Making Book

I just finished doing a tax return for a corporation, and the sole owner of this corporation will soon realize one of the greatest benefits of the corporate structure: protection of personal assets in bankruptcy proceedings. We on the left often demonize “corporations” as if they were persons. In fact, a corporation is nothing more than a legal fiction, a way of encouraging risk-takers, and of raising large pools of capital. It’s very hard to envision an industrial society without such a structure.

Are corporations evil? (Are “sole proprietorships” virtuous?) Not at all. All of the evil perpetrated by humans on one another is done by humans, and humans alone. The corporate structure merely facilitates some of our worst traits.

When I lived in Billings, I encountered a term bandied about by employees of the Billings Gazette: “making book”. It’s not something ever seen in print. (As Molly Ivins reminded us, if you want real news, you don’t read what reporters write. You drink with them.) “Making book” meant delivering a certain rate of return to the corporate owners, say, 12%. The owners didn’t care how the Gazette publisher went about it – let some people go, raise rates, trim the page size, boost the ad/news ratio. Didn’t matter. Just make book.

So the publisher did what he had to do. People got hurt – the publisher, unless his name rhymes with wheelie, was not a bad person. In fact, with very few exceptions, none of us are bad people. Yet we are constantly doing bad things to one another. We do it out of necessity – we need to eat, we want to accumulate wealth and be secure. We do so without corporations, but the corporate structure magnifies our worst traits.

The reason is simple – top-down authority. In corporations, people below must carry out the orders of people above. If they don’t, they are soon gone. For the people above, they are removed from the effects of their decisions. (The management of Union Carbide didn’t live near Bhopal; the Dow boys never smelled napalm-burned flesh or gazed upon a deformed Agent Orange baby.)

Greed is a tool, like a hammer, than can build or destroy. Corporations are built around greed. Removal of accountability unleashes naked greed, and it is unabashed, unrestrained greed that gives large corporations a bad name. Monsanto right now is pushing legislation (HR 875) introduced by Rep. Rose De Lauro (whose husband works for Monsanto) that would put organic farming out of business. It’s called the “Food Safety and Modernization Act”. It’s not about safety, and its not modern. It’s as old as time itself. Monsanto doesn’t like all the competition it’s getting from non-chemical based farming. They want it stopped.

Hugh Grant is the CEO of Monsanto. He made the decision to introduce that legislation. It is being carried out below, by the wife of one of his employees. It’s a very bad deal for thousands of small farmers and people, like me and my wife, who like organic food. The farmers will either buy and use Monsanto’s (or some similar corporation’s) pesticides and fertilizers, or stop farming. And we’ll have to eat that crap. We’ll all be hurt.

Hugh Grant will never have to answer to us. He’s alone in his office, unaffected by his decisions.

Perhaps we on the left need to clean up our own act, clarify our concepts. We attack evil corporations. What we mean is that we want to bring corporations under control of law and stakeholders, make them accountable. That’s all we mean. If we do that, if CEO’s are held accountable for more than just making book, we will have a better, cleaner, safer, and nicer world.

Media Priorities Set Straight

This is important – I can’t begin to emphasize how important it is. Joe Biden, our VP, is a blowhard – I think we can all see that. He gets on a roll, and Lord only knows what follows. So he made up this oval office conversation with George W. Bush that went as follows, on CNN:

… President Bush once told him in the Oval Office, “‘Well, Joe, I’m a leader,” and Biden responded: “Mr. President, turn around and look behind you. No one is following.”

Yeah, that happened. Bush often parried and engaged in repertoire with people he disagreed with, so he likely opened himself up like that to Biden. Righto.

Here’s Karl Rove in response:

“I hate to say this, but he’s a serial exaggerator. If I was being unkind I would say liar. But it is a habit he ought to drop. … You should not exaggerate and lie like this when you are the Vice President of the United States. There were few presidents who spend hours with somebody in the Oval Office, particularly with a blowhard like Joe Biden was”.

Here’s why this is important: Politicians have to be honest with us. That’s one of the important changes we made last November – no more lying! Now Rove never lied to us when he was Bush’s Brain, and Dick Cheney, as Vice President, certainly set a high bar, and hundreds of thousands of people did not die in part because Karl Rove and Cheney and others orchestrated the official lying that never went on anyway. So he doesn’t have any blood on his hands at all. That’s a given. That’s why he’s a prominent spokesman on FOX. He’s trustable.

And anyway, lying is not important, even if it had happened (it didn’t), when it is only foreigners who would have to pay the price if anyone had lied, which they didn’t.

But this … this is important. Joe Biden might be telling us a lie about a passing conversation involving only personal vanity.

We have our priorities straight. ‘Bout time.

In other minor news notes, Attorney General Eric Holder has decided that while former Senator Ted Stevens, plainly guilty, can walk, former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, maliciously imprisoned by Karl Rove, can rot.

Kakistocracy

Jeff Cohen founded the media critic group FAIR, and for a brief while before the Iraq war produced the Phil Donohue Show on MSNBC. That network is a sleek and graceful wood duck among mallards that has recently been hiring liberals, notably Rachel Maddow, to host its commentary shows. Donahue was its highest rated show at the time he was canceled in 2003.

Cohen was inside the belly of the beast during the propaganda campaign before the war, and offers some unique insight. His essay, We Were Silenced by the Drums of War, was written in December of 2006, but it’s always good to revisit. Very few liberals get to see the inside of the propaganda machine as it is operating at full throttle.

It was excruciating to be silenced while myth and misinformation went unchallenged. Military analysts typically appeared unopposed; they were presented as experts, not advocates. But their closeness to the Pentagon often obstructed independent, skeptical analysis.

In November of 2002, UN Weapons inspector Hans Blix was sent back into Iraq after a four year absence (the UN had pulled inspectors out before Clinton’s attack in 1998. Official truth: Saddam kicked them out.). Blix was a voice in the wilderness, one of just a few telling the American public the truth – there were no weapons.

[MSNBC pre-war news show] Countdown: Iraq’s host asked an MSNBC military analyst, “What’s the buzz from the Pentagon about Hans Blix?” The retired colonel declared that Blix was considered “something like the Inspector Clousseau of the weapons of mass destruction inspection program … who will only remember the last thing he was told – and that he’s very malleable.”

Malleable is too nice a word for propagandists, as they know quite well what they are up to. There was even a little time for personal commerce, as General Barry McCaffrey, Clinton’s “drug czar”, said on-air “Thank God for the Abrams tank and Bradley fighting vehicle.” He was on the board of directors for the company making those vehicles. There is no low-bar in this business.

As the war began, CNN news president Eason Jordan admitted that his network’s military analysts were government-approved:

“I went to the Pentagon myself several times before the war started. I met with important people there and said, for instance, at CNN, here are the generals we’re thinking of retaining to advise us on the air and off about the war. And we got a big thumbs-up on all of them. That was important.”

Others (notably Michael Massing: Now They Tell Us) have noted that media coverage of the lead-up to war, bad as it was, got even worse in November of 2002…

Management favored experts who backed the Bush view – and hired several of them as paid analysts. Networks that normally cherished shouting matches were opting for discussions of harmonious unanimity. This made for dull, predictable TV. It also helped lead our nation to war, based on false premises.

Print journalism was equally guilty, says Massing.

A survey of the coverage in November, December, and January reveals relatively few articles about the debate inside the intelligence community. Those articles that did run tended to appear on the inside pages. Most investigative energy was directed at stories that supported, rather than challenged, the administration’s case.

Says Cohen:

As war neared, MSNBC Suits turned the screws even tighter on “Donahue.” They decreed that if we booked one guest who was anti-war on Iraq, we needed two who were pro-war. If we booked two guests on the left, we needed three on the right. At one staff meeting, a producer proposed booking Michael Moore and was told she’d need three right-wingers for political balance.

I thought about proposing Noam Chomsky as a guest, but our stage couldn’t accommodate the 28 right-wingers we would have needed for balance.

So that’s why Chomsky never makes the news channels! The studios aren’t big enough to hold the necessary right wing counterbalance.

American news coverage is, aside from that of outright despotic countries like North Korea, the worst, the most slavish and groveling on the planet. It is, as Cohen notes elsewhere, a “kakistocracy”, a real word meaning rule by the worst. In American media, there is no punishment for being wrong, so long as you are submissive. You can be bad, slavish, and stupid, but if you toe the line, your face will grace the screen.

Not every weapons expert had been wrong. Take ex-Marine and former UN inspector Scott Ritter. In the last months of 2002, he told any audience or journalist who would hear him that Iraqi WMDs represented no threat to our country. “Send in the inspectors,” urged Ritter. “Don’t send in the Marines.”

It’s telling that in the run-up to the war, no American TV network hired any on-air analysts from among the experts who questioned White House WMD claims. None would hire Ritter.

Said Russian General Alexander Lebed in the wake of the September, 1996 Clinton attack on Iraq,

This is the nature of democracy: You send in the planes and drop the bombs. Then you gather in the journalists and tell them to applaud. We need to study that.

MSNBC now has a lineup that includes the truly thoughtful Rachel Maddow, the entertainer Keith Olbermann, and the hacks Chris Mathews and Ed Schultz. They all qualify as liberals, I suppose, though Mathews is more like a flag in the wind. It’s an interesting experiment they are doing, but I can’t help but wonder – if Obama decides we need to attack Iran, will the network have to fire its entire evening lineup? (Probably they fire just Maddow and Olbermann. Schultz will fall in line, since it will be Obama’s war, and not Bush’s. And Mathews will go with the flow.)

In a Pickle

From the cartoon strip “Pickles” today, quoting Orwell:

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

That’s something to ponder as we look around and see the devastation wrought by undoing of Depression-era banking regulations by Clinton and Bush.

Certain Democrats Recruiting Liberals to Run for Office

What do Jane Hamsher, (Firedoglake.com), Glenn Greenwald and Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos) have in common? They are supporting the Accountability Now Political Action Committee, which has set out to recruit liberal Democratic candidates to run primary contests against seats currently held by so-called “moderate” Democrats – those who often support Republican policies and oddly, when stripped of party designation, seem like Republicans. Accountability Now is also supported by MoveOn.org.

Read more about it here.

Predictably, the Democratic leadership is not happy about this. Says Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee,

What I’ve been warning people very clearly is, beware of forming a circular firing squad. We people should be focusing their efforts on expanding the Democratic majority, and that should be their singular focus.

Asked what was the point of electing Democrats who support Republican policies, Van Hollen said “That’s the whole point. Both parties dislike liberals. Always have.”

OK, I made that up, but it is my suspicion. Here’s his eminence, Harry Reid:

It’s not helpful to me. It’s not helpful to the Democratic Caucus.

Asked why having more liberals in congress would not be helpful to the Democratic Caucus, Reid said “They interfere with my objectives. I have a job to do – I have to promote an agenda completely at odds with my supporters while at the same time having to appear to be in harmony with them. It’s hard enough without having to deal with real liberals.”

OK. I made that up too.

It’s a good thing they are doing. I’ve long said that liberals don’t get what they want because they are too easy. They cave to the Democrats like a the class nerd to the homecoming queen. If having Democrats in congress is important for its own sake, and not to advance an agenda, then the two-party system is a sham.

By the way, it is, pretty much.

Baucus and Tester Vote For Rehberg

It was a sad day last Thursday for the states of Washington and Montana, as all four Democratic senators representing these two states sided with Republicans to lower the estate tax. Senators Maria Cantwell, Patty Murray, Max Baucus and Jon Tester all jointed with Republicans in voting to extend current estate tax levels into the foreseeable future. Its a wee bit confusing, as there is a “deficit-neutral” provision that would actually increase the estate tax exemption to $10 million. Let’s just say that Congress is looking at the re-emergence of the old estate tax at 2001 levels with trepidation.

The estate tax is a deceitful issue, but one very demonstrative of how politics is done in the United States. It affects only the top 2/10th’s of one percent (.002) of all taxpayers. These would be our wealthiest families and their heirs – the Walton’s, Harriman’s, Kennedy’s and Bush’s. Yet when politicians talk about it publicly, they frame it in terms of dirt farmers and cattle ranchers, who are mostly unaffected. Further, conservatives ran the tax through the public relations industry, and were instructed never to use the expression “estate tax”, but rather the “death tax”, giving it an ominous aura.

The vote on Thursday will be a costly one – a tax cut of $245 billion for our wealthiest, bringing the total cost of estate tax cuts since Bush took office to over $700 billion. This at a time when so many working and middle class people are suffering. Baucus and Tester have screwed up priorities, it seems.

Why an estate tax? It goes back to the Progressive Era. During the late 19th century, for the first time in our history and coinciding with the Industrial Revolution, the U.S. saw its ranks of extremely wealthy families grow – the Rockefellers, Mellons, DuPonts and others left a bad taste on the public palate. Based on our experience in Great Britain, a country still run by its wealthiest families through the House of Lords, our forebears thought it wise to break up large estates. Nothing good comes from large concentrations of wealth save undue power and influence, bought politicians and privileged citizens enjoying special influence over public officials – the opposite of democracy.

In other words, untaxed estates lead to rule by the Walton heirs – oligarchy, or plutocracy, to be precise. We have legislators bending over (backwards) for the sake of the top 1%.

In Montana in 2006, 92 estates paid estate taxes – about 1.1% of all estates that year. But these are the wealthiest people in the state, and Senators Baucus and Tester seem very aware of them. One of the wealthiest families in the state is the Rehberg family. Congressman Rehberg ought to recuse himself from estate tax votes, as he is voting dollars into his own pocket. Rehberg has been one of the most vocal opponents of estate taxation – I suspect this has to do with his father’s estate having to pay the tax, and Denny’s inheritance being decreased. Hell hath no fury like a jilted trust baby. (Read here how Rehberg in 2005, true to form, speaks of the Estate Tax as affecting “families who have their whole lives invested in the farm or their small business”, rather than affecting him personally. It’s blatant – he’s shameless.)

But he’s got Senators Baucus and Tester fighting for him. So it’s a moot point.

Say What?

Here’s something you don’t often see … justice. Ward Churchill won his court case. He was indeed fired for exercising his first amendment rights, says a jury.

That was obvious. He wrote an essay critical of U.S. foreign policy, calling 9/11 victims “little Eichman’s”. His point was that “if you make it a practice of killing other people’s babies for personal gain . . . eventually they’re going to give you a taste of the same thing.”

He was railroaded out of his job at the University of Colorado in Boulder. They didn’t specifically fire him for writing those words – instead they went on a witch hunt, looking for something, anything in his body of work that would offer a good hook to hang the firing on. They came up with plagiarism.

No, says the jury. You fired him for speaking his mind.

Churchill vindicated? This is America. That’s doesn’t happen often – savor the moment.

Rachel Maddow Plays Journalist

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Rachel Maddow has run a very good show. It’s not a great show because she doesn’t get great guests, and so keeps a steady flow of softies coming through. That’s not her choice. It seems that when the heavies come through, she asks them hard questions. No Tim Russert, she – she makes her guests uncomfortable. When she has them there, she can’t not do that. She has integrity.

For that reason, they don’t come on. They go to see Larry king or David Gregory or Stephanopoulos or Anderson Cooper – Dick Cheney’s people preferred to be on Russert’s Meet the Press, because they could control the message there.

The analogy I like to draw, as an accountant, is Enron, and its relationship with its auditor, Arthur Anderson and Company. Anderson clearly screwed up, and let Enron get away with things. The question is, why? It’s a myriad of relationships, and the profit motive was involved, but the bottom line was that Anderson had to be strong enough to risk losing a client to be right. They had a couple of knights working for them, but mostly, they failed.

The media assumes the same role as auditor. Like Enron, people in high office, public and private, want to control the people who are supposed to be reporting on them. It helps that large corporations own our media, it also helps that we are star-struck. People like Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert have undeserved reputations for integrity. They are exactly the opposite of that – they are rewarded for sycophancy. But they do it with gravitas, which is the key to their success. I’ll never forget Brokaw talking about how he was called back to work when they “captured Saddam Hussein” – whatever happened there. It was perfect news for a suck-up – a spoon fed story and a chance to be an insider reporting on the activities of powerful people. The interesting thing is that he really thought he was doing important work.

Anyway, Maddow doesn’t play those games. So expect that Colin Powell won’t stop by again, and that most insiders know to stay away from her. She’s got a problem. She thinks she’s a journalist.