Yet another reminder
Regular readers know that when conservatives talk about freedom and choice; when they complain about government waste, fraud, and abuse; when they raise the alarm about federal deficits; and when they talk about replacing the New Deal with a “better deal”; they are acting as Wall Street shills. They don’t care about the amount of government spending, only about into whose pockets that spending goes.
Nor do they care about improving not-for-profit government services they think should not exist if, even just in theory, they might be provided by the private sector at a markup. Like public education. Not exploiting government spending for private profit is a crime against capitalism.
We’ve seen in the last few day how commerical interest corrupts the delivery of accurate news. Adam Serwer wrote of Fox in The Atlantic (emphasis mine): “The Dominion filing drives home a few points. One is that there is a Fox News propaganda feedback loop: The network inflames right-wing conspiracism, but it also bows to it out of partisan commitment and commercial incentive.“
Fox has always been a propaganda operation. The Dominion filing just ices that cake with Tucker Carlson’s insistence that a fact-checker be fired because his audience doesn’t want facts. “The stock price is down. Not a joke,” Carlson texted nighttime anchors Laura Ingraham and Sean Hannity.
I mentioned the other day that I was listening to Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” One of his most-shocking and under-reported tales of the Trump administration involves Trump’s appointing commercial actors to run government agencies, operations they viewed as direct competitors. People like Barry Myers, CEO of Accuweather, whom Trump appointed to run the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a branch of the Department of Commerce (Quartz, 2018):
Lewis emphasizes the importance of this little-publicized agency: “[NOAA] had collected all the climate and weather data going back to the recordings made at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. Without that data, and the weather service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well,” he says. The weather service’s data is free to the public, and proprietary models used by private weather companies, including Accuweather, are powered by its raw data.
“By the 1990s, Barry Myers was arguing with a straight face that the national weather service should be, with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of Accuweather,” says Lewis. “The exception was when human life and property was at stake.”
What actors like Myers did when placed in charge of public, taxpayer-funded data (massive data collection no private actor would finance) was to take it offline, out of public view. Myers is in the business of repackaging and selling that public data back to those same taxpayers. Even tornado warnings that the National Weather Service issues for free. NOAA was not the only agency under Trump to restrict public accesss to public data.
Chief Data Scientist of the United States DJ Patil
saw “nothing arbitrary or capricious about the Trump administration’s” data suppression, telling Lewis that “Under each act of [such] suppression usually lay a narrow commercial motive,” followed by several examples he attributed to Trump (p. 188). Such special-interest corruption of political decisions is a failure inherent in the political process and hardly unique to the Trump administration, but Patil saw the problem as a rift coursing through American government which “was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money” (pp. 188–89).
Guess which type predominate in one of the major political parties?
Matt Taibbi (beore he went the way of Glenn Greenwald) wrote of two Americas in “Griftopia,” “one for the grifter class and one for everybody else. In everybody-else land … the government is something to be avoided.” For the grifter class, government is “a tool for making money.” Exhibit A: Grifter-in-Chief, Donald J. Trump. Exhibit B: Barry Myers. There are more besides.
Lewis told NPR:
So it matters — it matters a lot — who’s in these places. And it’s a problem when the person knows nothing; it’s an even bigger problem when the person has an incentive to screw it up.
Caveat emptor. Look for those narrow commercial motives.