Category: Political issues

Raleigh News & Observer: Pat McCrory, newly elected governor of North Carolina, dedicated corporate servant

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if an anti-education red state governor wanted to say something stupid like the quote below about North Carolina’s university system, he’d first have one of his aides do a little fact-checking. Here’s the quote as given in the Raleigh News & Observer:

“If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job…. Right now I’m looking for engineers, I’m looking for technicians, I’m looking for mechanics.”

You’d think that North Carolina’s university system is turning out a bunch of English majors and gender studies majors. Hardly, as the chart below shows. All the same, this false charge will be used to further degrade and corporatize North Carolina’s once strong education system. And by the way, I’d bet a nickel that that talking point about gender studies was written by ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) the out-of-state right-wing outfit which actually has written most of the legislation that these corporate-owned politicians are enacting — not just in North Carolina, but all over the country.

But McCrory doesn’t care about facts. He just believes in his gut that “education” is just trade school that ought to serve corporations, and he does not approve of liberal arts educations. It’s the same medieval mindset that caused the Republican Party of Texas to oppose the teaching of “higher order thinking skills.” Undermines parental authority, you know. These people don’t want us to think for ourselves. They want us dumb, so we’ll believe what we hear on TV, and so we’ll keep electing people like them.

Right-wingers now control the legislature and the governor’s office in North Carolina. Their agenda: to put private corporate profit above everything else; to decimate the state’s educational system, including letting for-profit outfits encroach on the public schools; to frack the state; to roll back clean energy initiatives; to shift the tax burden away from corporations and the rich onto the backs of working people; to make it harder for people they don’t like to vote.

North Carolina is screwed. The know-nothing white rural folk who voted in these clowns will be the people most hurt by what Raleigh is getting ready to do. But they won’t know what hit them, because they’re all sitting in front of the television watching Fox News.

Here’s the kind of graduates we actually have in North Carolina. Source: ƒ„Statistical Abstract of Higher Education in North Carolina, 2011-2012.

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Postscript: And here’s the kind of guy this legislature has put in charge of ethics. The Senate chair of the Legislative Ethics Committee paid off his personal credit cards with campaign donations. This is the kind of people who want to educate us, to frack us, to tax us, while distracting us with blather about god and guns and jobs.

Update: Here’s an editorial in the Raleigh News & Observer on McCrory’s stupidity.

Update 2: An essay by the president of Macalester College.

Here is a fresh, important lesson in how political players and the corporate media collude to generate false, self-serving drama. It’s not difficult to pull back the curtain and see what they get out of it. Political players — especially those with the weakest hand — get to strut in front of cameras and recite their talking points, to build their brands, to reinforce the fiction that Washington is the center of the universe. The media need conflict, urgency, and drama to get people to watch their crap and listen to their dumb-as-rocks talking heads.

Immediately after the election, the political entertainment industry panned their cameras to the so-called “fiscal cliff,” as though it was all pre-planned, which it was. Political players cooperated in all sorts of ways, including running it down to the wire to maximize the drama. But in the end, it wasn’t even close. The legislation passed 89-8 in the Senate and 257-167 in the House. What a silly drama.

It was the same with the election. The right-wing media said Romney would win (apparently believing their own fantasies), and the mainstream media said it was a close horse race. But a small minority of real-world people, thanks to Nate Silver, knew that it was not close, and that Romney would not win. Silver was demonized and marginalized, and the political entertainment industry went right on playing out the election according to their horse-race script. Here’s a test: Did you find, and evaluate the evidence of, Nate Silver before the election? If yes, you get a gold star. If not, you need to rethink your information sources.

The ringmasters of the pig circus will do it again, and then again. We will see within the next day or two what their next dramatic theme will be. They’re shifting the cameras and rehearsing the script even now. The show will go on.

To the ruling elite (and by this I mean all the players in the government industrial complex, not just Democrats), there are many benefits in this arrangement. One important benefit is distraction. By focusing the people on empty dramas, they distract us from the things that really matter. They keep us angry and divided, so that we can’t see who is really eating our lunch.

The cure: to turn off our televisions and read. Everything must be read with great skepticism and an alertness to hidden agendas and conflicts of interest. Those who have a record of being wrong (that category includes almost all our pundit class and all the players who go back and forth through the revolving doors between government and corporations) must be ignored. Anyone who has any kind of power must be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise. Similarly, anyone who is rich must be assumed to be lying until proven otherwise.

Also, keep a long memory. Remember when the whole political entertainment complex ridiculed the idea that there was a housing bubble? Remember when Alan Greenspan, kissing the ass of George Bush, who was running for president, said that the Clinton-era surplus created the danger that we might pay off the debt too fast, and that we must therefore give rich “job creators” a tax cut? The script-writers for the pig circus keep the horse shit flying so fast that we’re not supposed to have time to fact-check or to think back to their lines in last year’s script. Don’t let them get away with it.

Apply a few simple tests of track record and truth, and it’s clear that 99 percent of what we’re fed by our media and by political players is horse shit.

As they roll back the curtain on the pig circus’s next act, pay no attention. What’s important, as always, is somewhere they don’t want us to look.

At the water cooler, instead of talking about the “fiscal cliff” and the drama du jour, review the show. Critique the performances. Ridicule the script. Laugh at the contrived, car-chase ending. Speculate on the setup for the sequel. Then turn off the damned television and don’t fall for it again.

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In fact, the “fiscal cliff” legislation passed the House with a significantly greater margin than John Boehner’s re-election as speaker (220 to 192).

Al-Ahram

My recent post about Wallace Carroll left me thinking a great deal about Mr. Carroll, and so I thought it was time to read Persuade or Perish again. I had not read it since I was in my early 20s. I was too young then to understand the book very well, and I knew next to nothing about World War II.

So I’m rereading it, and I’m about halfway through. I’ll write more about it later, but the passage below struck me as so important and so visionary, and so relevant to what is now going on at our embassies in Africa and western Asia that I’m going to quote several paragraphs from the book.

It really sheds light on how we are paying the price for America’s ugly image abroad, especially in the Islamic countries. It’s not that we lack a propaganda campaign aimed at those parts of the world. It’s also about what we do. As Mr. Carroll wrote, “the most effective propaganda is the truth.” How absurd is it that some raggedy-ass, hate-filled filmmakers operating in the shadows in Southern California can so easily define this country abroad? That ugly image of America sells abroad because of what we have done and are doing. Their memories are longer than ours. For us, it’s far away. For them, it’s very close to home.

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From Persuade or Perish, by Wallace Carroll, published in 1948:

“Such a strategy of persuasion — I believed it then and I believe it now — is essential if the United States is to succeed in its paramount aim of assuring a just and lasting peace. It must replace the old narrow concept of international relations as an exchange of correspondence and courtesies between governments. It must proceed from the realization that behind the governments are the peoples, and that it is more important to win the hearts of men than the cold and formal approval of their rulers. American foreign policy will be successful only to the extent that it can convince the people that American aims are in harmony with their aspirations for peace and freedom and personal liberty.

“The best starting-point for a strategy of persuasion — if the lessons of North Africa and Italy are valid — is an awareness that a democracy like the United States must keep its acts in harmony with its words. For a dictatorship like Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia, this is not essential. A dictatorship can talk about a glorious New Order while it is girdling a continent with concentration camps. It can denounce interference in the affairs of other nations at the moment it is seeking to destroy their governments by fomenting strikes and riots. The aim of the dictatorship is to confuse and divide. The aim of democratic America will always be to unite. When an American government is guilty of actions which confuse other nations, it defeats its own ends. That was shown in North Africa and Italy where American actions gave rise to misunderstanding of American purposes and weakened the bonds between the United States and its allies in war and peace. Later events showed that even in our domestic policies contradictions between our acts and words can lead to confusion abroad and thwart the aims of our foreign policy. It was the widespread belief abroad that the United States was moving toward reaction after the war which caused its fine words about democracy and liberty to be received with skepticism and hampered its efforts to rally the great coalition of peaceful nations on which the future welfare of the world depends.

“The events which I witnessed in London [1941-1944] convinced me that policy and persuasion are one, or that persuasion is simply an extension of foreign policy…

“The policy-makers in Washington, however, like the diplomats who serve them in the field, must be men who are sensitive to trends of feeling and opinion out on the periphery. As our mishaps in the Mediterranean campaign showed, the United States cannot afford to be dependent upon policy-makers and diplomats who are deaf to even the most violent expressions of human feelings. Without sympathetic reporting of trends of opinion from the field, the policy-makers will be exposed to grave miscalculations. Given such reporting, they will be able to keep American actions in harmony with the hopes of free peoples.”