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.

Will we vote for corporate capitalism or the common good?

As a business communicator, I admire a good marketing plan. For example, when Nike’s “Just Do It” campaign developed their ad targeting women, I was impressed. “I believe there’s an athlete in everyone,” one woman says in the signature ad. It helped move me off the couch to start jogging; I still buy Nike shoes. And it’s helped Nike weather troubles with athlete endorsements and factory conditions in Asia.

Since I’ve written a few marketing plans myself throughout the years, I’ve learned to spot them in action. And I’d been saying, “There has to be a marketing plan for conservative political interests somewhere,” when I stumbled across an article in August 2011, acknowledging the 40th anniversary of something called the Powell Memorandum. (Read the document here: http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/en/campaigns/global-warming-and-energy/polluterwatch/The-Lewis-Powell-Memo/) This memorandum, penned by former Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, is the blueprint for American political history during the last 40 years.

Written in 1971 when Powell was working as an attorney and sitting on the board of 11 corporations, it outlines for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce an extensive list of tactics to protect the interests of America’s largest corporate citizens. Paranoid about liberal activism in the 60s, Powell believed corporate America should exercise much more political influence. His tactics include shaping the political environment within higher and secondary education via: staff appointments, speakers, textbooks and curriculum, especially in graduate schools of business.

With regard to the wider public, Powell suggested developing think tanks to craft research and messages designed to favor big business. To disseminate them, television, radio, print publications, books, journals and paid advertisements should all be used. Consequently, today most major media is owned by corporate conglomerates.

Finally, Powell suggested corporate powers turn their efforts to the political and judicial arenas. The key to this strategy was money – to both parties, with efforts targeted to wean Democrats from union influence. Yet over time, more dollars began to flow to conservative political challengers.

In a web article about the Powell Memorandum, Bill Moyers and Company posted an excerpt from Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson’s book Winner-Take-All Politics: (http://billmoyers.com/content/the-powell-memo-a-call-to-arms-for-corporations/2/) “By the end of the 1978 campaign, more than 60 percent of corporate contributions had gone to Republicans, both GOP challengers and Republican incumbents fighting off liberal Democrats. A new era of campaign finance was born: Not only were corporate contributions growing ever bigger, Democrats had to work harder for them. More and more, to receive business largesse, they had to do more than hold power; they had to wield it in ways that business liked.”

The height of this plan’s success was the current Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, unleashing loads of corporate cash into the current election.

Great American businessmen have long understood that a business cannot survive without customers. Henry Ford made sure to pay his employees a wage large enough to allow them to buy the cars they helped make.

But unfortunately, current corporate leaders (And I’m talking about large international companies, not small Main Street businesses.) have lost sight of their place in the American community, squeezing larger profits via staff cuts, government subsidies, tax breaks and public contracts without giving back via taxes and living wages to employees. Their leaders do not acknowledge responsibility for the common good.

As Hacker and Pierson’s book points out, this corporate agenda provides money to both political parties. Yet the majority now flows to Republican politicians, represented at the top by Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

So no matter what you may feel about President Barack Obama, if you’re part of the 99 percent, following the money means you have a better shot with the incumbent. That’s your choice – corporate capitalists or the common good.