This Week: The Presidential Campaign

"Quote" of the Week: "Racial Resentment" and Voter ID

Sign Up for A Free Class on Propaganda. Taught by Nygaard!

The Presidential Campaign in a Nutshell

The Real Campaign Corruption

Greetings,

I'm violating a couple of long-held Nygaard Notes traditions this week. I don't usually write about things in the Opinion pages. This week I do. And I don't usually talk about campaigns. This week I do. I don't know why I'm doing this. Maybe it's global warming.

If you live in or near the Twin Cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul, please consider signing up for the class I'll soon be teaching. (See Item #2 this week.) I'd love to have some people in the class who are familiar with the Notes. Some of the things we'll be covering will be things I've covered in these pages, but much of it I haven't mentioned for years. Plus, I fully expect to cover some brand new territory, since the people in the class are bound to know a lot of things that I don't know. I'm going to facilitate the process, and we'll see what happens. Fun!

By the way, if anyone has seen the movie "2016: Obama's America," please write and tell me what you think of it. It's reported to have become the 2nd-biggest grossing political documentary of all time, but I just can't bring myself to see it.

In solidarity,

Nygaard

"Quote" of the Week:"Racial Resentment" and Voter ID

A press release that was put out on July 17th began like this:

"A new National Agenda Opinion Poll by the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication reveals support for voter identification laws is strongest among Americans who harbor negative sentiments toward African Americans."

Since the poll was completely ignored in the U.S. media, here are a few quotations from the press release:

"To assess attitudes toward African Americans, all non-African Americans respondents in the poll were asked a series of questions. Responses to these questions were combined to form a measure of 'racial resentment.' Researchers found that support for voter ID laws is highest among those with the highest levels of 'racial resentment'.

"Paul Brewer, the center's associate director for research, said, 'These findings suggest that Americans' attitudes about race play an important role in driving their views on voter ID laws.'

"The link between 'racial resentment' and support for such laws persists even after controlling for the effects of partisanship, ideology, and a range of demographic variables.

After noting that "Republicans and conservatives have the highest 'racial resentment' scores, the release continues,

"Republicans and conservatives overwhelmingly support voter ID laws regardless of how much 'racial resentment' they express. In contrast, Democrats and liberals with the highest 'racial resentment' express much more support for voter ID laws than those with the least resentment."

Sign Up for A Free Class on Propaganda: Taught by Nygaard!

I'm excited about this. Starting next month I will be teaching a free six-week course here in Minneapolis called 21st-Century Propaganda: Thought Control in A Democracy. It'll go from 7:00 to 9:00 pm every Thursday from October 4th until November 8th. The class will be at the University of Minnesota, in Blegen Hall Room 150. It's on the West Bank of the U of M, just a few blocks from my house. It'll only go if enough people sign up. I expect it to go—in fact, one person signed up before I even knew it was listed!—but I don't know if it'll be crowded or not. I asked that it not have more than a dozen people. If you want to be sure and get a spot, I suppose you should sign up sooner rather than later. It starts in three weeks; that's not so far away (I'd better start getting ready...)

Here's the course description:

"This six-week course will offer an unconventional definition of Propaganda as it functions in U.S. society in the 21st Century. Although the premise of the class is that Propaganda permeates the entire intellectual culture, the focus will be on the mass media. Along the way we'll do a bunch of fun and challenging exercises, working in small groups and doing as much homework as people want to do. (Maybe none.) We'll consider how Propaganda affects social change work, learn how to protect ourselves from the dangers of Propaganda and how to begin to neutralize the power of Propaganda in the culture at large. We'll look a bit at Public Relations theory and what I like to call the Public Relations-ization of U.S. culture. We'll be learning a bit about systems analysis and the functioning of the structures and processes that are built into the modern media environment. By the end of the course, I hope we'll all have a better understanding of how Propaganda works, how it affects our lives, and how to spot it and disarm it. The only requirement will be interest in the subject—no prior knowledge will be required to understand any of the concepts we'll be covering."

You can sign up online right HERE.

It should be fun. I'm planning to make it similar to some classes I taught a few years ago here in Minneapolis, and the students then always said they enjoyed themselves.

The class is being offered through the Experimental College of the Twin Cities—or EXCO—which "is a collective dedicated to supporting community initiated educational opportunities as a means for social change." In the spirit of Nygaard Notes, all the classes are free and open to anyone. You can learn more about Exco on their website.

The Presidential Campaign in a Nutshell

I don't write much about the presidential campaign, as I don't think there is much to be gained from following the Public Relations extravaganzas that are paid for with the $2.5 billion that the presidential campaigns expect to spend this year. However, a telling tidbit appeared on page 15 of the August 29th New York Times, with a headline that got my attention: "How the Media Adapt When News Is Scarce." News is scarce? I had to read that article. And, lo and behold, I learned something. I'll pass it along now to you.

The Times was talking about the Republican National Convention where, admittedly, anything that might be called "news" was almost completely absent. Into that vacuum the Times sent a reporter, whose article contained a few paragraphs that revealed a lot, although not in the way he likely intended. How about this, for instance: "Media organizations have turned the political parties' quadrennial gatherings this year into laboratories of innovation and experimentation, straying from their traditional areas of expertise as they search for new ways to engage readers and audiences."

By "innovation and experimentation" they're referring to things like newspapers taking video, and Internet news services putting out paper magazines. Who cares? But note the interesting distinction between "readers" and "audiences." Back to that in a moment.

Added the Times, "[Thirty years ago] conventions were less scripted and generated more surprises, while today's media labor to enliven coverage of what typically are endless hours of preordained events." By "more surprises" they mean "more than none." And when they say "endless hours of preordained events" they are talking about Public Relations and nothing else.

Despite the completely-predictable "scarcity" of news, the article mentioned a lot of major news organizations that were there "laboring" to serve their "audiences." Included were The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Diane Sawyer (anchoring 'ABC World News' and taping videos for Yahoo). the Associated Press, NBC News, CBS News, PBS NewsHour (offering 24-hour Web streaming), Politico and C-Span (simulcasting live Web coverage), and the local Tampa Bay Times.

What were all these high-powered media organizations doing there? And how were they "adapting" to the lack of news? I think the final two paragraphs of the story more or less say it all:

"If the conventions fail to produce much in the way of news these days, the one thing they do generate for news outlets is an unparalleled opportunity to raise their profiles. Bloomberg, which is going beyond its digital roots and publishing a daily print magazine during the convention, has spent more than $1 million to construct an airy, sleek office space here. Caterers serve Nicoise salad with seared tuna, and visitors lounge on white leather couches as New Age music pulses through overhead speakers. 'The convention around the convention is the story,' said Kevin Sheekey, chairman of Bloomberg Government, a news service sold to lobbyists and Capitol Hill offices for thousands of dollars a year."

And there you have it: To engage the "readers"—that is, you and me—who are the product that the media organizations sell to their advertisers, the news corporations offer prime time speeches and other "preordained events" featuring all of our favorite political celebrities, aimed at keeping us entertained and watching their ads. All the maneuvering is also aimed at reminding the campaigns and non-campaign organizations that the media corporations can deliver eyeballs for the amazingly-lucrative political ads that will be purchased by partisans of both sides this year—$575 million spent on TV and radio ads alone, says NBC News in a report released September 11th. And counting.

That's all to engage the readers. But "the story," which occurs offstage—"the convention around the convention"—is reserved for the "audience," which is the lobbyists and the other Capitol Hill insiders who can pay "thousands of dollars a year."

It's nice of the Times to tell us about the strategy being pursued by itself and its corporate media confederates in covering the convention, even if they do put it on page 15, in code, buried in the last two paragraphs.

Oh, and, by the way, had these media mega-corporations taken some of their millions out of Tampa and used it to do some journalism, I think they could have found some "news" worth reporting, "scarce" though it may be. Ya think?

The Real Campaign Corruption

Long-time readers know that I don't usually talk about what's in the editorial pages. The reason is that I believe that readers can deal with opinions—when they're clearly labeled "opinion"—on their own. I'm generally much more concerned with the hidden, insidious opinions that appear in the supposedly "objective" news articles that we see and hear every day. But in the Sunday August 4th edition of my local newspaper appeared an opinion piece that illustrates a very common bit of Deep Propaganda that I think is worth challenging. So, here goes:

The opinion piece was submitted by a former business reporter for the Star Tribune, Mike Meyers, under the headline "Don't Show Me the Money." He began by saying that "the problem with current campaign finance law is not too much secrecy. The problem is too little." So he recommends that we "Drop an impenetrable shroud between those who give and those who receive. Put people in jail for divulging the names of political donors. With so much money sloshing around politics, fines won't do. A stretch in the pen would. Imagine if the candidates themselves were prevented from knowing the identity of their benefactors. Might they behave differently toward 'special interests'?" Meyers asks us to "Envision politics with government officials having no direct knowledge of who gave money to their campaigns."

Meyers' point is that, if politicians didn't know who financed their campaign, they would not be beholden to them. The widely-shared, and cynical, belief here is that politicians can be "bought," in the sense of getting them to do something in exchange for money. At the risk of appearing insufficiently cynical, I don't think this form of corruption is that big of a problem. And the more we talk about this sort of corruption the more likely we are to miss the far bigger corruption that is at work in U.S. politics.

In this regard, I highly recommend the book "Golden Rule: The Investment Theory of Party Competition and the Logic of Money-Driven Political Systems," by Thomas Ferguson. In the meantime, I will here repeat an anecdote that I often relate, which succinctly summarizes Ferguson's "Investment Theory."

Back in the year 2000, I was listening to Minnesota Public Radio. On the air was a leader of a Political Action Committee, or PAC. He was responding to an accusation that money from groups like his has deformed and corrupted our political system. Here's what he said in defense of how political action committees work:

"We don't ever try to buy politicians in Minnesota because, frankly, I don't think they are 'buyable.' What we do is, we study their records and their statements. If we like what they are doing, we say to them, 'Hey, we know campaigns are expensive, and we want to help you get your ideas out to the public.' That's how we make our decisions on whose campaign to contribute to."

And that, in a nutshell, is how money works in our political system. People with money "invest" in right-thinking politicians for the purpose of "helping" them get into office. Money thus flows overwhelmingly to politicians—of any party—who can be counted on to support policies that are pleasing to those with the money. In 2010 the Supreme Court ruled, in the famous "Citizens United" case, that there are no limits on such investment. This ruling seems to be making the problem worse, but the basic dynamic was in place long before Citizens United.

So, here's my advice to those who are concerned about money and politics: Forget about conspiracies, and forget about the "retail" corruption, personal graft, and the politicians who are willing to sell themselves for cash. Sure, there are such people. But even if we got rid of all of them, the system would still be based on the Political Golden Rule: Those with the Gold make the Rules.

In place of focusing our attention on "bad" people who are corrupt, consider instead the phenomenon of good people, people who are sincere but who have been propagandized over decades, and who are now seeking your vote so they can achieve positions from which they can re-shape the nation in line with their beliefs. And then add in the money—money that comes from the same places as the money that's been used to shape and enforce the propaganda that produces these True Believers. In such a rich but grossly-unequal society as the United States, there's enough money in the hands of the few as to allow them to elevate those True Believers to positions of power. No one is being asked to lie or cheat. They're simply being enabled to do what they want to do—as long as what they want to do is the Right Thing. That's the Investment Theory of money in politics. Watch it at work in this campaign. Once you know what to look for it's easy to see.