OPINION: Money & politics shouldn't mix

It’s the political season. Not sure why it has to be so long. And it brings the usual discourse. Blame. All the bad things are because of the opposition and all the good things are because of us (depending on who “us” is). The circus goes on.

If it’s blame that needs to be portioned, let me begin here. Abraham Lincoln stated, ”Corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in few hands and the republic is destroyed.” I agree with Lincoln. Five members of the Supreme Court obviously don’t.

 I lay the blame for our current middle class economic uncertainty directly upon the new royalty (multi-national corporations), and more specifically, the inheritance generation who were given everything and expect even more. For just as the privileged English royalty before them did, they have greedily taken all for themselves at the expense of the common family. Wealth concentration and income disparity are at record levels (IRS). This is undeniable and acknowledged by everyone including the ultra-conservative IMF, the Pope, many Republican presidential candidates (or “puppets”, as Donald Trump calls them), and unbelievably, even some prominent billionaires. Income inequality is a worldwide problem.

For ANY media to blame the poorest Americans for this problem is beneath contempt. The poor had neither the financial means nor organizational capacity to have caused the recession as right-wing (corporate) media continually states. The whole world went into recession, and somehow America’s poorest caused it? Hell, the Walton heirs alone are worth more than the poorest 40 percent (140 million) of Americans. That 140 million includes a lot of hard working Americans — they’re not all unemployed “takers” as Fox News describes them. No, it was Wall Street that gambled and committed fraud, and we all lost.

Since the loss of the Fairness Doctrine, reliable information on these issues has been challenging to obtain (it’s a free-for-all). Corporate media serves corporate masters. And corporate masters get their way. We do not get the truth. We get their version of such. This makes it difficult to retain faith in those who knowingly and willingly engage in message deception for their sole financial benefit. I was not raised that way. Apparently some of America’s most wealthy citizens were. No one wants to deny honest gains to those who earn them, but for decades now, an undue share of benefits has gone to the holders of capital, and policy decisions have created and sustained that inequity.

Corporate welfare far exceeds welfare for the poor. It costs us hundreds of billions a year. We subsidized the moves of over 40,000 factories, from the U.S. to China (and Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.) in the eight years from 2000-2007, alone. It cost over 3.5 million U.S. jobs. These factories leaving the country and shipping the same goods back, and the resulting loss of jobs and drop in U.S. wages, only benefits a few people at the top of our system.

That drop in U.S. wages has resulted in the subsidization of hard-working Walmart employees alone to the amount of $6.2 billion a year, effectively handing each Walton family member over a billion dollars a year to pay their work force what they won’t — a living wage.

Promises that tax cuts for the wealthy would be applied to income increases for worker productivity is, and was, a ruse. Yet that is the proposed Republican solution for income inequality — more tax cuts for the wealthy (ideological constipation) and further budget cuts to Social Security (even more ideological constipation). In other words, exacerbate the problem and broaden poverty.

The solution is not to increase pay for the most productive workers in the industrialized world, who work more hours than any other advanced nation; it is to have them “work harder and longer.” The fact is: productivity gains have not translated into income gains for well over 30 years. Working harder and longer only fills the pockets of the wealthy. Nothing has ever “trickled down.” Thank you, Ronald Reagan, for instituting this policy lie.

The supply-side (trickle-down economics) lie is alive and well because of the efforts of some of the wealthiest Americans (i.e. the Koch brothers, the Walton family, Rupert Murdoch, etc.). They have embraced and promoted this lie with full knowledge of its dubious claims.

The whole facade was spawned by the Powell Memorandum, which doesn’t counsel lying, but it strongly suggests aggressive advocacy of their positions, which would not be a problem were the positions based upon factual evidence. But they were not and are not so based (i.e. the Laffer Curve – now known as the laugher curve).

Over the years, evidence has emerged that many policy decisions were promoted with known mis- and disinformation originating from the think tanks spawned during the mid-1970’s. These Powell-inspired think tanks continue to script false narratives to protect ill-gotten benefits. Corporate-owned media messages are carefully planned and strictly followed. It is not by chance that the same phrases, the same talking points are heard simultaneously from varied sources.

The framing of policy disagreements with half-truths, wrongly portraying honest Americans as something less than honest, is beyond the pale. Evidently, that’s the only way to sell the trickle down lie. Such is the world in which we live. Journalism wasn’t always this way. Evidence used to trump innuendo, and truth used to trump volume. It no longer does (thank you, Fox News).

It doesn’t have to remain like this. As citizens, we can change things. That’s the beauty of the Constitution. We may never get dishonest ideologues to tell the truth, but we may able to stop them from buying the instruments to disseminate their lies. We must reinstate a journalistic standard on our public airwaves for others to emulate (someone needs to be “fair and balanced”). And we must get money out of politics. We must. Our future depends upon it.

Straka is a resident of Whitefish.