The Problem With Politics

I just had to post this tweet storm by Charlotte Alter @CharlotteAlter because it is about the most astute political commentary I've seen lately.

I have spent the last three days speaking to almost every person I've seen on the streets in Kenosha and Racine and folks... I hate to break it to you... but nobody gives a shit about any of the scandals you're tweeting about
It is IMPOSSIBLE for me to describe how much they don't give a shit. It's like they give NEGATIVE shits.

There's this mentality on Twitter that's like "THIS one huge scandal will sink Trump with THIS group of voters" and I can conclusively report that this is bullshit

Here's why:

Many of the people who ~tweet about politics~ assume that voters behave according to a particular logic 

Like: Trump insults women, therefore women will dislike Trump
or
Trump breaks the law, therefore "law and order" R[epublican]s will break from him

YOU THINK voter logic is like: 

A > B > C >D 

IN ACTUALITY, voter logic is more like:

A > Purple > Banana > 18

(this is true on both sides by the way, not just MAGA folks)

Also: the most pervasive bias in political coverage is not left vs. right it's "follows politics" vs. "doesn't follow politics"

By default, nearly everyone who covers politics falls into the "follows politics" category, which makes it really hard to understand people who don't

Also: the most pervasive bias in political coverage is not left vs. right it's "follows politics" vs. "doesn't follow politics"

By default, nearly everyone who covers politics falls into the "follows politics" category, which makes it really hard to understand people who don't

Or politics people will be like "according to polls and modeling, if X% swing in Y direction then Z will happen" and normal people are like... whut

It's worth noting that man-on-the-street reporting is highly anecdotal! This is by no means a comprehensive analysis because it totally depends on who decides to talk to me.

But taken alongside polls and other data, it can be a helpful way to learn what's landing and what's not

One more point, re: EQ

A side effect of the data-fication of political expertise is that the people who can read polls are perceived to be smarter than the people who can read people.

So you have all these guys crunching numbers who aren't actually LISTENING to normal ppl

LISTENING means hearing what people are not saying as well as what they're saying.

LISTENING also means not ambushing voters like "but aren't you upset about X or Y?" or bullying them

LISTENING means making sure they feel like they're being heard and not judged

just saying there are a lot of politics dudes who love to talk and hate to listen

Google vs Republicans:

The big headline in the Guardian today is Google made large contributions to climate change deniers.

I don't think Google was targeting climate change, denial, but rather the reasoning is found in another article: The obscure law that explains why Google backs climate deniers.

Google and other large internet companies rely on section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to avoid liability for what people like me publish on my Google-owned blogs. This part of the CDA offers the internet giant legal immunity for content I create using their platform "in effect treating them as distributors of content and not publishers". And this seems fair enough. Google owns Blogger. There are millions of blogs on this platform and Google cannot reasonably moderate them expect retroactively if people complain. Google merely distribute my words. And I should be the one who has the liability.

Still, this doesn't explain why Google are giving a lot of money to quite so many right-wing think tanks. Nor why Google have been so defensive about being caught out.

“We’re hardly alone among companies that contribute to organisations while strongly disagreeing with them on climate policy,” the spokesperson said.

The reason they have been making contributions is that Republican senators, particular Ted Cruz have been calling for repeal of §320. And in particular Cruz argues that Google is biased in favour of the Democrats. That is that Google search results are biased. Here is Cruz grilling a Google representative on 16 July 2019:

Make no mistake, this is a disaster for Google! Because senators have power to change laws. If Google were deemed to be a publisher then they would be open to vast number of lawsuits from Republican supporters.

In Aug 2019 Slate ran an article with a bit more information on this. 

"Fox News’ sister network Fox Business had discussed the July Senate testimony of a psychologist named Robert Epstein, who said that “Google’s search algorithm likely impacted undecided voters in a way that gave at least 2.6 million votes to Hillary Clinton.” 

And President translated this into a Tweet that said in part "Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election!" Now this is an obvious distortion of the facts and one of tens of thousands of lies that Trump has told.

Epstein works at the American Institute for Behavioral Research. But Epstein was already in a long standing conflict with Google: "In 2012, Epstein publicly disputed with Google Search over a security warning placed on links to his website" (NYTimes). He subsequently made a career of criticizing Google and other big internet companies. And of course in the increasingly divided and paranoid politics of the US, Republicans latched onto this idea that Google had manipulated search results. 

Of course Google has responded through the usual channels - the mainstream media. They have testified in  But the parts of the media controlled by Republicans of the extreme views we associate with Cruz and Trump are not bound to give Google a fair hearing. The comments under that Ted Cruz video are disturbing in their partisan credulity and paranoia. 

The original liberal country, the home of liberal democracy, the nation that has inscribed liberalism into the very fabric of their constitution has produced a generation, of mainly younger white men, who hate liberalism. I saw yesterday that young white men have issued death threats to Greta Thunberg who they see as representing a vast conspiracy against them. Angry older white men like Jordan Peterson have only stoked the fire higher by confirming their fears of a liberal conspiracy. It's not quite clear what this liberal conspiracy will achieve apart from free healthcare and green energy, but the paranoiacs associate it with gun control and with progressive social values.

We often see negative comments about Google bowing to political pressure to censor results in China. We seldom see analysis of the kind of political pressure that Google has to deal with in the USA where society was always economically right wing, but has become increasingly socially conservative and authoritarian. And make no mistake, Epstein has put Google firmly in the cross hairs. 

Google should be scrutinised. It enjoys a monopoly on the market and it is not always a friend to the individual citizen. Issues about privacy, data, metadata, and censorship are important and Google should be seen to be conforming to social norms on these issues, or at the very least complying with relevant law. 

But the pressure Google face from paranoid Republicans and the rednecks who support Trump is something else. We can perhaps understand why they have resorted to giving large (but undisclosed sums) to right-wing think tanks. Google is fighting for survival and needs allies in the Republican Party to help thwart the insane clown posse that is Trump and his supporters. They cannot simply make a rational argument and present evidence because the other side don't operate on facts and reason. They operate on emotions and prejudice.

Still there is something fundamentally immoral about supporting these organisations that are contributing to climate change denial. Sure, other big companies are doing it, but since when has that been a valid moral argument? Two wrongs don't make a right. Climate change is the issue of our time. And even if we are wrong about everything and we clean up the environment only to realise that we needn't have, we still have clean air, clean water, lower deaths from pollution, and so on. We have to make the transition to a Green Economy anyway. Climate change just makes it urgent. 

Lewis Powell argued in 1971 that the American free enterprise system was under attack by progressive social attitudes (by which he specifically meant the environmental movement, but at that time presumably also the civil rights movement as well). 

The freedom of economic liberals has always been about the freedom to exploit the people and world for profit. The so-called free enterprise system only ever worked well for large multinationals that pursued and gained monopoly power. It wasn't free for anyone else. The free market ideology that combined classical economic liberalism and the new economic theory of monetarism never really addressed the complete lack of freedom of markets. Google is fighting to survive and against a pernicious trend led by a corrupt politician who is misusing his office, but they are using their wealth to buy political influence. This is the flaw in the free market system: those who could, always have manipulated markets for their own benefit. 

Capitalism always ends up being about the elites fighting for power over the workers. If that means drafting our workers to kill your workers, then so be it. The various factions get involved in the deluded idea that by backing the right tyrant they will get special treatment in the new dispensation. So suddenly the young right-wing white men of the USA are against Google, even though Google's contribution to their lives far exceeds that of senator Cruz and this cronies. It's all part of a sinister plot. 

All this is frankly terrifying. Trump, Cruz, the Republican Party, are corrupt and disinterested in dealing with climate change because it shifts profit making to other industries. Google, in a shameless attempt to buy political influence with the allies of these corrupt politicians in order to stave off a disadvantageous change i the law, are making large contributions to the very think tanks that fuel the Republican climate change denial. The only winner here is climate change denial. 

The UK where I live is scarcely any better. Venal millionaire politicians are destroying democracy for money.

Occupy Wall St's Rolling Jubilee!

This is such a brilliant idea. Occupy Wall St's Jubilee idea is to use donated funds to buy up poorly performing debts - which can be done for pennies in the dollar. Then they just forgive the debt. They call it a Rolling Jubilee (http://rollingjubilee.org/).

In America Banks sell debts which are bought up by debt collectors who then extort money from the debtor. A little bit of money goes a long way. With $50k they can buy $1 million worth of debt and forgive it. 

As well as the website there is a YouTube video:

One of the organisers, David Rees, also has his own blog How to Sharpen Pencils, and he describes how in the test run they used $500 to buy up $14,000 worth of debt, and just forgave it. There is a fund-raising event on 15 Nov which will be streamed on rollingjubilee.org.

The industrialised world is heavily over-burdened with debt. It is sucking the life out of our economies. We desperately need a debt forgiveness program - a Modern Debt Jubilee. I have been advocating Steve Keen's version of this, but it assumes that the government will face up to the private debt problem. The fact is that if we wait for the UK government to do something about private debt we'll probably die waiting. The government is deep in denial about private debt and have no policy to deal with it. So we need to help ourselves and this Rolling Jubilee idea is an excellent approach to it.

If you are American I urge you to donate money to this project. It doesn't have to be a huge amount, a lot of little amounts will do the job. $1 of debt costs around 4c to buy. So $1 buys ~ $28 of debt.

I will help promote & donate money to a UK version of this if someone will organise it.

Bernie Sanders: There's a War Going On.

Their greed has no end...

Senator Bernie Sanders, Speech to the US Senate, November 30, 2010. Transcript on the senator's website.

2008 "The US Bailout Won't Work"

Here's Steve Keen being interviewed in 2008, explaining why the US bank bailout wouldn't work. And of course he was right. It didn't work. Are they listening yet? Not hardly.