Breaking the Invisible Frame
Breaking the Invisible Frame
An invisible frame restricts the content of public discourse in America. It serves to quarantine ideas, policies and solutions political and financial elites find discomfiting. It prevents these ideas from gaining traction in the public mind and to that end is rigorously (and invisibly) maintained across television news, print and other corporate media outlets. Its dictates are so ubiquitous and universal that they have generally been absorbed as the only acceptable frame of public discussion, with the consequence that no problem currently stressing our Nation—healthcare, political corruption, bank regulations, environmental protection, our election system (including voting technology), upgrading of Government computers, improving public education, infra-structure repair— can be examined outside the restrictive area described by this fence. This insures that any possible solution which contradicts the elite’s acceptable political premises are suppressed, ridiculed, or ignored.
What is the Frame?
The frame is a set of ideas, philosophies, and ideologies composed of the following accepted wisdom:
Free Markets
The assertion that no Government policy or social concerns be allowed to interfere in the untrammeled freedom of markets. Despite clear evidence that markets completely free of government intervention are a) a fiction and b) are largely responsible for the growing divide between our 1% wealthiest citizens and the rest of our populations, and c)are fostering distrust of institutions, ubiquitous rage and discontent, they continue to be offered, as a panacea to all economic woes.
Every developed European country considers as a matter of course that the economic policy bears directly on the well-being of its citizens and affords governments some controls to insure positive social outcomes. Indeed, while our elected officials promise economic bounty, since they do not control economic policy, but work for those who do—business leaders making their own independent decisions as to what is best for themselves and their shareholders—the people are afforded no voice in economic decisions. As legislators increasingly depend on corporate/Wall Street largess for their election our citizens are proportionally disenfranchised and have become minority shareholders in a privatized election system living in the tattered results of that demotion.
Small Government
Constant reiteration and implications of the phrase “Government is the Problem” enhanced by the election of legislators hostile to its authority—which for most of citizens is nothing less than the power to protect ourselves from the deleterious effects of unfettered capitalism—pollution, unsafe products, environmental despoliation, and corporate reticence to make investments necessary to public health and well-being.
In his new book, The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis points out that President Trump’s actual agenda is an extension of this philosophy designed to destroy government by either not appointing qualified people to senior posts, or worse, appointing seriously unqualified ones. A single example:
By October of 2018, Trump had failed to put forward nominees for 139 top government positions. The Department of Agriculture currently has no Undersecretary for Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services, a Department with a $122 billion-dollar budget in 2015. The Undersecretary oversees fifteen federal nutrition assistance programs including school meals and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, and is especially charged with creating policies to combat hunger in America. Add to this neglect the President’s convention of appointing agency heads publicly antagonistic to the mandate of the agency they are appointed to run—Wilbur Ross, Betsy DeVos, Scott Pruitt, Ben Carson and Rick Perry to name just a few.
Low Taxes
The constant refrain that low taxes generates wealth remains a truism certified by corporate media and the political class. It does—for them, by reducing their fair share of the costs of running our Nation. However, as the nation grows those costs escalate while the richest citizens hide money offshore (current calculations for the US alone is 1 trillion dollars) or take advantage of tax deductions created for them by their millionaire brothers and sisters in Congress.
During my childhood in the 40s and 50s, when America was unquestionably the richest nation on Earth, building its railroads, ports, highways, airports and infrastructure, tax rate on top earners was 70% Today it is around 35%, so low, that even an investor of the stature of Warren Buffet must acknowledge that he pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. In the meantime, sales taxes, fees, fines and permit costs shift the burden of these increasing costs to the poor and middle class, exacerbating the divide and intensifying their feeling that they are losing ground.
Private vs. Public Solutions
Denying the ability of government to solve problems is an extension of this kill-government philosophy. It extends even to prohibiting discussion of economic policies our Socialist allies have developed to solve problems we are unable to dent. This is not to argue that the United States abandon capitalism, but if we are to tend adequately to our citizens and defuse the growing nationalistic and raw populism, we will have to smooth its roughest edges.
Our reflexive devaluing of government’s value prevents us from utilizing it to create systemic changes in tax-policy, public works, and health and education outcomes, labor-law, unions, and product safety, because discussion always to private sector solutions.
Only government could invest in rebuilding national wealth. For example, employing loggers and mill-workers to plant 100 million trees on public lands to combat global warming; to repair salmon habitat to restore the gigantic salmon runs of the past; to uproot invader species and replant native prairies. All such activities would be investments for future generations similar to the endowment our parents and grandparents bequeathed us in the trains, planes, highway systems, subways and ports, which we are abandoning to ruin like unloved bicycles.
If there is no profit to be made the private sector will not invest. When We the People are the profit, it will have to be our government, operating in our name to fund such endeavors.
A FEW CRITICAL TASKS
- A democracy cannot survive without facts.
Consequently, legislators should be proposed changing the funding of PBS and NPR to be financed by a nominal tax on the sale of TV’s and Radios (as is done in Britain) insuring that their funding can never be punitively restricted by Congress.
- The public needs to reclaim its ownership of the airwaves.
News divisions of media corporations should once again be non-profit divisions of media empires as they were up through a good part of the 1960s, when Bill Paley, President of CBS informed his news reporters, “Don’t worry about money. I have Jack Benny to make money.” At that time the news was a universally respected institution and men like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow, Huntley and Brinkley told the public what it needed to know and the public trusted and relied on the national news.
Since the financial success of 60 Minutes, all TV news has been required to generate corporate profits and in doing so has remade itself as infotainment, cheerful “he-said” “she-said” focusing on scandal, feel-good stories, inch deep analysis, and endless opinions, while affairs outside our borders are virtually ignored. These are our airways and we, the public, once was empowered to intervene at licensing hearings to make demands of Broadcasters. President Clinton effectively ended that practice and look where we are today.
- We need to revise our privatized Election system.
The public is a minority shareholder in our democracy, the entire logic of which is built around money. If We the People funded our elections, giving each candidate a set amount (as it is done across Europe and Scandinavia) it would follow that it should be unnecessary and therefore illegal to allow lobbyists to give legislators money. If it is necessary to increase legislator’s salaries to compete with the private sector, we should. We could also offer bonuses for meeting metrics beneficent to the nation: universal healthcare, diminished high-school dropouts, raising America’s educational standing vis a vis Europe and Asia, creating timely budgets. We should claw those bonuses back when they fail to perform.
When today’s idealistic crop of young candidates from #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and the Parkland shootings attain public office (and they will) they will discover that Goldman-Sachs is running their briefings and learn that they are obligated to raise $40,000 a day. They will be forced to accept money from people with whom they have substantial disagreements and that money will come with fetters forcing them to determine whether to compromise to remain in office and do some good or leave. We are throwing healthy goldfish into polluted water.
Long-term problems that cannot be served by short-term candidates.
We should increase the terms of House members to 4 or 5 years. It is impossible to concentrate on the public business when you are fund-raising 6 hours a day and running for office every 18 months.
- We need to remove impediments preventing people who aren’t millionaires, on the take, or brilliant fund-raisers from running for office.
Perhaps 500 names on a petition and $1500 fee would open candidacy to many more people and ideas. Of course, there would be wing-nuts, but primaries would shake them down.
- We need national standards and equipment for any election to National Office.
Voter suppression and vote-rigging is today’s open secret. State’s Rights must not be allowed to camouflage anti-democratic behavior. Election machine software is privileged by private ownership so that the public has no idea if it has been tampered with or not. Public software exists which would reveal tampering instantaneously. All ballots for National office should be uniform in every state; ditto for all voting machines. The South should be put back under Federal election supervision, since the day the restraints were lifted by the Supreme Court, they returned to egregious practices to suppress the African American and Latino vote.
Let the discussion begin.
ps- a reader just sent me this bill proposed by Elizabeth Warren that would address a number of these problems directly.
www.warren.senate.gov/...