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Friday, December 7, 2012

10 Brilliant Quotes by Noam Chomsky on How Media Really Operates in America



  Media  


Chomsky's observations about propaganda and corporate media are always useful to keep in mind.

 
 
 
 
 
Lo and behold, someone has put together on Tumblr a fantastic collection of great quotes by the world's most cited intellectual, curated and verified by fans of his.  Chomsky also has his own site , a vast trove of speeches, articles, interview transcripts -- and lots else.

You can easily spend hours poring through it if you're not careful, reading up on the history of propaganda or the American empire. But the Chomsky quote site is great if you are looking for a thought of the day and you're on the run.
Here are 10 Chomsky quotes worth mulling over on the media:

1. "The major media-particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow-are corporations “selling” privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms."
 
2. “If the media were honest, they would say, Look, here are the interests we represent and this is the framework within which we look at things. This is our set of beliefs and commitments. That’s what they would say, very much as their critics say. For example, I don’t try to hide my commitments, and the Washington Post and New York Times shouldn’t do it either. However, they must do it, because this mask of balance and objectivity is a crucial part of the propaganda function. In fact, they actually go beyond that. They try to present themselves as adversarial to power, as subversive, digging away at powerful institutions and undermining them. The academic profession plays along with this game.”
From Lecture titled " Media, Knowledge, and Objectivity ," June 16, 1993
 
3."The leading student of business propaganda, Australian social scientist Alex Carey, argues persuasively that “the 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: the growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy."
 
4. "The public relations industry, which essentially runs the elections, is applying certain principles to undermine democracy which are the same as the principles that applies to undermine markets. The last thing that business wants is markets in the sense of economic theory. Take a course in economics, they tell you a market is based on informed consumers making rational choices. Anyone who’s ever looked at a TV ad knows that’s not true. In fact if we had a market system an ad say for General Motors would be a brief statement of the characteristics of the products for next year. That’s not what you see. You see some movie actress or a football hero or somebody driving a car up a mountain or something like that. And that’s true of all advertising. The goal is to undermine markets by creating uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices and the business world spends huge efforts on that. The same is true when the same industry, the PR industry, turns to undermining democracy. It wants to construct elections in which uninformed voters will make irrational choices. It’s pretty reasonable and it’s so evident you can hardly miss it."
From lecture titled "The State-Corporate Complex: A Threat to Freedom and Survival ," at the The University of Toronto, April 7, 2011
 
 
5. "The Obama campaign greatly impressed the public relations industry, which named Obama ‘Advertising Age’s marketer of the year for 2008,’ easily beating out Apple computers. A good predictor of the elections a few weeks later. The industry’s regular task is to create uninformed consumers who will make irrational choices, thus undermining markets as they are conceptualized in economic theory, but benefiting the masters of the economy. And it recognizes the benefits of undermining democracy in much the same way, creating uninformed voters who make often irrational choices between the factions of the business party that amass sufficient support from concentrated private capital to enter the electoral arena, then to dominate campaign propaganda."
 
6. "Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business…the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products."
From article " Force and Opinion " in Z Magazine
 
7. "The first modern propaganda agency was the British Ministry of Information a century ago, which secretly defined its task as “to direct the thought of most of the world” — primarily progressive American intellectuals, who had to be mobilized to come to the aid of Britain during World War I."
From article "Destroying the Commons " in Tom Dispatch
 
8. "One of the questions asked in that study was, How many Vietnamese casualties would you estimate that there were during the Vietnam war? The average response on the part of Americans today is about 100,000. The official figure is about two million. The actual figure is probably three to four million. The people who conducted the study raised an appropriate question: What would we think about German political culture if, when you asked people today how many Jews died in the Holocaust, they estimated about 300,000? What would that tell us about German political culture?"
 
9. "You don’t have any other society where the educated classes are so effectively indoctrinated and controlled by a subtle propaganda system – a private system including media, intellectual opinion forming magazines and the participation of the most highly educated sections of the population. Such people ought to be referred to as “Commissars” – for that is what their essential function is – to set up and maintain a system of doctrines and beliefs which will undermine independent thought and prevent a proper understanding and analysis of national and global institutions, issues, and policies."
10. “Citizens of the democratic societies should undertake a course of intellectual self defense to protect themselves from manipulation and control, and to lay the basis for meaningful democracy.” 
From Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

How the Hype Became Bigger Than the Presidential Election



Blame the media for making whole generations hate The Process

 
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama participate in the first Presidential Debate. (SAUL LOEB/AFP/GettyImages)


Well, it's over. Or almost over, thank God. It looks like Obama will probably win, which I guess is good news, compared to the alternative – a Mitt Romney presidency would have felt like four straight years of waking up with a naked Lloyd Blankfein sitting on your face. But it's not so much the result that matters – it's the quiet.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides. A decision that in reality takes one or two days of careful research to make is somehow stretched out into a process that involves two years of relentless, suffocating mind-warfare, an onslaught of toxic media messaging directed at liberals, conservatives and everyone in between that by Election Day makes every dinner conversation dangerous and literally divides families.

Politicians are much to blame for this, but we in the media have to take responsibility for the damage we do to the American psyche in the name of election coverage. At this very moment, there are people all over the country who are stocking up on canned goods and ammo for the apocalypse they believe will come if Obama is re-elected. For the broadcast business to be successful, viewers need to be not merely interested in our political melodramas, they have to be in an absolute state about them – emotionally invested in the outcome and frightened not to watch what happens next. And any person who's been subjected to 720 consecutive days of propaganda is not likely to take the news well if he gets the wrong result, whether it's a victory for Obama or for Romney. By that point, the networks have spent two years finding new ways each day to convince him that the world is going to disintegrate into some commie or Hitlerian version of Mad Max, to keep him coming back and watching ads.

The campaign should start and finish in six weeks, and there should be free TV access to both candidates. And it should be illegal to publish poll numbers. This isn't as crazy as it sounds – they actually had such a law in Russia while I lived there, and people were much happier. (Well, they were still miserable, because they were Russian, but at least they weren't stressing about poll numbers.) Think about it: Banning poll numbers would force the media to actually cover the issues. As it stands now, the horse race is the entire story – I can think of a couple of cable networks that would have to go completely dark tomorrow, as in Dan-Rather-Dead-Fucking-Air dark, if they had to come up with even 10 seconds of news content that wasn't centered on who was winning. That's the dirtiest secret we in the media have kept from you over the years: Most of us suck so badly at our jobs, and are so uninterested in delving into any polysyllabic subject, that we would literally have to put down our shovels and go home if we didn't have poll numbers we can use to terrify our audiences. Can you imagine if your favorite news network had to do stories like, "What is the Overseas Private Investment Corporation up to, and what do each of the candidates think about it?" That would be like asking Nineties-era baseball players to take the field without popping greenies – what, you mean play the game sober? Half the on-air talent would have to resign, or do ad work hawking reverse mortgages.

It obviously matters who gets to be president. And it's perfectly valid for us media types to advocate for the candidate we think is more qualified, based on our reporting. But the hype has gotten so out of control, it's become bigger than the presidency itself. In every race there are now not two but three dominating figures – the Democrat, the Republican and The Process, and we're raising whole generations who hate The Process far more than they like either of the candidates. Mainly for grim commercial reasons, we in the media manipulate people to stay wired on hate and panic-focused on the race for every waking moment, indifferent to how much this depresses the hell out of everyone. In doing so, we rob people of their patriotism and their desire to vote. If The Process is so clearly wrong, how right can the candidates be?

If we did this right, people would come out of presidential elections exhilarated, maybe even stoked to get involved in their local races for county sheriff or D.A. (Such races would likely have more of an impact on their day-to-day lives: For the most part, when it comes to our daily routines, the president might as well be on Mars.) Instead, most of us come out of the election exhausted, in desperate need of a couple of Ambiens and determined to spend the next two years buried in Hulu reruns, afraid to even pass a news channel while couch-surfing our way to Storage Wars or a Lifetime movie.

What makes us feel pessimistic about the world, ultimately, is the way the media encourage us to believe that our fate hangs on the every move of the promise-breaking, terminally disappointing Teflon liars in Washington. And that's a shame, because feeling optimistic shouldn't require turning off the TV or tuning out The Process. What we are witnessing, after all, is the world's greatest contest for power, an amazing fairy tale full of iconic moments that we'll watch no matter how much Sean Hannity or Chris Matthews screams at us. But it would be awesome, next time, if we could find a way to turn down the volume.
Matt Taibbi
As Rolling Stone’s chief political reporter, Matt Taibbi's predecessors include the likes of journalistic giants Hunter S. Thompson and P.J. O'Rourke. Taibbi's 2004 campaign journal Spanking the Donkey cemented his status as an incisive, irreverent, zero-bullshit reporter. His books include Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History, The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion, Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire.

Saturday, July 14, 2012

Freedom = Censorship?


CommonDreams.org



 
Think you have the right to speak freely via cellphones, websites and social media? Well, the companies that provide you with access to the Internet don’t.
The framers drafted the First Amendment as a check on government authority — not corporate power. But whether we’re texting friends, sharing photos on Facebook, or posting updates on Twitter, we’re connecting with each other and the Internet via privately controlled networks.

Verizon: Paying Politicians to Rule the Air  
(photo: watchingfrogsboil)


And the owners of these networks are now twisting the intent of the First Amendment to claim the right to control everyone's online information.
Right before the Fourth of July, Verizon filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that expressed this intent in no uncertain terms. The brief was part of the telecom company’s bid to overturn the Federal Communications Commission’s Net Neutrality rules, which prohibit carriers from blocking or discriminating against Internet users’ content.
In the brief, Verizon argues that the First Amendment gives the company the right to serve as the Internet’s editor-in-chief.

The First Amendment “protects those transmitting the speech of others, and those who ‘exercise editorial discretion’ in selecting which speech to transmit and how to transmit it,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “In performing these functions, broadband providers possess ‘editorial discretion.’ Just as a newspaper is entitled to decide which content to publish and where, broadband providers may feature some content over others.”

By “content” Verizon means all digital communications that cross its wires, from photographs of your cousin’s backyard barbeque to YouTube videos of human rights violations in Syria.

Verizon filed its brief quietly just before the July Fourth holiday, but it has caught the attention of the Internet freedom community like a skunk under the back porch.

This is not the first time Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have suggested that they have a First Amendment right to stifle speech online. AT&T argued in 2010 that its role is similar to that of an editor who selects content and speaks — and that it is not merely a conduit for the communications of others.

This defense of corporate censorship is no idle threat but a pretext for a full-scale takeover of the Internet — a move that first requires killing off any consumer protections that stand in the way.

We live in a time when growing numbers of people watch television programs, listen to music, create videos and share photographs via Internet connections provided by private entities.

A 2011 report from European Digital Rights states that ISPs and other technology companies are fast becoming the information cops of the world. The report paints a picture of an emerging “censorship ecosystem” fueled by private entities that often work hand in glove with governments.

This collusion serves both corporate and political interests. ISPs are seeking new authority to interfere with user traffic, including limiting access to the content of competitors like Netflix or shutting down the accounts of users they charge with sharing too much media. Governments are demanding that access providers help them filter and police the Internet — and that they do so under a veil of secrecy.

The most dangerous threats to free speech today lie at this intersection between corporate and political power. While businesses might do many things better than governments, our government is at least by definition directly accountable to the American people. So when Verizon claims the right to decide who gets free speech on the Internet, it’s making this claim as a benevolent despot, not as a representative democracy.

The framers of the U.S. Constitution could not have foreseen a time in which technology allowed more than a billion people to communicate via mobile phones connected to the World Wide Web. Nor could they have envisioned a world in which companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast wield more authority over our free speech than a British monarch.

And yet the First Amendment has survived to this day in defense of democracy’s most consequential right. People on both the left and right value freedom of speech. Just days after Verizon filed its brief, a diverse coalition of more than 1,000 groups and Internet dignitaries joined together behind a Declaration of Internet Freedom that establishes freedom of expression as its first principle.
But popular consensus behind free speech on the Internet is running headlong into media giants like Verizon that want to suppress open Internet culture.
Any claim that the First Amendment protects corporations — and not people — is absurd. And it shows just how far some companies are willing to go to control 21st century communications.

Tim Karr
As the Campaign Director for Free Press and SavetheInternet.com, Karr oversees campaigns on public broadcasting and noncommercial media, fake news and propaganda, journalism in crisis, and the future of the Internet. Before joining Free Press, Tim served as executive director of MediaChannel.org and vice president of Globalvision New Media and the Globalvision News Network.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Confidence in TV News Hits an All-Time Low



CommonDreams.org


Only 19% of liberals now trust television news

- Common Dreams staff 
 
Americans' confidence in television news has hit an all-time low, according to a new survey released Tuesday by Gallup.



Only twenty-one percent of the 1,004 adults polled said they had "a great deal" or "a lot" of confidence in television news media, continuing a steady decline from the 46 percent who expressed confidence in television media in 1993.

Meanwhile, just 25 percent (down from 28% last year) of those polled expressed confidence in newspapers -- the second-lowest rating since 1973 and less than half of the 51-percent peak in 1979.

"It is not clear precisely why Americans soured so much on television news this year compared with last," when confidence was at 27 percent, Gallup wrote. "Americans' negativity likely reflects the continuation of a broader trend that appeared to enjoy only a brief respite last year. Americans have grown more negative about the media in recent years, as they have about many other U.S. institutions and the direction of the country in general."

Confidence in television news also declined across the ideological spectrum, though the decline in confidence among liberals and moderates was far more severe, putting their outlook below that of conservatives for the first time since 2007. Nineteen percent of liberals expressed confidence in television media, versus 20 percent of moderates and 22 percent of conservatives.



Liberals and moderates lost so much confidence in television news this year -- 11 and 10 points, respectively -- that their views are now more akin to conservatives' views. This marks a turnaround from the pattern seen since 2009, in which liberals expressed more confidence than conservatives. Conservatives' views of television news were last similar to liberals' in June 2008, before the last presidential election. However, moderates are significantly less confident now than they were then, 20% vs. 28%.
# # #

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Not Only Phony Conservatives and Progressives in the Media

Dissident Voice: a radical newsletter in the struggle for peace and social justice


Phony Conservatives and Progressives in the Media

Most of us probably knew for the longest time how the Fox Cable talk show hosts keep labeling themselves conservatives.  A purist conservative would never dare refer to the Hannitys, O’Reillys et al as one of them. After all, these blokes rail and rave about how broke our government is, and then wave the (false) flag repeatedly for more and more military spending. “Stay the course” is the newest mantra for our illegal and immoral invasions and occupations of Iraq & Afghanistan. When the Bush-Cheney gang was behind it all, these so-called journalists bent over backwards to support their acts of aggression. More importantly, these pundits supported the obscene spending increases that the compliant Republican and Democrat Congress approved. This brings me to part 2 of my disgust.

The so-called progressives on MSNBC. I sat there the other night as Ed Shultz lambasted those of us who are against what is known as Obamacare: the cave-in to the private insurance megalith that rules health care forever. Shultz was indignant at the Republicans who are trying to derail this new law. Yet, he never will acknowledge that Obamacare, as it is called, will destroy the only hope we have for real health insurance reform, which is a Medicare for All first step. Of course, the Republicans are against the law for their own political reasons. After all, do you think a right wing ideologue like Justice John Roberts would vote to keep Obamacare if not for the fact that it ultimately will increase profits for the private health insurers? Trust me on this one: If the insurers do not like any part of the new law as hurtful to their profits, they will simply raise deductibles and co-pays. They will have millions of new customers too, mandated by law with threat of a tax for evasion. Yet, this is not the key reason why I for one have absolutely NO connection with the phony progressives out there.

There have been more drone attacks under Obama than during the eight years of their use by the Bush-Cheney gang. Gitmo is still open, rendition of suspects is still going on, and we still are in over 100 countries with over 800 permanent bases. We still occupy and kill and are killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yet, the real tragedy is that under Mr. Obama and his party, in collaboration with the Republicans, military spending goes up and up and up — to the tune last year of over $563 billion. Imagine what some of that money could have done to alleviate the housing mess or the need for more good paying jobs? Infrastructure repairs for our cities, our roads? How about having our National Guard out there doing what they were meant to do: help out in disaster relief? Nope! Where are the Ed Shultzs and Rachel Maddows, Chris Mathews, Al Sharptons et al.? Silence!

Someday, and I hope soon, Americans who now struggle to make ends meet will awaken from this 2-Party One Big Empire hypnosis. They will turn off the mainstream media, whether it be on radio or the boob tube, whenever a so-called ‘news or news talk show’ comes on. It is time to rally behind the need to pull back this military industrial empire; the same one that both General Smedley Butler (War Is a Racket) and President Eisenhower (“Farewell Address”) warned us about.

Phillip Anthony Faruggio is a free-lance columnist, environmental sales rep, and organizer of the ProActivists of Volusia. He can be reached at: paf1222@bellsouth.net. Read other articles by Phillip.

Monday, June 11, 2012

Mentally Challenged Media Attacks Obama for Not Compromising with Republicans

Mentally Challenged Media Attacks Obama for Not Compromising with Republicans










Despite the fact that President Obama has spoken of compromise throughout his presidency, CNN attacked the president for not compromising with Republicans.


 Here is the video:

http://cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/bestoftv/2012/06/10/exp-sotu-axelrod-part-1-june-ten.cnn.html



Transcript via CNN:

CROWLEY: Let me — since you brought up the $250,000 tax cut, should they or should they not be extended for those making over that amount –
AXELROD: Let me just — let me just — let me just clarify something. He wants $250,000 above and beyond the extension of the Bush tax cuts so let's make that clear, but anyway, go ahead.
CROWLEY: Let me just read you something that Claire McCaskill, Democrat from Missouri facing a tough re-election, had to say. "If you want to do something in the spirit of compromise, you don't start out by saying, I refuse to do this or I refuse to do that. It's not my preference to extend tax cuts to millionaires, but I want to keep every option open in the spirit of compromise." So it's not just Republicans. As you know, there are others, Bill Nelson of Florida, who have said I don't know, I don't know that we shouldn't go ahead and extend those tax cuts.
AXELROD: Candy, Candy –
CROWLEY: You've got problems in the Democratic Party as well, correct?
AXELROD: Candy, first of all let me say I agree with Senator McCaskill, that we ought to have a spirit of compromise, I watched –
CROWLEY: But the president said he'd veto it.
AXELROD: — I watched Governor Romney on the stage saying that he wouldn't accept one dollar of new revenue even for $10 of tax cuts. That's not the spirit of compromise. That's what is animating the Republicans in Congress. They share that view.
CROWLEY: Is the president veto threat a spirit of compromise?
AXELROD: Let me ask you a question, if we want to compromise, why don't we compromise on the thing that we all agree on? We all agree that we should renew those tax cuts for the middle class. Ninety — if they sent him a bill that would renew those tax cuts for 97 percent of the American people, the president would sign it today. If we want to –
CROWLEY: Sure, they'd agree to it –
AXELROD: Let's compromise on the things we can agree on.
CROWLEY: But obviously they know they would then lose their leverage because you wouldn't go back to do it for those that they want to continue –
AXELROD: Leverage for tax cuts for the wealthy. We have to make a choice as a country, Candy. We do have deficit issues, we do have debt issues. Are tax cuts for the wealthy more important than bringing down the deficits and investing in things like education and research and development and energy? The things that are going to grow our economy and grow the middle class. That's really what the debate is about.

Candy Crowley is becoming a Sunday regular when conservative media bias is discussed, but her claim that if Obama vetoes an extension of the Bush tax cuts, he is rejecting compromise was preposterous by even her standards. Crowley’s intentional ignorance would not be so aggravating if her profession was something other than a reporter at a national cable news network.

The fact is that this president spent more than half of his first term working towards compromise, and has been routinely bashed for it by the media and members of his own party. Obama was accused of caving by extending the Bush tax cuts. He was accused of caving again on the debt ceiling. Until the second half of 2011, the most common complaint from the left was that Obama "caved."
Over the past month and a half the media has complained about Obama attacking Romney's record, and criticized the president for being too aggressive, (As you know an aggressive Democrat goes against the right wing stereotype, which depending on the day of the week is that all Democrats are tyrants who are looking to run their lives, or Democrats are flower waving, weak kneed hippies who are afraid of a fight).

Crowley's latest adventure in pandering is a fine example of what happens to the media when they decide to check their intelligence at the door in order to appeal to a certain audience. A presidential veto does not signal an unwillingness to compromise. A veto a strictly an Executive Branch decision. An willingness to to compromise would occur if the president and legislative branch entered into negotiations and one side refused to give a single point, as the Republicans have done.

This sort of journalistic abandonment of basic human intelligence is why CNN has lost 52% of their viewers, and this is why Democrats should fall to the floor in convulsions of laughter when the right breaks out their tired old liberal media bias Trojan Horse.

As Democrats and progressive pick their jaws up off the floor as they absorb the latest media attack on facts and reality, understand that broadcasters are in bed with the GOP. They have billions of dollars in profits on the line in the 2012 elections. Media bias is real, and they will go to any absurd length to protect their financial interests.

Sunday, June 10, 2012

The Corporate Media Conspires With Republicans to Strengthen Citizens United

The Corporate Media Conspires With Republicans to Strengthen Citizens United






At the behest of corporate broadcasters, a single subcommittee vote by House Republicans killed an FCC disclosure guideline and strengthened the role of secret money in American politics.

The new FCC rule would have required broadcasters to post online who is buying advertising for political candidates. Currently, the only way those records can be inspected is by requesting to inspect them in person at each television station. By making the records accessable to all this new rule would have blown the veil of secrecy off the Citizens United based spending, which meant that Republicans had to kill it as soon as possible.

Republicans accomplished their goal by attaching a rider on to the FCC’s budget that prohibited them from spending any funds on disclosure rules.

The intrigue in this story comes from who was behind the effort to kill the new FCC rule. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) was behind the push to kill the new rules. Last month the NAB filed a lawsuit against the FCC claiming that the new rules were, “arbitrary, capricious, in excess of the commission’s statutory authority, inconsistent with the First Amendment, and otherwise not in accordance with the law.”

The FCC argued that, “The public file rules are a common-sense update by the FCC to move from paper to online access to public information in the digital age. The rules are consistent with Congress’s directive to ensure public availability while providing cost-savings for broadcasters."

Surprise!!! The corporate media doesn’t want you to know how much money they are making off of the Citizens United ruling.
Media reform advocates Free Press summed up the situation, "Some members of Congress, working at the behest of the broadcast industry, want to keep the public in the dark. The FCC's online political file rules will shine a brighter light on the political ads that have inundated local airwaves this year. Broadcasters spent nearly $14 million on lobbyists in 2011. Now they’re spending millions more on campaign contributions to buy support from some members of Congress — but that's a drop in the bucket compared to the over $3 billion in political ad revenues that television stations stand to pull in this election cycle…It's clear that the broadcast industry is pulling out all the stops to bury information about political ad spending on the public airwaves. What's more appalling is that some elected officials are willing to help them do it."

House Committee chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-KY) unbelievably argued that, “television station fiscal matters are private and should be kept private.” The Republican position is that even when broadcasters are using public airwaves, the American people have no right to know who is paying for the political ads that they are seeing.

It should be crystal clear now why House and Senate Democrats who are advocating for disclosure can’t get their message on television. Corporate broadcasters are spending millions of dollars to keep the American people in the dark about the impact of Citizens United. With the exception of Sen. Bernie Sanders sneaking in his plea for disclosure, broadcasters limit their discussion of Citizens United to its impact on elections.

However, the sordid story of the demise of the FCC disclosure rule reveals that there is a third player at the table with corporations and Republicans. America’s broadcasters have skin in the game, and if their choice is between an informed public and billions in profit, the broadcasters are going to sell out the American people and stand by their cash.

Tuesday, June 5, 2012

How the Corporate Media Obscure the Truth About Mitt Romney's 'Vulture Capitalism' at Bain

AlterNet.org

  ELECTION 2012  

The media's knee-jerk hostility to criticism of Wall Street is muddying the waters.

 
Photo Credit: ShutterStock.com
 
 
Were it not such a sad statement about how superficial our political discourse has become, the indignant defenses of Bain Capital by self-flattering “centrists” in the media would be almost comical.

The simple reality that has been totally obscured in most of the coverage of what has been reduced to a “political flap,” is that finance is what's known as an “intermediary good” – it doesn't produce anything directly. It can -- and does -- stimulate the larger economy. But the financial sector can also extract wealth from the real economy, at a cost.

The lion's share of Mitt Romney's fortune was made doing the latter through leveraged buy-outs (LBOs), a reality that Romney doesn't like to talk about on the campaign trail. Instead, he wants to talk about Staples, or Sports Authority -- two among a small handful of his venture capital deals -- and just about every mainstream media report elides the distinction between those very different things.

Perhaps the media, like much of the American public, doesn’t understand what LBO artists like Romney really do. Here’s a quick refresher.

Venture capital deals represent a very basic free-market transaction. Investors put money into a company at its early stages in exchange for a share of the company. If the start-up doesn't pan out, the investors lose their stake; if it grows and matures, they make a healthy profit. In venture capital deals, investors only make a profit when the company they put their cash into does well.

Leveraged buy-outs are a different creature entirely. LBO firms also deal with risky companies – usually those struggling to stay afloat – but they don't actually take on much risk themselves as they structure the deals so that they profit whether the target company becomes healthy and grows, or collapses, often under the weight of debt piled onto it by the private equity firm itself.
Here's how the deal works. The leveraged buy-out firm will put down a fraction of the cost of buying an ailing company. The balance of the transaction is borrowed, but the debt goes onto the books of the target company, not the private equity firm – the struggling company basically finances the lion's share of its own sale.

The target company's debt payments then increase significantly, and that debt service is written off, reducing its tax burden a great deal. This subsidy increases short-term revenues (at the expense of long-term debt) and that, in turn, is paid out to the firm's investors along with a fat stream of management fees that Romney and his partners skimmed off the top.

(The industry-standard structure of these deals is known as “2 and 20.” Management gets 2 percent of the capital they invest as a fee, and 20 percent of the profits that the fund realizes. That 2 percent represents between two to four times what the average management fees for a mutual fund usually run, and is collected regardless of how the fund does.)

This is a win-win deal for the leveraged buyout firm. A recent study by researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that the average tax benefit of these companies' increased debt-loads in 1980s equaled “10 to 20 percent of firm value,” which, as Mike Konczai noted recently, “is value that comes from taxpayers to private equity as a result of the tax code.

Now look at how this story has been covered. Let's focus on CNN, which is supposedly the most “neutral” of the cable news outlets.

Consider a remarkably obtuse “Letter to the President” penned by CNN political correspondent Tom Foreman – “an Emmy award-winning journalist whose experience spans more than three decades.” The thrust of it was that Newark Mayor Cory Booker “spoke truth to power” when he said he was “nauseated” by Democrats' criticism of Bain. Of course, nobody knows what was in Booker's heart, but we do know that he got $565,000 in campaign funds from Wall Street to get elected, with at least $36,000 coming from Bain and its employees, and in that context one has to be willfully naïve to jump to the conclusion that he was just speaking the truth as he sees it.

Then there was host Christina Romans saying that “what private equity does” is “comes in, cleans up a company, sells it, or moves it forward.” When Bain “cleans up” companies, more often than not it means looting pension funds, laying off workers, and saddling the firms with huge amounts of debt before flipping them.

Another anchor, Ashleigh Banfield, attacked Ben La Bolt, the Obama campaign's press secretary, saying, “Ben, come on, you and I also know that he had plenty of success, as the Washington Post has outlined many successes... that Bain Capital has had in creating jobs, in saving people's companies from going under.”

But Bain Capital was not in the business of creating jobs, or even saving companies over the long-term. Its model had a relatively low rate of success. A study by Deutche Bank found that 33 out of 68 major deals cut on Romney's watch lost money for the firm's investors. Its richest deals made up for the flops, however, and Bain's partners were guaranteed hefty fees regardless of how the businesses they “restructured” ultimately performed.

That gets to a crucial difference between venture capital and leveraged buy-outs. With the former, the private equity firm only makes money if the companies it invests in succeed. By using loopholes in the tax code, LBO firms are essentially guaranteed to make money – for their partners, if not always their investors – regardless of how their investments do. Yet David Gergen suggested on “Out Front with Erin Burnett” that attacks on Bain are attacks on “free enterprise.” “There has been, as you know, an anxiety, a fear and anger on the part of many in the business community by what they regard as a hostility toward private enterprise, toward business,” he said. “And the messages to -- that many are taking away from the president's campaign right now is not just about Bain Capital. It's about people who are in private sector.”

Erin Burnett crowed about a study, which found that “companies bought out by private equity firms lose about one percent of their workforce.” For Burnett, those layoffs “support the more positive view of private equity which is that firms like Bain take over weak or faltering companies where everyone might lose their jobs, build a stronger company where the remaining jobs are more stable.” But as Paul Krugman noted, “The real complaint about Mr. Romney and his colleagues isn’t that they destroyed jobs, but that they destroyed good jobs.”
When the dust settled after the companies that Bain restructured were downsized — or, as happened all too often, went bankrupt — total U.S. employment was probably about the same as it would have been in any case. But the jobs that were lost paid more and had better benefits than the jobs that replaced them. Mr. Romney and those like him didn’t destroy jobs, but they did enrich themselves while helping to destroy the American middle class.
And Burnett was echoing Bain's own talking points. The firm has claimed that only 5 percent of the companies it acquired went bankrupt “while under our control.” As the Washington Post pointed out, those were “the operative words in the Bain statement” That's because, as the Wall Street Journal discovered, once saddled with mountains of debt, more than four times as many companies with which Bain was involved – 22 percent – “either filed for bankruptcy or liquidated by the end of the eighth year after Bain invested.”

We hear a lot about how this is a good debate for the American people to have. And it should be. We should consider how our financial sector has become bloated, swimming in capacity the larger economy doesn’t need. Historically, it’s grown and contracted along with the business cycle. When the economy was going gang-busters and businesses were expanding, it was there to provide capital and insurance and connect investors with entrepreneurs and innovators. Then, when the business cycle took its inevitable turn and the economy slowed down, it would contract. But as the Associated Press noted, "when the Internet bubble burst in 2000, the sector never stopped growing. Instead, it ballooned over the past eight years to around 10 percent of the U.S. economy, puzzling economists."

We should also have a discussion of the influence the financial sector has on the behavior of the rest of the corporate economy. The original function of the financial markets -- to link investors’ capital with innovative firms -- has been turned on its head by Wall Street. Today, corporate behavior is very much dictated by the markets -- quarterly earnings, stock prices and the like -- and not the other way around. That’s not a good thing.

Lawrence Mitchell, a professor of business law at George Washington University, notes in his book, The Speculation Economy, that a survey of CEOs running major American corporations found that almost 80 percent would have "at least moderately mutilated their businesses in order to meet [financial] analysts’ quarterly profit estimates."
Cutting the budgets for research and development, advertising and maintenance and delaying hiring and new projects are some of the long-term harms they would readily inflict on their corporations. Why? Because in modern American corporate capitalism, the failure to meet quarterly numbers almost always guarantees a punishing hit to the corporation’s stock price.
These dynamics are epitomized by leveraged buy-out artists like Mitt Romney. So, yes, this would be a very valuable discussion to have, but the traditional media's mewling about people daring to criticize Bain, and their instinctive deference to Big Finance, are doing more to obscure the issue than illuminate it. And that's preventing us from having a real debate.

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet. He is the author of The 15 Biggest Lies About the Economy: And Everything else the Right Doesn't Want You to Know About Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America. Drop him an email or follow him on Twitter.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Too hot for TED: The Inequality Speech



Too hot for TED?

May 19, 2012   //   by boyce   //   Articles, Media Library  //  No Comments
Something funny happened when millionaire Nick Hanauer’s was invited to give a TED talk on income inequality in America. He advocated higher taxes on the rich – including people like himself. Then the good people at TED decided his talk was too “political.” They decided not to post it. Here’s an excerpt from Hanauer’s non-talk:
We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic  feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

 Read the full text of Hanauer’s non-talk here.

Restoration Roundtable Blog

The Inequality Speech That TED Won't Show You

May 16, 2012 | 2:26 p.m.
Friday update: Read the full profile of Nick Hanauer, and his millionaire's case for the middle class, here.

Prepare to meet Nick Hanauer. He's a venture capitalist from Seattle who was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. Today he's a very rich man. And, somewhat jarringly, he's screaming to anyone who will listen that he, and other wealthy innovators like him, doesn't create jobs. The middle class does - and its decline threatens everyone in America, from the innovators on down.

(RELATED: Why This Speech Was Too Hot for TED)

You'll read a lot more about Hanauer in the next installation of Restoration Calls, which drops tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the full text of a speech Hanauer gave in March at the TED University conference. You can't find the talk online, because TED officials have declared it too politically controversial to post on their web site. You be the judge:


It is astounding how significantly one idea can shape a society and its policies.  Consider this one.

If taxes on the rich go up, job creation will go down.  

This idea is an article of faith for republicans and seldom challenged by democrats and has shaped much of today's economic landscape.

But sometimes the ideas that we know to be true are dead wrong. For thousands of years people were sure that earth was at the center of the universe.  It's not, and an astronomer who still believed that it was, would do some lousy astronomy.  

In the same way, a policy maker who believed that the rich and businesses are "job creators" and therefore should not be taxed, would make equally bad policy.  

I have started or helped start, dozens of businesses and initially hired lots of people. But if no one could have afforded to buy what we had to sell, my businesses would all have failed and all those jobs would have evaporated.

That's why I can say with confidence that rich people don't create jobs, nor do businesses, large or small. What does lead to more employment is a "circle of life" like feedback loop between customers and businesses. And only consumers can set in motion this virtuous cycle of increasing demand and hiring. In this sense, an ordinary middle-class consumer is far more of a job creator than a capitalist like me. 

So when businesspeople take credit for creating jobs, it's a little like squirrels taking credit for creating evolution. In fact, it's the other way around.

Anyone who's ever run a business knows that hiring more people is a capitalists course of last resort, something we do only when increasing customer demand requires it.  In this sense, calling ourselves job creators isn't just inaccurate, it's disingenuous.

That's why our current policies are so upside down. When you have a tax system in which most of the exemptions and the lowest rates benefit the richest, all in the name of job creation, all that happens is that the rich get richer.

Since 1980 the share of income for the richest Americans has more than tripled while effective tax rates have declined by close to 50%.  

If it were true that lower tax rates and more wealth for the wealthy  would lead to more job creation, then today we would be drowning in jobs.  And yet unemployment and under-employment is at record highs.

Another reason this idea is so wrong-headed is that there can never be enough superrich Americans to power a great economy. The annual earnings of people like me are hundreds, if not thousands, of times greater than those of the median American, but we don't buy hundreds or thousands of times more stuff. My family owns three cars, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. Like everyone else, we go out to eat with friends and family only occasionally.

I can't buy enough of anything to make up for the fact that millions of unemployed and underemployed Americans can't buy any new clothes or cars or enjoy any meals out. Or to make up for the decreasing consumption of the vast majority of American families that are barely squeaking by, buried by spiraling costs and trapped by stagnant or declining wages.  
Here's an incredible fact.  If the typical American family still got today the same share of income they earned in 1980, they would earn about 25% more and have an astounding $13,000 more a year. Where would the economy be if that were the case?

Significant privileges have come to capitalists like me for being perceived as "job creators" at the center of the economic universe, and the language and metaphors we use to defend the fairness of the current social and economic arrangements is telling. For instance, it is a small step from "job creator" to "The Creator". We did not accidentally choose this language. It is only honest to admit that calling oneself a "job creator" is both an assertion about how economics works and the a claim on status and privileges. 

The extraordinary differential between a 15% tax rate on capital gains, dividends, and carried interest for capitalists, and the 35% top marginal rate on work for ordinary Americans is a privilege that is hard to justify without just a touch of deification 

We've had it backward for the last 30 years. Rich businesspeople like me don't create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an eco-systemic  feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That's why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.

So here's an idea worth spreading.  

In a capitalist economy, the true job creators are consumers, the middle class.  And taxing the rich to make investments that grow the middle class, is the single smartest thing we can do for the middle class, the poor and the rich.

Thank You.

The PowerPoint Slides That Were Too Hot for TED

May 16, 2012 | 5:14 p.m.


Read the backstory here.

Too Hot for TED: Income Inequality


Jeffery A. Salter
Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer
Updated: May 22, 2012 | 4:40 p.m.
May 16, 2012 | 3:03 p.m.
If you’re plugged into the Internet, chances are you’ve seen a TED talk – the wonky, provocative web videos that have become a sort of nerd franchise. TED.com is where you go to find Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explaining why the world has too few female leaders, or Twitter cofounder Evan Williams sharing the secret power of listening to users to drive company improvement. The slogan of the nonprofit group behind the site is “Ideas Worth Spreading.”
There’s one idea, though, that TED’s organizers recently decided was too controversial to spread: the notion that widening income inequality is a bad thing for America, and that as a result, the rich should pay more in taxes.
(RELATED: The Speech That's Too Hot for TED)

TED organizers invited a multimillionaire Seattle venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer – the first nonfamily investor in Amazon.com – to give a speech on March 1 at their TED University conference. Inequality was the topic – specifically, Hanauer’s contention that the middle class, and not wealthy innovators like himself, are America’s true “job creators.”
(RELATED: The Slides That Are Too Hot for TED)

“We’ve had it backward for the last 30 years,” he said. “Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs. Rather they are a consequence of an ecosystemic feedback loop animated by middle-class consumers, and when they thrive, businesses grow and hire, and owners profit. That’s why taxing the rich to pay for investments that benefit all is a great deal for both the middle class and the rich.”

You can’t find that speech online. TED officials told Hanauer initially they were eager to distribute it. “I want to put this talk out into the world!” one of them wrote him in an e-mail in late April. But early this month they changed course, telling Hanauer that his remarks were too “political” and too controversial for posting.

Other TED talks posted online veer sharply into controversial and political territory, including NASA scientist James Hansen comparing climate change to an asteroid barreling toward Earth, and philanthropist Melinda Gates pushing for more access to contraception in the developing world.

TED curator Chris Anderson referenced the Gates talk in an e-mail to colleagues in early April, which was also sent to Hanauer, suggesting that he didn't want to release Hanauer’s talk at the same time as the one on contraception.
Hanauer’s talk “probably ranks as one of the most politically controversial talks we've ever run, and we need to be really careful when” to post it, Anderson wrote on April 6. “Next week ain't right. Confidentially, we already have Melinda Gates on contraception going out. Sorry for the mixed messages on this.”
In early May Anderson followed up with Hanauer to inform him he’d decided not to post his talk.

National Journal e-mailed Anderson to request an interview about what made a talk on inequality more politically controversial than, for example, contraception or climate change. Anderson, who is traveling abroad, responded with an e-mail statement that appeared to swipe at the popularity of Hanauer’s speech.
"Many of the talks given at the conference or at TED-U are not released,” Anderson wrote. “We only release one a day on TED.com and there's a backlog of amazing talks from all over the world. We do not comment publicly on reasons to release or not release [a] talk. It's unfair on the speakers concerned. But we have a general policy to avoid talks that are overtly partisan, and to avoid talks that have received mediocre audience ratings."

You can read the text of Hanauer’s talk here.

You can read the full story of Hanauer and his warnings about the decline of the middle class on Thursday as part of National Journal’s Restoration Calls series.
Update: 4:09 p.m.

In a May 7 email to Hanauer, forwarded to NJ, Anderson took issue with several of Hanauer's assertions in the talk, including the idea that businesspeople aren't job creators. He also made clear his aversion to the "political" nature of the talk.
"I agree with your language about ecosystems, and your dismissal of some of the mechanistic economy orthodoxy, yet many of your own statements seem to go further than those arguments justify," Anderson wrote.

"But even if the talk was rated a home run, we couldn't release it, because it would be unquestionably regarded as out and out political. We're in the middle of an election year in the US. Your argument comes down firmly on the side of one party. And you even reference that at the start of the talk. TED is nonpartisan and is fighting a constant battle with TEDx organizers to respect that principle....

"Nick, I personally share your disgust at the growth in inequality in the US, and would love to have found a way to give people a clearer mindset on the issue, without stoking a tedious partisan rehash of all the arguments we hear every day in the mainstream media.

"Alas, my judgment - and it is just a judgment, and that's why my job title is 'curator' - is that publishing your talk would not meet that goal."
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Tuesday, May 22, 2012

TED Explained: BS worth spreading...

AlterNet.org


ECONOMY  

It has become an exclusive, expensive elite networking experience. Strip away the hype and you're left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur.

 
Photo Credit: R.Iegosyn via Shutterstock.com

 
There was a bit of a scandal last week when it was reported that a TED Talk on income equality had been censored. That turned out to be not quite the entire story. Nick Hanauer, a venture capitalist with a book out on income inequality, was invited to speak at a TED function. He spoke for a few minutes, making the argument that rich people like himself are not in fact job creators and that they should be taxed at a higher rate.

The talk seemed reasonably well-received by the audience, but TED “curator” Chris Anderson told Hanauer that it would not be featured on TED’s site, in part because the audience response was mixed but also because it was too political and this was an “election year.”

Hanauer had his PR people go to the press immediately and accused TED of censorship, which is obnoxious — TED didn’t have to host his talk, obviously, and his talk was not hugely revelatory for anyone familiar with recent writings on income inequity from a variety of experts — but Anderson’s responses were still a good distillation of TED’s ideology.

In case you’re unfamiliar with TED, it is a series of short lectures on a variety of subjects that stream on the Internet, for free. That’s it, really, or at least that is all that TED is to most of the people who have even heard of it. For an elite few, though, TED is something more: a lifestyle, an ethos, a bunch of overpriced networking events featuring live entertainment from smart and occasionally famous people.

Before streaming video, TED was a conference — it is not named for a person, but stands for “technology, entertainment and design” — organized by celebrated “information architect” (fancy graphic designer) Richard Saul Wurman. Wurman sold the conference, in 2002, to a nonprofit foundation started and run by former publisher and longtime do-gooder Chris Anderson (not the Chris Anderson of Wired). Anderson grew TED from a woolly conference for rich Silicon Valley millionaire nerds to a giant global brand. It has since become a much more exclusive, expensive elite networking experience with a much more prominent public face — the little streaming videos of lectures.

It’s even franchising — “TEDx” events are licensed third-party TED-style conferences largely unaffiliated with TED proper — and while TED is run by a nonprofit, it brings in a tremendous amount of money from its members and corporate sponsorships. At this point TED is a massive, money-soaked orgy of self-congratulatory futurism, with multiple events worldwide, awards and grants to TED-certified high achievers, and a list of speakers that would cost a fortune if they didn’t agree to do it for free out of public-spiritedness.

According to a 2010 piece in Fast Company, the trade journal of the breathless bullshit industry, the people behind TED are “creating a new Harvard — the first new top-prestige education brand in more than 100 years.” Well! That’s certainly saying… something. (What it’s mostly saying is “This is a Fast Company story about some overhyped Internet thing.”)

To even attend a TED conference requires not just a donation of between $7,500 and $125,000, but also a complicated admissions process in which the TED people determine whether you’re TED material; so, as Maura Johnston says, maybe it’s got more in common with Harvard than is initially apparent.
Strip away the hype and you’re left with a reasonably good video podcast with delusions of grandeur. For most of the millions of people who watch TED videos at the office, it’s a middlebrow diversion and a source of factoids to use on your friends. Except TED thinks it’s changing the world, like if “This American Life” suddenly mistook itself for Doctors Without Borders.

The model for your standard TED talk is a late-period Malcolm Gladwell book chapter. Common tropes include:
  • Drastically oversimplified explanations of complex problems.
  • Technologically utopian solutions to said complex problems.
  • Unconventional (and unconvincing) explanations of the origins of said complex problems.
  • Staggeringly obvious observations presented as mind-blowing new insights.
What’s most important is a sort of genial feel-good sense that everything will be OK, thanks in large part to the brilliance and beneficence of TED conference attendees. (Well, that and a bit of Vegas magician-with-PowerPoint stagecraft.)
Look at Jonathan Haidt’s talk on morality and its relation to political preference, which Dave Weigel linked to as an example of a political TED talk.
It’s a very good TED talk, and a good précis on Haidt’s interesting work. It’s also full of dubious assertions that Haidt doesn’t really have time to support with relevant arguments or data (morality is an evolutionary adaption — that is, biological?), gross flattery of the audience (“This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight — to fight wrongs, to solve problems”), and some decidedly flaky material on the superiority of Eastern religions. (There is, at least, no techno-utopianism to be found.)
And Haidt is talking about politics, or liberalism, in the way it’s commonly defined by the sort of liberal rich people who make up the majority of the media elite and the Hollywood elite and even the (more libertarian) Silicon Valley elite: “social liberalism.” He is talking about moral issues, and while economic issues are also moral, he does not mention social justice or economic redistributionism.
Because TED is for, and by, unbelievably rich people, they tiptoe around questions of the justness of a society that rewards TED attendees so much for what usually amounts to a series of lucky breaks. Anderson says he declined to promote the Hanauer talk because it was “mediocre” (that has never once stopped TED before, but we needn’t get too deep into that), but an email from Anderson to Hanauer on the decision was more a critique of Hanauer’s thesis than a criticism of his performance. Anderson cited, specifically, his concern that “a lot of business managers and entrepreneurs would feel insulted” by the argument that multimillionaire executives hire more employees only as a “last resort.” (The entire recent history of the fixation on short-term returns, obsession with “efficiency,”  and “streamlining” of most American corporations escaped the notice of Mr. Anderson, apparently.) I can’t imagine this line-by-line response to all the points raised in a TED Talk happening for an “expert” on any subject other than the general uselessness and self-importance of self-proclaimed millionaire “job creators.”

On his blog, Anderson attempted to deflate the growing anti-TED outrage by saying that while he supported Hanauer’s “overall stance” (a claim belied by his email to Hanauer), the talk was not good enough to merit posting.
At TED we post one talk a day on our home page. We’re drawing from a pool of 250+ that we record at our own conferences each year and up to 10,000 recorded at the various TEDx events around the world, not to mention our other conference partners. Our policy is to post only talks that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.
The word “partisan” or variations on it appear three times in Anderson’s explanation. The words “Democrat” and “Republican” appear only once in Hanauer’s talk, at the very beginning.

Anderson is using “partisanship” the same way idiotic centrist pundits like Thomas Friedman do: as a meaningless catch-all term for any political action or belief that they disagree with. “Nonpartisanship” is, as always, defined as “whatever I think is reasonable and correct.” Hanauer’s argument is certainly left-leaning, but it’s not “partisan” — the Democratic Party helped usher in our new Gilded Age, and its leaders do not have an anti-income-inequality platform, even if Democrats are more likely to speak out on the subject than Republicans.
“Partisan” is the word that reveals how full of shit Anderson is, even if he doesn’t know it. This is the blinding ideology of the globe-trotting do-gooder billionaire class that mistakes its self-evident dogma for a pure lack of ideology.
The people at Davos and in Aspen also think they’re saving the world, and the majority of them are also deeply involved in making it much worse for people who can’t afford to go to Davos and Aspen. It is no wonder at all that a talk on how their voluntary charity can better the lives of the unwashed is received with much more enthusiasm than one on how a better use for their money would be for them to have much less of it and everyone else a little more.

Hanauer’s talk was remarkably dry — and I am sure that was part of the reason for its burying, because TED truly values flash and surprise over substance — and not remotely mistakable for a pro-Democratic Party stump speech. But its central message was incompatible with the TED ethos: that TED People Are Good for the World.

Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene