The Media Institution as on Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part III

Independent voices have and still do exist, of course, especially in the less expensive media such as the small press and online. And through a dizzying array of online platforms and social media outlets, the world’s citizens can and do talk to each other directly in billions of daily exchanges. But as Gonzalez and Torres submit: “…it’s not simply the right to speak, but the right to be heard by others” that is the measure of a free media.[i] An independent blog may have a thousand hits; a network website like The New York Times or Fox News will have millions of viewers. Any whispers of wisdom will be drowned out in the white-noise roar of the corporate media. 

Powered by the juice of “cheap” fossil fuels, capitalism has generated a wire and wireless environment of electronic media that brings information to over half the world’s population. Radio, television, phones, and the internet surround the world’s least impoverished billions like the very air we breathe. It is so cheap, so ubiquitous, that it is almost as invisible as the air, and cheaper and materially less toxic than the water we drink and the food that we eat. And it is advertising, of course, that funds this ubiquity.

Advertisements work at all scales of society, at all levels of culture. Most conspicuously, advertising is designed to sell products. The utility and social value of the product is immaterial. Indeed, there may well be an inverse relationship to value and advertising space—far more money on hair products and beer, for example, than on exercise and broccoli. It is not about selling products that are good for people, society, or the Earth. It is not about selling what people need.  It about selling whatever sells.  By trying to sell products that people do not need (and indeed may be happier without), the advertising industry encourages, according to ad director Chris Hooper, “every sophomoric… irresponsible hedonistic, egotistical, narcissistic behavior.”[ii] Going just slightly deeper, it does this by skillfully exploiting our psychological proclivities. With steadfast devotion, advertisers trigger feelings of dissatisfaction in their audience—with themselves and with their possessions. In this consumer atmosphere, people “equate self-worth with ownership of goods.”[iii] As the sociologist William Catton put it, advertising is a “want-multiplying industry” that “augments human frustration.”[iv] 

On another level, advertisement creates and sustains the paradigm of consumption and, by drowning out or muting every other voice, marginalizes other possible worldviews. It accomplishes this by every means available, including the powers of ubiquity and propaganda.[v] Ubiquity is accomplished through iteration, saturation, branding, product placement, and so forth, so that a person in a post-industrial society finds no respite from advertising in her waking hours. The economist Ezra J. Mishan said, “the sheer weight of reiteration rather than the power of reason influences the attitude of the public.”[vi] The average American—should there actually be such a creature—receives three thousand daily advertising messages from all the various media.[vii] About three hundred of those come from the television: that is, three hundred prolonged sales pitches.[viii] Americans spend about a year of their lives watching television commercials. Those ads come mostly in three-to-seven minute barrages between fifteen minute programming spaces. Advertising continues during the actual program, of course, with such practices as product placement and news tickers (crawlers) and floating icons on the bottom third of the screen. And there are some networks—such as the Home Shopping Network and MTV, to mention a couple of the earliest ones—where the program is advertisement; that is, the audience tunes in to explicitly watch advertisement, whether the product is a kitchen knife or a downloaded song. 

And now ever more powerfully, the online medium is perfecting the art of perpetual advertisement. Through the screen comes a relentless assault of ads. Often, to even view the desired online material, one must first engage with the ad which overlays it.  Concurrently, the screen’s edges are alive in ads of various schemes. The online screen is becoming more like a video game, perhaps oddly reflecting the urban world at large, where ads move about constantly on taxis, busses, trains, walls, billboards, bus stops, shop windows, screens, and even the clothes of passersby. This reflection works as two facing mirrors might, so that the origin of the image is lost in our mindspace. But again, the difference may be that with the computer screen, this virtual world is experienced mostly alone. 

Given this saturation of consumerist image and text, the actual content in the media becomes irrelevant. As Marshall McLuhan stressed, the medium—not the content—is the message.[ix] So, it has become rather immaterial whether, for example, the New York Times has articles about poverty, hunger, inequality, the atrocities of war, the population explosion, global warming, corporate malfeasance, and the general biospheric breakdown. It doesn’t even really seem to matter what its position is on any of these subjects, except for perhaps how it may affect readership numbers. Advertisements fill half its paper; and, from the online version, ads radiate from the screen as the glitziest, most colorful and kinetic spaces. The advertisements (and most of content, really) reinforce the dominant consumption paradigm and the culture of collapse, and so they easily drown out any content that may be contrary to that paradigm. The audience is consumer. All else in us has been marginalized—citizen, lover, parent, worker, intellect, artist, naturalist, friend.

            We can verify this at the neural level, as well. Connections between neurons are made as a response to stimuli. More iterations of a specific stimuli strengthen the neural connection.[x] Constant iteration of reward in the pleasure centers creates a person habituated to those stimuli that created the pleasant feeling. If consumption is tied to the pleasure response, to levels of the pleasure and reward hormones—dopamine, particularly—then consumption has been selected for as the default mode of pleasure satiation.[xi] Like a drug dealer, business has done its job—another consumer has been fixed. And the culture of collapse has been reinforced.

            Every car driven, shirt and shoe worn, piece of gum chewed, and discarded water bottle is an advertisement for both the product and for the lifestyle of consumption in general.  More subtly, the presence of one thing implies the absence of the other.  IPhone instead of Droid; new instead of old; television instead of family dinner; mall instead of forest; porn instead of intimacy; consumption instead of contentment. As McLuhan found, the media technology doesn’t simply transmit information; it changes our worldview. Television doesn’t simply transmit facts and fiction, truth and lies, information about global warming and entrepreneurial heroes like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs; its ripple effects spread out at every level and scale, psychologically, socially, economically, environmentally. Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore noted, for example, in the medium is the MASSAGE: “Your family circle has widened. The worldpool of information fathered by electronic media—movies, Telstar [satellites], flight—far surpasses any possible influence mom and dad can now bring to bear. Character no longer is shaped by only two earnest, fumbling experts.  Now all the world’s a sage.”[xii] And with the Internet, it takes a global village to raise a child. Sadly, a significant part of that global village that coaches, educates, and advises your teenage child is made not of wise elders but of same-aged children on Facebook, Instagram and other social networks. Much of the rest is composed of adults who are trying to get something from your child through advertisements, banal to insidious entertainment, and twitter and press releases presented as news items. As the propaganda pioneer Edward Bernays knew almost one hundred years ago, “We are governed, our minds molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.”[xiii] 

The message of consumerism and the culture of collapse drowns out any other point of view. It is ubiquitous and reiterated on every transmittable frequency and piece of paper and moveable surface. And so, despite its promise as a medium of hope, as the propaganda arm for the coming biospheric consciousness, the media is presently one of the greatest obstacles to societal transformation.  

Amir Noor, Artist. https://amizle.wordpress.com/tag/consumerism-2/

REFERENCES

[i] Gonzalez, J., and Torres, J. (2011:11) News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Verso, London.

[ii] Cited in Bakan, J. (2005:125-126) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, New York.

[iii] Laszlo, E. (2006) The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., Charlottesville, VA.

[iv] Catton, W.R. (1982:235) Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change, Univ. Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago.

[v] Greif, M. (2007, December 30) The Hard Sell, New York Times.

[vi] Mishan, E.J. (1993:13) The Costs of Economic Growth, Praeger Publishers, Westport, CT.

[vii] Brower, M. and Leon, Warren (1999) The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Three Rivers Press, New York.

[viii] Myers, N. (1997) Consumption: Challenge to Sustainable Development, Science, v. 276, pp. 53-55.

[ix] McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, New York.

[x] Purves, D., Augustine, G.J., Fitzpatrick, D., Katz, L.C., LaMantia, A-S., McNamara, J.O. (Editors) (1997) Neuroscience, Sinauer Associates, Inc. Publishers, Sunderland, MA.

[xi] Berridge, K.C. and Kringelbach, M.L. (2008) Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: reward in Humans and Animals, Journal of Psychopharmacology, v. 199(3) pp. 457-480.

[xii] McLuhan, M. and Fiore, Q. (1967/2001:14) the medium is the MASSAGE. Gingko Press, Corte Madera, CA.

[xiii] Bernays, E. (1928/2004:37) Propaganda, Ig, Brooklyn, NY.

The Media Institution as an Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part II

Integral as media has been to Civilization and to the culture of collapse, the media as an institution is a relative newcomer. For most of history, the heralds, scribes, academics, and artists served their masters and patrons. Rarely were they an independent voice with a novel, radical, or dissident perspective.[1] However, during the European power struggles of the 1600s—bourgeoisie versus the feudal powers of nobility and church, and later monarchy versus nobility—journalists served as mouthpieces for the competitors, and the media became a force to be reckoned with.[2] Napoleon’s famous quip, “Four hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets…” speaks to the emerging power of the media in the late 18th century. At about the same time in the American colonies, de Tocqueville and James Madison observed the importance of the press in self-governance. “Because its public service responsibility” was seen to be, “… so intertwined with the health of democracy itself, the press is the only business explicitly protected by the Constitution.”[3] Even then, though, the media was still largely a public sphere of opinion and alleged facts.[4] Literate people with the power of the moveable type spoke their minds and sold papers. And the medium was still, in the historian Carroll Quigley’s words, an instrument of (an albeit elite), society more than a viable self-serving institution.

It took the Industrial Revolution to institutionalize the media. This transformation involved three interrelated forces that had been evolving through the past centuries and reified in the late 18th century.[5] One, advances in printing technology and transportation allowed for the inexpensive mass production and distribution of the local newspaper. Two, a growing literate and energetic bourgeoisie created a large audience with an appetite for information and luxury goods. And three, advertising of those luxury goods paid for larger papers with more content, and eventually for investigative reporting, fact checkers, and other duties that were not simply opinion and promotion.[6] The press continued to inform and editorialize on social matters as it had for centuries, but now it was assimilated into the capitalist economy, set up to sell products.

What advertising had given the media with one hand—greater resources to inform and persuade—it took with the other—namely, independence. Through advertising, business pays for three-quarters of a newspaper’s revenue.[7] By the 21st century, newspapers were placing over forty billion dollars in ads a year in the United States, alone. Expenditures for total advertisements in all the U.S. media total more than $250 billion annually.[8] World totals for advertisement lie somewhere between five and eight hundred billion dollars annually.[9] This does not take into account the money involved in labor and production of advertisements, only their placement. The media cannot function without advertisement. Witness the crash of the newspaper business in this century as advertising dollars have been relocating to the Internet.[10] Through the sheer power of money, the media is beholden to business. It does not have the independence to speak candidly about or on issues that may alienate advertisers and audiences. 

Thus the Discovery Channel’s omission of any reference to the causes for global warming during their seven-week series Frozen Planet in 2012.[11] In the last episode, On Thin Ice, spectacular images of ice calving from glaciers and ice shelves, melting ice sheets, stranded polar bears, and the disappearing Adelie penguin demonstrates with frightening force that, as narrator Richard Attenborough says, “The ends of the earth are changing.”  The poles are warming ten times faster than the rest of the earth, we are told.  But any discussion of human causes, carbon emissions, industrialization, consumerism, etc., was absent. It was noted, however, that less polar ice will provide new opportunities for energy exploitation and commercial shipping. In what is otherwise a stunning example of the documentary power of television, a tour de force of artistic and technical collaboration, there is an odd silence about the human influence. Vanessa Berlowitz, the series producer, admitted that they did not want to alienate their audience.[12] The organization’s judgment is not being questioned here. Far from it. In their discretion, they very well may have reached a larger audience and done far more good than had the show been candid and then been canceled for lack of funding. The main point here is that the business institution dominates the American culture and thus greatly influences the content and expression of the media about the most important issues concerning us. The 20th century propaganda of Goebbels and Stalin was crude, opaque and short-lived in comparison to that of today’s elite.

Media’s institutional fidelity to the other institutions of power is a phenomenon that is difficult to quantify. However, given the magnitude of the ecological and economic crises and the enormity of the human inequality and suffering, the relative silence on these matters speaks loudly about the institutional paradigm. That is, just as it has since the beginnings of civilization, the media is serving the interests of the powerful minority.

How critical could the media ever be about consumerism and the culture of collapse when its existence wholly depends on it? More, how critical can the media be when they are no longer distinguishable from the other institutions? Like the others, the media are peopled with millions of intelligent, well-intentioned staff. And just as in the other institutions, the successful ones, those who climb up the ladder to be lead reporters and editors, are those who are both competent and who generally accept the institutional belief system. Note that even the best and the brightest—the enlightened opinion writers for the New York Times, for example, such as the liberal Paul Krugman and the independent thinker Thomas Friedman are, despite their incisive critiques, major proponents of capitalism, the media, and American “democracy.” Chomsky writes that there “is a kind of filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society… They wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going to say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like.”[13] In The Death and Life of American Journalism, Robert McChesney and John Nichols write, “The [corporate] pressure is applied subtly; more often than not, successful editors and reporters tend to internalize the necessary values so no pressure is necessary.”[14] And of course they know what the expected values are, as the media elites are part of the very same social networks as are members the other four principal institutions: same neighborhoods, same places of worship, same parties, same schools, same sources of information, same set of beliefs.

Journalists in Geneva. UN Photo/Violaine Martin

In this neighborhood pool, information waves are reflected back and forth, reinforced by constant reiteration and a delusional sense that the sources are independent.  A few examples will suffice to make the point. 

•  Since most organizations within the television, radio, and other electronic media cannot (competitively) afford to hire independent on-the-scenes reporters, they gather their information from other media, mainly newspapers.[15] 
• And newspaper houses have greatly cut their staff in the past decade. Many of the major newspapers are going bankrupt.[16]
• Which means the information pool is getting even smaller.  So, how good is the newspapers’ information?  “A 1990 study found that almost 40 percent of the news content in a typical U.S. newspaper originated from public-relations press releases, story, memos, and suggestions.”[17] 
• “According to the Columbia Journalism Review, more than half of the Wall Streets Journal’s news stories are based solely on press releases.”[18]
• Press releases are simply propaganda pieces released by interested parties to the media. In the United States there are more people employed in public relations to manipulate news and public opinion and policy than there are news reporters.  By 2008, there were three-fold more.[19] 

·      News organizations tend to be owned by multi-billion dollar corporations (as of this writing, Disney owns ABC, ESPN, Pixar, and much more; General Electric owns MSNBC; Time Warner owns Turner Broadcasting Network, Warner Brothers, Time Inc., HBO and many others), or they are multi-billion dollar transnational mass media conglomerates (NBC-Universal-Telemundo (which is owned by Comcast and General Electric), Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp (which includes Fox News, The Wall Street Journal, and Twentieth Century Fox, among many others). Or they enjoy a complex, ever changing legal relationship, as is the case with the giants CBS, Viacom, and Westinghouse.[20]

Independence of large media businesses, if it ever existed at all, disappeared early in the institution’s history. The tipping point for the press began in the 1960s, when the major newspaper companies left their family and small company origins and became publicly traded companies.[21] Among them were the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Times-Mirror.[22]  In 2009, revenues for the New York Times Company was $2.4 billion (down from $3.4 billion in 2005): besides publishing The New York Times, the Boston Globe and the International Herald Tribune, it owns about twenty regional papers and maintains significant ownership in other businesses such as the Boston Red Sox Baseball Club.[23] By most counts, as one scholar put it, “Since the mid-1980s the corporations that produce news in the United States have begun to treat it less as a public trust and more as a commodity, simply a product for sale.”[24]

Fittingly, the electronics media belies its image of informational democracy by concentrating the power of worldview into even fewer hands than the print media.[25]  Radio and television have enjoyed little democracy. By the time of their origins, corporate capitalism was already well established. Radio and television were immediately under the control of a very few networks. “In recent years,” according to the journalists Juan Gonzalez and Joseph Torres, “commercial radio and television stations, and in increasing number of Internet news sites, have likewise become cloned subsidiaries of the big conglomerates, a half-dozen of which now exercise unparalleled influence over the dissemination of information.”[26] Four companies own 77% of all radio stations on the planet; four own 84% of all television networks, and eight own 98% of them; for consumer magazines, recorded music, and film entertainment, the top four and eight corporations own respectively, 77% and 78%, 98% and 100%, 91% and 100%.[27]

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-90-of-the-media-in-america-2012-6

Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Ben Bagdikian writes that by 2004 just “Five global-dimension firms, operating with many of the characteristics of a cartel, own most of the newspapers, magazines, book publishers, motion picture studios, and radio and television stations in the United States.”[28] This dominance, he continues, gives each of these five conglomerates—Time Warner, The Walt Disney Company, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann—“and their leaders more communications power than exercised by any despot or dictatorship in history.”[29]

In the dispassionate tones of sober journalists, Gonzalez and Torres note that “This concentrated media ownership has become a major obstacle for those seeking to preserve a racially diverse and democratic system of news.”[30] Given the entwinement of corporations, business, and the military, the corporate media is not an independent institution allowed honest reporting on world events.[31] They are in bed with the other institutions. Or, as in the case of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they are embedded with them.[32] According to McChesney and Nichols, the corporate pressures on reporters and editors “can be explicit… The effect is that the news is altered, unbeknownst to the public, in a manner it would never had been had the newsroom been independent and freestanding.”[33]

Embedded journalists in Baghdad (via BBC)

REFERENCES

[1] Shlain, L. (1998) The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Penguin/Compass, New York.; Weber, J. (2006) Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe, German History, v. 24(3), pp. 387-412. 

[2] Rudd, C.A. (1979) Limits on the “Freed” Press of 18th- and 19th-Century Europe, Journalism Quarterly, v. 56, p. 521-530.; Barnhurst, K.G., and Nerone, J. (2009) Journalism History, pp. 17-28 in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Hanitzsch, T. (Editors). Routledge, New York.; McNair, B. (2009) Journalism and Democracy, pp. 237-249 in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Hanitzsch, T. (Editors). Routledge, New York.

[3] Croteau, D., and Hoynes, W. (2006:217) The Business of Media: Corporate Media and the Public Interest, Pine Forge Press, London.

[4] Examples from Holton, W. (2007) Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Hill and Wang, New York.

[5] Taylor, P.M. (2003) Munitions of the Mind: A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present day, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.

[6] The Economist (2011, July 7) Reinventing the Newspaper.  Available at http://www.economist.com/node/18904178. Accessed April 15, 2012.

[7] Mensing, D. (2007, Spring) Online Revenue Business Model Has Changed Little Since 1996, Newspaper Research Journal, v. 28(2) 22-37.

[8] Croteau and Hoynes (2003:49); New York Times Alamanac 2011 (2010) Penguin Books, New York..  New Half of this went into newspapers, magazines, television and radio. 

[9] Given that ad figures vary greatly based on source, the WPP (2011, December) GroupM forecasts 2012 global ad spending to increase 6.4% would supply the lower value, and extrapolating from U.S.A. data in NYT Almanac (2010) would give the upper value.  Brower and Warren (1999) estimate $620 billion annually are spent by corporations on advertising (Brower, M. and Leon, W. (1999) The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices: Practical Advice from the Union of Concerned Scientists. Three Rivers Press, New York.)

[10] For example, see McChesney, R.W., and Nichols, J. (2010) The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution that Will Begin the World Again. Nation Books, Philadelphia, PA.

[11]  Stelter, B. (2012, April 20), No Place for Heated Opinions, New York Times. 

[12] Stelter (2012). 

[13] Chomsky, N. (1997, October) What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream, Z Magazine.    

[14] McChesney and Nichols (2010:41). This is not to say that there are not tens of thousands of journalists, many of them cited in these pages, who are committed to accurate and honest investigation and reporting. It is to say that it is easier to be successful in the field by writing excellent stories from a safe perspective.

[15] McChesney and Nichols (2010:17, 49); Gonzalez, J., and Torres, J. (2011) News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Verso, London.

[16] McChesney and Nichols (2010).

[17]  Korten, D.C. (2001:148) When Corporations Rule the World, Second Edition, Kumarian Press, & Barrett-Koehler Publishers.

[18] Korten (2001:148). 

[19] McChesney and Nichols (2010:49)

[20] McChesney and Nichols (2010:41), Gonzalez and Torres (2011:6), Columbia Journalism Review (2012, April 27) Who Owns What; Free Press (2012) Who Owns the Media? Freepress.net; Strauss, G., and Puente, M. (2012, March 1) Murdoch’s son steps down, USA Today.  

[21] Gonzalez and Torres (2011:349-350). 

[22] Gonzalez and Torres (2011:349-350). 

[23] The New York Times Company Profile and Media Properties, Mediaowners. 

[24] McManus (2009) The Commercialization of News, pp. 218-233 in in The Handbook of Journalism Studies, Wahl-Jorgensen, K. and Hanitzsch, T. (Editors). Routledge, New York.

[25] Gonzalez and Torres (2011:1-11).

[26] Gonzalez and Torres (2011:6).

[27] Croteau and Hoynes (2006:108).

[28] Bagdikian, B. (2004:3) The New Media Monopoly, Beacon, Boston, MA.

[29] Bagdikian (2004:3).

[30] Gonzalez and Torres (2011:6).

[31] McChesney and Nichols (2010:27-44). 

[32] Cockburn, P. (2010, November 23) Embedded Journalism: A distorted view of war, The Independent: Ignatius, D. (2010, May 2) The Dangers of Embedded Journalism, In War and Politics, Washington Post. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/30/AR2010043001100.html.  Accessed May 6, 2012.

[33] McChesney and Nichols (2010:41).

The Media Institution as an Obstacle to Civilization's Resilience: Part I

       Marshal McLuhan (1911-1980)

Media is plural for medium, the substance in which information is stored or through which it is delivered. Marshal McLuhan called a medium “any extension of ourselves.”[i] Less broadly, the media is thought to be the tools and technology of communication—amphitheaters, cuneiform, and the clay tablet, the printed type of books and newspapers, the electronic world of telegraph, radio, television, and the internet.  Each is a medium—like the air in which sound waves travel—through which information is transmitted.

The media have adaptive value for the same reasons information naturally has for all social creatures, whether it is the information being transmitted through the waggle dance of the honeybee, the feelings of comfort, trust, and love communicated through a mother chimpanzee’s soft cooing sounds, or the spiritual mysteries that are painted on the walls of Paleolithic caves at Lascaux, Kakadu, and Maros.[ii] In the egalitarian world of the early foragers, information was a power shared by the collective. As a society grew less equal, so did access to the media, and consequently so did access to high quality information. A medium tends to amplify one’s voice; it provides access to a larger audience. And so it confers the power of persuasion and to influence the cultural worldview, and, from an economic and political perspective, to control more resources. 

Historically, each new medium transformed increasingly concentrated forms of energy into a means of reaching more people. Human somatic energy could project only as far as the voice carried or as the eye could see. The audience usually numbered in the dozens, rarely in the thousands. Progressively, horseback, wind, water, and the burning of biomass moved information farther, faster, and to larger audiences.[iii] By the early 19th century, coal-burning, steam-powered printing presses produced books and pamphlets that reached hundreds of thousands of European readers.[iv] And today the dense energy stored in fossil fuel and uranium blasts electronic information across entire continents and flings satellites around the planet, reaching billions of people simultaneously. In a positive feedback loop, assess to material resources and assess to the media reinforce each other.

If access to the media confers power, control of it provides virtually absolute power. According to the media analyst Edward Herman, “Control over definitions of reality, the agenda that people are allowed to think about, the ability to reiterate messages and manipulate symbols are basic ingredients of power.”[v] Those in control of the media sit at the top of the human food chain. In the early empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, the Indus, and Central and South America, the media was in the hands of the kings and priests.[vi] They used the media for purposes of propaganda; that is, to influence the opinions and attitudes of the community. And surely it must have taken a constant and concentrated effort to convince the general population to accept conditions and behave in ways that were contrary to billions of years of natural selection. Against their personal interest, people were persuaded to work long, hard hours, to subordinate themselves, to give their freedom and the fruit of their efforts to their supposed superiors, to even sacrifice their lives in war for them. To this end, the views of the political and religious institutions—in the form of kings and priests—were propagated through every medium available: pottery, monuments, story-telling, town criers, couriers, and heralds; through dance, theatre, sculpture, art, and architecture; even by way of stories told from one settlement to the next of the ghastly savagery of an invading or marauding army.[vii] Whether it is a pyramid, ziggurat, coliseum, cathedral, ritual, logical treatise, or threat of mutilation and death, media have been the mouthpieces for the ruling minority. The media served to propagate the minority position and to shape the worldview of the larger community.

                     credit: https://www.shutterstock.com/video/search/king-and-queen

     David Hume (1711-1776)

Clearly, their propaganda has worked. For, as David Hume noted, “Nothing appears more surprising… than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.” [viii] Especially when “force is always on the side of the governed.” So, what keeps people from realizing this? What keeps them from rising up and overthrowing their masters? Hume concluded that the rulers control opinion, a “maxim that extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and popular.” What Hume found for government extends to all the institutions (especially the main institutions—the business, religious, military, and media itself). They require the control of information (and so, the media) to persuade the multitudes of viewpoints that serve the minority interests. 

This is even more important in “democratic” governments, where coercion is less of a threat. Or as Noam Chomsky with characteristic wit phrased it: “Propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.”[ix] As Chomsky has spent the last few decades demonstrating, the elite of the “democratic” countries have managed rather well to keep their populations ignorant of the inequality and suffering perpetrated by their elite, often in the name of the people. In the United States, this would include the many assassinations, military incursions, funding of dictators and militaries, incarcerations within our own borders, oil spills, chemical contaminants, and so forth. It does cost government and business some time and money, but obviously it pays proper dividends. 

Kissinger and Pinochet meeting (Image by Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores de Chile, Wikimedia Commons). "Make the Economy Scream": Secret Documents Show Nixon, Kissinger Role Backing 1973 Chile Coup, according to Democracy Now!

In 1928, Edward Bernays published a short, candid book entitled, simply enough, Propaganda, extolling the virtues and methods of propaganda in a democratic society during peacetime. In a clear, unapologetic manner, he explained why and how an educated, well-intentioned elite must control “the herd” if we “are to live together as a smoothly functioning [democratic] society.” Called the “father of modern public relations,” Bernays was listed among Life magazine’s 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century. Highly successful in both government and business propaganda, his innovations included the clever use of press releases, “tie ins,” and the third party technique (where for example we hear that: “Four out of five dentists recommend sugarless gum for their patients who chew gum”).  Among his many achievements, he has been credited (or implicated, depending on one’s point of view) for being instrumental in convincing an ambivalent, isolationist American public into entering World War I on the side of the British; for raising cigarette sales by changing a cultural norm against women smoking in public; for helping Alcoa to profit from the sodium fluoride wastes of aluminum production by convincing an American public to fluoridate their drinking water; and for helping United Fruit and the U.S. government to overthrow the democratically elected Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz Guzman.[x] In all these, he exploited the megaphone of the media and the authority that we attribute to it. He conflated information and misinformation, fact and fiction, news and fancy.  According to Bernays, propaganda provides the leadership with a mechanism “to mold the mind of the masses” so that “ they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.”[xi] This process of “engineering consent,” he said, is the very “essence of the democratic process.”[xii] 

It is through the media’s bullhorn that the propaganda of the few becomes the worldview of the many. As media evolved—from the ephemeral, low tech oral and visual media to its concretization in script, print, radio, television, online—they have all come in service of elite propaganda. Napoleon Bonaparte’s success has been attributed as much to his mastery of the newspapers and other media as to his military genius.[xiii] The power of the media was unmistakable in Nazi Germany as Adolf Hitler’s voice, broadcast through radio, transfixed what has been up to that point the most literate, civilized nation on Earth.[xiv] In Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” and Churchill’s oratory masterpieces, too, the radio reached audiences as the press never had, immediately en masse, and emotionally, personally, as well as intellectually. The electronic medium could now capture and broadcast the deeply embedded familiarity of the spoken word, the oldest medium, to millions simultaneously, each in the security of their own home. Then, with television and the Internet came a confluence of all the media, plus the sheer power of continuous iteration, of enveloping people—individually, one at a time, within the powerless space of isolation—in a deep, cold, relentless and multi-sensory medium. In these, the medium thoroughly and simultaneously expresses and fabricates the culture. From product placement, to the consumerist worldview, to the isolated, powerless individual with a head filled with fantasy, the screen projects a world that alienates the many for the benefit of the few.

REFERENCES

[i] McLuhan, M. (1964:23) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. McGraw-Hill, New York. However, to quibble, air is a medium through which the sound waves of oral communication pass.  In this instance, air is an extension of ourselves, but not a technology.

[ii] For the fascinating and lesser well-known Maros caves in Sulawesi, see Roebroeks, W. (2014) Art on the Move. Nature, v. 514, pp. 170-171.; and Aubert, M., Brumm, A., Ramli, M., Sutikana, R., Saptomo, E.W., Hakim, B., Morwood, M.J., van den Bergh, G.D., Kinley, L., and Dosseto, A. (2014) Pleistocene Cave Art fromSulawesi, Indonesia. Nature, v. 514, pp. 223-227.

[iii] Weber, J. (2006) Strassburg, 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe, German History, v. 24(3), pp. 387-412.

[iv] Weber (2006), Buringh, E., and van Zanden, J.L. (2009) Charting the “Rise of the West”: Manuscripts and Printed Books in Europe, A Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries, The Journal of Economic History, v. 69(2), pp. 409-445. 

[v] Herman, E.S. (1989) An interview by R.W. McChesney (1989, January) The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Monthly Review.  

[vi] Taylor, P.M. (2003) Munitions of the Mind: A history of propaganda from the ancient world to the present day, Manchester University Press, Manchester, UK.. 

[vii] Taylor (2003:19-48).

[viii] Hume, D. (1777) On the First Principles of Government, in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects In Two Volumes, Volume 1.  Thanks to Noam Chomsky for his analysis of this passage in Chomsky, N. (1999) Profit Over People, Seven Stories Press, New York..

[ix] Chomsky, N. (2002a:20) Media Control: The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda, 2nd Edition, An Open Media Book, Canada.

[x] World War I—Bernays, E. (1928/2004) Propaganda, Ig, Brooklyn, NY. Smoking—Brandt, A.M. (1996) Recruiting Women Smokers: the Engineering of Consent. American Medical Women’s Association, v. 51(1-2), pp. 63-66..  Fluoride—Foulkes, R.G. (2004) Public Deception on Fluoride: Book Review Editorial, Fluoride, v. 37(2), pp. 55-59.; Freeze, R.A., and Lehr, J.H. (2009:135-137) The Fluoride Wars: How a Modest Public Health Measure Became America’s Longest Running Political Melodrama. Wiley, New York. Guatemala—Klump, S. (1996) The CIA, Carlos Castillo Armas, and Communism in Guatemala, The Wittenberg History Journal, v. 25, pp. 1-8.; Kirsch, S.J. (2011) PR Guns for Hire: The Specter of Edward Bernays in Gadhafi’s Libya. Present Tense, v. 2(1), pp. 1-8.

[xi] Bernays (1928/2004:47). 

[xii] Bernays, E. (1947:113) The Engineering of Consent. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, v. 250. pp. 113-120.

[xiii] Hanley, W. (2005) The Genesis of Napoleonic Propaganda, 1796-1799, Columbia University Press, New York. 

[xiv] Shlain, L. (1998:404) The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, Penguin/Compass, New York.

The Political and Business Institutions as Obstacles to Civilization's Resilience: Part VI

Wealth flows upward in every conceivable way. Even American foreign charity serves to feed the rich. American food aid to Third World countries comes with it a number of certain provisions; mainly that it is used to buy America’s surplus food. “In other words,” Francis Lappe reports in the journal New Scientist, “food was not an altruistic donation program for the world’s poor, but a clever subsidy system for American farmers.”[i] 

Boxes of food aid from USAID. Photo credit: Josh Lozman/ONE

This dysfunction has been further incised into the lives of planetary citizens with the “free trade” agreements being made among the world’s elites. In 1994, Bill Clinton signed The North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Until then, Mexican corn growers had been protected from cheap American imports. Afterward, they could not compete. By 2008, two-thirds of Mexico’s corn production had been “either shut down or reduced.”[ii]

The genetic diversity of maize, or corn, is declining in Mexico, where the world’s largest food crop originated, report researchers in Mexico and at the University of California, Davis. (https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/study-reveals-troubling-loss-mexico%E2%80%99s-maize-genetic-diversity/

More than a million small farmers lost their farms, flooding the cities with cheap labor and increasing illegal immigration into the United States.[iii] Contrary to promises of the business, political, and media elite who had pushed for NAFTA,[iv] consumer prices rose while farmer pay plummeted, jobs were lost, and wages for workers dropped—for all three countries.[v] Poverty and malnutrition also rose significantly in Mexico.[vi] And countries either abandoned some of their environmental laws or paid polluting business restitution for enforcing them.[vii] For the United States, particularly, a country that is fully food self-sufficient, importing food makes no ecological or economic sense.  And for any country that wants to maintain a long-term strategy of food self-sufficiency and environmental health, undercutting domestic production (particularly of local and regional strains) is unwise. When a region can no longer feed itself, its citizens become dependent on the global system, which suffers continual economic volatility, declining crop diversity, an unknown brew of toxic chemicals, and an unsure climatic future.   Already, some 800 million people go to bed hungry every day although we globally produce roughly ten percent more food than we can eat.[viii] By depressing the price of food, First World subsidies serve to further hurt the small local farmers who will more likely feed the poor and hungry. Globalism perpetuates world hunger.

With increasing globalism, the power over one’s own life and individual affairs are becoming ever more removed and abstract. Citizens exert little enough power within the legal confines of their own nations, but international treaties remove them from the process all together. The 1948 ratification of GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade), the WTO (World Trade Organization) that replaced it in 1995, and NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) in 1994 have become, as Joel Bakan put it, “a fetter on [the] economic sovereignty of nations.”[ix] With their ratification, citizens have even less influence on the products that are available to them and the way these products affect the environment.[x] Noam Chomsky adds, “…the general population doesn’t know what’s happening, and it doesn’t even know that it doesn’t know.”[xi] The rules are made in international meetings among the world’s elite members—the elite of the elite. Or as Joseph Stiglitz acknowledged, “…we have a system that might be called global governance without global government, one in which a few institutions—the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO—and a few players—the finance, commerce, and trade ministries, closely linked to certain financial and commercial interests—dominate the scene, but in which many of those affected by their decisions are left almost voiceless.”[xii] Besides being a Nobel Prize winner in Economics, Stiglitz served as Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank. From his years of working on the inside, he found that in these international institutions, the finance and trade ministers are “closely aligned” with the oligarchy and elites from their countries. “The finance ministers and central bank governors typically are closely tied to their financial community; they come from financial firms, and after their period of government service, that is where they return.”[xiii]  No surprise then that revolving door whiz Robert Rubin’s name comes up here as an exemplar in the very next sentence of Stiglitz’s discussion.

 Indonesian farmers protest against the World Trade Organization meeting on December 3, 2013 in Denpasar, Indonesia. Lowering tariffs that protect farmers make joining the WTO difficult for many countries. Photo by Agung Parameswara/Getty Images

Agreements signed by the more than 150 WTO member nations trump national laws. Nations must abide by the WTO decisions.[xiv] Here, again, corporate interests trump all. According to Joel Bakan, “On numerous occasions the organization has required nations, under threat of punishing penalties, to change or repeal laws designed to protect environment, consumer, or other public interests.”[xv] In this way, corporations further vitiate citizen power. So, for example, national decisions regarding such issues as the banning of genetically engineered foods, animal fur, animal testing for cosmetics, shrimp caught in nets without turtle excluder devices (so that sea turtles are not caught in these nets), and products from cruel dictatorships have been overturned in favor of corporate interests.[xvi] The significance of this disempowerment of the individual cannot be overstressed. Using McWorld as a metaphor for global corporations, analyst Benjamin Barber suggests that, “The usurping dominion of McWorld has, however, shifted sovereignty to the domain of global corporations and the world markets they control, and has threatened the autonomy of civil society and its cultural and spiritual domains, as well as of politics.”[xvii]  

Container boxes are seen at the Yangshan Deep Water Port, part of the Shanghai Free Trade Zone, in Shanghai, China September 24, 2016. Picture taken September 24, 2016. REUTERS/Aly Song/File Photo

In keeping with this logic, when it comes to international decisions that can actually benefit its world citizens, it is then the national (meaning corporate again) interests that trump. So, both the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the 2009 Copenhagen Accord failed to achieve meaningful results, mainly because its saner, ambitious proposals were thwarted when some of the most powerful nations—particularly, the United States, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and China—refused to make concessions.[xviii] Short-term economic interests, not the long-term environmental interests of our planetary system, were their concern.

During the 1997 negotiations for the Kyoto treaty, the fossil fuel industry led a thirteen million dollar ad campaign in the United States against the treaty and lobbied the U.S. Senate to sabotage it.[xix] The Senate complied by cleverly passing a 95-0 non-binding resolution that urged president Clinton to insist on targets and timetables that neither the developing nor industrial countries would accept.[xx] Since any treaty requires Senate ratification, Clinton’s hands were tied. After the 2009 the Copenhagen Accord, a commentary in the journal Nature found the Copenhagen Accord pledges to be “paltry,” estimating that they will increase (not decrease) 2020 emissions by 10-20% over 2010 levels.[xxi] Not even trying to slow the rise in atmospheric temperature, these nations accepted an outrageously inauspicious three degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100 with all the scary attendant climate implications. “It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are,” the authors of this most venerable of science journals concluded. Then again in 2011, for what became, according to the New York Times, “the 17th in a series of habitually quarrelsome and mostly unproductive gatherings,” the nearly two hundred nations met in Durban, South Africa. And then despite all the fanfare, the 2016 Paris accords still did not promise anything better than a potentially catastrophic 3˚ Celsius rise by 2100.[xxii] The activist George Monbiot has noted:

“When you remember that only a smallish proportion of the cost of dealing with climate change will be borne by governments, it becomes clear that this is not a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on foreign aid and essential public services. It is a choice between state spending on climate change or state spending on coal, oil, roads, farm subsidies, environmental destruction and unprovoked wars. We would do well to ask why governments seem to find it so easy to raise the money required to wreck the biosphere, and so difficult to raise the money required to save it.”[xxiii]

Corporations and financial institutions did not always dominate the global landscape, nor even the American landscape, for that matter.  In the United States, corporations were initially formed to provide a public service, build a bridge, road, or canal.[xxiv] They were often dissolved after performing their function. First formed in the late sixteenth century, it has been only in the past 150 years that corporations have “gone from relative obscurity to become the world’s dominant economic institution.”[xxv] And this rise did not “just happen.” It is not the result of some Darwinian natural selection process in an Adam Smith free market system, whereby the most effective and efficient wins out against less competent economic structures. The American state actively promoted the rise of corporations by subsidizing their railways, telegraphs, roads, and highways, coal, oil and agriculture.[xxvi] In the process, capitalism has gone from being an “instrument” that produces unequaled progress and innovation to an “institution” that subordinates everything to itself. And, in those one hundred fifty years, it has changed the United States from the marvel described in Alexis De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America—the vibrant land of local entrepreneurial spirit and innovation, independence, and fierce adherence to local activism—to a sterile landscape of shopping malls and highways inhabited by overweight, sedentary consumers.[xxvii]

And yet it is much worse in many other countries. In China, Uzbekistan, Myanmar, and Zimbabwe, to mention but a few, citizens have almost no representational power. Authority is centralized. And, even worse, for those whose revenue comes not from its citizens, but from foreign aid or from the selling of its mineral resources, wealth funnels directly to the elites, and the citizens have little recourse to affect change.[xxviii]   Nigeria, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo come to mind.

In the United States and in any country with representational government, citizens still have the institutional means to reverse the gross imbalances of wealth and power.  The corporation is not a person, however much the American judiciary has ruled. The corporation is basically a contract on a piece of paper.[xxix] It is a creation of the government that issues its charter.[xxx] And so, if and whenever the government so decides, the corporation must follow the laws made by that government. Given that the American citizen still has the basic power of the vote, citizens theoretically have the authority at any point to claim the government and to determine the rules by which corporations must abide. The Gordian knot can be cut in one swipe by illegalizing corporate financing of political campaigns (at all levels). And again, this latent power in the citizen is what motivates the corporation to press full court against any such intrusions into its affairs. Their strongest ally in this effort is the media, our next subject of inquiry.

REFERENCES

[i] Lappé, F.M., Collins, J., and Rosset, P. (1998) World Hunger: Twelve Myths. Grove Press, New York. This is a common strategy with American businesses, particularly military industries (see for example, Harvey, D.  (2003:18) The New Imperialism. Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford.

[ii]  Roberts, P. (2008:170) The End of Food. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston.

[iii] Public Citizen (2010) The Ten Year Track Record of the North American Free Trade Agreement: U.S., Mexican and Canadian Farmers and Agriculture, NAFTA at Ten Series.  NAFTA (as well as subsidies to large agribusiness in the United States) hurt the small farmers in all three North American countries.

[iv] Morris, S.D., and Passé-Smith, J. (2001) What a Difference a Crisis Makes: NAFTA, Mexico, and the United States, Latin American Perspectives, v. 28(3), pp. 124-149.

Dugger, C.W. (2003, November 19) Report Finds Few Benefits for Mexico in Nafta, New York Times..

[v] Public Citizen (2001, 2010), Campbell, Salas and Scott (2001), Morris and Passé-Smith (2001), Dugger (2003).

Campbell, B., Salas, C., and Scott, R.E. (2001)  NAFTA at Seven: Its Impact on Workers in All Three Nations, Economic Policy Institute, Briefing Paper.  

[vi] Anderson (2001), Campbell, Salas and Scott (2001), Morris and Passé-Smith (2001).

[vii] Anderson, S. (2001) Seven Years Under NAFTA, Institute for Policy Studies.  

[viii] Nature (2010a, 2010b).

Nature (2010a) Editorial: How to Feed a Hungry World, Nature, v. 466, p. 531-532.

Nature (2010b) Food: The Growing Problem, Nature, v. 466, pp. 546.

[ix] Bakan (2054:22), WTO (2011).

Bakan, J. (2005) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, New York.

WTO (World Trade Organization) (2011)) What is the WTO? 

[x] Korten (2001:147), Harper (2004:416-423). 

Korten, D.C. (2001) When Corporations Rule the World, Second Edition, Kumarian Press, & Barrett-Koehler Publishers.

[xi]  Chomsky, N. (1994:7) The Prosperous Few and the Restless Many, Odonian Press, Berkeley, CA.  Also available at http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Chomsky/ChomOdon_GlobEcon.html.  Accessed June 25, 2012.

[xii] Stiglitz, J.E. (2003:22) Globalization and its Discontents, W.W. Norton and Co., New York.

[xiii] Stiglitz (2003:19).

[xiv] BBC News (2011, December 20) Profile: World Trade Organization.

[xv] Bakan (2004:24).

[xvi] Bakan (2004:24), Harper, C.L. (2004:416-423) Environment and Society: Human Perspectives on Environmental Issues. Pearson Prentice Hall, New Jersey.

[xvii] Barber, B.R. (1995:296) Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, Ballantine Books, New York.

[xviii] Anderson (2002), Beder (2002), Vidal (2005), Harper (2004:155-156), Harkinson (2010).  The Chamber of Commerce—perhaps the single largest lobby of business and whose board is 94% composed of large corporations—was particularly vehement in its opposition of the Kyoto Protocol (Harkinson, 2010).

Anderson, J.W. (2002) U.S. Has No Role in U.N. Treaty Process: Senate Reluctant to Ratify, Resources, issue 14, pp. 12-17. 

Beder, S. (2002) Casting Doubt and Undermining Action, Pacific Ecologist, v. 1, pp. 42-49.

Vidal, J. (2005, October 9) China Leads Accusation that Rich Nations are Trying to Sabotage Climate Treaty. The Guardian (UK). 

Harkinson, J. (2010, Jan/Feb) Tom Donohue and the Chamber of Secrets, Mother Jones, pp. 22-25.

[xix] Gelbspan (1998), Beder (2002), McCright and Dunlap (2003), Skjaerseth and Skodvin (2004:190).

Gelbspan (1998, June) A Good Climate for Investment, The Atlantic Monthly.   

[xx] Dewar and Sullivan (2007), Gelbspan,R. (1998, 2005), McCright and Dunlap (2003), McKibben (2010:78-79).

Dewar, H., and Sullivan, K. (1997) Senate Republicans Call Kyoto Pact Dead, Washington Post, A37. Available at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/climate/stories/clim121197b.htm.  Accessed December 25, 2011.

McCright, A.M., and Dunlap, R.E. (2003) Defeating Kyoto: The Conservative Movement’s Impact on U.S. Climate Change Policy, Social Problems, v. 50(3), pp. 348-373.

McKibben, B. (2010) eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

[xxi] Rogelj, J., Nabel, J., Chen, C., Hare, W., Markmann, K., and Meinshausen, M. (2010) Copenhagen Accord Pledges are Paltry, Nature, v. 464, pp. 1126-1128..

[xxii] Rogelj, J. et al. (2016) Paris Agreement Climate Proposals Need a Boost to Keep Warming well Below 2C˚. Nature, v. 534, pp. 631-639.

[xxiii] Monbiot (2007:56). Monbiot, G. (2007) Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. South End Press, Cambridge MA.

[xxiv] Bakan (2004); Carson, K. (2010) The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Booksurge.

[xxv] Bakan (2004:5).

[xxvi] Stiglitz (2003:21), Bakan (2004), Carson (2010).

[xxvii] De Tocqueville, A. (1835/1956) Democracy in America. Mentor Book, New York.

[xxviii] Qudir, I. (2010) Empowerment is Key, Nature, v. 465, p. 550-551.

[xxix] Reich, R.B. (2007) Supercapitalism: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.

[xxx] Bakan (2004), Reich (2007). 

The Political and Business Institutions as Obstacles to Civilization's Resilience: Part V

This is the fifth installment in an exploration of the ways the Political and Business institutions collude to further their interests at the expense of the rest of Civilization and the biosphere. Here we examine the role of perverse subsidies.

Successful business people are savvy with their money. They do not repeatedly invest in anything, including political campaigns and lobbyists, unless there is a good return. And, indeed, the returns on politicians and lobbyists are phenomenal—far more than the mere few cents on a dollar they can earn from most ventures. Business gets (and sometimes itself writes) legislation that grants them subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation, biofuel mandates, drilling of public land, the continuity of externalities, invasions of sovereign countries, assassinations of heads of state, unacceptable demands at international forums such as in Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Durban, and trade agreements in international organizations such as the WTO and NAFTA that sell out a nation’s citizens to transnational interests.[i] The buying of government by business is a shrewd investment serving their short-term fiscal interests. Simultaneously, it has formed a great obstacle to meaningful environmental and social change for the long-term benefit of all.[ii] 

Subsidies and tax breaks, alone, bring business thousand-fold returns on investment. Subsidies and tax breaks are two strategies that a society uses to pool its resources to promote a desired result. China, Germany, Spain, and Denmark have lavishly subsidized solar energy, and so they are the world’s leaders in manufacturing and use of this inexhaustible energy form.[iii] In Germany’s case, solar has become a major source of energy even though they suffer the constraints of high latitude and frequent rain and cloudiness.[iv] With Obama’s push, American subsidies of solar businesses reached nearly fifteen billion dollars in 2010.[v] Less than one-tenth of what fossil fuels are annually subsidized, but still… a significant step in a nation dominated by the fossil fuel industries.

To distinguish from these sorts of salubrious subsidies, Paul Hawkins and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins speak of “perverse subsidies,” which involve ridiculous sums of corporate welfare: over $400 billion to the fossil fuel industries, $360 billion to farmers, $25 billion to the fishing industry, and $14 billion to the logging industries—each and every year.[vi] Big business has hijacked a strategy meant to benefit society. In what amounts to a massive upward redistribution of wealth, these powerful interests are paid to poison and sterilize our soils, atmosphere, and oceans and to lay waste to the diversity of life. According to the authors of Natural Capital, all of whom are clearly big fans of capitalism itself, “Perverse subsidies… function as disinvestments, leaving the environments and the economy worse off than if the subsidy had never been granted. They inflate the costs of government, add to deficits that in turn raise taxes, and drive out scarce capital from markets where it is needed. They confuse investors by sending distorting signals to markets; they suppress innovation and technological change; they provide incentives for inefficacy and consumption rather than productivity and conservation. They are a powerful form of corporate welfare that benefits the rich and disadvantages the poor.”[vii]  

Among the most perverse are the vast subsidies sucked in by the fossil fuel industry. The sums are inordinate, the arguments for the use of fossil fuels short-sighted and antiquated, and the handouts to the world’s largest corporations unnecessary, even if fossil fuels were a good idea. Even the last vestige of an argument once in their favor—that fossil fuels are cheaper than alternative fuels—has steadily eroded. Even though wind power does not enjoy the lavish government subsidies and pollution and military externalities of conventional fuels, they are still—within that unequal playing field—competitive with oil, coal, and gas. They cost the consumer no more and sometimes less than oil, coal, and gas. [viii] And although energy from photovoltaics still costs several times more than wind and conventional, they too are expected to be competitive by 2020.[ix]

 Yet, when comparing solar to fossil fuels, the message to investors, citizens, and consumers has been that solar technology is still decades away from being a competitive energy source. This message is patently wrong, even when comparing these energy forms in the simplistic logic of economic theory. In the United States, fossil fuels have been subsidized and costs externalized to the tune of fifty billion dollars annually, for decades.[x] Worldwide, subsidies for fossil fuels totaled somewhere between $410 billion and $560 each year from 2008 and 2011.[xi]  Plus, externalized expenses—those not paid for by business such as pollution, health, infrastructure, and military security—cost the planetary citizens another fifty to two-hundred billion dollars every year.[xii] If these were inserted into the equation, economists would likely find wind power and other renewable technologies to be already cheaper than fossil fuels.[xiii] By bringing down the prices of wasteful practices and products, perverse subsidies and externalized costs increase perverse consumption.[xiv]In his book Perverse Subsidies Norman Myers suggests that the bilking is actually far worse than this. U.S. corporations alone, he estimates, suck $2.6 trillion from the government teat every year in subsidies and externalities.[xv] These are perverse subsidies because pollution, war, and the loss of fisheries and habitat cause much suffering and premature death, and because, by being hidden, they distort the information citizens use to make important social decisions.[xvi]

Perhaps even more perverse are the subsidies that go to the big farming businesses, estimated to be $20 billion dollars annually in the United States.[xvii] Sixty percent of these go to the largest ten percent of the farming businesses.[xviii] The twenty-nine OCED countries—basically the industrialized First World nations—pay their farmers more than $350 billion annually, much of it to not grow food.[xix] Meanwhile, three billion people are malnourished and nearly a billion are not eating enough calories to sustain themselves. The investments needed to help the poor feed themselves would cost far less—four to thirty times less, according to various estimates—than these exorbitant handouts to the rich.[xx] 

Subsidies hide the gross flaws of a dysfunctional agricultural system. Most First World farmers do not net a profit from the market value of their produce. To make a living, they must rely on subsidies and on income from working jobs off the farm.[xxi] That is, the only way that First World farmers can now be “competitive” on the world market of subsidized farmers is to be subsidized. Taxpayer money allows these industrial farmers to sell their crops below cost, undercutting the Third World farmers whose countries cannot afford to subsidize their farmers.[xxii] Not only does the big-business model of agriculture destroy and deplete precious land, water, and energy resources, diminish wild and domesticated biodiversity, diminish the quality and variety of foods people eat—that is, it doesn’t make environmental and health sense—but it doesn’t even make economic sense. 

REFERENCES

[i] Barber (1995), Korten (2001:143-150), Luke and Krauss (2004), Liebman and Reynolds (2006), Broder (2011), Lipton (2011).  For just one example of corporate interests intersecting with the assassination of a democratically elected leader, see Petras, J. and Morley, M. (1978) On the U.S. and the Overthrow of Allende: A Reply to Professor Sigmund’s Criticism, Latin American Research Review, v. 13(1), pp. 205-221.  For a host of them, read Perkins, J. (2004) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., San Francisco, CA..  For but one egregious example of corporate tax loop holes, see Koncieniewski, D. (2011, December 29) Tax Benefits from Options as Windfall for Business, New York Times.  

Barber, B.R. (1995) Jihad vs. McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism are Reshaping the World, Ballantine Books, New York.

Korten, D.C. (2001) When Corporations Rule the World, Second Edition, Kumarian Press, & Barrett-Koehler Publishers.

Luke, D.A. and Krauss, M. (2004, December) Where there’s smoke there’s money: Tobacco industry campaign contributions and U.S. Congressional voting. American Journal of Preventative Medicine, v. 27 (5) pp. 363-372.

Liebman, B.H. and Reynolds, K.M. (2006) The Returns From Rent-Seeking: Campaign Contributions, Firm Subsidies And The Byrd Amendment. Canadian Journal of Economic Revue, v. 39(4), pp. 1345-1369.

Broder, J.M. (2011, March 10) House Panel Votes to Strip E.P.A. of Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases, New York Times.

Lipton, E. (2011, December 23) Mining Companies Back Friend’s Bid for Senate, New York Times.  

[ii] Barber (1995), Bakan (2005).

Bakan, J. (2005) The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Free Press, New York..

[iii] French (2005), Bradsher (2009, August 24), Galbraith (2009, March 12), McKibben (2010:191), Miller and Spoolman (2009:417), Schiermeir and Kohnert (2011). 

French, H.W. (2005, July 26) In Search of a New Energy Source, China Rides the Wind, New York Times.

Bradsher, K. (2009, August 24) China Racing Ahead of U.S. in the Drive to Go Solar, New York Times. 

Galbraith, K. (2009, March 12) Europe’s Way of Encouraging Solar Power Arrives in the U.S., New York Times. 

McKibben, B. (2010) eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York.

Miller, G.T., and Spoolman, S.E. (2009) Living in the Environment: Concepts, Connections, and Solutions, Sixteenth Edition. Brooks/Cole, Belmont, CA.

Schiermeir, Q. and Kohnertm K. (2011). Renewables Revolution, Nature, v. 480, pp. 279-280.

[iv] Miller and Spoolman (2009:417).  In 2012, both Germany and Spain greatly reduced solar subsidies (Nicola, 2013; Sills, 2013).  However, at least in the case Germany, solar panels were still going up in record numbers in 2012 (Sills, B., 2013, January 27. Spain Halts Renewable Subsidies to Curb $31 Billion of Debts, Bloomberg.com). 

[v] Lipton, E., and Kraus, C. (2011, November 11) A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search, New York Times.  

[vi] Myers and Kent (2001), Monbiot (2007:55). 

Myers, N., and Kent, J. (2001) Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Monbiot, G. (2007) Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. South End Press, Cambridge MA.

[vii]  Hawken, P.A., Lovins, A., and Lovins, L.H. (1999:160) Natural Capitalism, Little, Brown and Co., New York.

[viii] Jacobson and Delucchi (2009), Miller and Spoolman (2009:416), World Watch Report 187 (2012:19-24).

Jacobson, M.Z., and Delucchi, M.A. (2009, October 26) A Plan to Power 100 Percent of the Planet with Renewables, Scientific American. 

World Watch Report 187 (2012) Sustainable Energy Roadmaps: Guiding the Global Shift to Domestic Renewables, Worldwatch Institute, Washington D.C.

[ix] Miller and Spoolman (2009:416), World Watch Report 187 (2012:19-24).

[x] Hubbard (1991), Andrew (2006), Margonelli (2007), Howell (2009), Wald and Zeller (2010), Muller et al. (2011), New York Times (2012, March 30).

Hubbard, H.M. (1991, April) The Real Cost of Energy. Scientific American, v. 264(4), pp. 36-42.

Andrews, E.L. (2006, February 14) U.S. Has Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies. New York Times.

Margonelli, L. (2007, January 30) Our Secret Stash of Oil. New York Times.

Howell, K. (2009, October 19) What is the Real Cost of Power Production. Scientific American. 

Wald, M.L., and Zeller, T. (2010, November 7) Cost of Green Power Makes Projects Tougher to Sell, New York Times.

Muller, N.Z., Mendelsohn, R., and Nordhaus, W. (2011) Environmental Accounting for Pollution in the United States Economy. American Economic Review, v. 101, pp. 1649-1675.

New York Times (2012, March 30) Big Oil’s Bogus Campaign, Editorial.

[xi] IEA (2011, October 4), Kenny (2012), Ochs and Knodler (2012).

IEA (International Energy Agency) (2011, October 4) IEA analysis of fossil-fuel subsidies, World Energy Outlook, International Energy Agency. 

Kenny, C. (2012, October 21) When it Comes to Government Subsidies, Dirty Energy Still Cleans Up. Bloomberg Business Week. 

Ochs, A., and Knodler, A. (2012) Value of Fossil Fuel Subsidies Declines, National Bans Emerging, pp. 86-89, in Vital Signs 2012: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future. Worldwatch Institute, Washington DC.

[xii] Hubbard (1991), Howell (2009). Subsidies and externalized costs attributed to automobile use for 2001 alone was estimated to be $275 billion (Brown, L.R. 2006:78. Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble, W.W. Norton & Company, New York).

[xiii] Wald, M.L., and Zeller, T. (2010, November 7) Cost of Green Power Makes Projects Tougher to Sell, New York Times.

[xiv] Carson, K. (2010:105) The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto, Booksurge.

[xv] Myers and Kent (2001:14).Myers, N., and Kent, J. (2001) Perverse Subsidies: How Tax Dollars Can Undercut the Environment and the Economy. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

[xvi] For deaths from energy production and pollution, see Fischetti, M. (2011, September) The Human Cost of Energy. Scientific American, p. 96.

[xvii] Washington Post (2006, July 2) Farm Subsidies Over Time.  

[xviii] Public Citizen (2010) The Ten Year Track Record of the North American Free Trade Agreement: U.S., Mexican and Canadian Farmers and Agriculture, NAFTA at Ten Series.   McKibben (2010:177).

[xix] Nature (2010), Hawken, Lovins and Lovins (1999:160-162), Monbiot (2007:55). 

Nature (2010b) Food: The Growing Problem, Nature, v. 466, pp. 546.

[xx] $10 billion/year—Sanchez, P.A. and Swaminathan, M.S. (2005) Cutting World Hunger in Half, Science, v. 307, p. 357-359. $30 billion/ year—United Nations, cited by Rosenthal, E., and Martin, A. (2008, June 3) UN official holds rich nations accountable for food shortages, New York Times.   $40 billion/year—Hawken, Lovins and Lovins (1999:160-162).  $83 billion/yr—Bradsher and Martin (2008). 

[xxi] Kierschenmann, F.L. (2007) Potential for a New Generation of Biodiversity in Agroecosystems of the Future, Agronomy Journal, v. 99(2), pp. 373-376.

[xxii] Mshomba, R. (2002), Borders and Burnett (2006), Lula da Silva (2006), Rohter (2006), Public Citizen (2010). 

Mshomba, R. (2002, September) How Northern subsidies hurt Africa, Africa Recovery, v. 16(2-3), p. 29. Available at http://www.un.org/ecosocdev/geninfo/afrec/vol16no2/162agric.htm.  Accessed December 19, 2011.

Borders, M. and Burnett, H.S. (2006, March 24) Farm Subsidies: Devastating the World’s Poor and the Environment, NCPA (National Center for Policy Analysis), no. 547. Available at http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba547.  Accessed December 19, 2011.

Lula da Silva, L.I. (2006, June 1) Time to get serious about agricultural subsidies, New York Times.  Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/01/opinion/01iht-edlula.html?scp=1&sq=Lula,%20Time%20to%20Get%20Serious%20about%20Agricultural%20Subsidies&st=cse.  Accessed December 19, 2011.

Rohter, L. (2006, Sepember 11) Agriculture Discord Stymies World Trade Talks’ Revival, New York Times. Available at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/world/americas/11brazil.html?scp=4&sq=Lula,%20Time%20to%20Get%20Serious%20about%20Agricultural%20Subsidies&st=cse.  Accessed December 19, 2011.

Public Citizen (2010) The Ten Year Track Record of the North American Free Trade Agreement: U.S., Mexican and Canadian Farmers and Agriculture, NAFTA at Ten Series.  Available at http://www.citizen.org/publications/publicationredirect.cfm?ID=7295.  Accessed January 1, 2012.