Analysis of the major news-media’s declining credibility tends to revolve around the idea that objective journalism is being drowned out by foreign propaganda and ‘fake news’ spread by an inexhaustible legion of useful idiots via social-media. Though Democrats and Republicans disagree over whether it was the fault of Russians or the liberal elite, both narratives are unified by a singular premise that non-objective news has made it too hard for the stupid public to recognize the objective news. Of course, this assumes that such a thing as ‘objective journalism’ exists and that should raise the question — is there such a thing as objectivity in journalism? Where exactly is the line and, more importantly, who gets to draw the line between objective and non-objective news? And does journalistic objectivity even matter if enough of us just dispute the media that displeases us regardless of (alleged) objectivity?

Does Journalistic Objectivity Exist?

“The imaginary and the rational-the visionary and objective vision — hover close together”
- Donna Haraway

Most would agree that some kinds of information like measurements, records, and events that either did or did not occur are inherently objective enough to be communicated without much risk of misleading others. This would generally include any information available in public records — like the fact that Chuck Schumer received $102,988 in contributions from weapons giant Lockheed-Martin in 2018 — and measurements like that Three Mile Island is just 2.5 miles long, as well as historical events like the fact that the Allied Powers turned down a proposal by Stalin to attack Hitler before WWII on August 15th, 1939. Since numbers, dates, events, and the like can be verified not just by other journalists but by virtually anyone, this sort of objectivity is least problematic. Factual accuracy must obviously be a minimum requirement for media to even be considered as journalism but accuracy in fact, in itself, is hopelessly inadequate as a standard of journalistic objectivity or the credibility of news because media, as it actually exists, is never a raw feed of carefully-labeled numeric data.​..

The Poverty of Factual Accuracy

Not only does factual accuracy fail to account for most facets of real media, facts that are technically correct can be (and frequently are) used to support conclusions based on faulty reasoning. As an example, it would be technically correct to report that rates of shark attacks rise along with revenue from ice-cream sales and, by the simple omission of further context, that might imply that sharks like the taste of people who eat frozen-treats or that Big Ice-Cream is terrorizing the public with sharks. None of the facts in such a report would be false and yet clearly it would be just as untrustworthy as any ‘fake news’ story based on mistaken or made-up “facts.” That, of course, is a very simple, silly example but it serves to illustrate that, however accurate or verifiable or numerous, the facts are still a house of cards that is always one case of bad reasoning away from ruin.

But factual accuracy’s inadequacy becomes even more palpable considering that facts can be used to distort reality as easily as they can be used to communicate it. In the wrong hands, this sort of factual quackery can be tailored to suit just about any narrative as Zachary Goldfarb demonstrates in an article that appeared in the Washington Post, titled How We Misread the Numbers That Dominate Our Politics — :

I want to tell you the story of a president [who] came into office during a massive financial crisis, with the economy losing 800,000 jobs per month, and he turned things around. He created more than 5 million new jobs and saved the jobs of teachers who were at risk of being laid off. The manufacturing industry roared back, adding 460,000 workers. And after its worst decline ever, the housing market started to rebound, with home prices rising and the government helping millions of people avoid foreclosure.

Now I’d like to tell you the story of another president [who] also came into office during a massive crisis, but he hardly made things better. He created just 325,000 jobs over his term. More than 100,000 teachers were laid off, while the manufacturing industry lost 635,000 positions. Home prices slumped to a nine-year low, and 3 million homes went into foreclosure.

In both cases, the president in question is Barack Obama and, in both cases, the facts are accurate but each of these equally factual accounts conjures a reality that antagonizes the other. In these, as well as other useful examples in his article, Goldfarb shows just how strikingly malleable fact-based ‘objectivity’ can become in the insidious presence of confirmation bias and attribution errors (i.e. did the president affect the jobs of millions all by himself or were other factors at play too?). None of this is to say that facts are unimportant, of course. The point is that factual accuracy can’t even prove instances of news are more than literal nonsense, much less whether the news is objective or trustworthy.

Scientific Objectivity

Physics — arguably the most objective field there is — provides another good reason to be skeptical of journalistic objectivity. Among scientists who study subatomic particles, it is common knowledge that, as far as physicists can tell, it seems to be impossible to observe anything at all without interacting with it and, even if only very slightly, changing it. This is because of how perception works. When vision appears in the eye, it is no magical streaming-service but light particles rapidly striking the retina in specific patterns determined by the geometry of surfaces off which the light is scattering. And not only is this how vision works but also scientific instruments — telescopes, microscopes, or the like may alter the input and expensive widgets like electron-microscopes can even re-create the process with machine-like precision but, in the end, all of it is still just photons running into stuff. Ultimately, to see any part of reality, someone somewhere needs to hurl at least one photon right into its face. And the same basic thing applies to the other senses.

For scientists, this is no problem — the obvious solution is simply to acknowledge the subject’s impact on the object so that measurements can be corrected accordingly. But if so many rigorous scientists can freely admit that even the most empirical disciplines fall short of true objectivity, how can anchors and journalists claim to be anywhere near it?

The Myth of Objective News-Media

“When a saint walks by, the pickpocket sees only pockets” — Old Saying

The more fundamental issue with journalistic objectivity, however, is that the very act of selecting what news to report is irreversibly enmeshed in a journalist’s subjective experience. This article, for instance, is about the nature of objectivity in news media but — if its author were, say, a Californian living in Ventura County — then, the 100K acres lost to the Woolsey Fire would easily have seemed to be a more pressing topic and — if the author’s parents had been Honduran emigrants — he might have selected Trump’s present fiasco at the southern border as a topic instead.

To report something as news is always to also assert that a thing is important and worthy of being reported. Outside a small array of world-historical events that hold a universal importance that is likely to trump other headlines (think: world war, huge natural disaster, alien invasion, etc), the immense majority of news stories possess only a limited and subjectively-determined importance. Despite a near-universal awareness of the profound non-importance of celebrity gossip found in rags like US Weekly or People magazine, the fact of its existence is points to the existence of groups of people with definite interests in asserting such media’s importance. The existence of media devoted to fashion, finance, travel, etc., all reveal the existence of classes with enough money and leisure time to buy fancy clothes, invest, or take vacations and, in turn, the many forms of media in its totality reveals an intersectional kaleidoscope of class-interests that are served by each.

The Irrevocably Subjective Perspective of Class, Race, etc.

The flip-side, of course, is that stories with incredible importance for marginalized communities are only rarely considered ‘worthy’ of attention. Take what happened to water-protectors at Oceti Sakowin and other camps on unceded territory at Standing Rock during 2016 and ’17. The indifference of most news-outlets in regards to those events was not so much an issue of non-objectivity or inaccuracy as an instance of the commentariat and career-political class simply neglecting a story that was outside — and, in a lot of ways, in conflict with — their collective interest. Meanwhile, national newspapers kept printing whole sections of news about the stock market and nevermind that nearly 90% of all value in stocks is held by just 10% of everyone because those who own and manage news-firms genuinely cannot imagine what it is like not to care — to have no reason to care — about stocks.

Subjectivity, Objectivity, & Totality in News Media

To fully understand what is happening when objectivity is asserted in media, it is necessary to look at the greater context that objectivity relates to. In broad terms, a person is considered “objective” to the extent that she has severed herself from all subjective relation to the question at hand. In other words, an objective viewpoint is supposed to stand over, above, and outside the object of investigation. From the objective point of view, the world is presumed to appear as it would appear if there was no person to subjectively experience it, which is to say that a perspective of objectivity can only exist under conditions that are not just sanitized of meaning and incoherent by definition but impossible to boot.

In the case of news media, the object (ostensibly) is society itself, its internal motions of development, and its relations to forces external to society. An objective news-media would then look something like field-notes taken by a dispassionate alien observer documenting events from a vantage-point beyond the petty concerns of human and social existence. With that in mind, the question of whether The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Reuters, et al makes the cut is barely worth asking and the idea that a particular journalist or editorial board (or anyone, for that matter) is meaningfully nearer to such a real objectivity than the rest is not just stupid but arrogantly so.

Death to Objectivity, Long Live Situated Knowledges!

“My relation to my environment is my consciousness”
- Karl Marx

But given how absurd it is to ask subjective fragments for an objective image of the social whole, what then for journalism — ? Is news media doomed to slosh around the tepid swamp of relativism, eternally frustrated by an utter void of certainty in a postmodern hellscape? Not exactly. It is not just valid but useful and necessary to distinguish accurate from inaccurate news-media but to claim greater objectivity beyond matters of fact is ultimately rooted in the appeal to spooky authority. In her 1988 essay on the topic, feminist scholar Donna Haraway identifies this as a “conquering gaze from nowhere,” arguing that notions of ‘scientific objectivity’ tend to privilege the views of dominant social-classes at the expense of others and that objectivity could be more usefully re-framed in terms of situated knowledge. “The moral is simple,” Haraway explains, “only partial perspective promises objective vision.”

“The ‘eyes’ made available in modern technological sciences [telescopes, electron microscopes, et cetera] shatter any idea of passive vision; these prosthetic devices show us that all eyes, including our own organic ones, are active perceptual systems, building on translations and specific ways of seeing, that is, ways of life” [emphasis mine -JL]

Rather than abstracting a disfigured reality as it would be under imagined objective conditions — that is, conditions, which above all should never actually be observed — valid observations and analyses can be engaged as knowledges that are situated in shifting social, economic, and historical edifice. To access more rigorous analyses of media, critical thinkers must abandon the indefensible idea that factual instances of media somehow possess unequal yet non-measurable claims to objectivity.

The concept of objectivity is valid in fields of study that work with abstraction intentionally like philosophy and epistemology — but the concept is dysfunctional when applied in fields that are practical, social, material, human. Approaching media as a constellation of what Haraway’s essay describes as “detailed, active, partial way[s] of organizing worlds” makes everyone who participates in making or presenting knowledge “answerable for what we learn how to see.” Rather than taking the uncritical relativist approach of liberal trash-philosophers who legitimize every opinionated bumper-sticker as part of a rainbow of equally valid views, instances of media can be taken as narratives that are situated at definite locations in history and class-society.

CONCLUSION?

Pundits, journalists, and media executives alike exist as living, breathing intersections of social class, sex, race, and nationality that shape the narrative they present and, insofar as a story is accurate in fact and in good faith, all of this should enrich and contextualize the story, not compromise it. Approaches that exclusively seek the ‘objective’ minimize, erase, and dismiss all of this critically enriching information as subjective waste-matter that is, at best, irrelevant. But even more interesting is how convenient this is for those privileged few who never want to discuss things like inequality, systemic racism and sexism, worker exploitation, the literal fact† that capitalist vampire-squids are sucking out the planet’s insides, or other things that might disrupt the stasis of the present order.

The last thing to understand is that there is no conclusion here — or at most, a partial one — because anything else would miss the point, which is that real understanding never concludes. To conclude is to circumscribe the Narrative, to define the limits of what is true and valid, and to say that no more needs to be included because what is essential has already been stated. And objectivity — that conquering gaze from nowhere — is just a spectre often invoked to imbue these conclusions with an air of authority and finality that neither privilege nor complacency deserves.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

† It is also a fact that — after centuries of obstinate abuse by literally everyone, including Charles Dickens and Charlotte Brontë — every major dictionary now officially defines one or more additional senses of the word ‘literal’ so that the word can, inarguably, be literally used to mean ‘virtually,’ ‘figuratively,’ or as a hyperbolic and ironic intensive.

Journalism Is Never Objective: News-Media Objectivity Is Ideology was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With the urgent findings of last month’s IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C — an assessment of the scientific, technical, and economic research related to climate change by thousands of scientific experts — the political economy of ecological crisis is more crucial than ever. Sadly, the economics of climate change are mostly presented from a viewpoint that cannot imagine solutions outside the capitalist system and the result is a discussion that is less about the transition to a sustainable system than how to make that transition profitable enough to attract investors. If this assumption — that the strategies available to address climate change are constrained by ‘the market’ — must be made, then of course the only real question is whether scientists can find a way to lower the investment risks of human survival in time for Wall Street to finance it before Lower Manhattan joins the Upper Atlantic.

It is therefore high time we reexamine this assumption.

The IPCC Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C:
What Is to Be Done?

“This report gives policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change while considering local context and people’s needs. The next few years are probably the most important in our history”
- Debra Roberts, IPCC working-group III co-chair

The good news is that scientists from across the world have analyzed over 6,000 studies and concluded that it is possible to limit global warming to 1.5°C using today’s technology — but there is a catch. Though it is possible within the laws of physics and chemistry, it would require unprecedented efforts at a planetary scale to pull off the greatest hustle in world-history (and probably galactic or even universal history) to transform the global energy-system, overhaul supply-chains, and replenish a pilfered ecosystem but — and here’s the kicker — it all needs to be halfway done in about 12 years.

As for how it might be done, the IPCC special report offers an array of plausible scenarios — some of them hold the line at 1.5°C whereas others rely on more-intensive CO2-removal to overshoot and pull back — but the bottom line of any good scenario is to reach net-zero emissions around mid-century. As the report states bluntly, this would require greenhouse-gas emissions to fall “by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030” — which is about 60% from today’s levels — and the only way to do that is “by broad transformations in the energy, industry, transport, buildings, agriculture, forestry, and other land-use sectors.”

Concrete Actions That Address the Climate Crisis

To stabilize global temperature at any level, ‘net’ CO2 emissions would need to be reduced to zero. This means the amount of CO2 entering the atmosphere must equal the amount that is removed. Achieving a balance between CO2 ‘sources’ and ‘sinks’ is often referred to as ‘net zero’ emissions or ‘carbon neutrality’
- Chapter Two, IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C

Chapter two digs into how a “whole-system transformation” could work, comparing the advantages and drawbacks of various policies, including “fiscal and structural reforms, public procurement, carbon pricing, stringent standards, information schemes, technology policies, fossil-fuel subsidy removal, climate risk disclosure, and land-use and transport planning.” Overall, the report identifies “four central options” to reduce emissions, which are:

1. Decrease Demand for Energy
2. Electrify Energy-Services
3. Decarbonize Power-Generation
4. Decarbonize Non-Electric Fuel Consumption

Very broadly speaking, energy demand can be reduced (1) by increasing energy-efficiency (like fuel-efficient technology, buildings that use less energy for heat, ‘smart-meters,’ etc), gas-powered services can be refitted to use electricity (2), the power sector can be decarbonized (3) by solar, wind, and other renewable installations, and non-electric fuel consumption can be decarbonized (4) by using biodiesel, fuel-cells, and other low-carbon alternatives to fossil-fuels like petroleum. But these are just a handful of the many things that can be done about climate change. There is no shortage of concrete solutions.

Aside from the technical challenges that can only be discovered and solved through implementation, the only major obstacle to achieving all of this and more is the political obstacle.

The Chimera of ‘Sustainable Capitalism’

“Capitalism is inherently anti-ecological. Competition and accumulation constitute its very law of life […] In a society of this kind, nature is necessarily treated as a mere resource to be plundered and exploited. The destruction of the natural world, far being the result of mere hubristic blunders, follows inexorably from the very logic of capitalist production”
- Murray Bookchin

The central obstacle is the doctrine that the present ecological crisis can — and, indeed, must — be resolved under capitalism and that sufficient reforms are possible within its institutional-framework of private property and competitive exchange. This ideology is why so much of the Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C had to be about the “major shift in investment patterns” that would be required before humanity can stop killing itself. Rather than taking the definite actions that would halt global warming — which, it bears repeating, are known and feasible — liberal investors like Al Gore claim that “companies and investors will ultimately mobilize most of the capital needed to overcome the unprecedented challenges we now face.” Meanwhile, one of Gore’s heroic investors, hedge-fund manager Micheal Nock, was telling the Guardian that the rich are dropping billions on so-called ‘boltholes’ or luxury climate-fortresses in remote locations, saying “it’s in the back of everybody’s mind at the moment. If there are, shall we say, changes, where can we go?”

These politicians and the shareholders they serve would have the world believe that it was never capitalism as such that destabilized global ecosystems to make money but only the “unsustainable capitalism.” In the fantasy-world of liberals like Gore, the centuries-long process of profit-fueled global warming will simply grind to a stop by asking greedy investors to make greener investments. The “fundamental problem,” as billionaire Elon Musk claims , is not the existence of “an unpriced externality” to the market but the existence of an unpriced internality.

Crisis & The Internal Logic of Capitalism

Capitalism is rooted in an internal logic that organizes labor and resources to increase the production of exchange value — or, more simply, things are produced for money, not for how useful they are. The only way this tendency toward constant expansion of value can be realized is by a process of capital accumulation based on rising productivity, which in turn must cause the average rate of profit to gradually fall so that further accumulation requires an acceleration of productivity-growth — then, productivity rises, capital accumulates, profit-rates fall, and round and round it goes. Since it is impossible to accelerate productivity for all eternity, this process eventually leads to the development of crises of over-production and under-consumption, where exploitation of labor and natural resources reaches increasingly destructive levels as to avoid breakdown of production.

The inevitable bottom-line, in any case, is that continued use of fossil-fuels, as well as extraction of resources from vulnerable ecosystems, manufacture of inefficient vehicles, cost-saving pollution, etc., generates loads of profit and will continue to do so until it is stopped because that is internal to how capitalism works. And what about re-configuring global power-production to use renewable, non-private energy-sources, constructing extensive new public-transit systems, ecological restoration — ? If it was lucrative, investors would have been there long before this discussion began and the notion that any of this is likely to wind up being profitable is exactly the overly-desperate sort of optimism that the planet can no longer afford.

Socialism — or Extinction!

Any plan to restructure such prosperous sectors of the economy is going to conflict with the short-sighted interests of private capital that are advanced by both major parties — however, the working classes have the world to gain from that endeavor. Even if it may be bonkers to envision replacing the capitalist state with rule by the working majority in less than a decade, the alternative is so spectacularly tragic that we are practically forced to. Make no mistake — the next pages of history will tell only one of two stories. Either society transforms its economic base to reach net-zero emissions in a few decades or begins its hellish descent into a sweltering dystopian twilight of famine and war and the oceans, emptied by extinctions, will rise and crash on new shores on mountainsides.

In light of all that, it seems prudent to at least consider what could be achieved if the ordinary people of the working majority were to — hypothetically,† of course — seize the apparatus of the state from these wealthy psychopaths and re-calibrate it to fix this absurd mess. To elaborate on this line of thought, the following section presents a policy-framework that could directly address ecological crisis from a point of view that assumes the state-power has already been brought under control by the classes who make up the working majority for the purpose of advancing their common interests.

[Note: the author chose to limit his consideration to the US as he feels it is not his business to tell people of other nationalities what to do; that being said, much of it may also be broadly applicable in other national contexts]

What an Economic Plan to Fix the Climate Crisis Might Look Like

“World history would indeed be very easy to make if the struggle were only taken up on condition of perfectly favourable chances”
- Karl Marx

The first thing would be to open the throttle on spending, mobilizing the idle workforce by funding a workers’ self-managed federal job-guarantee, as well as programs to assist workers in establishing construction co-ops capable of building new infrastructure for transportation and energy and to assemble movable labor-armies led by workers for large-scale reforestation and similar efforts. Recent unemployment numbers from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics show about 12.6 million under- and unemployed workers and, if the 524,000 ‘discouraged workers’ whom the BLS left out are added, the total US idle workforce may be just over 13 million workers. Using the earnings paid by federal, state, and local governments to employ all US public-sector workers to create a rough estimate, employing the 13 million in the idle workforce at a similar rate might run about $52.7 billion and, to put this in perspective, that is just 8.2% of the current US military budget.

US Armies of Labor & Mass Reforestation

With up to 13 million new workers, a wide array of initiatives are possible and those presented here should only be taken as an incomplete list of potentially helpful actions. On top of the obvious tasks of building solar, wind, and other renewable installations, research suggests that 27 million acres — or about the size of Kentucky — could be reforested by an investment as small as $17 billion. Such a program could remove 1.1–1.6 giga-tonnes of CO2 yearly, offsetting the global carbon-budget up to -2% over the next century. From a perspective of environmental and economic justice, reforestation has an added advantage of not being confined to any particular area, opening the possibility for US armies of labor to assist other nations (by invitation, of course) in restoring ecosystems historically damaged by US military and economic imperialism.

Large-Scale Public Improvement of Energy-Efficiency

Starting with their own homes and communities, worker-led armies of labor should initiate ambitious energy-efficient improvements to buildings in all sectors alike from home-weatherization to reduce energy-use in heating and air-conditioning to the electrification of services and installation of smart-meters. The principle of “taxing bads, not goods” could be applied in matters of energy efficiency — while lifting taxes on earned income, taxes can be levied on cubic-feet of living space to discourage the absurdly high ceilings the rich seem so fond of, as well as on fuel consumption. And an industrial carbon-tax goes without saying, of course.

Channeling Capital Flows into Clean Energy

To fulfill any of the scenarios projected to limit warming to 1.5°C, present investment patterns need to change dramatically to the tune of anywhere from $800 billion to $2.9 trillion with capital flowing from high-emitting sectors into sustainable power and technology. Although the margin of error is wide due to the chaos that inheres in financial markets, annual investments from now to 2050 specifically need to average somewhere in these ranges:

Solar Power: $90 billion — $1 trillion
Wind Power: $100 billion — $350 billion
Nuclear Power: $100 billion — $250 billion
Power Transmission/Distribution/Storage Tech: $300 billion — $1.3 trillion

Additionally, around $1 trillion would have to be pulled from current investments in fossil-fuel extraction and power-generation. To irrigate existing flows of capital into the relevant industries, every tax that might conceivably impact firms that are implementing or developing these renewable technologies ought to be lifted and aggressive incentives put in place. To make up as much of the difference as possible (and bear in mind these projections are global averages), clean-energy subsidies should be created and continually adjusted to target the levels of solar, wind, and nuclear-power investment that are consistent with 1.5°C scenarios.

De-Subsidization & Gradual Expropriation of Fossil-Fuels

Since it would be counter-productive to antagonize private business without good reason — and especially smaller owner-proprietors who have more in common with workers than big capitalists — the owners of energy, transportation, and other relevant firms should be given every reasonable incentive to cooperate voluntarily with the low-carbon conversion of industries. To the greatest extent possible, the administrative and organizational experience of cooperating business-owners should be leveraged to assist with the transformation of capitalist society. That being said, the US is home to 5 of the top 20 corporate emitters (Chevron, ExxonMobil, ConocoPhillips, Peabody Energy, Consol Energy Inc) that are altogether responsible for over 9% of global emissions since 1751 and — especially considering that all these firms knowingly orchestrated disinformation-campaigns to systematically delay climate-action for decades — not everyone should be left off the hook.

With robust unemployment-benefits in place for workers transitioning from affected industries, all fossil-fuel subsidies will need to be phased out rapidly with harsh penalties imposed on private firms that attempt to foist the costs on employees or consumers by price-hikes, wage-cuts, layoffs, and the like. While taking care not to suppress power production beyond what renewables can replace, a heavy progressive tax on emissions from industrial and energy-sector activity would act as a lever to gradually wrest capital from high-carbon energy firms as renewable outputs increase and to oblige private firms to make improvements, minimizing emissions from production.

Conversion of the Military to an Ecological Rescue Force

The US, in particular, is uniquely poised to eliminate a relatively massive amount of emissions by closing the absurd number of military-bases it maintains worldwide. Tens of thousands of troops with all their tanks and hummers and jets could be pulled from the Korean Peninsula alone, which would not just free up significant heaps of resources by reigning in the single largest institutional carbon-emitter but also resolve the world’s last extant nuclear flash-point. US forces in Korea, however, are dwarfed by another 40,000 or so stationed at 112 bases in nearby Japan — and even all that accounts for just a fraction of US bases in the south Pacific.

The strategic positioning of US bases worldwide may also be an opportunity to re-purpose the military’s considerable resources by converting some of this network to provide relief during natural disasters, particularly for the small island-nations most likely to be impacted by warming-driven extreme weather events. Aside from bases deemed fit to re-purpose, however, a rapid shut-down of the war-machine deserves priority for the simple reason that the military is likely responsible for around 80% of US government fuel-consumption, although no exact figure exists as it is exempt from any requirement to track emissions.

Toward a Planetary Socialist Struggle for Ecological & Human Liberation

The most important thing is to understand that a better world is possible. Not just possible in theory or possible to imagine but physically, chemically, technically — it is actually possible. The specter of impossibility has already been banished from every sphere of human endeavor except the political sphere. An overwhelming world-majority recognizes anthropogenic climate change as the existential threat that it is — even the United States, where the science-deniers are now outnumbered 5-to-1 — and the consensus of the international science-community is that humans already possess the power and the technology needed to fix things.

And yet only 6% think that nations can and will succeed in combating climate change. That is where we are — 6%. For every 20 random passersby on the street, there is just a slight chance that more than one would admit to being crazy enough to think the situation is going to improve. There exist sparks of hope — the spread of indigenous resistance and direct action is a major cause for hope and, hell, we even have a few socialists in congress now (and one just helped occupy Nancy Pelosi’s office to demand a Green New Deal). But those sparks must be kindled if they are to become the great conflagration that is necessary. To steal the the words of one of the old revolutionaries — there are moments in history when a desperate struggle by the masses, even for a hopeless cause, becomes necessary.

And friends — this is one of those moments.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

Economics of Climate Change: How to Stop Global Warming by 2030 was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Democracy, by definition, is a popular concept and, in the theater of politics, a popular concept is an important one. States usually take care to maintain democratic appearances with their populations and the international perception of democracy is often what determines whether the press refers to a nation’s leaders as a government, a regime, or a dictatorship. Since it is impossible to ask a whole population whether it feels enfranchised or not, the integrity of democracy must be inferred with statistics by looking at voter participation, exit polls, public-surveys, and other data. Of these, one of the more important is voter-turnout and — with mass media being such a minefield of dishonest statistical figures and the 2018 midterms being just around the corner — it can be handy to know how turnout is calculated…

How to Calculate Voter-Turnout & Fight the Dark Side of Statistics

Without voter-turnout, it would be hard to judge whether an election is meaningfully democratic because turnout is what tells us how much of a population actually participated in the collective decision-making process otherwise known as democracy. If just 10% of a country’s people votes to elect their leaders, for instance, only a cynic would call it democracy — but if 90% participates in the elections, it would be hard to characterize it as anything else. Turnout isn’t everything, of course — in a situation where a state only allowed one candidate to run, for example, or where systematic violence was used to bully people into voting a particular way, such elections could not be democratic no matter how many ‘voted.’

But so long as no disqualifying anti-democratic shenanigans occur, turnout is pretty useful for evaluating the quality of elections and there are two basic ways to measure it — one uses the VAP or voting-age population and the other uses the VEP or voting-eligible population.

Voting-Age vs Voting-Eligible Population: a Critical Comparison

Calculating voter-turnout using a nation’s VAP is pretty straightforward — the number who voted is simply divided by the number who are old enough to vote. It is a simple fraction, like so:

Number of Votes / VAP = % Turnout

When turnout is calculated using the voting-eligible population or VEP, the number of people who voted is divided by the result of subtracting the people designated by the state’s authorities as non-eligible to vote from the total of the voting-age population.​ Some algebra, along with some research into the state’s electoral laws, is needed to figure out the VEP-based turnout:

Number of Votes / (VAP — Non-Eligible Population) = % Turnout

Without getting too entangled in the gazillions of non-essential details, these are the two major approaches to turnout — only one of them is useful, however.

How Measuring Voter-Turnout w/ VEP Is Misleading

To illustrate why VEP should never be used to calculate turnout, consider the fact that Saudi Arabia kept women from voting until just 3 years ago in 2015. Turnout figures calculated with VAP would clearly show that half the people were disenfranchised by the Saudi monarchs — a VEP-based turnout figure, on the other hand, would suggest Saudi Arabia was a functional democracy. And in the technical terminology used in the field of statistics, this type of thing is known as horseshit. Using VEP to measure turnout basically lets a nation’s political-authorities customize the equation that is meant to determine whether its elections are “free and fair” — a flaw so spectacularly fatal that it defeats the whole purpose of turnout before the measuring even begins.

Case in Point: VEP vs VAP Turnout, 1989 South African Elections

As a more concrete example, consider the turnout rate for the 1989 elections held in apartheid-era South Africa. At the time, only whites were eligible to vote and, with this nation being located in Africa and everything, this policy tended to exclude quite a lot of people, by which the author means almost everyone. If the South African voting-eligible population is used, then it appears that there was an impressive turnout for 1989 because a total of 2.2 million or about 87% of 2.5 million suspiciously-pale voting-eligible South Africans turned out to vote. See:

2,157,593 / 2,478,930 = 0.87037 or about 87%

In reality, of course, the 1989 elections were a reprehensibly illegitimate farce — the actual turnout rate, calculated honestly by using South Africa’s voting-age population¹ as the denominator, was really just 12.7% —

2,157,593 / 17,047,560 = 0.1265 or about 12.7%

The Distortion of US Voter-Turnout Today

Though apartheid South Africa and the Saudi regime in Arabia are some of recent history’s more dramatic cases, the erasure of whomever election-authorities label ‘ineligible’ from voter-turnout figures is so widely accepted among the mass media commentariat that the legitimacy and usefulness of such calculations is rarely questioned. This enables countries like the US to erase a few percentage-points from its population — mostly People of Color — with the flick of a pen by denying voting-rights to incarcerated citizens, along with a few million more felons disenfranchised by state-level laws (most of whom are also People of Color).

6.1m disenfranchised felons & prisoners / 245.5m VAP = 0.0248
or about 2.5%

And 2.5% of the US-American adult population is erased — just like that. 7.7% of Black US adults, erased — just like that. The disenfranchisement of these unlucky, mostly non-violent, mostly Black and Brown people is not accounted for in the VEP-based figures that US news-media seems to favor. Among many others excluded from these statistics are about 22 million lawful residents and other human-beings whose citizenship-related fees and paperworks have yet to find their way through the bureaucratic labyrinth of the US immigration process.

22m / 245.5m = 0.0896 or about 9%

And another 9% of the US adult population — along with the 2.5% erased by incarceration or past conviction — disappears into the statistical void of ineligibility and, at the same time, US voter-turnout grows by as much as 11.4%.

VAP Is Ethically & Empirically Superior to VEP

In addition to providing a way for despotic states to edit their own turnout statistics by restricting eligibility to whomever they please, the use of VEP also sabotages the scientific usefulness of turnout data. Since demographic traits like age exist in populations of all nationalities, VAP-based turnout in different countries can be compared, allowing scientists to study how different forms of democracy and election-systems may affect levels of voter-participation. Since ‘eligibility’ is a legal construction that differs depending on the political-leadership of various nation-states at any historical moment, turnout measured using VEP cannot be compared with data from other countries or even to the same country’s past and future turnout because eligibility requirements (like most laws) tend to change over time.

Real Voter Turnout Is Always VAP, VEP Only Distorts It

At the time of writing, the 2018 US midterm elections are only weeks away and that means we are all about to hear a ton of analysis and hot takes from the news-media commentariat, much of which will inevitably deal with the impact of voter turnout. Many of these numbers will ignore the tens of millions of disenfranchised people living in the land of the free because ignoring them is what allows everyone else to continue believing they live in some kind of democracy or, at the very least, an acceptably-democratic republic. But this is a fantasy that cannot withstand an honest look at the numbers. For the sake of those whose voices are silenced to prop up the fantasy, it would be good if those whose voices are still audible would use them to call out the collaborators whose bad statistical analysis helps to make such a farcical democracy possible.​

In solidarity,
John Laurits

Notes:
¹ Due to a lack of reliable demographic data for age distribution in the South African population prior to the 1994 elections, I’ve estimated the South African VAP for 1989 based on the ratio of voting-age South Africans to the total South African population 3 years later in 1994. My figure for the 1989 VAP is based on what I judge to be the reasonable assumption that the VAP-to-total-population ratio did not change significantly in the 5yr period from 1989–1994. For transparency’s sake:
(1994 est. pop / est. VAP) 23,063,910 / 40,436,000 = 0.57038, or ~ 4:7 and ~ 57% ;
(1989 est. white pop. X 0.57) 4,349,000 X (0.57) = eligible white population of 2,478,930 or about 2.5m

VAP vs VEP Voter Turnout Calculation & the Dark Side of Statistical Figures was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In 2015, studies estimate that US renters paid $535 billion to landlords in residential rents. To put this in perspective, $535 billion is about enough to give $15,000 to every human being in the US state of California. It would also be enough to replace every page of every book in the US Library of Congress¹ with $100 bills. And if a person stood outside of Walt Disney World every day from open to close, handing $30,000 in cash to each individual visitor, it would take a year to hand out $535 billion. But what exactly did this massive sum of money actually pay for? Why did people start paying landlords in the first place? And do lands really need lords?

The Historical Origin of Landlords:
Feudalism & the Medieval Politics of Land

Long before the blossoming of modern technology and the dawn of the industrial era, humanity occupied only a fraction of the lands it does today. Between the hubs of ancient commerce, an immense wilderness existed that (legally speaking) was the property of no one and even land that had already been settled was likely to be managed communally. In parts of West Europe, wild and communal lands were (and are still) called “commons” and those who could not or did not wish to make a living in the town often had the option to subsist by farming common land or to join a communal farming-village that was already established. Similar forms of non-private, custom-based and communal systems of land-use existed across the globe in the pre-industrial ages for tens-of-thousands of years — until a few centuries ago.

Pre-Capitalist Society: The Feudal Mode of Production

Before modern notions of private-property arose alongside the full development of capitalism in the 18th century, social and economic life in medieval Europe was organized within a system that today is known as feudalism.² Under the pre-industrial conditions of feudalism, the central focus of economic activity was agriculture and, since land was the main thing needed for production, landholdings were the most important form of wealth in feudal society.

In the same sense that ‘money is power’ in capitalist societies today, land is power in feudal society.

‘Landed Lords’ & Feudal Hierarchy

Feudalism appears in different forms, depending on time and place. In feudal England, all land belonged to a king who strategically granted titles to powerful members of the nobility that allowed them to rule over large estates in exchange for pledges to provide knights or soldiers for the king’s military. In turn, the “lords” of these estates (none of whom could possibly use so much land) leased parts of the land to their aristocratic peers and important allies, many of whom also sublet parts of their land, often for similar pledges of military-aid, for rents, or as payment for services.

Noble landholders were considered to be the lords of their sub-tenants, as well as the peasants and serfs inhabiting the land, and most lords were also considered a tenant (also known as a vassal) of the overlord who granted the land to them. A lord whose land was given directly by the king was known as a tenant-in-chief and held the title of baron, in addition to attending the king’s councils. Altogether, such arrangements added up to form a kind of “military-agrarian complex” that reinforced the monarchic regime’s ability to control land through a complex bureaucracy of landholders that enforced the rigid hierarchy of feudal society.

The Historical Origins of Rent

While the warlords, aristocrats, and Church officials who made up the landholding class mostly occupied political, military, and religious​ roles, it was the peasants who did the work in feudal society. Unlike the nobility, few peasants had their own land and many were considered serfs (an Old French word related to servant and slave) who were legally prohibited from leaving the land they cultivated without their lord’s permission due to laws dating from the late Roman empire. In most cases, serfs were bound to work the same land as their ancestors, which meant that serfs were essentially leased along with the land by one landed lord to another. While free peasants at least could move or be married without permission slips, their circumstances were rarely better. Since most were landless, landed lords demanded rents from peasants in exchange for the right to work the soil, often paid with daily labor or with a hefty part of the peasant’s own harvest.

Because the Church had forbidden usury (that is, lending at interest), landed lords started to buy and sell leases of land and, by the year 1500, the leasehold had become a common and lucrative way to circumvent the Church’s ban. The practice of transferring land in the form of leaseholds — which naturally included the feudal right to exploit the labor of serfs and extract rent from its tenants — is what forms the legal foundation for the residential leases that exist across the world today.​

The Transition From Feudal to Capitalist Rents

Unlike the hereditary rights of kings to rule or the institutions of serfdom, which had already been largely eroded by the time of the industrial age, the feudal relationships of landlord and tenant were never really abolished. As factory-based industry spread, the market-economics that would come to characterize the emerging capitalist societies took hold around the world, much of which — thanks to colonialism — had not just been colonized by Europe but also by European legal systems, along with the feudal property laws they codified​. The English system was transplanted everywhere from the Americas and Pacific Islands to Africa, India, and Australia, while similar feudal systems were exported by France, Spain, and other colonial and imperialist nations.

Over the next few hundred years, feudal leaseholds, as well as the land in general, were gradually privatized through acquisitions, settlement, and processes of enclosure pushed by governments that were often led by the same wealthy lords in shiny, new capitalist hats.

Why Do Landlords Still Exist Today?

Even setting aside the social and legal history that traces the origins of rent collection to feudal entitlements that granted hereditary rights to inbred clans of medieval warlords, there is still the question — why should landlords be entitled to payment at all?

A Word About Small-Scale vs. Large-Scale Landlords

Before continuing the discussion, an important distinction needs to be drawn between the small-time “mom-and-pop” landlord and the big-time tycoons and corporate landlords. The key point of difference is that small-time landlords tend to act as groundskeepers who perform labor, such as landscaping and maintenance, whereas the tycoon and corporate landlords act as shareholders, hiring others to perform the labor of maintaining their properties. In the interest of fairness, the following discussion will consider small-time landlords to be groundskeepers and exclusively address the large-scale landlords.

Political Economy of Rental Agreements

The rental of residential land and living-space is a strange commodity. Broadly speaking, commodities — whether physical products like food and cars, services like repair and healthcare, or informations like research and iPhone apps — are the results of some kind of production. Or in other words, commodities are made by people using other things. Cars are made by people using factory machinery and steel, things are repaired by people using tools and parts, and apps are created by software-developers with knowledge gained from education and the value of each is determined by how much labor is needed to produce them. But who produces land and space, with what materials, and how many labor-hours on average is needed to produce them?

If a thing is produced, it is reasonable to argue that the person who labored to make the thing has a right to control its use, whether she wants to use it herself, lend or sell it to others, or give it away because she created it. That, in fact, is exactly the reasoning used by classical-liberal philosophers like John Locke to support the idea of a natural right to property, which was fairly radical at the time because it opposed the feudal entitlements to land held by a ruling minority of aristocrats. Things like land and space, along with springs, oyster-beds, or other forms of natural capital, are non-produced. And if neither the landlord’s nor anyone’s labor is a factor of land’s existence, why should society’s laws entitle landlords to payments from anyone too poor to buy property?

How Rent Harms the Economy & Drains Workers’ Wealth

The absurdity of entitlements to rent is clearest in cases of unimproved land with no structures, utilities, or other bells and whistles added. Extracting rent for the use of idle soil and empty living-spaces is nothing but a legalized act of extortion. Since the basis of society (and human survival) is availability of living-space and cultivation of land, to keep others from occupying living space or using land productively is not just violent but anti-social in the most literal sense of the word.

In cases of improved land, rent collection seems more defensible at first. It may be argued, for instance, that a landlord who buys an apartment complex and pays for its upkeep has a right to collect rents to recover his investment and in reward for assuming the risk. But this accounts only for the landlord’s personal interest without considering the deficit to society overall. After the costs to build the complex, the only real costs left are to maintain it. Since these costs must be less than a landlord’s revenue to create income, rents must always exceed the real cost to maintain the property and rent collectors must always be less efficient than if tenants had simply paid such costs directly.

The real cost to build and maintain housing is unavoidable because society depends on housing to exist and, while small-time landlords often provide at least some real labor and materials, rent collection in itself contributes nothing to this endeavor. If small-time landlords who maintain properties are considered as workers like the grounds-keepers and other workers who are paid for similar labor, the remaining landlords’ only labor is to manage the rent-collecting business. And business is booming.

Because everyone needs a place to live.

The Balance Sheets of the Non-Working Class

According to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), this rental business raked in an average $11,232 per unit yearly for about 43.9 million housing units in 2015 — but what does the business provide in return? The US Census Bureau’s Rental Housing Finance Survey shows landlords spend an average of 10 hours per month managing properties overall, while half of them spend just 3 hours per month or less, and that is according to landlords’ own responses. The average expenses were $4,751 per unit and most of it covered property tax and business activity (insurance, payroll, professional and legal services, etc), while maintenance, grounds, and landscaping accounted for just $1,906. This means that, aside from the necessary costs to continue providing housing to a renter, the landlord collects…

$11,232 — 1,906 = $9,326

…around $9,326.

After settling property taxes (coincidentally also $1,906 per unit on average), the landlord is essentially siphoning $7,420 from the wages of each of their tenants. For $11,232, a US tenant can expect $1,906 in maintenance and landscaping services on average, in addition to not having to pay the property tax — and that’s it. In return for arranging those services, the average landlord can expect to be free from the kinds of wage-labor that most renters have no choice but to perform if they wish to enjoy the privilege of a roof over their heads.

Envisioning Alternative Systems of Land Tenure

The alternatives to this medieval system of land tenure are only limited by the imagination. One of the more straightforward options would be to transform private residential properties into housing cooperatives, grouped by neighborhood, building, or community. Instead of rent, funds for maintenance costs (national avg $1,906) would be pooled together through the cooperatives and paid out as needed and surpluses could be re-distributed as dividends to residents to incentivize efficient repairs or re-invested in improvements (community gardens, pools, shared tool-libraries, cooperative wifi-zones, etc).

Depending on how the transition to cooperative housing was handled, it might even be plausible to preserve the jobs of small-time landlords as groundskeepers who are compensated for labor rather than property ownership. The process of changing residence would remain mostly the same except that cooperatives would manage applications rather than landlords and the major consideration would be the average maintenance-costs at different housing cooperatives rather than rental agreements.

Toward Universal Housing & a World Without Rent

Of course, the real problem lies in overcoming political obstacles to land reform. Though rental-property owners make up just 3% of the US population, the rental-housing market is stuffed with nearly as much capital as the US ‘defense’ budget and so it may be fair to say that a successful US land-reform movement would be about as hard to build as a successful US anti-war movement. Not impossible, of course, but pretty damned challenging.​

The good news is that virtually everyone in society stands to benefit from ditching this outdated model and, if the historical record is any indication, the chance of revolutionary action is likely to rise pretty quickly once enough of the peasants are miffed about unfair land-distribution. And if history teaches us anything, it is that nothing — not kings nor even gods — can hold the united wrath of the peasants in abeyance for long…

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

Notes:
¹ This assumes averages of 275 words/per-page and 64,500 words/per-book. Such assumptions are unavoidable due to typographical distortion of page-counts, differing averages by genre, and a diversity in the norms of various eras and languages. Dividing these estimated averages results in an average of 234.54 pages/per-book. $535 billion, divided by 24,356,449 books in the US Library of Congress, is 21,965.4351 — about $21,965.44 per book. That, divided by 234.54 pages each, is $93.65 — thus, $535 billion yields $94 for each page in the Library of Congress.
² There is ongoing (and, in my own opinion, very necessary) academic debate over whether the term ‘feudalism’ is useful, partly due to over-use of the term in describing a broad category of things and partly due to white academics’ sh*tty tendency to smoosh the colorful spectrum of global history and culture into a bland two-tone scheme of ‘Europe’ and ‘seems like this one thing in Europe.’ In this post, I’ve chosen to use ‘feudalism’ in a strict Marxian sense to refer to a range of pre-capitalist, non-industrial societies characterized by (1) land being the main form of wealth and (2) the productive classes’ ability to subsist on the direct fruits of their labor.

A History of Landlords: Rent & the Feudal Origins of a Non-Working Class was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The following is part-3 in an open series meant to introduce the basics of modern monetary theory (MMT) and to explore the potential for MMT’s radical model of macroeconomic reality to intersect with revolutionary theory and struggle. In part-1, the basic principles and monetary mechanics of MMT were presented alongside an irresponsibly brief review of money’s evolution from its prehistoric origins to the ongoing failure of orthodox economics to explain how money functions today. Part 2 looked at how MMT re-writes the rules of public spending and how it could be used by the working classes to build radical organizations and fight the power of capital with a self-managed federal job guarantee. And now Part 3 presses on to new territory where, for the first (and probably last) time, engine mechanics and the state theory of money will become relevant to a discussion of one of history’s most exhilarating topics — taxes. (Please, don’t leave)

For those who missed them, here is a link to Part 1 and here is a link to Part 2.

MODERN MONEY SYSTEMS, PART III:
The State Theory of Money, Social Power, & Taxes

In the fogs of economic illiteracy that envelop today’s political debate, there exists the eternal stalemate over how much ought to be taxed from whom to pay for what for whom else under which conditions and why.​ Those preferring a small welfare-state that taxes and spends less stand bitterly opposed to those who prefer a less-small welfare-state taxing and spending more. All of it, of course, is silly and unnecessary because, for sovereign currency-issuers like the US of A, taxes do not fund spending and the only real constraint on spending is the availability of idle labor and resources. Public healthcare, for example, is not a financial question of funds but a material question of whether definite amounts of labor and resources are available to build clinics, train doctors, and produce medical supplies.

But if monetarily-sovereign governments like those of Japan, Australia, and the US can fund such ambitious programs as a federal job-guarantee and universal public-healthcare without taxes, the obvious question is — then, why tax at all? Strange as it may seem, it turns out that the value of money depends on taxes….

How Money Gets Its Value & Why Gold Is Just a Yellow Rock

For anyone still using gold doubloons as money, it may seem reasonable to assume that money’s value results from its materials since metals have value apart from any seal of authority. But considering that all major currencies are issued by fiat today, it seems absurd for anyone else to assume so and particularly for the billions who regularly use money made from nothing valuable and backed by even less. Metallism — the notion that money’s value results from its price as a commodity — simply fails to describe any form of money that has actually existed (including the metal ones). The fetish-worshipers of gold and other metals can cry about it all they like but the fact is that bits of paper work as well as (and in many ways better than) electrum, silver, and gold ever did.

A Quick Word About Value: Use-Value & Exchange-Value

One way to pose the question of money’s value is to ask why anyone would exchange things of obvious value — food, tools, labor, etc — for zinc wafers or paper with spooky symbols, numbers, and images of dead rich people on them? Money satisfies neither hunger nor thirst nor any other need in itself. In fact, money’s only use seems to be in exchanging it for other things but that just leads back to the question of why it has value at all. To get a clear idea of how exactly fiat money differs from things of easily-recognized value, it helps to know how use- and exchange-values work.

If something satisfies a need or desire (real or imagined) it is a use-value. Most things people make are use-values. A use-value that is produced for exchange becomes reflected as an exchange-value by the market and both values together form a commodity that turns value into price, expressed in amounts of money. As an example, a pair of shoes is a use-value that satisfies a person’s need to protect her feet and also an exchange-value equal to, say, 2 months of Netflix, 24 AA-batteries, 3 packs of cigarettes, etc. In commodity-exchange, one side takes the shoes as use-value and the other as exchange-value — it is impossible to possess both use- and exchange value at the same time (i.e. nobody can eat cake and still have it, too).

What makes fiat so weird is that, while the commodities that people are familiar with exist as both a use- and exchange-value, fiat appears only as an exchange-value. And this is too much like a one-sided coin — it just cannot be.

The State Theory of Money

The answer to the riddle, as it turns out, is not so much on either side of any coin but printed right across the front of the fiat. Inscribed on all notes denominated in US dollars are the words “this note is legal tender for all debts, public and private,” along with the authorizing seals of the US Department of the Treasury and US Federal Reserve. This tells us a few things –

• That the US government has the sole authority to issue US dollars
• That the US government accepts payment in US dollars to settle public debt (taxes, fines, etc)
• And that private debts under US jurisdiction are legally settled by payment of US dollars

To take part in the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services that forms the basis for society, virtually everyone ends up with debts owed to the government as taxes on income, payroll, and property or other fines, customs, and fees. By fiat — meaning in Latin an official decree or literally ‘let it be done’ — the state imposes these debts periodically on adult citizens, a vast majority of whom pay up with a shrug to avoid the eventual imprisonment. And of course, such debt is only payable with… wait for it — US dollars.

Taxes Drive the Currency

Effectively, these tax-debts create a base-level of demand for dollars so long as the US has sovereign power to issue and tax its currency. Taxation (or another form of distributed debt, such as tithe or tribute) is what drives demand for a currency. This is corroborated by the historical record, which consistently shows that various forms of money rise and fall with the state-powers that tax them. In a nutshell, the state theory of money (also known as the chartal theory or chartalism) is that it was never about the gold — money was always a creature of the state. Sure, a Roman denarius is still a use-value to museums and it could even still be melted down to sell at current market-prices of silver 2,000 years later — but as a state, Rome is no longer in a position to insist on anyone making payments in denarii and so no one does.

In the end, the only real way to guarantee that any currency will be widely accepted in exchange is to enforce its acceptance with the organized power of the state.

Thought Experiment: Money & the State

Say someone hands you a note with “1 dollar” written on it. How valuable would this “dollar” be? Then, say that person returns with a baseball-bat demanding either “1 dollar” or your teeth — the dollar became pretty valuable, didn’t it? But more importantly, the dollar became a use-value — and even more importantly, it became the first and only unit of paper fiat-money in a very tiny hypothetical monetary system. Just replace the person and the bat with the state and the severe penalties it imposes for refusing to settle tax-debts, then multiply the whole scenario by 200 million or so, and presto — money.

Money, Among Other Units of Measure

In context, the fact of money’s origin in the state is hardly surprising. Few take any issue with the state’s role in setting most of the other official national standards. Is it not the state that typically decrees whether a nation officially uses Metric or Imperial units of weight and measure? And does the state not also declare whether temperature is recorded using the Fahrenheit or centigrade scales, as well as the calendar system used to date said records? Considering how normal it is for states to set everything from units of measure to national birds, official languages, and the whole kaleidoscope of regulatory standards, it almost seems obvious that states would also set the unit of account, aka money.

The Real Function of Taxes

One of the implications of this state theory is that taxation (in one form or another) is a vital, non-negotiable feature of money systems. To get rid of taxes altogether would also get rid of demand for — and thus, the value of — the currency.​ To be clear, this point — that a state’s ability to impose tax-debts is a core component of money systems — does not mean that a state “should” tax its citizens for moral reasons or because it is fair or just, or even reasonable to do so. It means that failing to enforce payment of tax-debts in a currency will result in evaporation of demand for that particular monetary-instrument and the system will literally be toast.​

Punching holes in the bottom of a boat will cause it to sink despite what anyone may think or feel about it because it is buoyancy that keeps vessels afloat, not feelings or opinions — likewise, the fact that taxes drive currency is just part of the operational reality of running a monetary system. If or when it might be ethical to punch holes in boats is probably a great topic for academic debate but, since this post is about how money works and not how to destroy it and because such a debate is clearly not in the interests of those of us on board, let’s leave it to the philosophers.

All that being said — while tax-collection is necessary to maintain a currency’s value, taxes are never needed to fund spending. ‘Taxpayer dollars’ fund nothing and no one’s hard-earned income is shoveled back into the treasury by the IRS — taxes are deleted. Taxes destroy the money that spending creates from nothing — however, the real economy happens in between.

Micro- & Macro-Economic Perspectives

To understand how a money system works, a macro-economic perspective must be adopted. Just as the mechanics of physical matter are different at very large scales — like that of planets and stars, where motion is determined mainly by gravitational forces — and very small scales — like that of subatomic particles, where nuclear forces dominate — the mechanics that rule economies look different at micro- and macro-economic scales.

Spending & Taxation as Inputs & Outputs

Think of all the circulating currency as a system with an input and output — currency is spent into the system and taxed out by the sovereign issuer. The reality is a slightly more complex (for example, the state can also pull money out with treasury bonds, in a way that is similar to taxes) but the principle is simple — the net-total of currency is increased and decreased by the state alone.

• If equal amounts of money are spent and taxed, the net-total currency doesn’t change
• If more is spent than taxed, the net-total currency increases
• If more is taxed than spent, the net-total currency decrease​s

Now — to get a basic idea of how this circulatory system of inputs and outputs works, it helps to understand its limits. In the simplest terms, the system’s capacity is determined by the amounts of actual labor and resources that are available — or, to put it another way, no amount of money can ever cause a factory to be built if there are no building-materials or workers willing to do so. If the system has reached full-capacity already (if labor and resources are fully-employed), then injecting more cash is not only pointless but may lead to unsustainable levels of demand and rising prices — this is where taxes come in handy as an exhaust for pulling out the excess. On the other side, if capacity is not yet reached, then choking the spending-input is a great way to increase unemployment and throw the system into artificial recession.

Resource & Labor Flows

Inside the system, circulating currency is moving labor and resources between the different parts of the society, distributing access to the means of producing wealth and to wealth itself. Broadly speaking, resources flow into activity arising from spending and out from taxed activity — this means spending and taxation (aka fiscal policy) function as levers that direct labor- and resource-flows within the system. To shift resources from fossil fuels to renewables, for example, heavy taxes might be levied on oil as new programs are funded to provide living-wages to millions of workers building a new framework for sustainable energy-production.

This can also be used to do awful things, of course — if the goal is to maintain a robust military-industrial complex full of parasitic finance-capitalists, income could be taxed more heavily than capital gains while subsidizing costs for weapons manufacturers. (As in today’s USA). The money system is a tool — it can be used to fix things just as easily as it can be used to beat the daylights out of poor people and sabotage the dawn of a better world.

It all comes down to whom is driving.

Taxation & Questions of Social Power

Accepting that taxes maintain a currency’s value but considering that taxes are never collected to fund spending, the question arises of what and whom to tax and why. From the perspective of a neutral ‘monetary mechanic,’ more than one answer is possible — unlike the matters of function discussed thus far (like that tax-debts create demand for currency, that sovereign currency-issuers cannot go broke, etc), any question of why to tax what or whom is inherently a human question — one that cannot be answered from a neutral point of view.

From the viewpoint of a currency-issuer looking ‘down’ at the macro-economy, taxation appears as an outlet for removing excess money from circulation that (in addition to driving the currency) can also be used to influence the flow of resources and manage inflation. However, from the viewpoints of individual currency-users, a tax appears as a limitation on the individual’s power to access wealth and control resources (aka capital) — or, to put it another way, taxes restrict how much buying-power an person has. And “buying-power” (at least in the context of capitalism) is hardly more than a euphemism for power itself.

So the correct question is: whom or what should have less power? And the answer depends on the perspective and the interests of the one answering.

The Social Approach: Taxing Bads, Not Goods

One approach to the question — and remember, no approach is neutral — is to employ the logic Mr. Spock used in The Wrath of Khan when he concluded that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.” Applying Spock’s logic to tax policy, the question can be refined to something like — whose (or what) money has the most negative impact on the society overall? This is the reasoning behind so-called “sin taxes,” such as added taxes on cigarettes, that are intended to deter economic activity considered harmful to society.

The same type of reasoning could also justify taxing activity that contributes to pollution (like oil extraction) or wastes resources (such as the production of junk-foods) and even taxes to deter stuff like the construction of buildings that block the view of natural surroundings or spoiling open spaces with advertisements. This approach to tax policy takes the social perspective of the collective and favors the interests of “the many” over and against individual interests. To implement such tax policies, however, the many would first need to gain control of their state….

Social Class & the State: Taxation as Power

The state, strictly speaking, is not the government. Government is an entire constellation of public institutions tasked with the chores of society, from fire departments and schools to waste and recycling, licensing drivers, civil courts, road work, and so on. Government is less of a monolith than a category of activities that organize society. The state is a political entity recognized as the highest authority in a geographic area. Since wielding supreme authority over even a small population is difficult, states invariably try to maintain at least some popular support, along with the capability to use violent force.

In historical-materialist (aka Marxian) schools of thought, the state arises from class-conflict as an institutional structure that formalizes the power of the dominant class to rule society. The state, in other words, is always and everywhere the organization of class-power. And only an organized class — like say, a hypothetical coalition of social activists and labor unions formed by an increasingly militant working-class majority — is capable of influencing the state’s use of power.

Taxation & Social Revolution

From a social-revolutionary perspective (broadly speaking, any perspective that aims to put the working-class majority in charge of society) the framework of modern monetary theory seems to offer new possibilities for a viable economic strategy to transition from a society ruled by private capital to one where all power rests with the people.​ Unlike the bourgeois neo-classical and New Keynesian economics, the MMT model acknowledges the social creation of money as an abstract form of value that serves as universal medium for circulating the real values that labor creates.

But to realize a truly modern monetary system — one that issues currency democratically by the public authority to benefit society as a whole and that frees people from the brutal austerity and artificial scarcity that the profits of private capital demand — for such a currency to exist, ordinary working people must become at least as well organized as those who presently hold the reigns of the state. And until the toiling classes do, these rich white men are perfectly content to keep using society’s monetary power to spend into their own pockets and tax away any shred of wealth the ones who actually work for a living manage to get because, wherever money grows, there is the chance it might turn into power.

And they can’t have that, now can they?

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

On the State Theory of Money, Social Power, & Taxes: Modern Money Systems 3 was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today is July 2nd 2018 and Googling “North Korea news” is likely to bring up a heap of news stories with titles like The Guardian’s North Korea still secretly enriching uranium, say US officials and Reuters’ US intelligence believes North Korea making more nuclear bomb fuel despite talks. Most who see these headlines are likely to assume that, since it is being reported by so many respected publications, the story must be true — and, in this case, most people would be wrong. Anyone who bothers to check can verify that all of the articles trace back to a single NBC report presenting the unofficial remarks of 5 totally anonymous US officials, presumably coaxed from the augmented voices of 5 silhouetted figures during an interview in a clandestine basement.

NBC’s Report on North Korea’s Nuclear Fuel:
An Analysis of War-Propaganda in Action

All of the truth contained in NBC’s report is contained in its opening sentence, which reads:

“U.S. intelligence agencies believe that North Korea has increased its production of fuel for nuclear weapons at multiple secret sites in recent months — and that Kim Jong Un may try to hide those facilities as he seeks more concessions in nuclear talks with the Trump administration, U.S. officials told NBC News”

NBC goes on to clarify that the officials mentioned above are specifically 5 US officials out of “more than a dozen” whom NBC spoke to “on the condition of anonymity.” What the report actually says is that 5 of 13+ anonymous officials interviewed think that some intelligence analysts think the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (better known in the US as North Korea) produced more nuclear fuel than usual during an unspecified number of recent months.

At the big media-outlets like NBC, Washington Post, the Guardian, MSNBC, Fox, Reuters, and the rest, the analysis stops right there and — before you can blink — MSNBC’s headline U.S. officials say NK increased nuclear production at secret sites is emblazoned on the front page of the Google.

Context: Like Kryptonite to US-Media

Apparently, not one reporter, fact-checker, or editor for these outlets thought readers should consider that Donald Trump’s and Kim Jong-Un’s historic meeting — the one where both nations committed to de-escalating a literal nuclear stand-off — only happened 20 days ago. But that would make the story less exciting. Why would readers (or anyone really) expect North Koreans to have started complying months ago with the hypothetical terms of a future agreement that was promised by a meaningful yet still symbolic peace summit fewer than 3 weeks ago?

NBC’s Sources: Anonymous ‘Officials,’ Ex-CIA, & Koch-Funded Think-Tanks

In addition to omitting the basic context journalists are expected to provide, NBC’s already-dubious report about rumors heard from (we can’t tell you!) is laced with misleading content. While the headline and introduction leads NBC’s readers to think the views of US intel are being reported, commentary by several others is mixed in with that of the mystery-officials. No explanation is given for why their opinions are relevant — and, to be fair, it would be difficult for anyone to justify a decision to insert comments from an ex-CIA neocon on a Koch-funded think-tank’s payroll and obvious imperialists. Whether it was an intentionally deceptive choice or just bad writing, the result is that the absurdly biased utterings can be mistaken for US intel by distracted, hurried, or uncritical readers — and, sadly, major media-outlets, as well.

A Closer Look at NBC’s Dishonest Mash-Up Tactics

Between the shadowy officials’ musings, NBC grafts a few sentence fragments alluding to a general suspicion that at least one nuclear-research facility’s whereabouts is kept secret. This bombshell revelation comes not from NBC’s officials but Joel Wit, a former bureaucrat in Bill Clinton’s state department and founder of the Stimson Center’s 38north.org. How Wit’s comments relate to the rumored increase in fuel-output ostensibly being reported is unclear but including them leaves readers feeling that something secretive, even sinister, went down in the DPRK in ‘recent months.’

While 38 North’s analysis is definitely more nuanced than the garden-variety orientalist tabloid-journalism that passes for news in US, Wit’s views on how the US should “deal with” the DPRK reliably echo the status quo of US Empire. It is important to note that, as a scholar, Wit is definitely qualified to comment on the topic and that he played a part in negotiating the US-DPRK Agreed Framework in ’94. The problem is how NBC interspersed his remarks — which reflect the US interests Wit pushed for a career — with US intel’s chit-chat so that a rumored increase in fuel-output starts sounding like the DPRK was just caught explaining its diabolical plan to f*** the US​ over.

The Heritage Foundation:
Credible Source… or Military-Industrial Orgy?

Near the report’s end, NBC also chose to inject the venom of Bruce Klingner, a 20-year veteran of the CIA who is currently on the Heritage Foundation’s payroll, one of the biggest conservative think-tanks around. Klingner’s remarks add nothing but his paternalistic opinion that North Koreans must be plotting something (because they’re evil, ya know?). By shoe-horning such reactionary trash into a report assumed by many to be a credible US intelligence assessment, NBC acts as product-placement for the military-industrial complex.

The inclusion of the Heritage Foundation’s ‘expert’ is particularly egregious considering that NBC leaves out the fact the think-tank is known to accept huge sums of money from South Korea’s central intelligence agency, KCIA. The South Korean National Assembly even discovered documents revealing the KCIA had funneled millions to the Heritage Foundation in the ’80s in exchange for Heritage establishing the “Asian Studies Center” — which, incidentally, is where Klingner is now employed as a senior research fellow.

It’s Almost as if US-Media Is Trying to Demonize the DPRK…

How NBC (or any journalist or news organization) could possibly run such a misleading report is a disheartening question to need to ask — but ask it, we must. However, an even more important question is — how did the combined editorial boards of most US-based, English-speaking media-outlets unilaterally accept and re-broadcast NBC’s absurd vilification of North Korea under their own names? Why did hundreds of articles spring up over the weekend echoing NBC’s elevation of a well-known reactionary think-tank’s warmongering as if it were news and not the racist, imperialist, exceptionalist, dangerous war-propaganda that it is? What purpose is served by demonstrably mistaken headlines like Gizmodo’s “US Intel Officials Allege North Korea Is Still Enriching Uranium After Trump-Kim Summit”? Or the Washington Post: “North Korea working to conceal key aspects of its nuclear program, U.S. officials say”?

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

Media Hits North Korea w/ Flurry of Pro-War Articles All Citing Shady NBC Report was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the past 17 months or so, much of the US has been steeped in a continual ebb-and-flow of outrage over whatever mess was made most recently by Trump’s administration. This is partly because most US-Americans (like people anywhere else) are halfway-decent people who instinctively reject antisocial behaviors like tearing families apart and spiteful resorts to violence. Homo sapiens is a social species, after all, and such popular dismay can act as an oddly precious reminder of how persistently humane most people really are. But it provokes a question, too — why is it that policies of military aggression, mass-deportation, cronyism, unchecked police violence, and ecological suicide are suddenly facing the ‘#resistance’ when Obama, Bush, Clinton, and the like all pushed identical policies for decades? Did millions really change their views on these issues in early 2017? A more-likely explanation can be found in the astonishingly successful use of brand marketing by the major US political parties.

#Resistance by Democrats™ — ‘America’s Viable Opposition Party’

Electoral politics and marketing share a lot of in common — in both cases, the idea is to use a range of psychological tactics to influence a population’s behavior to achieve a desired result. The goal may be for them to buy a product or to support political causes and candidates but, in essence, the job descriptions are the same. The cool thing about marketing is that its methods are fairly well-known compared to career politics, which are much less transparent. Sometimes, the best way to study politics is to not study politics — instead, study how brand marketing works and the politics follow.

Politically-Useful Concepts in Brand Marketing

In 2004, the personal-care brand Dove began its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty, seemingly in defiance of the beauty industry’s tradition of marketing products by preying on women’s self-esteem. The relevant media praised the marketing initiative, which included not just the garden-variety print, video, or billboard ads but also photo-exhibits, workshops, and even a play. As Dove Skin’s VP put it, the goal was:

“To make women feel comfortable in the skin they are in, to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence and not anxiety”

But whose goal was it, exactly? In the end, a brand’s success profits its owner and Dove is owned by the multinational consumer-goods corporation Unilever. Does Dove deserve support for siding with women harmed by absurd beauty-standards promoted by competing brands even though a lot of these brands are, like Dove, merely part of Unilever’s portfolio? Buying Dove’s products to support its goal for women to “feel comfortable in the skin they are in” seems great — but the money might as well have been spent on Fair and Lovely, a skin-whitening product Unilever markets to dark-skinned girls in 36 countries. For Unilever’s shareholders, it makes no difference.

Umbrellas & Multibranding

The marketing term for Unilever’s approach is multi-branding, a strategy used for taking a bigger share in markets where companies already own an established brand. As it profited off Dove’s fight against advertisers’ distorted portrayals of women, Unilever quietly raked in cash with ads that overtly sexualized and objectified women to sell brands like Axe and Lynx. To be clear, this does not make the issues raised by the campaign less important — it does, however, call into question the sincerity of the private interests benefited by the ads and whether loyalty to their brand is truly an effective way to combat toxic beauty standards.

‘Flanker’ & ‘Fighter’ Brands

Despite already owning the successful detergent brand Tide, the multinational Proctor & Gamble launched a second detergent branded as Cheer — a flanker brand. Bigger firms often use this maneuver to protect an established brand from startups trying to lure customers away from existing brands by offering a similar product at lower prices. A flanker does the same thing but, since it is owned by the same company, it poses no threat to the established brand. A fighter brand is similar but with one distinction — flankers hold down a strategic segment in the market to lock out new competition but fighters are designed to sandbag an existing one.

Form & Substance: The Political Party Brand

Brands tap into how people express identity. Most people know that buying Dove soap is unlikely to alter how ads depict women but, despite the attention to Unilever’s hypocrisy by the press, the ads associated the brand with something people wanted to identify with and sales took off. The contradiction of the brand’s empowered appearance and its dubious ownership vanished. Beneath the dazzling form, substance is obscured.

The ‘resistance’ — or, more precisely, anti-Trumpist — movement reveals a deep inconsistency in how partisan factions in the US respond to perceived changes in policy. If it is assumed that the major parties represent worldviews rooted in differing political values, such discrepancy is hard to make sense of. Thinking of them as brand-based organizations (rather than value-based) seems to offer the better explanation.

The Democrats™ Brand vs. Actual Democratic Policy

If democratic resistance to mass-deportations was value-based, one would expect to see similar opposition as Obama deported more people than all his predecessors for the previous century combined. Looking at presidential democrats’ past immigration policy, it is hard to imagine how anyone would think the people deported by Trump’s regime would fare better if the nation had voted blue. And long before Obama was deporter-in-chief, it was Clinton who signed 1996’s Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, criminalizing the undocumented and giving broad authority to the Department of Homeland Security to construct border-walls. Policies like Trump’s would be impossible without the statutory framework Clinton’s administration provided.

And sadly immigration policy is not the only instance where the democrats’ brand is contradicted by political reality.

#Resistance: the Democratic Party’s Fighter Brand

Setting aside Trump’s cringey style and sleazy but apolitical personal traits, no part of his overall political agenda differs fundamentally from the one democrats pursue. In fact, a lot of what anti-Trumpists seem to resist is the same policy-framework embraced by Clintonist democrats that drove Sandernistas to revolt against their party. Policy that legalizes corruption, decays civil liberties, guts social benefits​, ignores the climate crisis, militarizes racist policing institutions, legitimizes a permanent bloodthirsty state of war — democrats beat Trump to all of that. Mr. Tiny-Hands is just a manager.

Just as Unilever’s advertising alchemy transmuted the desire to abolish standards of beauty set by industro-patriarchs into revenue from hair-product-sales, democrats turn collective yearning for social progress into money and power.​ Their #resistance brand functions in a way that closely resembles a fighter brand launched to undermine progressive challengers that threaten the party from the left. In 2016, both parties lost control over their bases to challengers who appealed to popular discontent with politics-as-usual and, while the republicans failed to crush their revolt, democrats regained control of their party — barely.​ While the GOP is reduced to negotiating with their challenger in hopes of a buyout, democrats have a shot at maintaining dominance in their side of the electoral ‘market.’

How the Democratic Marketing Strategy Works

For obvious reasons, the Democratic Party modeled its faux-progressive #resistence brand after the grassroots challenger that arose around the Sanders campaign. Launching its own signature brand of grassroots opposition lets the party draw supporters from the progressive and leftist groups with more radical potential, while also building DNC-funded organizations whose support would be needed by future progressive movements.

Meanwhile, ‘liberal’ news-media aggressively brands the DNC’s flagship product as the ‘ethical’ party by criticizing Trump’s big arms-deals (nevermind that Obama peddled more weapons than any post-WWII president or that Clinton’s USA was also #1 in global weapons-exports); as the party with ‘compassion’ for immigrants (nevermind the IIRIRA or Obama setting the record for most deportations); as the party of integrity (nevermind their equally-shady donors); as the party that stands up for workers (nevermind their opposition to a living wage); as the party that you can have a beer with.

But the truth is that Trump is the best marketing tool democrats could have possibly asked for — and they know it. By portraying the barbaric but routine political events of Trump’s presidency as an all-out assault on a vague alternative presumably represented by the democrats, the partisan news-media uses the public’s genuine outrage to brand them as the ‘opposition party.’ The real problem with Trump is not that he’s a walking version of capitalism’s late-stage failure or that his cabinet is ruthlessly utilizing the savage framework that both parties gifted them — the real issue is that people seem to think Trump’s policies are unusual.

But they’re not.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

First published at www.JohnLaurits.com

Brand Marketing a Political Party: Inside the Democrats’ Fake Opposition was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The term ‘black and white’ is often used to label ways of thinking that are considered dismissive, narrow-minded, or simplistic. Informing someone that “the world isn’t split into black and white” is often used to suggest a person has failed to think outside of the box or is trapped in a false dilemma. Though black-and-white, ‘us versus them,’ and similar labels can certainly be used as handy substitutes for pompous-sounding terms like causal-reductionism, they also prop up one of the core delusions of the neoliberal ideology.

The Meaning of ‘Neoliberalism’ & ‘Ideology

First, a few words about a few words. Because the words ‘liberal,’ ‘neoliberal,’ and ‘ideology’ are all used in a few different ways, it seems worthwhile to clarify how each is being used here to avoid confusion.

The Meaning of ‘Ideology’

A lot of people nowadays use ‘ideology’ to mean ‘worldview’ or ‘belief-system.’ In this post, however, it refers to traditions, philosophies, conventions, ‘common sense,’ and customary beliefs that justify how a society functions.​ For example, people in one society enjoy stories about the present ruler’s heroic ancestors and people in another society feel a sense of honor in upholding a tradition of obeying their elders. Each idea offers a way to make sense of the particular ways their society does things — that is ideology. Like the genes copied by living organisms to reproduce themselves, ideology is a set of notions that leads members of a society to replicate its particular social and organizational patterns. Whether obedience to elders is a good system or not, the notion of it being the basis for collective honor helps to ensure that tradition continues.

Ideology can show up almost anywhere but it is often found masquerading as ‘common sense’ and lurking under popular ideas. ‘Bigger is better’ may be common sense in societies fueled by consumerism but it would seem like nonsense in a nomadic society. Components of ideology that are central to one system may be incompatible with or even toxic to another.

Neoliberalism in a Nutshell

The central idea of liberalism is that government’s main role is to ensure the liberty of the individual by upholding (more-or-less) free markets, free trade, and rights like the freedom to own property, free speech, religious freedom, free association, etc. Notice a pattern? While classical liberalism at least recognizes a need for limited government, the neoliberal ideal is to basically let the private sector run everything, including government. Neoliberalism replaces public schools with private-voucher systems, lets private firms run public infrastructure for profit, grants ‘rights’ to non-human corporations — that sort of thing.

In a nutshell, neoliberalism sees reality itself as a big market.

Black & White & Us Versus Them:
How Extremism Subverts Neoliberal Ideology

“Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral”
 — Paulo Freire

Returning to the topic at hand — the notion that extremist politics are bad is widely accepted as common sense in the technically-advanced, capitalist USA. This is particularly true among the rich white intelligentsia usually hired by media to referee the nation’s political discourse. But this anti-extremist bias is problematic, to say the least.

‘Black & White Thinking’ in Science, Philosophy, & Art

“Opposition brings concord. Out of discord comes the fairest harmony” — Heraclitus

One of the more glaring issues with assuming black-and-white views are less valid is the fact that scientists observe binary, either/or, and zero-sum phenomena in the natural world all the time. Physical reality is built from opposing forces — electric current arises from opposite charges, the elements are all configurations of the same two positive and negative particles, and atomic properties depend on whether the number of nucleons is even or odd. Deductive logic (the thing Sherlock Holmes uses to solve mysteries) depends on a binary notion that statements have truth values, i.e. that statements like ‘Egypt is in Africa’ are either true or not and that nothing is both in-Africa and not-in-Africa at the same time.

Science also shows the cosmos is full of continua, spectra, and shades of grey, of course — the point is that both kinds of thinking are useful. Some stuff is clearly a spectrum — color, gender, electromagnetism, and so on — and other stuff can only be grasped in binary terms. Artists use both all the time, melding binaries like foreground-background and center-periphery with spectra like hue, shade, tint, and tone to form a unified meaning. Each mode has its uses in art, logic, and science.

And then, there’s politics.

The Political Taboo of Extremism

“The question is not whether we will be extremists but what kind of extremists we will be”
 — Martin Luther King Jr.

While no one is blasted for overly-gradated opinions or excessive nuance, people are flayed left and right for views seen as polarizing or divisive, black-and-white thinking, using terms of ‘us’ and ‘them,’ and extremism. These kinds of views are unwelcome in politics. The political realm appears to be ruled by special laws that differ from those of logic, science, and art.

When a person is told she has an ‘us versus them’ mindset, it implies that the idea of ‘us’ opposing ‘them’ is unreasonable or unwarranted. By stating the critique as a matter of fact, the critic also implies that such a view itself is evidence that she failed to grasp ‘the real issue’ — or, even worse, that she is too stupid to grasp it or too churlish to care. The exasperated sigh that “things aren’t so black and white” is meant to rebuke a person for refusing to compromise with the implied shades of grey, all of which are apparently presumed to be equally valid.

As a result of this broad dismissal of extremist or uncompromising views, those who hold them also learn to hold their tongues while moderates and other grown-ups bravely hold the lines on either side of every trivial shade of reform imaginable.

A Brief Look at ‘Extremism’ in History

“It is a world of clashing interests — war against peace, nationalism against internationalism, equality against greed, and democracy against elitism — and it seems to me both impossible and undesirable to be neutral in those conflicts”
 — Howard Zinn

But why is framing an issue in terms of us-versus-them automatically wrong? Is history not full of examples of one group being oppressed by others with greater power and did the oppressed not often find justice only in open conflict and uncompromising opposition to the interest of groups who benefited by their oppression?​ Martin Luther King Jr seemed to think so — in his Letter From Birmingham Jail, King reflected on being called an ‘extremist’ for his involvement in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s:

“…though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ […] And [was not] Abraham Lincoln [an extremist]: ‘This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.’”

130 years before King sat in that cell, the radical abolitionist and writer William Lloyd Garrison was labeled an extremist in the 1830s for stubbornly insisting that enslaved Black people should be freed immediately. To his critics, Garrison replied: “I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity?” Activists who struggled for women’s suffrage and opponents of Jim Crow were also criticized for extremism in their day.

How Extremist Politics Subvert Neoliberalism

“The world is a dangerous place, not because of those who do evil, but because of those who look on and do nothing”
 — Albert Einstein

These false critiques are all rooted in the ideological heart of neoliberalism — : unshakable faith in the market. From within the neoliberal framework, ‘the market’ is not just the free market or even market-economics generally but an idealized market-principle more akin to a law of nature than to a human artifice. Of all liberties, the most holy is the liberty for private individuals to partake in the market with as little oversight as possible. The underlying ideological premise is that a perfect free market — that is, a perfectly unregulated market — produces the best result possible and that intervening always has a negative effect in spite of any noble intention.

This also applies to other ‘markets’ like the marketplace of ideas where any censure of free speech presumably harms the debate. Liberal notions of ‘diversity’ also approach culture as a market with the ideal “melting pot” being an imagined result of differing ways of life, religions, and customs freely competing.​ This neoliberal logic requires every individual, private enterprise, and political view to be treated as equally valid or, at least, with equal respect. Since intervention always favors some individuals over others, intervening is an abomination to the neoliberal commentariat, which is why they become so upset with people who punch literal Nazis. Beneath the concern for free speech is an ideological fear — if people can intervene in the market of ideas against Nazism for ethical reasons, why not intervene in private enterprise against fossil fuel or insurance companies for ethical reasons?

How Extremism Contradicts the Market’s Logic

This is where extremist views and refusals to compromise come to an impasse with the neoliberal ideology. Ex-President Obama put it well by saying, “America is the union leader and the CEO who put aside their differences to make the economy stronger.” This is about as neoliberal as rhetoric can get. If a person takes the view — as many US Americans do — that the right of workers to the fruits of their labor and to decent living-standards are more important and valid than an already-wealthy CEO’s right to profit, it conflicts with the CEO’s ‘liberty.’ Telling this CEO to get stuffed is not only uncompromising — it is ‘un-American.’ Also uncompromising is the position that the health of the environment is always 1,000% more important than all investors’ portfolios put together. Or the idea that the bosses and the Wall Street investors — ‘them’ — really do share interests that are fundamentally opposed to the interests of workers, aka ‘us.’

Non-Extremist Resistance Will Always Be Bullshit

“When you are right, you cannot be too radical”
 — MLK

Oppression never grows from nothing. Each instance of oppression expresses a relation of power arising from conflict between social classes with opposing interests. All of that — class, power, conflict — depends on the specific forms of social and economic architecture that presently exist in the society. It depends, in other words, on all that ideology exists to preserve and replicate — that, and your consent to the status quo.

“Neutral” Politics & a Parable About Flowers

Each particular thing depends on forces outside itself to exist. A flower, for example, depends on water and light in certain amounts, a specific type of soil, insects to pollinate it, and other forces that cannot be separated without destroying the flower. All of it — water, soil, light — is as much a part of a flower as its petals and those who disagree should try removing one. But each of these in turn depends on its own set of forces — water, for instance, may increase or decrease due to irrigation, climate change, and many other factors. Flowers do not grow from soil alone but in the center of a cosmic tug-of-war between multitudes of forces. Even slight disturbances to this web might alter what types are able to grow or make their growth impossible altogether.

Now, rather than flowers, think of society, its institutions, and all the various forms they take. Replace water, sun, pollinators, and other component-forces with you, me, our neighborhoods and apartment buildings, investors, workers, bosses, cops, and every other cell that makes up the body of society. The institutions of oppression that have grown up around and inside us — mass incarceration, economic exploitation, the terror of the police state — all depend on this social configuration staying the way it is. Conditions of oppression ever depend on our neutrality — on our non-intervention. And so ideology whispers — be neutral. And if being neutral is impossible, then at least act neutral — no interventions. What, are you some kind of extremist?

Be an Extremist!

“Indeed, it is impossible to be neutral. In a world already moving in certain directions, where wealth and power are already distributed in certain ways, neutrality means accepting the way things are now”
 — Howard Zinn

Today’s politicians would probably say that people like King were mis-labeled as extremists but the truth is that King was not just an extremist — he was an open and unrepentant extremist. The worst kind. Neoliberal doctrine, however, requires extremists to be bad and MLK was clearly good, which forces politicians to devise a story that resolves the contradiction. But no matter how many times they say 2 + 2 = 5, the sum is 4, was 4, ever will be 4, and Rev. Dr. King remains the same unapologetic extremist he told us he was in that cell.

He knew that some things are black and white and that every position is not equal — that sometimes it really is us versus them.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

In Defense of Political Extremism: ‘Us Versus Them’ Versus Neoliberal Ideology was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

During 2016’s nominally democratic primaries, the voter-rolls — i.e. the lists of people who get to vote — were afflicted by a slew of mysterious errors and illegal purges in a number of states. As a result, millions who registered as democrats were unable to vote. Millions more independents (who make up a majority of eligible voters) found they were disenfranchised in states where deadlines to register passed months before anyone even knew who the candidates were. New York, for example, excluded a mind-blowing 2.9 million active voters from the primaries for not registering by a deadline 7 months beforehand, as well as another 200,000 whom NYC election officials would later admit were illegally purged from voter-rolls. The worst voter suppression, however, is neither the purges nor the arbitrary placement of deadlines but the fact that the US forces its citizens to register before they can vote in the first place.

The US Voter-Registration System:
A Costly Sham to Suppress Voters

Managing a good elections system is no easy task and the right solutions often differ depending on type of government, population size and distribution, transportation issues, funding, and so on. Because of this complexity, election-related problems can sometimes be much harder to solve than it may seem at first. The US voter-registration system is not one of those problems. In fact, the US is the only developed nation — as well as one of the only countries in the world — that still foists the responsibility for voter registration on its citizens.

Voter Turnout in the USA: Tragedy or Farce?

The estimated US voting-age population during the 2016 primaries was around 250 million¹. Records show that almost 17 million voted to nominate the democratic candidate and a bit over 14 million nominated the republican. That means…

14,015,993 / 250,055,734 = 0.056051 or about 5.6%

16,917,853 / 250,055,734 = 0.06765 or about 6.8%

5.6 + 6.8 = 12.4%

…that altogether just 12.4% of 250 million voting-age US-Americans determined the two options that the rest of the nation had to choose from. Even if all voters in both primaries are combined…

(30,633,131 + 31,183,841) / 250,055,734 = 0.24721 or about 24.7%

…the result is still fewer than ¼ of US voting-age citizens. This is the predictable result of such a system.

In addition to the illegally purged and the millions regularly disenfranchised by other registration errors, the system is designed to exclude the majority of US-Americans registered as independents from the primaries. ​In this context, 12.4% is actually right on par. Even if there were no other problems (which there are), the fact that registration keeps most of the country from partaking in ‘democracy’ gets pretty darn close to single-handedly defeating the whole purpose of holding elections in the first place.

How Voter Registration Works
(& Why It Doesn’t in the US)

Maintaining some kind of list or registry of voters is one of the core features needed to manage elections² at a national level. As a FairVote research report on the topic explains:

Clean and complete voter rolls are [a] vital tool in every democracy: by confirming that citizens have met all the eligibility requirements and that each eligible citizen is registered to vote once and only once, the voter registration process ensures the validity of the vote and helps to confer legitimacy on the electoral process.

Before the digital age, there was a time when the best way to keep an up-to-date list of voters was to require everyone to fill out and submit paperwork to various regional authorities every few years. Processing millions of paper forms was a grueling yet necessary part of managing a national elections system. This type of system lead to a lot of errors, which is just what happens when vast, mostly unsupervised networks of underpaid clerks are asked to somehow turn a whole population’s handwritten submissions into an up-to-date national registry of voters.

Thanks to today’s informational architecture, such arduous and inaccurate systems are now used in only a handful of pseudo-democracies that continue to spurn the advances of the 21st century. Like Burundi. And the USA.

Opt-In Self-Registration vs. Automatic Voter Registration

In addition to reducing time and effort, modern automatic registries produce more accurate results. Digital registries can be updated automatically using data that is already being collected by civil registries like birth and death certificates or national healthcare records and social security. Whether conducted in the US or internationally, an overwhelming body of research shows that automatic systems are far more accurate compared to the self-initiated, opt-in US system.

And as if having an accurate voter-registry were not enough of an upside, automatic universal registration of eligible citizens is a lot cheaper, too. According to the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network³:

Concerning the cost of voter lists, a main lesson learned from previous research (and still relevant) is that permanent registries promote both transparency and cost-effectiveness, particularly when they are periodically updated with corrections, additions and deletions without obliging voters to re-register.

The system of voter-registration used in Canada, for example, costs 12 times less per-registered voter than the US system.

Modern Automatic Registration Works

Modern systems — like those nearly every stable country in the world use — result in much higher rates of registration among voting-age populations. Study after study (after study) has shown that wherever government assumes responsibility for registration by automatically adding voters as they come of age or become citizens, turnout is higher and more citizens are registered. For example, about 90% of the voting-age population (VAP) is registered to vote in Canada, 91% in Indonesia, 93% in France, and 97% in Japan.

And the US? According to the 2014 census, 64.6% or just under 2/3rds.

The Self-Initiated, Opt-In System Is Just Awful
(& US Public Officials Damn-Well Know It)

It has been well-known for decades that the US voter-registration system is one of the glaringly obvious reasons that US elections are #1 at having the worst voter-turnout in the developed world. It was known 25 years ago when embarrassingly low voter-turnout forced congress to pass the 1993 National Voter Registration Act that created a standardized form and required states to offer registration at certain public offices, such as the DMV. While some improvement is better than none, it was clear to a 2001 commission chaired by former presidents Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford that the NVRA had only scratched the surface of the problem. The commission bluntly concluded:

“The registration laws in force throughout the United States are among the world’s most demanding … [and are ] one reason why voter turnout in the United States is near the bottom of the developed world.”

Despite the success of the US campaign to spread ‘democracy’ all over Africa and the Middle East in the 17 years since, thus far the same politicians seem to be incapable of bringing it home.

Not Abolishing Self-Registration Is Voter Suppression

If the failure to fix the US registration system was only due to congress being a birdbrained horde of nitwits who genuinely were unable to find a workable solution, such inaction might be forgivable — but the truth is more disheartening.​ There are too many alternatives that are so well-known and readily available that it would be ludicrous to believe more than a few of them give a damn about the integrity of US elections or about democracy itself for that matter. Anyone who can use a search engine can verify that plenty of far better systems are currently in use all over the world.

It is a fact that self-registration results in lower voter-turnout compared to modern registration systems and it is also a fact that automatic registries are more accurate, easier to maintain, and cheaper. And in light of these facts, a person has to wonder — why would elected officials be so resistant to fixing voter registration — ? Why would they not implement any of the pre-tested, ready-made, more accurate systems at a fraction of the cost? Is it because US politicians want less accuracy? More difficulty? Or higher costs? Or is it that they want fewer voters participating in the political process?

What seems more likely?

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying this writer a cup of coffee using PayPal or making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

Notes:
Note¹ Despite what some claim, the voting-age population (VAP) is the best measurement to use for comparing elections internationally whereas voting-eligible population (VEP) is problematic for a lot of of reasons. To illustrate why, consider that until 2015 women were not eligible to vote in Saudi Arabia and, if VEP was used to calculate turnout %, the data would suggest that Saudi ‘democracy’ was equal to other democracies that allow both sexes to vote because women wouldn’t be counted as part of VEP. This allows states to arbitrarily define the denominator and that is big problem from a scientific perspective.
Note² The phrase “national elections” is used intentionally here because a voter registry is only a core feature of national elections but not of elections, voting, or democracy at large. In a better world — that is, a world without nations, borders, or nationality — elections may still be held without any need for a registry. The only fundamental reason for registration is to distinguish citizens from non-citizens, which this author thinks is a very silly thing that humans will eventually outgrow.
Note³ The “past research” here refers to decades of studies conducted by the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral assistance, the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa, Elections Canada, the National Electoral Institute of Mexico, the International Foundation for Elections Systems, the Carter Center, the UN Electoral Assistance Division, and the UN Development Programme.

Voter Registration Is Voter Suppression: Low Turnout by Design in the USA was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The article you are about to read is 100% pure Russian propaganda, written by some shill to deliberately mislead you with false information on what is obviously a fake news site. That, at least, is the story being used to foment mistrust of divergent views and discredit independent news-media, educators, and journalists. Thanks to the normalization of xenophobic slurs by the mainstream outlets, terms like ‘Russian troll’ and ‘Russian bot’ have been weaponized to dismiss non-corporate news and perspectives. Whether democrats’ repressive McCarthyism or the right-wing’s equally absurd censure of ‘fake news’ with ‘alternative facts,’ the result is an identical silence of dissent. Meanwhile, big social media now openly curates billions of newsfeeds at the request of governments in the US, Israel, and who knows where else and — as of April 23rd, Monday this week — the FCC’s unilateral decision to trash net-neutrality was set in motion.

​Before this constellation of repression and censorship revises history beyond repair, it is important to remember how all of this happened.

Russian Bots, Anti Social Media,
& the Bleak Rise of Internet Censorship

“the Russians, who typically, almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique”
 — James Clapper, former director of national intelligence

In January of 2017 (as this site reported), US intelligence’s assessment of foreign meddling in the 2016 election seemed to define Russian propaganda as anything critical of US policy. Content that “described the current US political system as corrupt,” characterized the US as “a surveillance state,” or voiced “criticism of the US economic system” is presented as proof of a Russian influence-campaign. The report came a month after congress had passed the NDAA for 2017 that appropriated funds for a “Global Engagement Center,” which sounds far nicer than “US Department of Propaganda.” Section 1259C authorized the center to covertly fund journalists, NGOs, scientific research, academic institutions, and “private companies” to counteract foreign influence on “the policies and social and political stability of the United States.”

Good thing that never resulted in state-censorship or the widespread persecution of dissenting views.

The Hunt for Russian Influence Continues in 2018

Anoa Changa — a Black activist, attorney, and podcast-host — was recently smeared by Atlanta NPR affiliate WABE after discussing issues like police violence on a radio station owned by Russian outlet Sputnik. This attack came un-ironically from an affiliate of NPR, founded and funded by the US government. As the actual journalists at FAIR.org explain:

“…instead of using this opportunity to highlight the causes they’re fighting for, or the injustices that brought them to become activists, WABE used its considerable resources and influence to talk about, you guessed, Russian influence”

In response to the hit-piece, Changa writes:

​”There’s nothing new about American institutions attacking and delegitimizing the work of Black activists and organizers. What’s new is that in the age of Russian election interference, journalists at establishment media companies are now using the Russia investigation as an excuse to mainstream these smear tactics. And it’s an affront to the activism of people of color that must be identified for what it is.”

Why Are So Many Russian Bots Also Journalists?

“[‘Russians’] try to get individuals, including U.S. persons, to act on their behalf either wittingly or unwittingly. Individuals going on a treasonous path often do not realize it until it is too late” — John Brennan, former director of the CIA

Anoa Changa is not the only one who has been targeted by the neo-McCarthyists. YouTube now imposes a big warning beneath the videos of comedian and host of Redacted Tonight, Lee Camp. This is not because he was exposed as a Kremlin operative poisoning the country with nefarious Russian propaganda — no, the reason we must be warned about Camp is that his insightful comedy and commentary airs on RT — a Russian outlet! Eugene Puryear, Abby Martin, Julian Assange, John Pilger, Chris Hedges — the list goes on.

From Social Media to State Media

“You created these platforms… and now they’re being misused. And you have to be the ones who do something about it — or we will”
 — Sen. Diane Feinstein, to Facebook, Google, & Twitter Executives

In October ’17, Twitter’s spokesperson told congress they had hidden 1/2 of all tweets about the leaks that revealed collusion by the media with DNC officials during the primaries. But it was no confession — Twitter was bragging about censoring the voices of tens of thousands to repress a news story. To congress. This is what “normal” is now. Part of the statement reads:

“With respect to #DNCLeak, approximately 23,000 users posted around 140,000 unique Tweets with that hashtag in the relevant period. Of those Tweets, roughly 2% were from Russian-linked accounts. As noted above, our automated systems at the time detected, labeled, and hid just under half (48%) of all the original Tweets with #DNCLeak.”

Facebook also accommodates the US government by removing profiles, ostensibly to fight fake news or Russian trolls. The social-media giant not only overhauled its newsfeed to favor content from large news-corporations over independent media but it has also granted 95% of requests by Israeli authorities to censor content in Palestinian territories. Considering that Facebook alone is the gatekeeper to 45% of news traffic (and social media altogether for 67%), the idea that US and Israeli politicians are able to act as its chief editors should be terrifying.

The collaboration of big social with governments, the fake news invective, the McCarthyist witch-hunts, the FCC’s unilateral demolition of net neutrality — is altogether a threat to any meaningfully free press and to online political organization. As grave as this assault may be, it is not unprecedented and — by adding a bit of historical context — it may be less hopeless than it first seems.

From the Printing Press to the Internet
(& From the Inquisition to Online Censorship)

“Printing […] is the art of arts, the science of sciences. Thanks to its rapid diffusion the world is endowed with a treasure house of wisdom and knowledge, till now hidden from view. An infinite number of works […] are now translated into all languages and scattered abroad among all the nations of the world”
 — Werner Rolewinck 1474

The invention of movable-type made it possible to cheaply imprint information onto paper, resulting in a mass-production of written material and expanded access to knowledge for unprecedented numbers of people. Before the printing press,† hand-copied manuscripts were so costly that access to education and specialized knowledge was mostly limited to the wealthy. The spread of printed media not only changed how people shared information but who and how many shared it. Because of this democratization of knowledge, printing technology’s impact on human civilization has often been compared to that of writing itself and, more recently, to the internet.

​For the most part, comparisons of the rise of online media to printing have emphasized the internet’s potential to change things for the better. But this ignores the fact that the democratic tendencies of printed media met heavy repression. The worst inquisitions and witch-hunts arose alongside the printing press during the period of Europe’s Renaissance that culminated in the Protestant Reformation and ended the political reign of the medieval Church.

The Historical Democratization of Knowledge

Technology has a strong tendency to tip the scales against power. The printing press ultimately led to a profound redistribution of access to knowledge — but not without upheaval. Before the victory, there were the accusations, the book burnings, and the witch-trials. ​Prior to printed media, the Church had been the major producer of manuscripts in Europe and that gave them a lot of power over what kinds of knowledge were copied and circulated. Naturally, they wanted to keep that power and — facing the spread of printed media that criticized the Church doctrines — power fought tooth and nail against the heretics to the bitter end.

Online News-Media & Today’s Inquisition

“The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next”
 — Helen Keller

The Internet — like the printing press — increased the velocity of information to such a degree that there was a qualitative change in how knowledge was created and distributed in societies. Just as small printing presses disrupted the Church’s centralized production of manuscripts in Europe, the Internet has eroded the centralized information-regime of the TV news networks, Hollywood, and the print industry. Instead of popes or archbishops, there are the Murdochs, Turners, and celebrity show-hosts from Rachel Maddow to Sean Hannity who — much like the medieval dogmatists Church before them — propagate the doctrines of wealth and power.

Old English Fake News

As Dan Bricklin has already noted, there seem to be many parallels between today’s popular news-bloggers and pamphleteers who agitated for revolution during the early modern era. The first pamphleteers — like Martin Luther who challenged the establishment’s narrative in his day — were smeared as “heretics,” a word‡ that described people who believed the wrong ideas. Pamphlets were so effective at undermining religious and political authorities that they were banned in many times and places throughout the 1500s. In 1590’s A Treatise Against Witchcraft, Henry Holland writes, “many fabulous pamphletes are published, which give little light and lesse proofe,” which is basically translates to “fake news” in ye Olde English.

Considering the historical repression that followed the rise of the printing press, the attack on the informational democracy of the Internet can be viewed in a totally different light.

Toward a New Narrative & a New Media

During the 2016 election cycle, polls showed that US media’s credibility had hit rock-bottom. The popular need for a relevant and informed social discourse led to the formation of decentralized, independent media, journalists, news-hubs, and grassroots distribution through social-media. In contrast to the packaged politics of the name brands, the improvised press was able to deliver a range of differing or even contradictory views by embracing the web’s participatory framework.

By the time the media realized how many had quit listening, a critical mass had rejected the narrative that the democratic candidate would unite the nation for an inspiring landslide against a clown supported by deplorable racist trash. ​That is the story that was being presented by the mainstream, celebrity-obsessed US media and it was rejected — not because people had been confused by Kremlin propagandists or duped by Macedonan teenagers’ fake news — but because it was horse-shit. Better, more compelling, more plausible, nuanced stories were being told in the new press and that successful act of heresy is what became the basis for the inquisitions today.

The ‘Russian Meddling’ Narrative Is Absurd

Each time pundits repeat this narrative that today’s problems are a result of Russian meddling, remember how US intelligence’s assessment defined “Russian propaganda.” By saying that Kremlin propagandists influenced the results, they are really saying that online media’s “criticism of US policy” is the problem and that reporting on US “infringements of civil liberties and police brutality” harms democracy. How dare they? By claiming Trump’s election was due to Russian propaganda, the anchors are saying that those who didn’t support the bipartisan consensus for endless war, mass-incarceration, and environmental destruction must have been fooled by the Kremlin. To accept this is to think that choosing between the status quo and a literal dumpster-fire was meaningful and that feeling uninspired by this choice is Russian propaganda.

In solidarity,
John Laurits

If you like these posts, please consider buying John a cup of coffee using PayPalor making a monthly donation using Patreon — it’s like a voluntary subscription directly to an artist & journalist

Notes:
† While the invention of movable type in Germany was the final piece in the printing press puzzle, it is right to give credit where credit is due. The printing press would have been impossible without China’s invention of rag-paper, introduced to Europe by Arab Muslims (along with tooth-brushes, Greek philosophy, and bathing) and, while it didn’t spread across the world at the time, a movable type was invented in Korea by the 11th century.

‡ Interestingly, the original Greek hairesis referred to “a choosing for oneself” and particularly choices between different ways of thinking.

The Russia Narrative Is Nonsense: Anti-Social Media Censorship & McCarthyist Democrats was originally published in Extra Newsfeed on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.