are free to expand upon them. Working people found out that they were able to make their voices heard in state legislatures, and so some states raised the minimum wage above the federal mandate, passed more stringent environmental protections, and expanded ways and times for citizens to vote. But now we are seeing a retreat from the absolutist view of states rights. States rights are to be defended when they serve to control the “little people,” (Blacks, women, workers), but can be infringed when they seek to expand or protect the same.

So long as the will of working people was able to be expressed anywhere, owning Congress, the Supreme Court, and exerting outsized influence on both major parties and presidential elections was not sufficient to meet the elite’s goal of total domination. The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) was founded in 1973 for the purpose of drafting “model legislation” to introduce in state legislatures. Today, ALEC is funded primarily by corporate interests and right-wing oligarchs. ALEC-sponsored legislation focused primarily on reducing regulations and taxes on corporations, but it also worked to make voter registration more stringent, weaken labor unions, and pass state “right to work” laws. Unions are viewed as a double threat, because they not only work to insure a more equitable division of collective production between capital and labor, unions also provide a structure that facilitates civic participation among working people, along with pathways to influence larger policies that affect workers. 

A Butterfly Flaps Its Wings: From the Powell Memo to the Eastman Memo and January 6th

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga Category: American History, Campaign Finance, Chaos Theory, Elitism, January 6th, Oligarchy, Public Policy

Part 3 of a 10-part Series:

The Powell Memo Let Loose

“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.”

Adam Smith, 1776

The wealthy, business elites and the corporatocracy took the advice from Powell’s memo and ran with it. The most obvious strategy was to exert influence in the places of power—where decisions that affect all of us are made. One way was through direct contributions to political candidates. Here in the United States, campaign finance reform (i.e., getting “big money” out of politics) has undergone a cycle of incremental improvements followed by regression. This is due to both the practical need for large amounts of money in order to run for office as well as limits imposed by Constitutional free speech jurisprudence.  Since the disastrous Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v FEC (2010), the amount of money already pouring into political campaigns has grown ever larger. Political committees may now accept unlimited contributions, so long as they do not “coordinate” with a candidate or a party. Although many of the fat cat donors have a political party preference, many of the special interest groups donate large sums to both parties—insuring access and influence regardless of what the people decide about who is elected.

 

Even prior to Citizens United, the Supreme Court eliminated the Millionaires Amendment in the 2008 Davis v FEC decision. The Millionaires amendment had allowed candidates running against an über-wealthy, self-funded opponent to bypass campaign contribution limits. Although the Millionaires Amendment imposed no limit on a wealthy candidate’s ability to spend funds on his own campaign, the Court’s rationale was that the Millionaires Amendment unconstitutionally “penalized” wealthy candidates; that such burden was not justified by any governmental interest in preventing corruption or the appearance of corruption; and that equalizing electoral opportunities for candidates of different personal wealth was not a permissible Congressional purpose. 

According to the FEC, the largest individual donors to Republicans in the 2020 election were Sheldon Adelson ($225 million), Richard Uhlein ($75 million), Kenneth Griffin ($70 million), Timothy Mellon ($60 million) and Dustin Moskovitz ($50 million). The two largest donors to Democrats—Michael Bloomberg ($150 million) and Thomas Steyer ($80 million)—were running for President themselves, so a large part of their donations was likely made to their own campaigns. The Adelson-backed super-PAC decided to support Trump late in the campaign, which likely contributed to Trump’s upset victory.  Thus illustrating yet more evidence of a “pay-to-play” political system.

Interest groups as well as wealthy individuals donate to political campaigns. One might think that these interest groups—who operate from individual donations and pooled funds—would likely be more representative of “the people.”  Yet, here again, we see that many of these groups either represent business interests (e.g., the Chamber of Commerce), or are “astroturf” organizations which appear to be supported by grass roots small donations, but are actually funded by wealthy (and often anonymous) donors:

  1. U.S. Chamber of Commerce   $130 million
  2. Crossroads GPS     $110 million
  3. Americans for  Prosperity    $59 million
  4. National Rifle Association    $58 million
  5. American Future Fund    $51 million

In 1971, only 175 firms had registered lobbyists in the nation’s capital. By 1982, some 2,500 firms had registered lobbyists. The number of Political Action Committees (PACs) increased from less than 300 to over 1,200 between 1976 and 1980, and their expenditures on congressional races increased nearly 500%.  In 1975, total revenue of Washington lobbyists was less than $100 million. By 2006, it was over $2.5 billion.  Although the number of lobbyists and the amount of money spent on lobbying proliferated during the 1980s and 1990s, the number of active lobbyists peaked at 14,837 in 2007.  In terms of both number of lobbyists and money, lobbying has been on the decrease following restrictions and reporting requirements passed by the Obama administration in 2008.

The Federal Election Commission (FEC) is itself a rather toothless organization. It is governed by six Commissioners, three from each of the major political parties. This (unsurprisingly) often results in deadlock. However, Commissioners must be confirmed by the Senate, and so the FEC frequently operates without a full Commission, which hinders its ability to issue rules, conduct investigations and approve enforcement actions. Shortly after the Citizens United decision, the FEC allowed the creation of independent expenditure-only committees, now known as super-PACS. Unlike political candidates, who must build their campaign coffers with legally limited smaller donations, super-PACs can collect six and seven figure donations. This “outside” (i.e., not under the control of a party or candidate) spending has amounted to $4.5 billion since 2010, outpacing “regular” candidate spending and contributing to record-breaking expensive campaigns. Billions of super-PAC dollars can flow instantly into ads and other communications—and they are often hard to distinguish from the ads produced by the candidates themselves.

Capturing the policy agenda with money may have been the primary agenda. But, in order to survive public scrutiny (and perhaps opposition), the oligarch agenda had to be supported with “scientific” sounding logic and argument. Money that wasn’t directly used to influence legislators and legislation was directed into academic-style “think tanks” that provided an intellectual foundation for oligarch ideology. This strategy is termed “preference-shaping,” a technique generally associated with advertising and marketing. When applied to the electorate, preference shaping is designed to insure that—during those few times when ordinary people (i.e., voters) are in a position to make a decision—that they are imbued with the world view, frameworks, and preferences of the plutocrats.

The Heritage Foundation was established in 1973 among a list of conservative notables. The Heritage Foundation receives an average annual revenue of $112.7 million. The Libertarian CATO institute was founded in 1974 and relocated to Washington in 1981. The older American Enterprise Institute—with an average annual revenue of $64 million—has been around since 1938. The AEI provided many of the personnel to staff the George W. Bush Administration. The Claremont Institute, founded in 1979, has become more recently infamous for its former senior fellow John Eastman, a figure (with another memo) who is nearly inextricable with January 6th. These are the sources of foundational ideologies that preach the gospel that allowing a few folks to become obscenely wealthy is good for all of us. This includes the “greed is good” ethos that emerged in the 1980s as well as “trickle-down” (aka supply side) economics—which has actually been disproven by real economists. But you would never know this from the continued promotion of it among economic and political elites.

Campaign finance ethics tends to focus on individual candidates—who is giving to whom in exchange for what favors. But the huge sums of money in our political system have a more insidious (and harder to discern) effect on both democracy and the welfare of the rest of us. It creates a system that is wealth-biased, or based on the presumption that everyone is equally free to accumulate as much as they are logistically able—and indeed are even expected to do so. Those whose only objective is the increase of their own wealth and power are easily able to create a unified and coherent value system.

All the rest of us, however, have a much wider universe of needs and interests: some folks struggle to keep a roof over their head or have enough to feed their families; others are worried about the quality of K-12 education for their children today and the cost of higher education for their children tomorrow. Others have more existential concerns about climate change, globalism, or war. If we can find time, energy, and resources which are not consumed with daily survival, we may be able to help toward one of these causes in some small way. But we will never have the unified clout of plutocrats and the corporatocracy. Indeed, a 2014 study by political science academics concluded that, “When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized  interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”