Media Fragmentation – The Wrongologist

The Crypto Bro Vote

The Daily Escape:

When Trump pivoted to being pro-crypto, everyone thought it was just another scam to make a few extra shekels in advance of election. From The Atlantic:

“…more than 1 million people tuned in for the launch of World Liberty Financial, a new crypto project promoted by Trump and his family. The former president has been posting about it on social media for several weeks.”

“Trump wasn’t always this pro-crypto. He once referred to bitcoin as a scam….This summer, he appeared at a bitcoin conference and declared that the United States ‘will be the crypto capital of the planet’”

But his embrace may be more calculated than that. You shouldn’t be surprised to learn that crypto companies are bankrolling Republican campaigns this election. The New Yorker has a detailed story about how Silicon Valley’s crypto boys went all in on Sen. Adam Schiff in part by crushing Rep. Katie Porter’s attempt to become the Democratic nominee for the California Senate race:

“…Katie Porter was…futzing around on her computer when she learned that she was the target of a vast techno-political conspiracy….Now she was in a highly competitive race to replace the California senator Dianne Feinstein, who had died a few months earlier. The primary was in three weeks.

A text from a campaign staffer popped up on Porter’s screen. The staffer had just learned that a group named Fairshake was buying airtime in order to mount a last-minute blitz to oppose her candidacy. Indeed, the group was planning to spend roughly ten million dollars.”

“Porter…had raised thirty million dollars to bankroll her entire campaign, and that had taken years. The idea that some unknown group would swoop in and spend a fortune attacking her…seemed ludicrous: “I was, like, ‘What the heck is Fairshake?’ ”

Fairshake is a super PAC funded primarily by three tech firms involved in the cryptocurrency industry. The pro-crypto PAC has raised more than $200 million for 2024’s election cycles, per OpenSecrets, with tens of millions of dollars flooding in from crypto giants Coinbase and Ripple, as well as the Menlo Park CA venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Fairshake’s thinking was: If Porter lost and other politicians saw how much money the industry had available to spend on elections, they’d be more likely to become pro-crypto. The stakes, for the big donors, are existential — regulatory acceptance would boost the value of their companies’ assets and the use of their services.

The PAC dumped about $10 million into the race, a third of the $30 million Porter had for her campaign. She hadn’t ever heard of the group, but its attack ads called her “a fake,” a “liar” and a “bully.” Fairshake selected Porter from a list of high-profile options, hoping to make an example. She lost and will be out of Congress when it convenes in January.

An unnamed political operative told the New Yorker:

“Porter was a perfect choice because she let crypto declare, ‘If you are even slightly critical of us, we won’t just kill you…we’ll end your career.’ From a political perspective, it was a masterpiece.”

Fairshake’s scare campaign appears to have worked. The House of Representatives passed a pro-crypto bill, with bipartisan support, in May. Candidates with Fairshake’s support won their primaries in 85% of the cases.

This has made its way into the presidential campaign: Trump backs crypto and Harris has signaled her support for it as well.

Trump may be on to something, since this could be a bigger factor in the election than we realize. The New Yorker quotes Coinbase as saying that fifty-two million Americans own cryptocurrencies. Those polls indicated that 60% of crypto owners were millennials or Gen Z-ers, and 41% were people of color, key demographics for each Party.

Coinbase also launched an advocacy organization, Stand with Crypto, which is advertised to Coinbase’s millions of US customers every time they log in, and which urges cryptocurrency owners to contact their lawmakers.

Sherrod Brown (D-OH) is running for reelection, where Fairshake has directed forty million dollars to ads in support of his opponent.

In total, Fairshake and affiliated PACs have already spent more than a hundred million dollars on political races in 2024, including $43 million on Senate races in Ohio and West Virginia, and $7 million on four congressional races in North Carolina, Colorado, Alaska, and Iowa.

The big question is whether the bro vote is overhyped? Will these crypto bros turn out to vote?

Trump’s best chance at success in November requires minimizing his losses among women and suburbanites while building a coalition that includes a historic number of male and working-class voters in his corner. As a result, we’re seeing both campaigns and their allies attempt to reach men in unprecedented and unconventional ways online. (A reminder: Young men historically vote at lower rates than young women.)

For Trump, it seems this targeted outreach to the tech bros segment of the electorate is essential. If he can’t win record numbers of men, it’s unlikely he can win the White House.

For the Harris campaign, the male-focused outreach efforts are happening in addition to major campaigns and organizing programs designed to reach more dependable parts of their coalition who turn out more dependably.

In a way, this is proof that American governance and legislation have become so perverted by money that it is nearly impossible for people other than billionaires to further their agendas. It’s particularly dangerous given that the US economy has bestowed lavish riches on a tiny group of disaffected, unaccountable technologists.

Today’s startup founders and venture capitalists are, like the nouveaux riches of previous eras, using their wealth for selfish aims. In doing so, they have revealed themselves to be as ruthless as the robber barons and industrial tyrants of a century ago—not coincidentally, the last time that income inequality was as extreme as it is today.

Will The Guilty Verdict Matter?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise, Cundy’s Harbor, ME – May 2024 photo by Eric Storm Photo

Everyone’s talking about it. Apparently, as with everything political, there are two sides. In real life, Trump was found guilty. For those of you who feel good about what the jury decided, Wrongo would give you all a big hug if you were nearby. In the Republican parallel universe however, he’s the victim of a Communist show trial. Wrongo hasn’t seen this many White men cry since Larry Bird retired. Don’t be surprised if the verdict caused Martha-Ann Alito to lower her “Stop the Steal” flag to half-mast.

You may not have already heard, but one of the jurors who voted to convict Trump regularly gets their news from Truth Social and Fox, meaning against all odds, they were convinced by the evidence. That was most likely the juror Trump was counting to deliver a hung jury.

At the Mansion of Wrong, we opened a bottle of good champagne.

In a nutshell, the reality facing Americans in the presidential election is that one of the two main contenders is a felon whose campaign is based on claiming the system is rigged. From Ed Luce in the Financial Times (paywalled):

“The Republican party’s nominee now joins his former campaign manager, senior political adviser, chief White House strategist, and national security adviser as a convicted criminal. The jury’s speed and unanimity leave little doubt about the watertightness of the verdict.…No matter what his lawyers advise, Trump’s court of appeal will be the US electorate.”

What happens between the guilty verdict in New York and inauguration day on January 20, 2025 will be a comprehensive stress test of American society. The decision will be made by the individual votes of the 244 million citizens who are eligible to vote, many of whom will stay home rather than vote.

November 5^th, 2024 isn’t the end point of this struggle because if the election outcome is disputed, societal forces beyond the courts and the ballot box will again come to draw up sides, as they did in the interregnum between November 2020 and January 2021.

The verdict matters. But is it enough to be decisive? The jury is, well, still out on that, and will be until November. But the verdict is a welcome outcome if you’re anti-Trump. It pierces Trump’s preferred narrative that he’s a winner and it’s plausible that it will depress some margin of potential Trump swing voters while activating the Democratic base.

Biden should seize the moment. He doesn’t need to speak about the details of the NY case, except to profess his faith in the judicial system and his respect for our fellow citizens who served on the jury. He doesn’t have to engage with the hysterical Trump defenders, except to point out their dangerous demagoguery and un-American attacks on our legal and judicial system.

Trump OTOH, can bitch and moan about unfairness all he wants, but only losers do that. And if you’re explaining, you’re losing. So while we should expect Trump’s conviction to have a very small effect on MAGA Republicans, it will be repellant to most centrists. By contrast, the verdict will be a heartening reminder to liberals and anyone invested in responsible government that the system can still work.

But first let’s take a deep breath and let this uplifting moment wash over us. Now, agree to start every conversation about him by saying: “Convicted Felon Donald Trump…”.

From Dan Pfeiffer:

“A lot of polling shows that a conviction is bad news for Trump. The highly respected Marquette University Law School poll recently did a split-sample. The first group was asked “If it turns out that Donald Trump is found guilty in his New York trial, would you vote for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump?” Biden led Trump 43-39. The other group was asked “If it turns out that Donald Trump is found not guilty in his New York trial, would you vote for Joe Biden or for Donald Trump?” In that group, Trump led 44-38.”

Other polls are similar. CNN released a poll in late April that offered some interesting details on the voters who could abandon Trump if convicted:

“They tend to be younger than other Trump supporters (64% are younger than 50 compared with 37% of those who would not reconsider), are less likely to be White (49% are people of color compared with 17% of those who would not reconsider), are more apt to report being Biden voters in 2020 (20% of them say they backed Biden in 2020 vs. 6% of those who would not reconsider) and are likelier to acknowledge that Biden legitimately won enough votes to win the presidency four years ago (63% vs. 22% among those who would not reconsider). They are also more apt to be politically independent (49% vs. 31%) and ideologically moderate (50% vs. 38%).”

These are some of the same voters who supported Biden in 2020 but who might defect in 2024. We need to remember that Trump is very good at distracting people from his problems by creating new ones, and most voters have very short attention spans.

America no longer has political guardrails. We no longer have standards which are bottom-line required in order for someone to be considered an admirable person. Apparently, a significant percentage of us are willing to elect anyone who yells the loudest or lies the most.

Still, there’s nothing but upside in believing Trump’s conviction will matter. Because if that turns out to be wrong, America will no longer be a place where it’s worth living.

Sadly, Wrongo has no plans for leaving it.

So it’s time for our Saturday Soother, where for the first time in forever, we can stay plugged into the news and talk about what’s going on with our friends and family. But we still need to take a few moments to consider the upcoming week and what it can mean for the nation. Since there’s beautiful weather in the northeast, start by grabbing a seat outdoors in the shade. Now, watch and listen to two musical performances.

First, “Song from a Secret Garden”, from an album by the Norwegian group, Secret Garden. Their music is sort of neo-classical new-age compositions. Here it is performed in 2022 by the Millennium Symphony Orchestra, a Korean group with solo Cello by Yoon Kyung Cho. It’s a lovely arrangement:

Second for levity, watch and listen to “I fought The Law” by the Bobby Fuller Four from 1966. The tune was written by Sonny Curtis of the Crickets and covered by the Bobby Fuller Four. Their version of the song was ranked No. 175 on the Rolling Stone list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time in 2004:

Two Writers Who Speak To What America Needs

The Daily Escape:

Wukoki, Wupatli National Monument, AZ – September 2023 photo by David Erickson

September is underway, and we’re about to have a negotiation about government spending. But that doesn’t mean that the news this month will be any less stupid than last month’s. Also, as the Republican presidential candidates demonstrate every day, we don’t actually know whether the GOP is a dying Party or, the rising single Party of an authoritarian state.

Unless and until the traditional press presents these as the stakes, it is very unclear which it’ll end up being. With this as an introduction, Wrongo wants to introduce two writers who are attempting to break through our chain of bad policies and the bad ideology that threatens our democracy.

First, from Wesley Lowery in the Columbia Journalism Review:

“We find ourselves in a perilous moment. Democracy is under withering assault. Technological advances have empowered propagandists to profit through discontent and disinformation. A coordinated, fifty-year campaign waged by one of our major political parties to denigrate the media and call objective reality into question has reached its logical conclusion: we occupy a nation in which a sizable portion of the public cannot reliably tell fact from fiction. The rise of a powerful nativist movement has provided a test not only of American multiracial democracy, but also of the institutions sworn to protect it.”

Lowery is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter. He goes on to say:

“In 2020, I argued that the press had often failed this test by engaging in performative neutrality, paint-by-the-numbers balance, and thoughtless deference to government officials. Too many news organizations were as concerned with projecting impartiality as they were with actually achieving it, prioritizing the perception of their virtue in the minds of a hopelessly polarized audience…”

Lowery also says that news organizations often rely on euphemisms instead of clarity in clear cases of racism (“racially charged,” “racially tinged”) and acts of government violence (“officer-involved shooting”). He says that these editorial decisions are not only journalistic failings, but also moral ones:

“…when the weight of the evidence is clear, it is wrong to conceal the truth. Justified as “objectivity,” they are in fact its distortion.”

Lowery concludes by saying:

“It’s time to set aside silly word games and to rise to the urgent test presented by this moment.”

Second, Bob Lord is a tax attorney and associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies. He also serves a senior advisor on tax policy for Patriotic Millionaires. At Inequality.org, he proposes a graduated wealth tax on the rich:

“The United States is experiencing a level of wealth inequality not seen since the original Gilded Age. This yawning gap between rich and poor has unfolded right out in the open, in full public view and with the support of both political parties.

A malignant class of modern robber barons has amassed unthinkably large fortunes. These wealthy have catastrophically impacted our politics. They have weaponized their wealth to co-opt, corrupt, and choke off representative democracy. They have purchased members of Congress and justices of the Supreme Court. They have manipulated their newfound political power to amass ever-larger fortunes.”

Monday Wake Up Call – February 6, 2023

The Daily Escape:

Sea smoke, South Portland, ME looking towards Portland Head light – February 2023 photo by Benjamin Williamson Photography

On Saturday, Wrongo and Ms. Right went to a dinner party with friends and two generations of family. The after dinner talk turned to how quite a few of the kids and grandkids weren’t planning on having children.

We tossed around ideas about why they were unlikely to procreate, and somethings stood out. First, they see climate change as an existential threat that society is unwilling to solve, even though the technology already exists. Why bring a kid into that?

Second, society seems broken. Our group meant that we face simultaneous crises, layered on top of each other. This situation involving simultaneous global challenges, for which we have few solutions, is called Polycrisis.

And a crisis in one global system can spill over into other global systems. They interact with each another so that each new crisis worsens the overall harm. The Polycrisis environment weakens every individual’s sense of security and their place in the world.

One impact that seems related to the simultaneous climate, health, economic and geopolitical challenges are the effects on children. The needs for special education and special services for the very young has never been greater in America. It’s forcing big changes in public school budgets across the country.

No one is really sure why this is happening.

Wrongo isn’t proposing a solution, just suggesting we need to think more about how the problems of declining birth rates, coupled with the growing issues our young children are facing, might be interrelated.

Noah Smith an economist, has an interesting newsletter about how we define community:

“In the past, our communities were primarily horizontal — they were simply the people we lived close to….Increasingly, though, new technology has enabled us to construct communities that I’ve decided to call vertical — groups of people united by identities, interests, and values rather than by physical proximity.”

Smith says that in the past few decades, Americans became disengaged from their local communities, hunkering down in their houses, and failing to interact with the people around them. That led to a well-documented decline in Americans’ participation in civic organizations, local clubs, etc. Our neighbors can also be stifling and/or repressive because they impose uncomfortable community norms on us.

We’ve always had Smith’s vertical communities: “the Jewish community”, “the LGBT community”, and many others. But in the past, an identity grouping wasn’t a true community. We all have identities that connect us with faraway people — other Irishmen, other Taylor Swift fans.

Prior to the internet, we couldn’t have much contact with them. These loose vertical communities weren’t efficient ways to exchange ideas. Before email, text and streaming video, getting the word out was very slow, and our horizontal communities would decide whether what we wanted to share was worthwhile.

Now, we’re no longer isolated. The internet brought us a world of human interaction: social media feeds, chat apps, and so on. Suddenly we’re surrounded by people through their words, their pictures, and their videos.

Now we organize much of our human interaction around virtual vertical communities. Former occasional connections became Facebook groups, subreddits and personal networks on Twitter. And like our small towns back in the day, vertical communities use social ostracism to punish those who deviate from consensus norms.

But vertical communities can’t provide things like public education, national defense, courts of law, property rights, product standards, and infrastructure that we all depend on.

These require a government to administer them. And governments are organized horizontally; mostly defined by lines on maps. But what if we socialize, cooperate, and fall in love with the people from our vertical community? What if we grow apart from the people next door and the relationship is irreparable?

We see this every day in America when citizens go to a PTA meeting and discover a bunch of strangers saying things that they despise.

Wrongo isn’t saying that vertical communities are another enemy. But they can and do exacerbate the polycrisis by making truth harder to see. And by making effective action more difficult.

If you doubt this, remember how powerful the anti-vaxx vertical was at the height of the Covid pandemic. Today’s vertical communities are strong enough to keep our government from getting much of anything done. How can we work together with neighbors when we share few common bonds?

America today is a predatory society. We predate on politics, ideas, values, and culture. Biden’s trying to change this, but can he succeed? How many of us are trying to help? Changing a society that’s this broken, one that’s moving deeper into vertical communities will be a very heavy lift.

Time to wake up America! What can we do to maintain what Lincoln in his first inaugural address said:

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.”

To help you wake up, listen and watch the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s 2022 cover of Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released” with Larkin Poe (Rebecca Lovell and Megan Lovell) on vocals and a fabulous slide guitar solo:

Sample of Lyrics:

Standing next to me in this lonely crowd
Is a man who swears he’s not to blame
All day long I hear him shout so loud
Just crying out that he was framed

There Are No Partisan Facts

The Daily Escape:

Roaring Mountain, Yellowstone NP – January 2023 photo via Yellowstone NP. The steam vents are called fumaroles. With a limited water supply, the water in steam vents turns to steam and makes noise before reaching the surface.

Today let’s delve into the right-wing mind. Sadly we can’t go in too deep, because you know. Wrongo will try to connect the dots on a few ideas that three interesting people wrote about last week, First, the headline in Phillip Bump’s piece in the WaPo:

“There’s actually only one conspiracy theory: Democrats are evil.”

He’s writing about all of the online conspiracy theories surrounding the hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, and then generalizes from the specific:

“Last year, Pew Research Center found that 1 in 8 Republicans (12.5%) liked it a lot when their leaders called Democratic leaders “evil.” Another 16% said they liked it a little.”

So, 28.5% of Republicans think Dems are mostly evil. Bump offers the long laundry list of Democrat conspiracies propounded by Republicans.

For example, the 2020 stolen election shows that Democrats are dishonest and will do anything to retain power.
The “deep state” is out to get Trump and the Republicans. This leads to demonizing the FBI and CIA as liberals out to get Trump. This year, we can add the National Archives who just wanted their secret documents back.
These conspiracies have led the new Republican House majority to create a committee to look at weaponization of the FBI, DOJ and other agencies against Republicans.

Next, let’s look at recent polling on the economy. Matt Yglesias provides two charts that show the US partisan divide on the economy. First is how Democrats view their family’s economic situation over the past 8 years:

On Election Day (ED) 2016, 50% of Democrats said their family’s situation was about the same. On ED 2020, 50% said it was the same. After two years under Biden, it was 52%, so no change. On ED in 2016, about 32% of Dems said their financial situation had gotten better. That fell to about 10% by ED 2020 and is now about 23%.

Contrast that with what Republicans think now and what they thought on Election Day 2016:

From ED in 2016 when Trump won the White House until ED 2020 when he lost it, the percentage of Republicans who thought their financial situation was about the same went from 45% in 2016 to 55% on ED 2020, meaning that they were pretty satisfied with the state of the overall economy. But with Biden, that dropped precipitously to 21% in just two years.

Republicans who thought their personal financial situation had gotten worse stood at 47% in 2016, and just 10% in 2020. But in January of 2023, after two years of Biden, 74% say their financial situation has gotten worse!

But what really happened with the economy? Paul Krugman has thoughts about what we learn from watching only cable news: (brackets by Wrongo)

“Would you know that real gross domestic product has risen 6.7% under President Biden, that America gained 4.5 million jobs in 2022 and that inflation over the past six months, which was indeed very high last winter, was [growing at] less than 2% at an annual rate?”

How does Krugman explain the disconnect between actual economic data and perceptions? More:

“Partisanship is clearly part of the story….. 90% of Republicans said the national economy was poor. A longer view, from the Michigan Survey of Consumers, finds Republicans rating the current economy worse than they did in June 1980, when unemployment was above 7% percent and inflation was 14%.”

Welcome to the United States of Cognitive Dissonance.

There always has been cognitive dissonance in the world. It’s part of being human. But today, people sincerely love to complain and persist in wanting to see the bad side of everything. Egg prices are up? This economy sucks. All that Americans seem to be capable of seeing is the downside.

The country Wrongo grew up in is still here, but its culture has changed. As a member of the Silent Generation, Wrongo and most others wouldn’t have bet against the USA, or its people. But today, we can’t be certain. This dumbing down of American citizens has happened in rapid and spectacular fashion, and the fact-free perception divide is weakening our institutions. This will be extraordinarily difficult to bridge.

Wrongo has no silver bullet for fixing this, but a very basic way to start is to read up on the big problems. Speak up whenever you hear bullshit spewing. That takes courage, but it can’t go uncontested.

Attend your town meetings. Join groups that sponsor educational exchanges on issues. And vote. Vote in every election no matter how trivial.

Wrongo lives in a semi-rural town. When he overhears political talk, it can be staggering to learn what some otherwise smart people believe.

We don’t have to convert all of them, maybe getting 10% to land on the side of the actual data would create a permanent change in our politics.

Are Americans Fatigued By Politics?

The Daily Escape:

Early fall, Andover, ME – October 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo

A lethal combination for democracy in America may be that not only do we field very weak candidates who hardly know how government works, but Americans are also woefully ignorant about our government.

The Annenberg Public Policy Center released its annual Civics Knowledge Survey in September. It focuses on the public’s understanding of the US Constitution. Here are some of its 2022 findings:

Less than half (47%) of US adults could name all three branches of government (executive, legislative, judicial), down from 56% in 2021. Here’s a chart of their findings on the branches of government:

A quarter couldn’t name any branch!

When asked to name the protections specified in the First Amendment, the number of respondents who could identify them had declined:

Freedom of speech was cited by 63%, down from 74% in 2021.
Freedom of religion was named by 24%, down from 56% in 2021.
Freedom of the press was named by 20%, down from 50% in 2021.
Right of assembly was named by 16%, down from 30% in 2021.
Right to petition the government was named by 6%, down from 20% in 2021.

Note how dramatically these results have shifted in just one year.

Over half (51%) said (incorrectly) that Facebook is required to let all Americans express themselves freely on its platform under the First Amendment. The First Amendment applies to the government not to private companies.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center said:

“When it comes to civics, knowledge is power….It’s troubling that so few know what rights we’re guaranteed by the First Amendment. We are unlikely to cherish, protect, and exercise rights if we don’t know that we have them.”

The precipitous decline in the First Amendment responses has Wrongo questioning whether the survey was performed accurately.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Annenberg found that having taken a high school civics class continues to be associated with correct answers to civics knowledge questions. In 2022, nearly two-thirds (65%) of respondents with at least some high school education said they had taken a civics course in high school that focused on the Constitution or judicial system, about the same as in previous years. More than a third of those with at least some college education (36%) said they had taken a college course that focused on the US system of government and the Constitution, significantly fewer than in 2021.

Yet, according to the Center for American Progress, only nine states and the District of Columbia require one year of US government or civics, while 30 states require a half year and the other 11 states have no civics requirement. This may explain why Americans are so weak on how their government operates.

Can we link Annenberg’s results about poor civic knowledge with this Gallup poll showing that Americans’ views of the two major US political parties remain more negative than positive? It also shows that the Republican Party’s favorability is now better than the Democratic Party’s:

The GOP’s favorable rating has edged up by four percentage points to 44%, while the Democratic Party’s rating slipped by the same amount, to 39%. With our political gridlock, along with high inflation and economic uncertainty, it’s understandable that neither Party gets high marks. But why did the Republicans’ position improve over last year? Is it that Biden’s poor ratings are dragging the Democratic Party down?

In October, 2021, Biden’s approval numbers stood at 45%. Today, he’s at 42.1%. That means he’s dropped 3 percentage points while the Party has dropped 4%. It definitely looks like he’s a drag on the whole Party. Since Annenberg tells us that only 47% of us can name all three branches of government, maybe we can conclude that Americans are getting their negative opinions about the two Parties from cable news.

Does anything explain the results of these two polls? Blog reader David P. offered a different view of Wrongo’s column on “Democracy Fatigue” in a comment. He says:

“Democracy Fatigue may be a misnomer. “Politics Fatigue” is closer to what I see around me and struggle to fight off in myself. The amount of money, airtime, phone messages, snail mail, etc. seems disproportional to discernible progress. News about scandal, verbal embarrassments and tactical mishaps outweighs discussion of policy alternatives or actual policy achievements.”

Has America just become too numbed by the news media “flooding the zone” with scare headlines about crisis after crisis to care much about something real – like the threat Republicans pose to our democracy?

Maybe our democracy is in peril not just because of poor civics knowledge. It’s always been a joke how badly people do when asked about the workings of government.

Maybe it’s that we’ve just tuned out. If so, goodbye democracy.

Some Factors Affecting The Mid-Terms

The Daily Escape:

Before dawn, Kennebunkport, ME – June 2022 photo by Eric Storm Photo.

Even though the first public hearing about the Jan. 6 attempted coup happened last night, Wrongo doesn’t intend to write about them for a few days. The hot takes are all over the media, and it’s doubtful that we will know much about how the public is reacting for a few weeks. Once again Wrongo cautions that the media will cover this like a political contest when it isn’t. It really is about the health of our democracy.

And did you realize that only 21% of Americans over 18 read a newspaper every day? Cheryl Russell of Demo Memo has statistics from the General Social Survey showing how precipitously newspaper readership has fallen. She says that in 1972, 69% of the American public read a newspaper every day:

“Now, the share of adults who never read a newspaper (40%) is far greater than the share who read a newspaper daily. Fully 57% of the public reads a newspaper less than once a week…”

This also has implications for how broadly the findings of the Jan. 6 committee will be shared. As does the fact that FOX won’t be airing the hearings and plans to counter-program with GOP members of the House and Senate presenting real-time disinformation as the facts are aired.

Speaking of not knowing the facts, YouGov reports on an economic survey showing that seven out of 10 Republicans think we’re currently in a recession. More than half of all independents and 43% of Democrats also think the same. They sampled about 1,500 US adults online between May 28 – 31, 2022, with a margin of error of ± 3%. Here are the results:

How can we be in a recession when our unemployment rate is at 3.6%? When wages are up 5.6% over the past year, and consumers still are spending money like crazy?

People may believe we’re in a recession, but the US economy added 1.2 million jobs in the past three months. Yes, inflation is the highest it’s been in 40 years, but higher gas and food prices don’t mean we’re in the midst of an economic slowdown. Maybe the survey was poorly worded, or maybe, since people really never read in depth about what’s really going on in America, they never learn what’s really happening. This will be very damaging to the Democrats’ mid-term chances.

Next, you may have heard that there was a “political earthquake” in the California primaries, that Dems did poorly because of the “crime” issue, and that will hurt Democrats all across the nation.

A recalled San Francisco District Attorney didn’t cause an earthquake, and neither did a Republican-turned-Democrat’s advancing in the LA Mayor race. Former Republican and billionaire Rick Caruso spent $40 million on his mayoral primary! His opponent, Karen Bass, spent $3 million on her campaign. He won the primary by 3 points, although she is the likely winner in November.

What WAS an earthquake was the anemic voter turnout. Only about 19% of California’s registered voters actually voted.

There was no sign of an anti-Democratic wave in CA. Candidates from both parties that were expected to make the general election did so. Probably the weakest performances by incumbents were posted by Republicans David Valadao and Young Kim, who struggled to defeat challengers running to their right. In particular, Valadao, who voted to impeach Trump, appears to have advanced to the general election.

And in CA-41, moderate Democrat Will Rollins advanced to the November election against Republican incumbent Ken Calvert, who voted to overturn the 2020 election results. Rollins has a decent chance to win in November in what is a 50-50 district.

Finally, Larry Sabato reports on the redistricting landscape now that most state redistricting is complete:

The total number of competitive districts has declined from 84 to 75.
The number of super-safe Republican districts (those where Biden won 40% or less) increased from 112 to 131.
The number of super-safe Democratic seats, 127, while similar to the Republican total, is down slightly.
There are 211 seats where Biden received 49% of the vote or less, and 202 seats where he won 53% or more.

Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Republicans having 214 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Republican. That means that if they hold those seats, they are just four additional seats from controlling the House. They rate the Democrats as having 193 seats as safe, likely, or leaning Democratic.

That means if both Parties hold serve, there are just 28 seats in play in the 2022 mid-terms. For the Democrats to retain control of the House would require them to win 25 of those 28 seats.

If the Dems want to retain control of the House, what message should they be telling voters who: a) Don’t read newspapers; b) Think the economy is crashing; and c) Fail to turn out in Democratic and Independent-leaning Congressional Districts?

Jan. 6 Committee To Hold Public Hearings

The Daily Escape:

Sunset, Seal Rock, OR – May 2022 photo by Mitch Schreiber

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol will hold six public hearings starting on June 9 and running for two weeks. TPM reports that some sessions will be aired during prime time, and others during the day. The televised hearings aim to give us a more complete story of what happened the day of the Capitol riot and what led up to it. They should dominate the national conversation right up to November’s midterm elections.

Six hearings. The Senate Watergate committee held 51 public hearings, over six months. And they began hearings within a year of the June 1972 arrests for the Watergate burglary. The Senate created the committee in February of that year; the hearings began in May. President Nixon resigned on Aug. 8, 1974.

Are these hearings similar to Watergate? Margret Sullivan in the WaPo doesn’t think so:

“The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.”

She goes on to say that the Select Committee’s June hearings won’t be all that visible:

“I’m willing to believe that the hearings will be dramatic. They might even change some people’s minds. But the amount of public attention they get will be minuscule compared with what happened when the folksy Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) presided over the Senate Watergate Committee.”

Martin Longman compares today with Watergate: (brackets by Wrongo)

“…more than two years elapsed between the discovery of the [Watergate] break-in and Nixon’s fall from grace. It has now been almost a year and a half since the failed coup attempt of January 6, 2021. We’re a bit behind schedule because the televised Watergate hearings began a mere 11 months after the initial arrests were made.”

Another difference was that in 1972, people went to the polls less than five months after the Watergate burglary was discovered. And Nixon was reelected in a landslide over George McGovern. This time around, it’s 18 months after the Jan. 6 event, and we still haven’t had national elections.

When people went back to the polls in November 1974 after Nixon had been run out of office, the Democrats netted four US Senate seats and 49 seats in the House. This time around, before they vote, people should have a very clear idea of what led up to Jan. 6, as well as what happened on the fateful day.

We need to remember that Watergate showed us that evidence of criminality wasn’t enough to turn the public decisively against a presidential contender. The criminality must be proven and demonstrated in a high-profile way in order to overcome the more general political considerations of the electorate.

Nixon’s lies were eventually exposed and the Republicans paid a hefty price. But only after the public Watergate hearings.

This means that there’s a lot of pressure on the Jan. 6 Committee. And their job is harder because most Americans no longer watch television. It’s likely that a small percentage of voters will watch the hearings, while a substantially higher percentage will see the most explosive parts in viral clips on the internet.

Finally, our political environment has changed for the worse in the past 48 years. While most Republicans defended Nixon at the start of the Watergate investigations, they accepted the legitimacy of the investigatory committee, and ultimately, turned against Nixon when the facts were clear.

This time, Republicans are attacking the committee as illegitimate and partisan. That means the evidence won’t be broadly accepted in their Party. In 1974, there came a time when Republicans would no longer defend Nixon.

If the current Select Committee does its job well, accusations that it is partisan will not be meaningful either to Independents, or to 10%-20% of Republicans who see the Jan. 6 coup attempt for what it was.

The stakes are high: The crimes of Jan. 6 are more serious than the Watergate crimes. An effort to overturn an election is more serious than an effort to cheat during an election. And most importantly, Trump, unlike Nixon, could run for president again (Nixon had already been elected twice).

While the Committee will eventually publish a report laying out their findings, they should immediately recommend that the DOJ pursue criminal cases and provide the DOJ with all relevant evidence.

As with Watergate, indictments should be doing the talking about the Jan. 6 crimes. In January, AG Merrick Garland said that the department “remains committed to holding all Jan. 6 perpetrators, at any level, accountable under law.” Remember that the DOJ has a policy of not bringing indictments prior to an election, so time is of the essence for America’s phantom AG.

It’s critical to act now. The American people need a clear picture of what happened and who is responsible.

That will give us a stark choice in the mid-term elections.

Saturday Soother – April 23, 2022

The Daily Escape:

North Landing River, near Virginia Beach, VA – April 2022 photo by Erik Moore

Our media ecosystem is overwhelming us. Some of the information is accurate, some is bogus, and much is intentionally misleading. And that’s a deliberate strategy. While it didn’t originate with Steve Bannon, he perfected it with his thought that:

“…the Democrats don’t matter….The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

This is why the ongoing cultural war works so well for Republicans. There’s always some petty war going on between the Parties that’s stoked by the media. And it’s almost always about cultural issues since Republicans really don’t have a policy platform, and don’t want to go against large corporate America. When you go against corporations, you lose the money needed to get elected.

But we should see the big corporations as our common enemy. Time Magazine has an article about how overtime pay has disappeared:

“If it feels like you’re working longer hours for less money than your parents or grandparents did, it’s because you probably are. Adjusted for inflation, average hourly wages have actually fallen since the early 1970s, while average hours worked have steadily climbed. American workers are increasingly underpaid, overworked, and overwhelmed.”

One reason is the loss of overtime pay:

“If you’re under the age of 45, you may have no idea that overtime pay is even a thing. But…middle-class workers used to get a lot of it….That means that [for] every hour you work over 40 hours a week you work for free, contributing…a giant pool of free labor that modern employers have come to expect and exploit. Profits are up, real wages are down, and income inequality has soared to its highest level since the Gilded Age.”

Overtime pay was one of the great New Deal reforms. It was a core provision of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA set the minimum wage at one-half the median wage and the overtime threshold at three times the minimum—an amount equal to 1.5 times the median wage.

But both the minimum wage and the overtime rules began to change in 1975, and rising income inequality since 1975 is responsible for a $50 trillion upward redistribution of wealth and income from the bottom 90% households to those in the top 1%. Here’s a chart showing the impact of losing overtime. Productivity goes up, but is completely decoupled from income:

Source: chartr

The Economic Policy Institute has a tool called “Company Wage Tracker” that allows you to select any big corporation and see what percentage of their employees make below a certain wage. For example, it shows that 51% of Walmart employees earn below $15/hr.

The NYT wrote about Mary Gundel, a manager at a Dollar General store in Tampa, FL who was fired for speaking out about the chain’s policies regarding overtime and short-staffing:

“The store used to have about 198 hours a week to allocate to a staff of about seven people….But by the end of last month, she had only about 130 hours to allocate….With not as many hours to give to her staff, Ms. Gundel often had to operate the store on her own for long stretches, typically working six days and up to 60 hours a week with no overtime pay.”

Ms. Gundel was working 60 hours a week and making $51,000 a year. That means she’s making only a little more than the minimum wage. Dollar General is one of the most profitable retail chains in the country.

Prices are going up everywhere across America, and corporations are making proportionately more income. This is what the Democrats should be focusing on, standing up for workers, doing what is right as opposed to groping for answers to the Republican’s culture war issues.

There’s plenty that’s wrong in America. But what’s wrong doesn’t see the light of day alongside all of the pissing contests about Critical Race Theory, or predator grooming or LGBTQ issues. These are ginned-up to make sure you won’t pay attention to what’s really going on.

Something seems to be brewing. We’re seeing halting attempts at unionization at Starbucks and Amazon. Those employees want a better life; they want to have a seat at the table about the future of the company.

We need to remember that without the “essential workers” the country grinds to a halt. We need to support those who try to organize. We need to wrest some economic power away from politicians and big businesses. And finally, some faceless people who are sick of being wronged are trying to do just that.

Enough for another week. It’s time to let go of the news. It’s time for our Saturday Soother. On the Fields of Wrong we’re preparing our vegetable garden, although it will be a few weeks before it’s warm enough for the plants to survive. We had an overnight temperature of 32° earlier this week.

Now, grab a seat by a large window and listen to violin soloist Soojin Han play Chopin’s “Nocturne No.20 in C# minor” in August 2019. She’s playing on a 1666 Stradivarius:

It sounds beautiful.

Chopin composed the piece in 1830, but it was published in 1875, 26 years after his death. It was featured in the movie “The Pianist” in 2002.

Should the Mainstream Media Stay Neutral?

The Daily Escape:

Sunrise with sea smoke, Curtis Island Lighthouse, Camden ME – January 2022 photo by Daniel F Dishner. Sea smoke forms on Penobscot Bay when the air temperature is colder than the water temperature.

On Tuesday, Wrongo took aim at the New York Times for it’s confusing editorial that misstated how to use an economic tool, and then went on to use that tool incorrectly.

The media, including the NYT, have become a source of both misinformation and disinformation. We really have two media, the mainstream one and the right-wing one. Although most of the disinformation is centered in the right-wing media, it’s becoming less clear to Wrongo that, at present, the mainstream media can (or will) help to defend our democracy.

If you doubt that, look at the November Marist College poll which found, by 42% to 41%, that American adults see the Democratic Party as a greater threat to democracy than the GOP.

The broader results were that 81% of Americans believed there is a “serious threat” to our democracy, including 89% of Republicans, 80% of independents, and 79% of Democrats. That was the poll’s headline. But buried in the cross-tabs was the answer to which Party presents the bigger threat – the 42% to 41% split.

This is mostly the result of our media that defaults to sensationalism rather than trying to explain complex issues. One group slavishly supports a GOP that is full of cranks, bigots, conspiracy theorists, and careerist politicians with flamethrowers. They’re also the media that say things like “intolerance of racism is worse than racism”.

The other side makes a pretense of non-partisanship while echoing many right-wing talking points.

We’ve learned over the past few years that the right-wing media has more control over setting the national agenda than the mainstream press does. The idea that the Party that’s trying to protect and expand voting rights is wrecking democracy isn’t just a misconception—it’s the result of an orchestrated assault on reality. And nearly half of Americans believe it.

In early December, Dana Milbank wrote in the WaPo about how the media has treated Biden as badly as – or worse than – Trump. Milbank had a data analytics company examine more than 200,000 mainstream news articles about both the Trump and Biden presidencies. Milbank wrote that: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“During 2020, when the Trump administration’s response to and dishonesty about the pandemic led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, when he refused to denounce white supremacists at a debate and launched serial assaults on democracy, he got slightly more favorable coverage in the mainstream media than Biden has received since August.”

Remember that Milbank’s review covered articles and mentions in the mainstream press. Milbank concludes by saying:

“We need a skeptical, independent press. But how about being partisans for democracy? The country is in an existential struggle between self-governance and an authoritarian alternative. And we in the news media, collectively, have given equal, if not slightly more favorable, treatment to the authoritarians.”

Does the mainstream media have the power to try to counter this? The big question is how will the mainstream press cover the 2022 mid-terms and 2024 presidential campaign?

People want to be light and breezy, but Wrongo‘s brand is accuracy. Things have been really bleak for many years. And Wrongo has become short-tempered with those in the media who continue to deny just how deep the hole has become.

After the 2020 election, America had a chance to recover from the anti-establishment efforts of Trump’s administration. It was clear that Biden wouldn’t be able to do all that much, because of the slender Democratic majorities in both Houses.

It was a gamble for Biden and the Democrats to wrap every promise into one big bill that would set us on a course for changing the “economic paradigm”. In the end, that was a failure. Governing isn’t simple, especially with such narrow majorities.

And that’s where Democrats are now, paying a heavy price for overpromising and Biden’s naive expectations that he would work magic with Republicans getting some of them to vote for his agenda.

Biden and the Dems could still rebound. Passing a smaller, more focused version of Build Back Better, along with an easing of inflation, and a return to something like normal on the virus front could bring a fall comeback wave.

But it will also take a mainstream media that understands and accepts its role with a resolve at least equal to that of the right-wing media.

Let’s close with a palate cleanser. Biden has an uphill fight. He should take inspiration from The Temptations doing “I’m Gonna Make You Love Me” live on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1969. Eddie Kendricks’ falsetto was the best:

The Sullivan Show aired on CBS from 1948-1971. For 23 years it aired a wide variety of popular culture.

The Wrongologist

Geopolitics, Power and Political Economy

Category: Media Fragmentation

Two Writers Who Speak To What America Needs

Some Factors Affecting The Mid-Terms

Jan. 6 Committee To Hold Public Hearings

Should the Mainstream Media Stay Neutral?