Tag Archives: U.S. politics

Bannon propaganda techniques

From Fresh Air, here’s some insight into how Steve Bannon manipulates people:

Conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who later worked in President Trump’s White House, became involved with the SCL subsidiary Cambridge Analytica. Wylie, who served as Cambridge Analytica’s research director for a year and a half, watched as his group began to use of data from Facebook and other online sources to target users for disinformation campaigns.

“They targeted people who were more prone to conspiratorial thinking,” Wylie says. “They used that data, and they used social media more broadly, to first identify those people, and then engage those people, and really begin to craft what, in my view, was an insurgency in the United States.”

The interview describes how they would identify people prone to conspiratorial thinking, target them with online ads, then convince them to attend real world events with other people who had been targeted by the same ads. They would choose small gathering places to give people a sense of crowding and that there were a lot of people attending the events. Then at the events, they would talk to other people with similar views and reinforce each other. Then they would get the sense that a lot of people believed whatever the conspiracy was and that it was a conspiracy that they didn’t see it in the mainstream media.

Maybe if more people understand how they are being manipulated, fewer will be manipulated. One can hope.

Koch propaganda techniques

It’s human nature to adjust your beliefs to justify actions that benefit you. That’s why the Koch brothers probably don’t (didn’t, since one passed away recently) think they are evil. But here is how they conspired to murder your grandchildren, and my grandchildren, and possibly their own great-grandchildren, although of course the ultra-rich will tend to fare better in a world of storms, fires, floods and food shortages than the rest of us.

So when you look at this equation of what would happen if we put a price on carbon emissions and greenhouse gas emissions, the real threat is that that might reduce demand for fossil fuels going out five, 10, 20 years. If that happens, the sunk value of this massive, industrial, globe-spanning infrastructure, the value of it, declines dramatically. And I interviewed a Koch Industries attorney who worked in the lobbying shop back in 2009 who told me, you know, Koch saw the efforts to put a price on carbon emissions as an existential threat to the company.

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(wow, this version of WordPress is complete garbage, there is no way to get rid of this white space without messing up the paragraph above or below)

So here’s what they did. They created a fake non-profit group to organize fake grass-roots protests that lawmakers considering voting for the cap and trade bill would see. They basically paid people to attend.

They also created a fake research organization to do fake studies about cap and trade. Then they paid for political ads that cited the fake research done by their fake organization, and again targeted lawmakers who supported cap and trade.

And it worked. There was bipartisan support for cap and trade based on a real understanding of the science and risk represented by climate change. A concerted campaign of lies masquerading as a citizen movement was able to derail it, all in support of cynically maximizing profits for evil, mega-rich people at the expense of everyone else on the planet for generations to come.

September 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story:
  • I think Elizabeth Warren has a shot at becoming the U.S. President, and of the candidates she and Bernie Sanders understand the climate change problem best. This could be a plus for the world. I suggested an emergency plan for the U.S. to deal with climate change: Focus on disaster preparedness and disaster response capabilities, the long term reliability and stability of the food system, and tackle our systemic corruption problems. I forgot to mention coming up with a plan to save our coastal cities, or possibly save most of them while abandoning portions of some of them in a gradual, orderly fashion. By the way, we should reduce carbon emissions and move to clean energy, but these are more doing our part to try to make sure the planet is habitable a century from now, while the other measures I am suggesting are true emergency measures that have to start now if we are going to get through the next few decades.
Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I mentioned an article by a Marine special operator (I didn’t even know those existed) on how to fix a broken organizational culture: acknowledge the problem, employ trusted agents, rein in cultural power brokers, win the population.

the climate town hall

A blog called “DeSmogBlog” has a pretty good run-down of the Democrats’ “town hall meeting” on climate change. I have to admit, I have not watched the whole thing, or very much at all.

Here’s my take. First, there are short- to medium-term practical issues that need to be tackled immediately and simultaneously. The first is disaster preparedness and disaster response – storms, fires, floods, droughts. We need to be ready for a major earthquake, plague or terrorist attack too although we can’t blame the climate directly for these. The second is the long-term stability of the food system under projected temperature and water supply trends. The third is dealing with the systemic corruption that has allowed the fossil fuel industry to buy and control our politicians for decades.

I think Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren understand these issues best. I don’t think other candidates understand them at all. I think they divorce them from larger socioeconomic issues to a certain extent, and that is a mistake. It should be possible to take advantage of fluctuations in the economy, employment, and financial system to make the right investments at the right time and minimize the pain.

Beyond these, we need to deal with our interwined land use, energy, transportation, food, and ecosystem issues. It could be done in ways that would be a win for everyone. Invest in the right kinds of infrastructure, education and training for workers, and innovation. It is unlikely to be done because our education system does not provide the public with the mental tools needed to understand systems, and therefore we do not elect politicians who understand systems and have workable ideas on how to fix them. This will still be true even if the corruption issues can somehow be solved.

yes, media bias exists

I didn’t really believe in media bias until the 2003 Iraq invasion, when it was just so blatantly obvious it couldn’t be ignored. But this article explains how Bernie Sanders can be right that subtler but still insidious forms of bias and censorship exist. I recently listened to a podcast (which I can’t find again…) on how relevant Noam Chomsky’s book Manufacturing Consent remains today, and I am as sold now as when I originally read it. Here’s a summary of his “five filters” along with my personal take.

The five points are a direct quote by the way. Shame on this awful version of WordPress that I can’t figure out how to make a block quote.

1. Media Ownership—The endgame of all mass media orgs is profit. “It is in their interest to push for whatever guarantees that profit.”

  • My take: this is what Bernie Sanders is talking about. Employees of any orgnanization are unlikely to challenge the interests of their owners and managers. They have to feed their families and pay their bills. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

2. Advertising—Media costs more than consumers will pay: Advertisers fill the gap. What do advertisers pay for? Access to audiences. “It isn’t just that the media is selling you a product. They’re also selling advertisers a product: you.”

  • A business does not want to lose its advertisers. No mystery here. They don’t have to lie, they can just avoid certain topics.

3. Media Elite—“Journalism cannot be a check on power, because the very system encourages complicity. Governments, corporations, and big institutions know how to influence the media. They feed it scoops and interviews with supposed experts. They make themselves crucial to the process of journalism. If you want to challenge power, you’ll be pushed to the margins…. You won’t be getting in. You’ll have lost your access.”

  • I believe part of this is laziness and penny pinching. Publishing government and corporate press releases with minimal editing is just easy and cheap. But government and corporations can lean on the press when they want to, as we saw most clearly during the Iraq invasion.

4. Flack—“When the story is inconvenient for the powers that be, you’ll see the flack machine in action: discrediting sources, trashing stories, and diverting the conversation.”

  • Trump has made this more obvious and ugly, but it was there before.

5. The Common Enemy—“To manufacture consent, you need an enemy, a target: Communism, terrorists, immigrants… a boogeyman to fear helps corral public opinion.”

  • Don’t forget Muslims and Mexicans.

July 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story: Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:
  • I laid out the platform for my non-existent Presidential campaign.

The Poor People’s Moral Budget

This report tries to quantify the costs of inaction on a lot of America’s social and environmental problems, and makes the case that the cost of inaction is higher than the cost of action. I tend to buy this, although they don’t give references in their summary and I bet if you dig deeper they may have cherry picked studies that produce the largest savings. Still, it illustrates how easily politicians can trick people by comparing the cost of action to an assumed zero cost of inaction, which is never the case. I don’t how you would go about educating the public about that, other than starting in kindergarten and teaching people how to look at evidence, think and draw conclusions.

Universal Basic Income, VAT, and baby bonds

A few 2020 Presidential contender highlights:

  • Andrew Yang (polling at about 1%) is promoting a Universal Basic Income of $1000/month for all U.S. citizens 18 and older regardless of income. He would pay for it by scaling back some other assistance programs and instituting…a VAT.
  • Cory Booker (polling at about 2%) is promoting “baby bonds”, where every baby gets a $1000 bond annually, and low-income children get up to an additional $2000 per year.

These are all ideas that (any) Democratic President and Congress could explore together, if they were to get a chance and managed to keep the corporate lobbyists at bay. I am 1000% in favor of VAT. It is just one of those things that all other modern countries do and the U.S. does not. It works and we just need to do it. Other taxes people hate can be reduced.

Both the UBI and baby bond ideas are supposed to address inequality quickly. The baby bond idea is supposed to particularly help racial disparities in wealth very quickly, but there is no reason the UBI could not do that with some fine-tuning. I like the idea of setting kids up with assets in principal, but in practice I am afraid unscrupulous relatives, Wall Street and payday lenders will find a way to take advantage of them. The UBI would essentially just be a “Social Security for All” scheme. We have the bureaucracy for that all set up and ready to go, so it seems practical to me. The only other difference I see between the two is that the government can more easily go back on a promise to pay you in the future than it can take money away from you that it has already paid. But of course it can do either, let’s not be naive.

My verdict – I’d like to see a VAT and a carbon tax used to fund education, infrastructure, and research. All of these things should help keep people busy if technology really does lead to unemployment. People can study to upgrade their knowledge and skills, design and build infrastructure and other types of capital goods, or go into research and teaching. Unemployment and disability insurance could also be beefed up to cover the gaps.

my campaign platform

I always fantasize in election years about what my campaign platform would be, in a fantasy world where I had political skills and was running. It’s not a useless fantasy, because it gives me a benchmark to measure candidates against when I’m thinking of who to vote for. So here goes:

  • Education – “free college” and trade school yes, but also universal preschool, lifelong education, and strong incentives for private sector skills training and retraining.
  • Infrastructure – I’ve talked a lot about this. Plan at the metropolitan area scale, take a broad view of infrastructure to include housing and green infrastructure. Include strong incentives for private sector capital investment.
  • Innovation – Flood universities with funding for basic research across the board. Make some bets on a few “moon shot” technologies like quantum computing, nanotechnology, fusion power, and advanced biotechnology. Include strong incentives for private sector R&D.
  • Corruption – also known as “campaign finance”, but that sounds boring. This is really about having voters rather than dollars decide elections, and having elected officials write laws that benefit a critical mass of citizens rather than a few large campaign donors. It’s really a prerequisite to achieving anything else in the long term. Hammer the fuckers relentlessly and voters might respond.
  • Nuclear Weapons – Sure I want world peace, but the public is incredibly cynical about that and this is a place to start. Remind people how horrifying and dangerous they are, and that we have way more than we could ever rationally need for any purpose. If we want others to give them up or stop pursuing them, we can easily lead by example. Just put them away as they wear out and don’t make new ones.

Maybe I’ll elaborate on these in future posts, if I get a chance.

Now, which politician do I think is the best match? I have a lot of research and paying attention to do. I think Bernie Sanders would be the strongest on campaign finance, and just making progress on that issue in an 8-year administration might be worth putting him in office. I also think he might be strong on peace. I think his instinct is to expand the welfare state without taking the first three steps to accelerate income growth over time. I’m not sure who I think would be strongest here. Possibly a rational, moderate Republican actually, if such an animal still exists. But I will never support any politician from that party as long as it continues to stand for bigotry, science denial, and war.

June 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • The world economy appears to be slowing, even though U.S. GDP is growing as the result of the post-2007 recovery finally taking hold, juiced by a heavy dose of pro-cyclical government spending. The worry is that if and when there is eventually a shock to the system, there will be little room for either fiscal or monetary policy to respond. Personally, the partisan in me is thinking any time before November 2020 is as good a time for any for a recession to hit the U.S. I am a couple decades from retirement, and picturing that bumper sticker “Lord, Just Give Me One More Bubble”. Of course, this is selfish thinking when there are many people close to retirement and many families struggling to get by out there. And short-term GDP growth is not the only metric. The U.S. is falling behind its developed peers on a wide range of metrics that matter to people lives, including infrastructure, health care costs and outcomes, life expectancy, maternal and infant mortality, addiction, suicide, poverty, and hunger. And it’s not just that we are no longer in the lead on these metrics, we are below average and falling. Which is why I am leading the charge to Make America Average Again!

Most hopeful story:

  • There have been a number of serious proposals and plans for disarmament and world peace in the past, even since World War II. We have just forgotten about them or never heard of them.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • In technology news, Elon Musk is planning to launch thousands of satellites. And I learned a new acronym, DARQ: “distributed ledger technology (DLT), artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR) and quantum computing”. And in urban planning news, I am sick and tired of the Dutch just doing everything right.