Many people feel that America’s political campaigns have become vapid PR hustles with little connection to the real-life concerns of workaday people. Luckily, Adam Swart says he has the fix for such voter malaise: Just add a more professional level of vapidity to the process, he says, and you can reduce the need for having actual voters involved in campaigning.
Swart is a for-hire politico who’s been hailed as a “visionary” and a “business rockstar” for launching an outfit he calls Crowds on Demand. His entrepreneurial concept is as simple as it is devious. Rather than the tedium of strategizing and organizing people into grassroots campaigns, just pay his COD team to stage a “movement” — you know, like Hollywood would do. Indeed, Swart’s operation is even headquartered in the center of Hollywood make-believe, Beverly Hills.
But let him sell his own product. He says he can create and staff a turnkey political front group for clients. “We provide everything,” exclaims COD’s website, “including the people, the materials, and even the ideas. ... We can help you plan the strategy and execute it.”
How happy — if you’re a corporate schemer needing to win or defeat a proposal, but you don’t have any grassroots base of support, Crowds On Demand promises to fake it for you. “We can set up protests, rallies, demonstrations — and even create non-profit organizations to advance your agenda.” It’s basically an AstroTurf campaign operation, but with even less turf and more plastic.
If there is one thing the American majority would agree on today, it is that the last thing our political system needs is more PR trickery, issue fakery and political hustlers. How about we give a little more honesty a try?
In bold type, nearly every newspaper urges readers to “VOTE! TAKE A STAND!”
But in this year’s truly momentous national election, we saw such giants of corporate media as the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today cower from taking their own stand on the presidency. Worse, the papers shamefully insisted that ducking their duty was itself a principled stand. Readers are smart enough to make their own decisions, they barked piously. Well, yes, but are you?
And who, exactly, are “you”? Take the Washington Post, a paper with a rich history of courageous journalism. But it wasn’t the paper’s knowledgeable reporters or editorial staffers who elected to be silent this year. Rather, one guy — Jeff Bezos — unilaterally chose to mute the paper’s voice.
Bezos, the gabillionaire founder of Amazon, bought the Post a decade ago, promising not to impose his financial self-interest over the staff’s journalistic integrity.
But that was then. Today, the notoriously weaselly Bezos is drawing some $13 billion from federal taxpayers, and he’s eager to get more. So, realizing that the next president can determine who gets those piles of money, Bezos abruptly stopped his paper from endorsing Harris, putting his financial principle above journalistic principles. The Post would’ve exploded, however, if he had dictated a Trump endorsement, so Boss Bezos tried the backdoor maneuver of no endorsement.
The Post exploded anyway. Star reporters either resigned or howled at the crass sellout, while more than 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. As one reader posted about the billionaire’s self-serving manipulation: “If you don’t have the guts to run a newspaper, don’t buy one.”
Woody Guthrie satirized Depression-era bankers who routinely gouged farmers and poor people. “I’m a jolly banker, jolly banker am I,” Woody sang about the joyful lenders who profiteered on people’s misery.
Woody’s song could be sung today by Bharat Masrani, CEO of the TD Bank empire. Investigative digger Judd Legum reports that Masrani has long profited from a jolly scheme by his bank to launder $670 million in drug money from criminal networks. Federal prosecutors found that top TD bankers knew they were engaged in illegal drug dealing, but (shhhh!), they “chose profits over [legal] compliance.”
So — POW! — the Feds socked it to TD Bank with a $3 billion fine. That’ll teach ‘em ... right?
No. Banks don’t commit crimes; bankers do. But pointedly, none of TD Bank’s top officials were charged with the crimes they committed or sanctioned. Masrani, who now admits his culpability, simply says, “I apologize.”
That’s it. He faces no consequences! He got $10 million in pay last year — and no one even says, “Give it back.” Also, he’s now retiring but expects to get a multimillion-dollar farewell package and become a paid consultant for the bank. How is this supposed to deter other bank honchos from turning criminal?
Meanwhile, even though the bank must shovel out 3 billion big ones for its executives’ illegalities, that’s no deterrent to executive criminality. Banks today reap such excessive profits that losing $3 billion is just written off as the cost of doing business — freeing executives to create new ways to rig the system for their own profit.
The message is plain: “Do the crime, and you’ll do the time — unless you’re a jolly banker.”
Here’s a progressive idea I picked up from the unlikeliest of sources: corporate CEOs!
For decades, these chieftains of our economic order have been steadily implementing a very visionary process for establishing corporate wage levels. The essence of it is this: Let the workers set their own pay! Since the 1970s, when this idea began taking hold in corporate America, pay levels have zoomed up by more than 1,000%.
Well ... not for you. This “set your own pay” movement has only been available to top corporate executives, whose median paychecks now top $16 million a year! But since it’s been a boon for this test group, I say it’s time to expand the no-hassle compensation concept to all employees. This would greatly boost grassroots purchasing power, economic growth and fairness for all.
“Omigod, no,” squawk corporate apologists, rushing to say that, technically, CEOs do not directly set their pay. Rather, the bosses have attached their earnings to their corporations’ ever-rising stock prices. Thus, astronomical rewards go to those who obsessively focus on jacking up the price of their own stock, even though that’s a selfishly narrow and false measure of a corporation’s performance.
Also, stock price is no indicator of a CEO’s worthiness. Even bosses who’re blockheads can still get a boost simply because they’ve rigged the system to hitch a free ride on inflated stock value.
This is Jim Hightower saying ... Still, if it’s good for them, why not an equal deal for working stiffs who actually deliver the products and services that give a corporation some true value? I say, each worker should get the same percentage increase in pay that the top honcho takes. It’s a simple process — and it’s only fair.
Forget the cartoonish “Great Man” version of American history. Nearly all social progress in our country has been spurred by unheralded “nobodies” who felt a sting of injustice and resolved to right the wrong.
Lilly Ledbetter, who recently died at 86, was one such trailblazing rebel. It’s worth remembering her gutsy stand for “paycheck fairness.” After 20 years as a supervisor at Goodyear Tire in Gadsden, Alabama, Ledbetter was stunned in 1998 to learn that she had routinely been paid about 40% less than men doing the same job — robbing her of some $200,000. She promptly sued Goodyear for backpay — and won. Justice!
But Goodyear unleashed a pack of lawyers to drag Ledbetter through spirit-sucking years of legal appeals, including to the Supreme Court. There, Justice Samuel Alito, the far-right judicial extremist, absurdly decreed that she should have filed her claim of sex discrimination when it first started 20 years prior. Never mind that she had no way of knowing back then that she was being gouged, Alito is not one to let reality interfere with his political agenda. So, she lost.
But sometimes you win by losing. Stung by the injustice, Ledbetter became a modern-day Mother Jones, launching a fiery national campaign for workplace fairness. Backed by women’s groups and labor, her tenacious organizing finally compelled Washington to enact the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, eliminating the sex discrimination loophole exploited by the likes of Alito and Goodyear.
Ledbetter never got a penny of the money the system cheated her out of, but with the passage of this law, she rightly said, “I have an even richer reward.” Yes ... and so does America.
A lot of working stiffs today say the system is rigged to keep them from getting ahead. One thing that might make them feel like that is this: The system is rigged against them!
Consider some very hard workers busting their butts going up and down our residential streets — Amazon’s army of delivery drivers, hauling tons of packages right to our doorsteps. Their exhausting, corporate-mandated hustle is a key source of Amazon’s enormous profits — making Amazon boss Jeff Bezos a cartoonishly rich global playboy.
Yet Bezos — whose entire career has been built on rigging the system against employees, competitors and taxpayers — even refuses to acknowledge that those hundreds of thousands of drivers work for him. He disavows them because many are attempting to unionize over the autocratic and abusive working conditions he imposes on them — including having such dehumanizing delivery schedules that drivers can’t even stop to pee. They commonly carry bottles so they can “go on the go.”
Not my problem, says Jeff, pointing to a perverse, corporate-written gotcha in American labor law. It rigs the system by letting Amazon contract with thousands of local front groups called DSPs — “delivery service partners.” They then hire drivers to deliver Amazon’s packages. This lets Bezos deny responsibility for how the workers are treated since, technically, he doesn’t employ them.
Cute, huh? Worse, his DSP ruse further rigs the system by proclaiming that unions cannot even try to organize Amazon itself. Instead, they must go place to place, trying to organize each of the 3,000 DSP fronts that provide Amazon’s workforce.
These legalistic manipulations disempower workers, enrich bosses and enforce the Corporate Golden Rule: “Those who have the gold, rule.”
Jim Hightower is a former Texas Observer editor, former Texas agriculture commissioner, radio commentator and populist sparkplug, a best-selling author and winner of the Puffin/Nation Prize for Creative Citizenship. Write him at info@jimhightower.com or see www.jimhightower.com.
From The Progressive Populist, December 1, 2024
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