How Greed Is Killing the American Dream
Taking the money out of politics is our only hope — but can we do it?
Editorial rights purchased by iStock. Photo by cherrybeans
The rich and powerful have spread a lot of lies about the benefits of capitalism. They want us to believe it’s capitalism that made America great, but they’re wrong. Democracy, not capitalism, has allowed us to set an example for the free world — one our current version of capitalism is destroying.
When Franklin Roosevelt created the New Deal, he understood how important investing in infrastructure and people would be to our recovery after the Great Depression. At the time, he was criticized more vehemently than Biden is being criticized now, but his plan paid off.
Unfortunately, by 1980, when Ronald Regan was first running for office, the benefits of the New Deal were in the rear-view mirror and too many failed to remember the lessons of history. One of the biggest lessons, which British economist John Maynard Keynes did his best to impress upon us, was that
“…government spending that put money in consumers’ hands would allow them to buy products made in the private sector. Then, as employers sold more and more products, they would have the money to hire more and more workers, who could afford to buy more and more products, and so on.” — Khan Academy
This is still a sound philosophy, in my opinion, and the basis of Roosevelt’s New Deal. But historians and politicians alike tend to have selective memories. WWII began soon after the New Deal was implemented and many now prefer to focus on how the war machine improved our economy, while neglecting to credit the government’s infusion of funds for the assistance it provided to the poor.
By the 1980s, Regan did all he could to convince us that the government was the problem to our economic woes, not the solution.
Reagan famously joked, “The scariest words you’ll ever hear are ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Reagan entered politics as a wealthy man. Before he became a politician, he was a well-known actor. During WWII, he was making Army training films. After the war, he played the role of a war hero in the movies, but he never fought for his country.
Still, his ability to project an image of a war hero would catapult his political career.
Reagan’s wartime roles caused audiences to see — and hear — him in a new light. Though he never came under enemy fire, to many Americans he was the face and voice of those who did. Newsreel footage of actual battles left most of the participants too distant or blurry to be recognizable; the studio-quality films Reagan appeared in showed his camera-friendly looks to admirable effect.—www.history.com
This was the first time the American people would be fooled into believing a man who played the part of a hero was a heroic figure in real life
This confusion between reality and fantasy fooled the American people into believing that Reagan was not only a war hero but was also qualified to lead our country.
More important, though, was that it showed politicians how they could manipulate the American people by creating scenarios to mislead us into voting against our self-interests. This is how the moneyed political elite has managed to maintain power in America.
What we now call “spin” was used to promote Reagan’s tax policies. Reagan’s philosophy on taxes and government spending was simple: Let people keep their money because they can better decide what to do with it than the government can.
It sounded good to people who were barely making ends meet, but Reagan was careful to ignore the consequences of such a policy. By promoting what he claimed was a way to make life better for the American people, he chipped away at our ability to thrive, by cutting programs we desperately needed.
If the government doesn’t tax citizens, how does a country finance basic infrastructure like roads, bridges, sewer lines, and water supplies?
This was not a question Reagan could answer because Reagan was not a problem-solver. He pretended the country could run itself, without government programs or taxes to fund them. This is what Trump would also claim, decades later.
Reagan’s economic policy was similarly flawed and soon garnered the nickname “trickle-down economics”
His theory was that by allowing unfettered capitalism to foster continued growth in wealth for the already wealthy, it would eventually benefit the rest of us by “trickling down” to those struggling financially. This was not only absurd but dangerous, because it belied the reality of human nature.
The more men have, the more they want. This is the truth about greed — a truth even Aristotle knew well many centuries ago.
Money is a means to an end — when it becomes an end unto itself, it distorts the natural balance of things. When rich men get richer, they don’t share their wealth; they hoard it.
Even Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations, admitted that the philosophy he’s most known for (if men do what’s in their own best interests it will automatically benefit the public at large) just didn’t hold. He advocated appropriate laws/regulations to protect the citizenry. But that part of his opus is rarely mentioned.
What Smith attempted to convey was that people tend to do better when the government doesn’t regulate their ability to make their own monetary choices. He never said there should be no laws against protecting people from abuse by those with enormous monetary power.
When people are not inhibited by laws, they do bad things. They always have, they always will.
But as Regan demonstrated, you can convince people to vote against their interests, if you can deceive them about reality.
The political elite has become masterful at using euphemisms and denial to control the public’s perception of reality. While we’ve long known the power of propaganda, before TV and film, propaganda was limited in its reach.
By the time Reagan was president, it was a free-for-all for any politician who had the money to invest in media blitzes designed to portray candidates as being “for the people” when their true motivation was nothing more than money and power.
The same techniques were used during the presidency of George W. Bush, who set up elaborately staged press conferences so he could talk about the great job the government was doing in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, in complete contrast to the reality on the ground.
When deception couldn’t be televised, politicians and their cronies resorted to euphemisms to control public perception. Rumsfeld and Cheney used “enhanced interrogation techniques” to describe the torture at Abu Ghraib and then lied about getting actionable intelligence from the inhumane practices they promoted during the Iraq War.
Even before the war, in the aftermath of 9/11, Bush and his cabinet used the mainstream media to televise Colin Powell confirming the lie that Niger had yellow-cake uranium and Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, insisting we needed to invade another country to protect ourselves.
Meanwhile, the media had already figured out that the more sensational the story, true or not, the more viewers (and the more advertising dollars) they would collect.
The unchecked corruption generated by the constant need for more money and more power by both the political elite and the media would override any consciousness of guilt that might otherwise have curtailed the greed, which fed the lies, which became our current reality.
And then there was Facebook
Facebook did not start as a way to bring the world together, contrary to Mark Zuckerberg. It started as FaceMash, a program designed to compare the physical characteristics of students to decide if they were “Hot or Not.”
With such an auspicious beginning, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that today FB’s (now Meta’s) Instagram app is responsible for the lowered self-esteem of many of the young women (and men) who use it. Nor should it surprise us that to populate the original program, Zuckerberg hacked into Harvard’s housing websites, which were supposed to be protected.
Clearly, democratic values that promote individual rights were not top of mind for Zuckerberg.
In a WIRED article, the author shares some of the notes he obtained from Zuckerberg’s earliest notebooks. Zuckerberg destroyed most of them, but somehow 17 pages were left untouched and WIRED has them.
In them, Zuckerberg outlines his thoughts about growing FB by allowing anybody to use it. (Before that, it was just for students in high school or college — a safe way to connect with their peers.) In this “Open Reg” version, there would be no gatekeeping.
“What distinguished Facebook from other social networks was the assumed privacy provided by its gated setup. Open Reg would throw open those gates to the masses. But would people then no longer see Facebook as a safe space? In designing Open Reg, he posted one final question to himself. ‘What makes this seem secure, whether or not it actually is?’”
Already, Zuckerberg is focused on appearances that contradict reality. His concerns are not for providing privacy to users, rather they revolve around convincing users that their privacy is protected — even when it’s not.
His notebook also outlined something he refers to as “dark profiles.” These are profiles that are not created by the people whose names appear on the accounts, rather they would be created by friends who could use the name and email address of someone else, then anybody could add details and photos to their friend’s profile.
The idea was that someone could create a profile for you, for example, and post photos and biographical information about you without your permission. Sure, there were some privacy concerns, but Zuckerberg was cool with it.
Positioned as “motivation” for new users to join, it was an argument for a kind of social blackmail. If you wanted to control the information, you’d have to create your own account.
You have to admit, it’s a brilliant (if amoral) marketing strategy.
In 2018, when Zuckerberg was under fire for his platform’s many privacy failures, Facebook also admitted to keeping data on non-users, “… for security purposes and to show outside developers how many people are using their app or website.”
Zuckerberg has also insisted that FB employees do not create profiles for non-Facebook users.
What Zuckerberg does not say, is that FB allows others to create profiles for non-users, or non-people, as the case may be.
Russians at the Internet Research Agency were able to create fake accounts to fool people into believing their neighbors were reaching out to them when all along the information being shared was propaganda supplied and spread by those trying to create chaos and destroy our democracy on behalf of Putin.
Zuckerberg designed his platform to allow this.
Deception is at the root of it all — and power— and money. When Zuckerberg created his News Feed, which was launched in September of 2006, it was the first sign of just how much power he would eventually amass.
The rollout was a disaster, and the flashpoint was privacy. But that didn’t stop Zuckerberg.
News Feed hit your social groups like a stack of tabloid newspapers crashing on the sidewalk. Every one of your “friends” now knew instantly if you made an ass of yourself at a party or your girlfriend dumped you. All because Facebook was shoving the information in their faces! Over 100,000 people joined just one of many Facebook groups urging the product’s retraction. There was a demonstration outside headquarters. — WIRED
And then guess what happened? Users hungry to see just how much dirt they could dig up on others went nuts. Despite protests, users did not boycott FB. Instead, they spend more time on the platform than ever before.
While a variety of privacy options were built into the platform in response to the uproar, the default settings did not include them. If you wanted privacy you needed to be willing to spend some time figuring out how to enable those features.
Even as his employees begged Zuckerberg to make the feature “opt-in” — meaning users would have privacy by default, Zuckerberg overruled them.
Today, FB’s algorithms are designed to push the most heinous information to the top of every feed. They are essentially tapping into the limbic systems of their users — it’s how they keep their eyes on the page and the money rolling in from ad dollars.
Reagan, the Bush/Cheney cabal, and Mark Zuckerberg all set the stage for Donald J. Trump and the insurrection of Jan. 6th. All of them have used their considerable money and power to push Americans toward authoritarianism, fueled by the capitalistic desire for power and greed.
They may tell the public that it’s all about a culture war, but the war was invented by them, to fuel the fires of dissent and division so they can take over our democracy and turn it into an oligarchy, just like Russia.
The question now is: How do we stop it?
(I’m starting a series on POLITICAL REFORM. More to come.)