Miner Queries: Why do I bother?

4:26 a.m. Sigh. I blame my daughter, Charli. That long conversation we had last night about the upcoming election switched my brain on early.

While discussing the Iowa caucuses and her generation and her millennial brother’s cohort, she mentioned my Facebook feed. I mostly post highlights of my daily news reading to share as an alternative to the broadcast media poured in our ears. I know too many non-readers and folks that avoid politics. They remain willfully uninformed, and as my daughter pointed out, that hurts us all. She clearly understands the price she and her peers are going to pay for the civic laziness of her elders.

Flashback to 1980 and an election I know I am going to miss by 4 months. My father, from whom I inherited my news and political junkie-ism, was reading candidate policy proposals. He informed me, then a senior in high school, I’d be looking at less college financial aid under a Reagan administration.

Meanwhile, everywhere I turned in rural Iowa, people were besotted by Ronald Reagan. I can’t tell you what policies they liked. I don’t remember them ever talking policy. Instead I got the usual claptrap about his storytelling and likeability.

Even at 17, I understood it was an act. But then Reagan was an actor. It should have been obvious, but when it comes to voting I have learned the hard way, people don’t think. They react.

Which explains our current predicament.

Of course, my 12 years working in marketing communication and public relations at a medium sized insurance company also made me painfully aware of how our news and information is carefully crafted to work against us. My first day in the department, the boss who hired me pointed to a shelf with resource books, including one titled, “Words that Sell.”

We the people have been sold a bunch of messages designed to help narrow monied interests. We’ve been sold a bunch of entertainment to keep us voting stupid.

And I’ve spent the last two months watching hearings full of Republican congress critters (to use Jim Hightower’s term) that apparently also believe the lies they’ve been sold about Democrats and liberals. They seem to be totally ignorant of history, the Constitution and for those espousing Christianity, the Bible.

Small wonder though. We’ve had a cable news apparatus in place for 30-plus years now, not to mention Uncle Milton Friedman’s market fundamentalist version of capitalism for even longer. It can be boiled down to this simple description:  greed is good. But it’s been sold under the holy label of Capitalism.

And who’s sold it to you? Why those monied 1%ers who want it all – everything.

And how have they sold it to you?

By buying up every media source (including textbook publishers) they can get their grubby hands on and pouring “Conservative” news in your ears. By pouring political contributions into the political parties, but mostly to Republicans. By contributing funds to universities to fund new professorships, particularly in economics and business. By creating Conservative and Libertarian think tanks to develop research that supports their narrow ideology and suppressing any results that don’t fit said ideology. By creating lobbying groups to develop corporate-friendly model bills for state and federal officials to pass. By weakening public education to create a less informed electorate. By aligning with socially conservative religious leaders to convince voters to cast ballots against their own economic interests.

By co-opting labels like conservative, liberal, Republican and Democrat, left and right and by shaping news media to report spectacle over substance, they have sold voters lies.

I am sure many of my “conservative” friends think I am just a deluded “liberal,” or as I have been called: a libtard, creepy liberal or little girl. They prefer to stick with their adopted labels rather than consider that I care because we are getting walloped by the same economic forces. And I care that they have been missing from the civic conversation.

What I love about America can’t be expressed by waving a flag, thanking a soldier or wearing a damn pin. It can only be expressed by participating.

We live in a democratic republic, which means we must participate to preserve our rights.

Not just by voting. We must stay informed, communicate with officials, including protesting if necessary, pay our taxes and serve as jurists. It’s work. But I see a populace that has been ground down the point they have either given up or they believe a pack of lies.

I’m not asking you to believe everything I do. I’m not telling you how to vote. I simply want you to open your eyes and ears to new and more information. I want you to consider alternative viewpoints. I want you to engage your brains and think critically.

And for God’s sake, turn off the talk radio and cable news and read something.

Miner Queries: What’s the vision for Iowa?

In 2001, I moved back to Iowa with my family. I am on the brink of my second child graduating from Iowa schools, but I’m not encouraging her to stay in this state – because Iowa has no economic vision. Her brother ended up in Minnesota, whose economy is more stable.

Since I was a kid, I have watched this state lose ground. And state leaders have done little to stem the bleeding.

Instead, I’ve watched leadership, particularly under Republican administrations, cut funding for vital services and defund government under the guise that lowering taxes stimulates growth. That’s a marketing message with no evidence to back it up. Lining historic U.S. tax cuts up with periods of growth quickly debunks it. More recent state level experiments with it in Kansas also clearly demonstrate its debilitating effects.

I’ve also watched legislation written in recent years focus on outside entities and their interests, rather than constituents in Iowa. Iowa’s Stand Your Ground law is an example.

As is education and its funding. In 1992, Governor Branstad politicized school funding by doing away with the funding formula, which was one of the premier school funding models in the U.S. By eliminating it, Branstad and his Republican colleagues were able to consistently defund our schools and erode our public education system.  This is death by a thousand cuts. Meanwhile, the state has increased funding for private schools, home schooling and online schools. If an educational program is private, it should NOT receive public funding. Parents choose private schools; they should pay. Period.

But decreased school funding doesn’t just affect schools. Iowa communities fighting for life have constricted further as schools, often the largest employer, close. Meanwhile, state government has not invested in building Iowa-based businesses and infrastructure to sustain and attract residents. Instead, we’ve courted outside corporations to bring in jobs – most of which haven’t materialized.

These decisions are always disguised as balancing the budget and being fiscally responsible. But it’s more marketing messaging. Take it from this former marketing and PR professional. As the state has cut, cut, cut, local taxing authorities have hit property owners harder. So our state officials may say, “We cut taxes,” but really all they’ve done is shift the burden. Eventually people catch on.

If we want to rebuild Iowa, we must invest in our people – starting with education. We also must take care of our people with health care (This includes mental and women’s health care. As a woman who experienced recurrent miscarriages and had multiple D&Cs, I know abortion needs to be part of that.), and we need to provide support for economic development with financing and infrastructure.

So does our one-party state government even have a vision for Iowa? Or is it simply out to protect the interests of that party and its primary funders? Do representatives vote with the caucus and accept the party’s talking points, or are they really dreaming big for Iowa?

Iowans don’t have to be fighting for crumbs. We can build a better state if we have a vision and political will. But we must stop being led around by unproven political and economic ideologies and engage in some critical thinking. We must get over party loyalty and be willing to stand up and question leadership, especially our governor and state legislators.

Miner Queries: Who you gonna believe?

This last Friday’s weather forecast offers a cautionary tale. For the entire week, we’d been warned about the blizzard approaching. Yet all week long, the various forecasting models had diverged widely.

Come Friday morning as the storm moved closer, school superintendents, among others, were faced with the decision to open as normal or to close. In our household, my husband’s school district opted to close for the day. Meanwhile, our daughter had gone to her school two hours early to practice for her district speech competition. Her school opted to stay open.

At home, I monitored weather all day, periodically checking various stations and web sites. And as the day wore on, it became clear that our location in Southwest Iowa was going to have very little precipitation. My daughter’s school got in a full day.

Monitoring our government is a lot like monitoring the weather. If you’re not checking multiple sources constantly, you probably don’t have the best overview of what’s happening.

I was surprised to see Paul Krugman describe this situation in politics in his Thursday New York Times column: “Why can’t Republicans govern? It’s not just that their party is committed to an ideology that says that government is always the problem, never the solution. Beyond that, they have systematically deprived themselves of the ability to analyze policies and learn from evidence, because hard thinking might lead someone to question received doctrine.”

That in a nutshell is America’s and, closer to home, Iowa’s problem.

If you rely on one or two news sources, you have no idea what’s really happening. The only way to get adequate information to cast informed votes, or even develop opinions about current events, is to monitor multiple media sources. This includes reading long running news sources like the New York Times or the Washington Post.

That’s not to say such sources don’t occasionally get it wrong. On the same day Krugman’s article appeared, Eric Boehlert, a veteran progressive writer and media analyst, formerly with Media Matters and Salon Magazine, posted an editorial on Daily Kos titled, “The New York Times is overdue for a Russia reckoning. What went wrong in 2016?”

In this post, Boehlert outlines the fate of former Times public-editor Liz Spayd. In that role, Spayd acted as an internal watchdog, monitoring news coverage, answering reader questions and addressing their concerns. But in May 2017, Spayd’s position was eliminated, forcing her out of a job. Why?

According to Boehlert, in late 2016 and early 2017, Spayd had been criticizing the Times’ minimal coverage of the emerging Russian story. Boehlert writes, “She claimed readers had been ‘shortchanged’ on the Russia hacking story, while the Times newsroom seemed completely ‘turbocharged’ in covering Hillary Clinton's emails during the same election cycle.”

As we have learned since, Spayd correctly accessed the situation; however, no one at the Times has acknowledged their role in misinforming the public regarding both stories.

If I’d been relying solely on the New York Times for information, I might have missed the information about our president’s Russian connections, too. But I choose to read from a variety of sources as well as monitor public radio and multiple television news broadcasts. I compare these various sources daily to parse the truth.

No single source will ever give me that. I must seek it. No one source is going to pour truth in my ears.

So, who you gonna believe?