Some months ago (I can’t recall exactly the day), I was sprawled on a floor, warming up at my gym. Across the way, through a big glass window, I caught a glimpse of one of the big TV screens tuned to CNN. The image was of a mysterious plane being tracked by cameras. I could only make out “BREAKING NEWS” from a distance. I thought: hijacking...plane in distress...foreign leader traveling on some high-level mission...maybe Air Force One.
No. It was Donald Trump’s private plane. Coming to some ginned up political rally. This wasn’t a quick camera shot. The network followed the plane for a very long time, leaving briefly for a commercial and a few other quick news stories and, then, returning to the same shot.
That was just a snippet in what would be regular, “in-depth” coverage of this dangerous fool.
In all the current hand-wringing about the overt racism and demagoguery spewing from the mouth of one individual, it is pretty astonishing—though perhaps not surprising--that there is a collective silence on the part of the traditional media about its singular role in promoting, fanning and giving wings to the hate and bile and division. It isn’t just FOX News. It’s the whole lot of them. And it speaks partly to a fraudulent, singular belief that says a lot about why we are in such a crisis.
To wit: Donald Trump was a long-time, hateful, misogynist individual, wholly unqualified to be president.
He was a venerable liar over many years, not the least of which his repeated lies, going back years, about his net worth (he actually sued a reporter for an article written a decade ago which accurately questioned Trump’s fraudulent claims about his wealth).
Yet, when this fool entered into the president’s race, the traditional media lavished massive amounts of coverage on his every move. Coverage that would have belittled him and dismissed him as a fringe oddity would have ended his campaign (but, of course, that kind of coverage was reserved for Bernie Sanders, who has a 40-year history of public service and policy accomplishments...but I digress).
There has been a whole lot of stupid when it comes to political coverage and the vast laziness of most of the political coverage (that allows, for example, a status quo candidate to run the most intellectually dishonest campaign in recent Democratic nomination history, and get, mostly, a free pass on the issues from the traditional media which is more obsessed with side issues and style).
But, there is, however, a blind spot that explains the idiocy around the coverage of a racist, and it says a lot about how our country is governed: why would anyone think a business executive is qualified to run a country?
This is essentially a piece I wrote for, of all places, the Murdoch-owned The Australian back in 2012, looking at why anyone would believe Mitt Romney should be president (relax, all you no-nothings about copyright—I can reprint the entire thing if I choose):
This is a common choice voters are being offered around the world. Unemployment is high, governments appear incapable of charting a course for economic security and people feel afraid.
Then, from the fog of paralysis, a saviour appears: the savvy businessman offering to get everything shipshape, just like he claims he did in his fabulously successful role as aprivate sector chieftain.
Indeed, on the campaign trail, Romney's newly chosen vice-presidential pick, Paul Ryan,says of Romney's business background, "It's the kind of experience you want to have in Washington."
But, while it may seem like an attractive proposition to try to translate business success into public policy life, it's highly debatable whether a chief executive is the kind of person you would entrust to manage national affairs.
Perhaps the most obvious point is companies are essentially dictatorships. The chief executive is the boss. Spare us the rhetoric about chief executives serving at the pleasure of the boards of directors. Boards of directors are mouthpieces for the chief executive, stacked with cronies.
So, while the CEO-as-supreme-leader might work well in Syria, Uzbekistan or North Korea, it's a role fundamentally at odds with democracies. Give and take, compromise and patience may be messy and tedious in the political world but, in most democracies, those are part of the checks and balances political leaders accept.
Examples of the imperial chief executive can be found in every corner of the globe.
Once she had accumulated a large share of stock in Fairfax Media, it took about five minutes for Gina Reinhart to demand that the company change its entire code of independence-and she wasn't even the chief executive. [Note to current readers: Reinhart, an Australian mining baron, is the richest woman in the world]
Imagine Rupert Murdoch sitting still for a parliamentary negotiation, or the perpetually impatient Bill Gates biding his time while the US congress debated, for weeks, whether to pass a farm bill.
Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, in a slim, little noticed book called A Country is Not a Company, points out that companies operate in very different environments from a country. An economy, he says, is monumentally more complex than a company, no matter how big the private enterprise: "A successful business leader is no more likely to be an expert on economics than on military strategy." To make this point, Krugman focuses on an essential difference: "Businesses, even very large corporations, are generally open systems. By contrast, a national economy-especially that of a very large country like the United States-is a closed system."
Think of it this way. In the open-system world facing a chief executive, when a company does well, the chief executive can expand lines of business and hire more workers. As it grows, the company can, as a whole, perform well and without regard to how it may hurt another company engaged in a similar market. The CEO's only concern is watching his own bottom line.
But in a national economy a leader does not have the same luxury. One industry's job growth from exports driven by a highly valued domestic currency, for example, often comes at a loss to someone else's jobs in another industry that is hurt by an overvalued currency.
A national economy's closed system-that is, a system where a pie is divided up among competing interests-is inherently a more conflicted ecosystem. And, in that conflict resides political challenges a chief executive is ill-equipped to manage. Thus, Krugman says, "an executive who has made $1 billion is rarely the right person to turn to for advice about a $6 trillion economy".
The real problem is that, by believing that a chief executive can do a better job than current political leaders from other walks of life, we aren't really understanding, or we are refusing to acknowledge, the deeper problem. Our worldwide crisis-too many unemployed workers, a declining standard of living, eroding retirement security, all coupled with an existential threat to life on the planet because of climate change-has little to do with a failure to run a nation with executive-like efficiency.
It's a failure of morality and vision. The crisis and paralysis are a direct outcome of an economic system-the so-called "free market"-that has delivered prosperity only to a handful of people while impoverishing most others.
Sharan Burrow, general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation, put it succinctly: "This is an economic model that is not creating jobs, protecting livelihoods or providing the social protection that people need to stabilise the economy." In the process, the system is exhausting the earth's capabilities to sustain itself.
Running a failed economic system with CEO-like efficiency means driving the entire human condition deeper into the abyss. An honest debate would make clear that chief executives embrace a set of beliefs and institutions that have got us into the mess we face. They are, thus, not suited to run a nation because their core instincts are to continue to offer more economic insanity over a path to sustainability. [emphasis added]
The same media fawning over the CEO as savior led to the financial crisis, the most recent one and the larger one we’ve had for over four decades: few thought to challenge the men running companies into the ground, enriching themselves while impoverishing millions of workers over decades by either cutting jobs or pay or both because, wow, these guys were geniuses; the media rarely questioned the greedy, morons running Wall Street leading to financial crisis after financial crisis, with the most recent thunderous mortgage-related recent crash of the economy; when they inserted themselves into government, the media routinely portrayed this as a good thing to make government more “efficient”, regardless of whether any of those great business minds ever understood how a real society works; and, when they royally screwed up in their public service, they skated (I’ll just mention Clinton Treasury Secretary, and close confident of the current status quo candidate, Robert Rubin, who, shilling for his Citibank pals, destroyed Glass-Steagall and, as I argued here, he probably lied in his testimony before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
The traditional media does not grasp that, as I wrote above in the past piece, what we face is a failure of morality and vision. Morality and vision come from decades of possessing an internal compass oriented not to seizing power and wealth but one influenced by principles—and, fulfilling the latter, there is only one candidate, in either party, that qualifies.
Donald Trump is a fraud. He’s a racist. He’s a misogynist. He’s a huckster.
And the traditional media, driven by that deeply held religious belief in the faith in the leaders of the “free market”, has fed his whole poisoning of the political dialogue, his appeal to hate and anger, and, I greatly fear, more violence.
From the media...not a peep about its complicity.
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