If you’re a progressive, it’s pretty easy to be smug right now. The right is preaching self-destruction to its own followers. “Don’t wear a mask. Don’t get vaccinated. Everyone else is a communist. The world is the same as it was 80 years ago. Donald Trump is some sort of saint, etc.” All the nut jobs are singing the same wannabe KFC commercial. It really is way too easy.
There’s a much uglier side to this total implosion, and it’s easy to ignore. Money now owns half of the US electorate. This is nothing to do with democracy or sanity. The people preaching this garbage are doing quite nicely, thanks for asking, and they don’t believe a word of it themselves. It’s a money grab, and it’s working.
It’s also business. FOX’s devoted viewers swept the August 2021 cable telecasts. (For those under 40 – Cable was a thing that used to happen…) Ideology? There is none. FOX lawyers famously stated no reasonable viewer could take Carlson seriously. So much for facts, you’d think, but there’s obviously a lot of money in they-there dummies. In this case, a tidy and prim few billion.
The sheer volume of money in US politics is an indicator of the depth of greed and corruption, and it’s a pretty grim picture. The figures for 2020 are astonishing. According to opensecrets.org, 2276 super PACs raised over $3.4 billion and spent $2.1 billion.
Hmmm…? Some might wonder where the loose $1.3 billion went. I would. Point being – This is the money known to be in circulation in this one area of US politics. A lot more is unpublicized and undisclosed.
In The New York Times, Paul Krugman makes the point very clearly that “politics” is now about corporate and billionaire self-interest to a whole new and very nasty level. The problem is that what’s visible obviously isn’t the whole story or anything like it.
Just think about this:
- How is actively promoting a pandemic that’s killing millions of people in anyone’s self-interest?
- Why the fanaticism for so many incredibly bad calls?
- How much total irresponsibility is required to be profitable?
- What’s the “business” side of the rabid polarization, apart from playing no-brainer chicken-level psychology?
Some business model you got there, grandma. Screw conspiracies and all their obscene useless thematic offspring. This is truly insane, and it’s fully-funded insanity. It’s deliberate, targeted, hate, of the US against the US. Money alone doesn’t quite cover any of these angles.
Presumably, all of this is done on a commission basis. What, do propaganda people get paid per thousands of infections, COVID deaths, hate crimes, per thousand words of propaganda, etc.? They might as well be because that’s the net effect.
All this without even mentioning the toxic effect of having every noun and verb in the last few years subject to the righteous scrutiny of paid trolls. These cut and paste, wrongly capitalizing, cretins don’t believe any of it either. Yet there they are, squeaking rabidly away around the world and particularly in the US.
What to do about it? A few things.
A lot of progressives will say, cynically and in this case probably rightly, that the suicidally psychotic ultra-right will exterminate themselves with a few more strains of COVID.
Well, OK, sure. Nice to know we’ve stopped caring about the objectively and existentially terminally and artificially handicapped, isn’t it? Some of these morons used to be people. …Or have we forgotten that in the luxurious exuberance of being able to look down so easily on such undiluted pure idiocy?
The other problem is less about ethics and more about functional issues –
The perpetrators of this utter lunacy won’t die out. These guys reap the rewards and don’t take stupid risks. They also don’t hang around when the money runs out or the methods stop working. They’ll go back to the usual income streams of municipal bonds, skank lobbying and other folksy ways of maiming societies.
The possible fix is tracking the money. Bitcoin and offshore tax havens are no defense if you look hard enough and add a few court orders in the right places. Identifying who did what and when could be quite simple. Typically, the money goes where the sleaze hangs out. Criminal associations are also inevitable in this line of “work”.
It’s the method of this madness that has to go. Politics is like the Easter Bunny; you only believe in it while the chocolate is on tap. This income stream for parasites has to be shut down, permanently, or “the bitch will give birth again”, to paraphrase Brecht. There’s some damn good protective case law waiting to happen, right here.
