No, A Businessman Is Not A Good Choice For President, And Government Is Not A Business

  Among the more misappropriated and indiscriminate expressions in the English language is saying that someone is “in business.” The pawnbroker, the accounts executive at CBS, and the musician busking on the street are all nominally engaged “in business,”. Cornelius Vanderbilt, P.T. Barnum, Bill Gates, Al Capone, and Charles Ponzi were all successful businessmen, but that fact obscures the differences in their daily affairs rather than reveals any fundamental similarities.

ROBBER BARONS

The term robber baron is originally German. It was used to describe feudal lords who charged nominally illegal tolls (unauthorized by the Holy Roman Emperor) on the primitive roads crossing their lands or larger tolls along the Rhine river. The American Robber Barons were titanic monopolists who crushed competitors, rigged markets, and corrupted government.
In their greed and lust for power, they held sway over a helpless democracy. Author & history professor  Hal Bridges said that the term represented the idea that "business leaders in the United States from about 1865 to 1900 were, on the whole, a set of avaricious rascals who habitually cheated and robbed investors and consumers, corrupted government, fought ruthlessly among themselves, and in general carried on predatory activities comparable to those of the robber barons of medieval Europe." The term combines the pejorative senses of criminal ("robber") and aristocrat ("barons" having no legitimate role in a republic). One thing is for certain. These types of people are harmful to democracy.  They are it's foes...not it's friends... and are always at odds with the very nature of fairness, justice, and all other democratic principles. Self interest drives business, even small benign business...and this is not conducive to public service.




Most U.S. presidents have had some experience in private enterprises before entering the Oval Office, a few of them quite substantial. Herbert Hoover made millions as a mining consultant; Jimmy Carter managed a successful peanut farm; and George W. Bush ran an oil company. However, no president before Trump has ever spent his entire adult life immersed in the hustle and huckstering of business or, to use Trump’s preferred nomenclature, deal-making. That activity deserves a special scrutiny in light of the refusal to release his tax returns. Conflicts of interests come in many forms, but few are as worrisome as the leader of the free world keeping one eye on his portfolio whenever he contemplates some national or international policy decision. The founders were clear about emoluments and of course it turns out the majority in power these days are not inclined to follow the constitution on this. They say Trump is a special case and allow him to continue profiting from his office; a clear constitutional violation. In fact, Donald Trump is the 10th highest paid "athlete" in the world based on the money he rakes in everytime he bilks the government for his golf trips.
No, we don't need a "businessman" to run the country. This is a common but idiotic notion that stems from the misguided belief that the president is essentially the nation’s CEO, a common misconception that warps one’s understanding of how exactly the federal government works constitutionally.

Americans are willing to overlook the opportunities for cronyism and self-dealing in a trade off for their mistaken belief that spending time “in business” is ideal training for being the commander-in-chief.
Instead of an obvious and (as far as the Founders were concerned) highly desirable consequence of the division of powers and divided government providing checks and balances,
Washington’s inability to “get things done” is seen as unmistakable evidence of gross deficits in the character and competency of its leaders.
If the president, in particular, were simply more technically gifted, managerially adroit, and decisive in his decision-making—in other words, if he had the skills we often associate with successful CEOs—Washington would at last “work,” a remarkable conclusion that assumes for one thing that Americans are unanimous about the “work” that they would like to see done.
The truth is far from this.

The head honcho of a Fortune 500 company may assume their orders will be dispatched faithfully by subordinates, but when dealing with members of Congress, a president’s power is by and large confined to the power of persuasion. Yes, the president does have a limited battery of carrots and sticks—the promise of a political appointment, for example, or the threat of withholding support in the case of a primary—but for the most part, when one can neither freely promote nor fire the individuals one must work with in order to get anything substantial accomplished, they are power centers unto themselves rather than pawns to be moved at will as in businesses.

Ironically we have a casino magnate with six bankruptcies under his belt
who is playing high-stakes poker.
Domestically, he's playing with house money.
Overseas, he gambles with blood...not his own.
The question is " how did we get to this low station?"

THIS LOW STATION

After the rise of the Robber Barons in the gilded age, Trust Busting Teddy Roosevelt accomplished a great deal towards diminishing the oligarchic practices of big business. FDR made further strides. And things were going well generally in terms of general democratic practices in the US.

But sadly, in 1980, Ronald Reagan won the White House by arguing that the New Deal, the laws that regulated business, provided a basic social safety net, and promoted infrastructure, were destroying American liberty. In his inaugural address, Reagan claimed “Government is not the solution to our problem;” “government is the problem.” 
And the sheep believed him. 

America now turned for solutions, not to educated experts informing government policy,
but rather to individuals who claimed to be outside that sphere of expertise
- The business men...men of the people.
As the sheep celebrated those “self-made” individualists
the Congress cut taxes and regulation to free them to run their businesses however they saw fit.
We had a Republican house speaker who got into politics because he had been in the exterminator business and was angry about the government telling him he couldn't just dump his poisonous chemicals down the sink.

After 1981, wealth began to move upward at a startling pace , and yet the Republican party continued to howl about socialism and insisted that we would not have true freedom until all regulations, all taxes, and government programs that did not enrich the already wealthy were destroyed. When Reagan came into office in January of 1981, the top tax rate was 70%, but when he left office in 1989 the top tax rate was down to only 28%.
As Reagan gave the breaks to all his rich friends, the lack of revenue coming into the federal government caused huge deficits. The national debt,  when Reagan came into office
was $900 billion, by the time he left the national debt had tripled to $2.8 trillion.
In order to bring money back into the government, Reagan was forced to raise taxes eleven times always hitting the working class and poor the hardest.
The american labor unions were neutered under this presidency.
In their place we would have businessmen who had proven their worth by creating successful businesses. They would run our country in the best way for all of us. The claim that this system worked well or worked at all for any but the very few directly profiting from it is fiction. . Republican leaders stayed in power not because a majority of voters agreed with their ideology, but because as their policies moved wealth upward into the few and hurt most everyone else. The wealthy blamed economic hardships of the workers and middle class on women, minorities, immigrants and “special interests” who were demanding hardworking white men pay more taxes than they should. They also increasingly buggared the political system to make sure they stayed in power. They disenfranchised Democratic voters and carved up districts so that in 2012, for example, Democrats won a majority of 1.4 million votes for candidates to the House of Representatives, and yet Republicans came away with a 33-seat majority. Trump lost the popular vote by OVER 3 Million votes but because of the arcane way states send electors to the electoral college...well you know the result. We place blame on the electoral college, but 47 of the 50 states choose to use a "winner takes all" regarding electoral votes. If they did not do this, if they submitted their electors in a way that actually reflected the votes in their state; the electoral votes would be similar to the popular vote count. While changing the constitution to get rid of the electoral college is a formidable task unlikely to happen, getting states to agree to delegate their electors based on the actual votes in their state is reasonable and practical.
Why do we not pursue this? (That's a question for a different posting I imagine.)

The election of Donald Trump
is the apex of this erroneous political mentality.

He was seen as an outsider who posed as a successful businessman, disdainful of politics, who promised to gut government (the swamp) and put into office only the best people, people known for their business or their family connections to other business sybarites. Expertise and loyalty to the American government was frowned upon.What mattered was the ability to make money and be loyal to the president. 
Trump, like his predecessors slashed regulations, gave away national resources to businessmen, and passed a huge tax cut for the wealthy, a tax cut which was supposed to stimulate investment in the economy and promote economic growth. In the midst of the myriad of growing administration scandals, Trump banked on the fact that Wall St. profits would keep him in office for a second term and insisted that those opposing his administration, regardless of party, were hostile Democrats who wanted big government “socialism.”

Now, a virus from China is exposing the hollowness of a generation of relying on businessmen to manage our government instead of experts. The whole anti science mantra is exposed for the absurd charlatanism that it is. The administration’s response to the coronavirus has been disturbingly poor.

In 2018, it got rid of the government leadership for handling a pandemic, so we have no one in charge who is trained to handle such a crisis. Then, when the virus broke out, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention insisted on developing its own test, rather than using the guidelines established by the World Health Organization. Their test didn’t work, making health officials unable to test people in danger before they got sick. Then, over the advice of the CDC, administration officials decided to evacuate 14 infected patients who had been stranded on a cruise ship in Japan along with healthy travelers. We learned from a whistleblower that, once landed in the U.S., workers came and went from the facility that housed the patients with no precautions. Now, we have our first case of the coronavirus that appears to have appeared here on its own, and it happened in the same place where these workers came and went (although it is too early to say if there is definitely a connection,,,it would surely appear likely).

 

 Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Director of the National Economic Council Larry Kudlow, Trump's appointees for handling the Corona virus
(instead of people with expertise or science -medical backgrounds),
insisted on television that the virus is “contained.”

The problem of handling a public health crisis of this magnitude when you are merely equipped to promote business is demonstrated by Secretary of Health and Human Services Alexander Azar, a former drug company executive and pharmaceutical lobbyist, telling Congress that when scientists manage to make a vaccine for the coronavirus (12 to 18 months out, by all accounts), not everyone will be able to afford it. “We would want to ensure that we work to make it affordable, but we can’t control that price" This is the modern Republican Party laid bare. Profits before lives, because only businessmen, not government policy, can manage the country. This moment makes it really clear what happens when the Republicans’ ideology comes up against reality. While GOP leaders over the years, and Trump of late, have managed to silence opponents by calling them socialists or making sure they cannot vote, this virus is not going to stop simply by changing the narrative on twitter or Fox News. Investors know this, and the dropping stock market shows their realization that you cannot shut down entire countries and keep supply chains and consumer goods moving. The stock market has fallen 11.13% in the past four days, erasing a third of the gains it has made since Trump was elected. We are facing an economic downturn, one that will strain an economy that was excellent indeed for those at the very top, but not good for those who now will be vital to keep consumption levels up because but those very people will struggle to come up with extra income in an economic downturn.

The markets are acknowledging the biggest drops since the 2008 crisis. This is a crisis that demands expertise and coordinated government health programs, but we no longer have those things. Instead, Trump and his surrogates on the Fox News Channel are falling back on the old arguments that have worked so well for GOP leaders in the past: "Democrats are hyping the coronavirus and spooking the markets to hurt the president."

Trump, and Americans in general, are about to discover that there comes a point when hokum and product image can no longer override reality. We are in the spiral of that chaos now. But on the other side of it, we have the potential to rebuild a government that operates in reality, and that works for all of us.

While Americans need to reject this notion that business men will fix democracy.
We must also understand that Trump is the symptom of an infection  much deeper.
The corrupting effect money has on governance.
Imagine if you can a world where public servants spent their time serving the public instead of endlessly fund raising and campaigning or sucking up to corporate donors & oligarchs. Imagine policy makers who did not owe favors to the wealthy. An electorate not bombarded with ridiculous negative advertising from shadow organizations. None of this is good for democracy. None of this is good for anyone but the very few directly benefiting  from such corruption.
We need to eliminate private money from the election process. Plain and simple.
Replacing an ignorant illiterate billionaire oligarch with a literate one is no answer. 
It's like taking an Advil to ward off cancer.  It just won't work.
Whoever is nominated to be the alternative to Trump's lies
has an awful big workload ahead of them
but not much else will matter if the importance of
private money in public policy making is not removed.
Public financing only. 
And campaigning should be limited to 2 months before an election. 
Attempting to influence elections or politicians through bribery
should be a serious criminal offense...not an institution.

Social Media Is Killing Democracy

In Brazil, a crowd of supporters of the far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro began a surprising chant. They weren’t cheering for Bolsonaro or his running mate or their party; instead, they were reciting the names of social media platforms. “Facebook, Facebook, Facebook!” the crowd yelled. “WhatsApp, WhatsApp, WhatsApp!” They were crediting the platforms with their victory, and they were not entirely wrong. During that campaign, a conservative pro-business interest group funded a massive disinformation campaign on WhatsApp (the popular messaging app owned by Facebook).

Damaging and false information about Bolsonaro’s left-wing opponent, included fake news mocked up to look like neutral fact-checks, spread like wildfire in the runup to the October 8 vote.
This deluge,  played a large role in Bolsonaro’s victory. The glee Bolsonaro’s supporters exhibited points to a troubling development, one that SHOULD be familiar to Americans: Social media, once seen as a profoundly democratic technology, is increasingly serving the needs of authoritarians and their allies. Many observers have noted that entrenched authoritarian states, like Russia and China, have gotten very good at manipulating these platforms to marginalize domestic dissidents and destabilize democracies abroad. What’s gotten less attention is how authoritarian factions inside democratic states — far-right politicians and parties that are at best indifferent to democracy, benefit from the nature of modern social media platforms. Authoritarians of  all sorts benefit from spreading falsehoods about their opponents, they create panics about minority groups, and undermine people’s trust in credible independent media. Both the 2016 US election and the 2018 Brazilian vote proved social media is a perfect cheap tool for manipulating an increasingly gullible public.

Social media has the potential to help pro-democracy movements at times, but these platforms  overall serve far-right extremists and authoritarians.  Once seen as democracy’s ally, these platforms have increasingly become its enemy.

Why?

 It is easier to spread misinformation on social media than to correct it.
It is easier to inflame social divisions than to mend them.
The very nature of how we engage with Facebook and the rest now helps far-right, authoritarian factions weaken the foundations of democratic systems — and give themselves an easier pathway to seizing power. This is the unfortunate and sad uncomfortable truth:
Social media, in the way that it exists at this moment, is an authoritarian medium.

Ronald Deibert, a political scientist and director of the University of Toronto’s tech-focused Citizen Lab wrote in the The Journal of Democracy (one of the premier academic venues for analyzing the current state of democratic politics). “It seems undeniable, that social media must bear some of the blame for the descent into neo-fascism.”

In 2009, Iranians rose up to protest against a rigged election, the so-called “Green Movement” using Facebook and YouTube clips of protests to spread their message globally. Two years later, the Arab Spring protests showed the true power of these mediums, as protest movements that made skillful use of social media for coordination and messaging toppled regimes in Tunisia and Egypt.
At that time, the consensus among observers was that social media was, by its very nature, democratizing. Social media facilitates the swift spread of information, allowing citizens to get around government censorship. Social media allows rapid communication among large groups of disparate people, giving citizen activists new tools for organizing actions.
We had every reason to believe the spread of social media would necessarily weaken authoritarian states and strengthen democracies.

This theory turned out to be partly true: It can be difficult to simply repress the spread of information on social media. But as we’ve come to discover, it’s even more difficult to repress the spread of disinformation.

A savvy person or political party looking to discredit online critics doesn’t need to ban their speech to disable it. Instead, they can create a deluge of false or misleading information, making it very hard for ordinary citizens to figure out what’s actually going on.

Deibert’s essay usefully summarizes a number of different studies documenting how well the twisted jiujitsu of misinformation and information overload works:


An always-on, real-time information tsunami creates the perfect environment for the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, rumors, and “leaks.” Unsubstantiated claims and narratives go viral while fact-checking efforts struggle to keep up. Members of the public, including researchers and investigative journalists, may not have the expertise, tools, or time to verify claims. By the time they do, the falsehoods have already embedded themselves in the collective consciousness.

Meanwhile, freshly baked scandals and outlandish claims are continuously raining down on users, mixing fact with fiction. Worse yet, studies have found that attempts “to quash rumors through direct refutation facilitates their diffusion by increasing fluency.” In other words, efforts to correct falsehoods can ironically contribute to their further propagation and even acceptance.
The constant bombardment of tainted leaks, conspiracy theories, and other misinformation in turn fuels public cynicism, with citizens growing fatigued as they try to discern objective truth amid the flood of news. Questioning the integrity of all media — one aim of authoritarianism — can in turn lead to a kind of fatalism and paralysis.

The WhatsApp propaganda in Brazil is one example of the effect Deibert is talking about. A well-funded campaign to spread false information was extremely difficult for Bolsonaro’s opponents and Brazil’s independent press to expose or discredit. The falsehoods these messages spread likely became truth in the eyes of a significant percentage of people who encountered them, many of whom would never see rebuttals and wouldn’t believe them if they did.

Donald Trump and his allies in the more unscrupulous parts of the American conservative movement employ a similar strategy. The president lies, a lot; while the mainstream press debunks him, right-wing outlets spread those falsehoods or manufactured supporting evidence on social media, where these lies cement as fact in the eyes of the president’s hardcore supporters.

Even my feed this morning was full of junk news going viral, claims that the whistleblower in the Ukraine scandal was identified (Absolutely untrue) and thanks to photoshop, was posing with all the democrats involved in the impeachment...that Adam Schiff was some sort of pedaphile (Quickly and easily debunked, but it won't matter...people who want to believe that, saw the posts, spread them further amongst their groups and no amount of fact checking will matter to them...it's now part of their mythology...their belief system.)

A recent study found that conservatives were more than four times as likely to share fake news on Facebook as liberals. Another study, from researchers at the University of Oxford, found that conservative users were overwhelmingly more likely to spread “junk news” (defined as outlets that “deliberately publish misleading, deceptive or incorrect information”).
“On Twitter, a network of Trump supporters consumes the largest volume of junk news, and junk news is the largest proportion of news links they share,” the Oxford researchers write. “Extreme hard right Facebook pages share more junk news than all other audiences put together.”

The phenomenon goes  far beyond the US and Brazil.
The far right has made huge inroads through most of Europe.
Marie Le Pen, and actual unabashed fascist very nearly won the French Presidency...and may yet win in the next election. The rise of the Tories and Brexit in England. Fascists rising even in the post-fascist nations of Germany and Italy where we once thought it would not be possible.
The Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte cultivated an online fan base — even bringing popular social media influencers into his government — that’s known for “patriotic trolling”: sending hate messages to his critics and spreading smears about them. The Philippine news site Rappler identified a network of more than 12 million pro-Duterte propaganda accounts on various platforms, reporting that, led to a concerted smear campaign against the site from Duterte’s fans. An #UnfollowRappler social media campaign cost the site tens of thousands of  followers, a huge hit for an online publication that depends on clicks to stay profitable.

Social media isn’t the only reason far-right populists have been able to win elections.
There are all sorts of other reasons, ranging from ethnic divisions to economic injustice to anxiety about crime or the weakness of the political opposition that these leaders have exploited in their rise to power. While it would be absurd to blame technology for this phenomenon, it would be equally absurd to ignore it's role.  The global challenge to democracy from within isn’t social media’s fault, yet the major platforms do seem to be making the crisis worse. The platforms by their nature allow far-right politicians to marginalize opponents, consolidate their base, and exacerbate the social divisions that helped them rise to power.

Russia’s Internet Research Agency (often abbreviated to IRA) has been a formidable troll factory for the Kremlin. It has displayed a mastery of postmodern disinformation techniques for fomenting polarisation, distrust and confusion in target populations of social media users.
 The New Knowledge report studied 10.4m tweets, 1,100 YouTube videos, 116,000 Instagram posts, and 61,500 unique Facebook posts published from 2015 to the end of 2017.
It found that the IRA created social media accounts under fake names on every available platform – not just Facebook and Twitter, but also Instagram, YouTube, Reddit, Tumblr, Pinterest, Vine and Google+. One of the most surprising revelations was the extent to which the IRA used Instagram to sow distrust and discord, which suggests that Russian trolls have a good working knowledge of western hipsterdom. Aside from polluting the minds of partisans, even the most reasonable sincere citizen, devoid of political affiliations; is bombarded with so much junk 'news' that eventually they disengage to protect their sanity.
Make no mistake, the Russian troll factory is hard at work right now as you read this. Their successes globally in 2016 and 2018, and the acceptance, even welcoming; of this interference by the hard right factions and even the US Senate, has emboldened not only Russia, but China, Iran, Turkey, the Saudi murderous regime, as well as North Korea to step up their trolling operations.

 Renée DiResta, one of the lead researchers in the study, had this to say: “In official statements to Congress, tech executives have said that they found it beyond their capabilities to assess whether Russia created content intended to discourage anyone from voting.
We have determined that Russia did create such content.
It propagated lies about voting rules and processes,
attempted to steer voters toward third-party candidates
and created stories that advocated not voting.”

 What does all this mean?

It means that the world has changed, and that democracies are in a new ballgame.
Manipulation of  media environment by foreign as well as domestic dishonest actors is now the new normal.
If anything has changed since 2016, it’s that social media is no longer seen as just a useful tool for influencing elections. It’s now the terrain on which the entirety of political culture rests, whose peaks and valleys shape the everyday discourse, and whose possibilities for exploitation are endless.
Until we either secure that ground or replace it entirely, we should expect many more attacks, each one in a slightly different form, and each leaving us with even more doubt that what we see reflects reality.  Or, to put it more succinctly: social media poses an existential threat to the kind of liberal democracy we like to think we have.


There is an urgent need to gain a deeper understanding of the widespread decline of democracy and the unnerving movement toward dictatorship in the 21st century.
We are confronted by serious and unexpected challenges to our freedoms and human rights.
By the end of this century, the United States, the European Union, and other societies that are at present relatively open may be overtaken economically and or militarily by China and other dictatorships. Closed societies might well become the dominant global powers and the ones that set the norms around the world. Open societies are not only facing threats from the outside.
 The election of Donald Trump and the rise of populist far-right “strongmen” (leaders who use threat, intimidation, displacement of aggression onto minorities, and various other tactics that undermine democracy) movements in a number of countries signal threats to open societies from the inside.
The recent history of authoritarian strongmen, including Hitler (1889–1945) and Mussolini (1883–1945), who for a time enjoyed wildly popular support, is not promising in terms of preserving open societies. Of course, as Federico Finchelstein pointed out, the fascism of the 1930s is different from the populism of the 21st century, just as the strongmen of the 1930s are in some respects different from Trump and other 21st-century strongmen. Yet make no mistake, 1930s fascism and 21st-century populism have in common the direct threat to the free press, rule of law, and democracy. Social media may be a threat to democracy even without the bad actors and their manipulations. The nature of how it works can be problematic...read about that here.




We need to gain a deeper understanding of threats to democracy in the context of globalization, the increasing economic and cultural integration of societies around the world, and the international populist backlash that is sweeping across national boundaries. No doubt, the threat to democracy is to some degree linked to the excesses of free-market capitalism, but the role of social media as a tool to suppress voter turnout, create and expand turmoil, and spread disinformation is integral.
 There is an irrationalist dimension to 21st-century populist antidemocracy movements, and it requires analysis. The solution at this time is unknown. Expect it to be far worse for numerous reasons in 2020. The saboteurs are emboldened by the results they achieved with minimal effort...those efforts will be stepped up. Nothing has been done to discourage these attacks on our elections at all. I'd expect far more bold manipulations this time including attempts to change votes cast.  What can we do? Well our institutions are failing us miserably. Be very vigilant and very skeptical...but be active. Be a real citizen. Don't fall for deceptive troll content. Be weary of any posts that promote division. Fact check, and consider the sources. Are they reputable?  Is it corroborated?
Be well...and do the right things. That is what defeats the saboteurs.