But buried in Priest's article is her revelation that American citizens are now being placed on a secret "hit list" of people whom the President has personally authorized to be killed:
Indeed, Aulaqi was clearly one of the prime targets of the late-December missile strikes in Yemen, as anonymous officials excitedly announced -- falsely, as it turns out -- that he was killed in one of those strikes. Just think about this for a minute. Barack Obama, like George Bush before him, has claimed the authority to order American citizens murdered based solely on the unverified, uncharged, unchecked claim that they are associated with Terrorism and pose "a continuing and imminent threat to U.S. persons and interests." They're entitled to no charges, no trial, no ability to contest the accusations. Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy? Obviously, if U.S. forces are fighting on an actual battlefield, then they (like everyone else) have the right to kill combatants actively fighting against them, including American citizens. That's just the essence of war. That's why it's permissible to kill a combatant engaged on a real battlefield in a war zone but not, say, torture them once they're captured and helplessly detained. But combat is not what we're talking about here. The people on this "hit list" are likely to be killed while at home, sleeping in their bed, driving in a car with friends or family, or engaged in a whole array of other activities. More critically still, the Obama administration -- like the Bush administration before it -- defines the "battlefield" as the entire world. So the President claims the power to order U.S. citizens killed anywhere in the world, while engaged even in the most benign activities carried out far away from any actual battlefield, based solely on his say-so and with no judicial oversight or other checks. That's quite a power for an American President to claim for himself. As we well know from the last eight years, the authoritarians among us in both parties will, by definition, reflexively justify this conduct by insisting that the assassination targets are Terrorists and therefore deserve death. What they actually mean, however, is that the U.S. Government has accused them of being Terrorists, which (except in the mind of an authoritarian) is not the same thing as being a Terrorist. Numerous Guantanamo detainees accused by the U.S. Government of being Terrorists have turned out to be completely innocent, and the vast majority of federal judges who provided habeas review to detainees have found an almost complete lack of evidence to justify the accusations against them, and thus ordered them released. That includes scores of detainees held while the U.S. Government insisted that only the "Worst of the Worst" remained at the camp. No evidence should be required for rational people to avoid assuming that Government accusations are inherently true, but for those do need it, there is a mountain of evidence proving that. And in this case, Anwar Aulaqi -- who, despite his name and religion, is every bit as much of an American citizen as Scott Brown and his daughters are -- has a family who vigorously denies that he is a Terrorist and is "pleading" with the U.S. Government not to murder their American son:
Who knows what the truth is here? That's why we have what are called "trials" -- or at least some process -- before we assume that government accusations are true and then mete out punishment accordingly. As Marcy Wheeler notes, the U.S. Government has not only repeatedly made false accusations of Terrorism against foreign nationals in the past, but against U.S. citizens as well. She observes: "I guess the tenuousness of those ties don't really matter, when the President can dial up the assassination of an American citizen." A 1981 Executive Order signed by Ronald Reagan provides: "No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination." Before the Geneva Conventions were first enacted, Abraham Lincoln -- in the middle of the Civil War -- directed Francis Lieber to articulate rules of conduct for war, and those were then incorporated into General Order 100, signed by Lincoln in April, 1863. Here is part of what it provided, in Section IX, entitled "Assassinations":
Can anyone remotely reconcile that righteous proclamation what the Obama administraiton is doing? And more generally, what legal basis exists for the President to unilaterally compile hit lists of American citizens he wants to be killed? What's most striking of all is that it was recently revealed that, in Afghanistan, the U.S. had compiled a "hit list" of Afghan citizens it suspects of being drug traffickers or somehow associated with the Taliban, in order to target them for assassination. When that hit list was revealed, Afghan officials "fiercely" objected on the ground that it violates due process and undermines the rule of law to murder people without trials:
So we're in Afghanistan to teach them about democracy, the rule of law, and basic precepts of Western justice. Meanwhile, Afghan officials vehemently object to the lawless, due-process-free assassination "hit list" of their citizens based on the unchecked say-so of the U.S. Government, and have to lecture us on the rule of law and Constitutional constraints. By stark contrast, our own Government, our media and our citizenry appear to find nothing wrong whatsoever with lawless assassinations aimed at our own citizens. And the most glaring question for those who critized Bush/Cheney detention policies but want to defend this: how could anyone possibly object to imprisoning foreign nationals without charges or due process at Guantanamo while approving of the assassination of U.S. citizens without any charges or due process? Glenn Greenwald: I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown. |
Cass Sunstein has long been one of Barack Obama's closest confidants. Often mentioned as a likely Obama nominee to the Supreme Court, Sunstein is currently Obama's head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs where, among other things, he is responsible for "overseeing policies relating to privacy, information quality, and statistical programs." In 2008, while at Harvard Law School, Sunstein co-wrote a truly pernicious paper proposing that the U.S. Government employ teams of covert agents and pseudo-"independent" advocates to "cognitively infiltrate" online groups and websites -- as well as other activist groups -- which advocate views that Sunstein deems "false conspiracy theories" about the government. This would be designed to increase citizens' faith in government officials and undermine the credibility of conspiracists. The paper's abstract can be read, and the full paper downloaded, here.
Sunstein advocates that the Government's stealth infiltration should be accomplished by sending covert agents into "chat rooms, online social networks, or even real-space groups." He also proposes that the Government make secret payments to so-called "independent" credible voices to bolster the Government's messaging (on the ground that those who don't believe government sources will be more inclined to listen to those who appear independent while secretly acting on behalf of the Government). This program would target those advocating false "conspiracy theories," which they define to mean: "an attempt to explain an event or practice by reference to the machinations of powerful people, who have also managed to conceal their role." Sunstein's 2008 paper was flagged by this blogger, and then amplified in an excellent report by Raw Story's Daniel Tencer.
There's no evidence that the Obama administration has actually implemented a program exactly of the type advocated by Sunstein, though in light of this paper and the fact that Sunstein's position would include exactly such policies, that question certainly ought to be asked. Regardless, Sunstein's closeness to the President, as well as the highly influential position he occupies, merits an examination of the mentality behind what he wrote. This isn't an instance where some government official wrote a bizarre paper in college 30 years ago about matters unrelated to his official powers; this was written 18 months ago, at a time when the ascendancy of Sunstein's close friend to the Presidency looked likely, in exactly the area he now oversees. Additionally, the government-controlled messaging that Sunstein desires has been a prominent feature of U.S. Government actions over the last decade, including in some recently revealed practices of the current administration, and the mindset in which it is grounded explains a great deal about our political class. All of that makes Sunstein's paper worth examining in greater detail.
* * * * *
Initially, note how similar Sunstein's proposal is to multiple, controversial stealth efforts by the Bush administration to secretly influence and shape our political debates. The Bush Pentagon employed teams of former Generals to pose as "independent analysts" in the media while secretly coordinating their talking points and messaging about wars and detention policies with the Pentagon. Bush officials secretly paid supposedly "independent" voices, such as Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher, to advocate pro-Bush policies while failing to disclose their contracts. In Iraq, the Bush Pentagon hired a company, Lincoln Park, which paid newspapers to plant pro-U.S. articles while pretending it came from Iraqi citizens. In response to all of this, Democrats typically accused the Bush administration of engaging in government-sponsored propaganda -- and when it was done domestically, suggested this was illegal propaganda. Indeed, there is a very strong case to make that what Sunstein is advocating is itself illegal under long-standing statutes prohibiting government "propaganda" within the U.S., aimed at American citizens:
As explained in a March 21, 2005 report by the Congressional Research Service, "publicity or propaganda" is defined by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) to mean either (1) self-aggrandizement by public officials, (2) purely partisan activity, or (3) "covert propaganda." By covert propaganda, GAO means information which originates from the government but is unattributed and made to appear as though it came from a third party.
Covert government propaganda is exactly what Sunstein craves. His mentality is indistinguishable from the Bush mindset that led to these abuses, and he hardly tries to claim otherwise. Indeed, he favorably cites both the covert Lincoln Park program as well as Paul Bremer's closing of Iraqi newspapers which published stories the U.S. Government disliked, and justifies them as arguably necessary to combat "false conspiracy theories" in Iraq -- the same goal Sunstein has for the U.S.
Sunstein's response to these criticisms is easy to find in what he writes, and is as telling as the proposal itself. He acknowledges that some "conspiracy theories" previously dismissed as insane and fringe have turned out to be entirely true (his examples: the CIA really did secretly administer LSD in "mind control" experiments; the DOD really did plot the commission of terrorist acts inside the U.S. with the intent to blame Castro; the Nixon White House really did bug the DNC headquarters). Given that history, how could it possibly be justified for the U.S. Government to institute covert programs designed to undermine anti-government "conspiracy theories," discredit government critics, and increase faith and trust in government pronouncements? Because, says Sunstein, such powers are warranted only when wielded by truly well-intentioned government officials who want to spread The Truth and Do Good -- i.e., when used by people like Cass Sunstein and Barack Obama:
Throughout, we assume a well-motivated government that aims to eliminate conspiracy theories, or draw their poison, if and only if social welfare is improved by doing so.
But it's precisely because the Government is so often not "well-motivated" that such powers are so dangerous. Advocating them on the ground that "we will use them well" is every authoritarian's claim. More than anything else, this is the toxic mentality that consumes our political culture: when our side does X, X is Good, because we're Good and are working for Good outcomes. That was what led hordes of Bush followers to endorse the same large-government surveillance programs they long claimed to oppose, and what leads so many Obama supporters now to justify actions that they spent the last eight years opposing.
* * * * *
Consider the recent revelation that the Obama administration has been making very large, undisclosed payments to MIT Professor Jonathan Gruber to provide consultation on the President's health care plan. With this lucrative arrangement in place, Gruber spent the entire year offering public justifications for Obama's health care plan, typically without disclosing these payments, and far worse, was repeatedly held out by the White House -- falsely -- as an "independent" or "objective" authority. Obama allies in the media constantly cited Gruber's analysis to support their defenses of the President's plan, and the White House, in turn, then cited those media reports as proof that their plan would succeed. This created an infinite "feedback loop" in favor of Obama's health care plan which -- unbeknownst to the public -- was all being generated by someone who was receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars in secret from the administration (read this to see exactly how it worked).
In other words, this arrangement was quite similar to the Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher scandals which Democrats, in virtual lockstep, condemned. Paul Krugman, for instance, in 2005 angrily lambasted right-wing pundits and policy analysts who received secret, undisclosed payments, and said they lack "intellectual integrity"; he specifically cited the Armstrong Williams case. Yet the very same Paul Krugman last week attacked Marcy Wheeler for helping to uncover the Gruber payments by accusing her of being "just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals." What is one key difference? Unlike Williams and Gallagher, Jonathan Gruber is a Good, Well-Intentioned Person with Good Views -- he favors health care -- and so massive, undisclosed payments from the same administration he's defending are dismissed as a "fake scandal."
Sunstein himself -- as part of his 2008 paper -- explicitly advocates that the Government should pay what he calls "credible independent experts" to advocate on the Government's behalf, a policy he says would be more effective because people don't trust the Government itself and would only listen to people they believe are "independent." In so arguing, Sunstein cites the Armstrong Williams scandal not as something that is wrong in itself, but as a potential risk of this tactic (i.e., that it might leak out), and thus suggests that "government can supply these independent experts with information and perhaps prod them into action from behind the scenes," but warns that "too close a connection will be self-defeating if it is exposed." In other words, Sunstein wants the Government to replicate the Armstrong Williams arrangement as a means of more credibly disseminating propaganda -- i.e., pretending that someone is an "independent" expert when they're actually being "prodded" and even paid "behind the scenes" by the Government -- but he wants to be more careful about how the arrangement is described (don't make the control explicit) so that embarrassment can be avoided if it ends up being exposed.
In this 2008 paper, then, Sunstein advocated, in essence, exactly what the Obama administration has been doing all year with Gruber: covertly paying people who can be falsely held up as "independent" analysts in order to more credibly promote the Government line. Most Democrats agreed this was a deceitful and dangerous act when Bush did it, but with Obama and some of his supporters, undisclosed arrangements of this sort seem to be different. Why? Because, as Sunstein puts it: we have "a well-motivated government" doing this so that "social welfare is improved." Thus, just like state secrets, indefinite detention, military commissions and covert, unauthorized wars, what was once deemed so pernicious during the Bush years -- coordinated government/media propaganda -- is instantaneously transformed into something Good.
* * * * *
What is most odious and revealing about Sunstein's worldview is his condescending, self-loving belief that "false conspiracy theories" are largely the province of fringe, ignorant Internet masses and the Muslim world. That, he claims, is where these conspiracy theories thrive most vibrantly, and he focuses on various 9/11 theories -- both domestically and in Muslim countries -- as his prime example.
It's certainly true that one can easily find irrational conspiracy theories in those venues, but some of the most destructive "false conspiracy theories" have emanated from the very entity Sunstein wants to endow with covert propaganda power: namely, the U.S. Government itself, along with its elite media defenders. Moreover, "crazy conspiracy theorist" has long been the favorite epithet of those same parties to discredit people trying to expose elite wrongdoing and corruption.
Who is it who relentlessly spread "false conspiracy theories" of Saddam-engineered anthrax attacks and Iraq-created mushroom clouds and a Ba'athist/Al-Qaeda alliance -- the most destructive conspiracy theories of the last generation? And who is it who demonized as "conspiracy-mongers" people who warned that the U.S. Government was illegally spying on its citizens, systematically torturing people, attempting to establish permanent bases in the Middle East, or engineering massive bailout plans to transfer extreme wealth to the industries which own the Government? The most chronic and dangerous purveyors of "conspiracy theory" games are the very people Sunstein thinks should be empowered to control our political debates through deceit and government resources: namely, the Government itself and the Enlightened Elite like him.
It is this history of government deceit and wrongdoing that renders Sunstein's desire to use covert propaganda to "undermine" anti-government speech so repugnant. The reason conspiracy theories resonate so much is precisely that people have learned -- rationally -- to distrust government actions and statements. Sunstein's proposed covert propaganda scheme is a perfect illustration of why that is. In other words, people don't trust the Government and "conspiracy theories" are so pervasive is precisely because government is typically filled with people like Cass Sunstein, who think that systematic deceit and government-sponsored manipulation are justified by their own Goodness and Superior Wisdom.
UPDATE: I don't want to make this primarily about the Gruber scandal -- I cited that only as an example of the type of mischief that this mindset produces -- but just to respond quickly to the typical Gruber defenses already appearing in comments: (1) Gruber's work was only for HHS and had nothing to do with the White House (false); (2) he should have disclosed his payments, but the White House did nothing wrong (false: it repeatedly described him as "independent" and "objective" and constantly cited allied media stories based in Gruber's work); (3) Gruber advocated views he would have advocated anyway in the absence of payment (probably true, but wasn't that also true for life-long conservative Armstrong Williams, life-long social conservative Maggie Gallagher, and the pro-war Pentagon Generals, all of whom mounted the same defense?); and (4) Williams/Gallagher were explicitly paid to advocate particular views while Gruber wasn't (true: that's exactly the arrangement Sunstein advocates to avoid "embarrassment" in the event of disclosure, and it's absurd to suggest that someone being paid many hundreds of thousands of dollars is unaware of what their paymasters want said; that's why disclosure is so imperative).
The point is that there are severe dangers to the Government covertly using its resources to "infiltrate" discussions and to shape political debates using undisclosed and manipulative means. It's called "covert propaganda" and it should be opposed regardless of who is in control of it or what its policy aims are.
UPDATE II: Ironically, this is the same administration that recently announced a new regulation dictating that "bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently." Without such disclosure, the administration reasoned, the public may not be aware of important hidden incentives (h/t pasquin). Yet the same administration pays an MIT analyst hundreds of thousands of dollars to advocate their most controversial proposed program while they hold him out as "objective," and selects as their Chief Regulator someone who wants government agents to covertly mold political discussions "anonymously or even with false identities."
UPDATE III: Just to get a sense for what an extremist Cass Sunstein is (which itself is ironic, given that his paper calls for "cognitive infiltration of extremist groups," as the Abstract puts it), marvel at this paragraph:
So Sunstein isn't calling right now for proposals (1) and (2) -- having Government "ban conspiracy theorizing" or "impose some kind of tax on those who" do it -- but he says "each will have a place under imaginable conditions." I'd love to know the "conditions" under which the government-enforced banning of conspiracy theories or the imposition of taxes on those who advocate them will "have a place." Anyone who believes this should, for that reason alone, be barred from any meaningful government position.
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Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book "How Would a Patriot Act?," a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, "A Tragic Legacy", examines the Bush legacy.
Not content with its lapdog coverage of President Bush over the past decade, the Beltway press has adopted a new, super-soft way to deal with Bush's former vice president, Dick Cheney, as well as GOP media star Sarah Palin. Journalists have set aside what had been decades' worth of guidelines and embraced special new rules for how Cheney and Palin get treated.
In a word, it's stenography.
That's how too many scribes have covered Cheney and Palin in recent months, allowing them to dispense tightly controlled pieces of information, which journalists then trumpet as breaking news. And yes, the trend is unprecedented in modern day American politics.
It's actually a two-fer. First, it's unprecedented because the Beltway press has never showered attention on political losers, such as Cheney and Palin. Meaning, the press has never cared what a former VP had to say about current events right after leaving the White House (think: Dan Quayle), or what a failed VP candidate had to say just months after losing in a landslide (think: Geraldine Ferraro). Traditionally, pundits and reporters disdain political losers (think: Mike Dukakis). But for Cheney and Palin, the rules have been generously reworked.
The second oddity is that journalists now allow Cheney and Palin to completely dictate the media ground rules and afford them the chance to have one-way relationships with the press. Palin, for instance, perhaps still bruising from her woeful 2008 media performances, still hasn't allowed herself to be interviewed by a single independent political journalist since she launched her book in November. Instead, she mostly communicates with the mainstream media via Facebook. And now that she's signed on to join the Fox News staff, the chances of Palin ever speaking with the serious press seem to be less than zero. That lack of openness stacks the deck and leads to dreadful bouts of stenography; of literally recording what controversial Republicans say, and nothing more.
Of course, the Cheney brand of stenography has been trademarked by the news crew at Politico, and recently reached its unfortunate, albeit predictable, crescendo when the outlet simply reprinted Cheney's latest Obama-hating "statement" (read: press release) in the wake of the failed terrorist attack aboard the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit on Christmas Day. What happened was that following the botched attack, either Cheney reached out and provided Politico with an exclusive statement, or Politico contacted Cheney asking for one. (It's not clear who contacted whom. And yes, journalistically, it matters.)
Then Politico, rather than incorporating some of Cheney's comments in an actual news article about the political ramifications of the attempted terror strike, and rather than contacting Cheney for an actual interview where reporters could flesh out his comments with follow-up questions, simply reproduced Cheney's wildly inaccurate, and inflammatory, Obama's-making-us-less-safe "statement," in full. All 660 words of it.
The stenography became so unseemly that MSNBC's Chris Matthews even called Politico out:
To make matters worse, when asked to defend Politico's Cheney-friendly stenography, editor John Harris mounted a completely illogical defense and refused to address the rather obvious complaints about the news outlet's outlandish practice of simply acting as a loving, unwavering conduit for Cheney. "Trying to get newsworthy people to say interesting things is part of what we do," was how, in the wake of the Cheney kerfuffle, Harris explained Politico to blogger Greg Sargent. Well, of course. Nobody objects to the pursuit of interesting quotes. That's what good journalists do. But they don't turn around and simply print the quotes as gospel, devoid of any context. Especially when the "interesting things" that "newsworthy people" actually consist of an avalanche of partisan lies.
The truth is, Politico used to at least send reporters over to Cheney's Virginia office in order to perform their stenography in person. Following a sit-down Q&A, this was the Politico lede from Feb. 9, 2009, under the doomsday headline: "Cheney warns of new attacks":
Former Vice President Dick Cheney warned that there is a "high probability" that terrorists will attempt a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack in coming years, and said he fears the Obama administration's policies will make it more likely the attempt will succeed [emphasis added].
That's right, Obama's "policies," which at the time were two weeks old, were endangering America and making it susceptible to nuclear attack. (Cheney doesn't really do subtleties.) On its face, the fearmongering claims were preposterous. But Politico's Mike Allen, Jim VandeHei, and John Harris played it straight. Worse, they played it as big, from-his-lips-to-our-ears news.
And let's not lose sight of just how extraordinary it was for Allen/VandeHei/Harris to even care what Cheney had to say in early February of 2009, because I can't stress enough how completely unprecedented it is for any major Beltway news outlet to turn to a dislodged vice president as a partisan newsmaker less than one month after he left office. And for Cheney to be the object of Politico's newsroom desire last February was even more bizarre since the Republican had just completed his stint as arguably the most unpopular politician in modern day White House politics. (Somewhere Richard Nixon was smiling.)
That is not an exaggeration. According to a CBS/New York Times poll at the time of the Cheney's White House departure, his job approval rating stood at a how-is-that-possible 13 percent. Yet despite his historically poor standing with the public, and despite the fact that his party had just been trounced in an electoral landslide, and despite the fact that former VPs were never considered to be newsworthy just two weeks after they packed their White House bags, there was the Politico brain trust in February 2009, sitting at Cheney's knee ("Suddenly a man of leisure ... his own mood was relaxed, even loquacious") and treating him like he was still vice president -- treating him like he was a popular vice president. Treating Cheney like a man with all the answers.
For Palin, it hasn't just been Politico's staff that's adopted the unfortunate stenography approach to covering the failed VP candidate. The truth is that since the launch of her book last November, Palin has refused to sit down with a single serious, independent reporter. Instead, she's stuck close to lifestyle interviews (i.e. Oprah and Barbara Walters) as well as taking questions from her professional right-wing media enablers.
Can you imagine the media caterwauling if, for instance, Hillary Clinton published a book and then refused to sit down with a single nonpartisan cable TV host, radio talker, or political reporter from a major newspaper or magazine? If Clinton roped off the press while she only did interviews with The Nation, Rachel Maddow, and Air America? The Beltway press would go berserk mocking Clinton for her timidity. But Palin completely snubbed the D.C. press corps, and rather than calling her out, journalists rewarded her with probably tens of millions of dollars in free book publicity. (Not that most Americans even cared about her book launch.)
Worse, Palin's refusal to engage directly with the press has, at times, led to confusion about what she did and did not say. The confusion may be purposeful on her part, but it hinders public debate and makes precise journalism nearly impossible. That trend was famously highlighted after Palin posted on Facebook her claim that proposed Democratic health care reform would mean bureaucratic "death panels" would ultimately decide whether Americans would live or die. (Palin specifically referenced her parents and her son as possible "death panel" targets.) Of course, the claim was thoroughly debunked and eventually named "Lie of the Year." In response to that dubious achievement, Palin returned to Facebook and claimed people had misunderstood her original "death panels" reference. It was an explanation some journalists echoed before Media Matters then debunked that as well.
But guess what? If Palin, like virtually every other politician on the planet, agreed to talk to real reporters on occasion, that kind of "confusion" would quickly be solved. Rather, Palin hides from the press. And instead of punishing her for her timidity, journalists act as dutiful stenographers by typing up Palin's online postings -- which she may or may not write herself -- and treating them as news.
From a journalism perspective, the whole spectacle has been embarrassing to watch. As David Weigel at The Washington Independent noted, "The media's indulgence of Palin's strategy -- which often results in pure stenography of press releases that may or may not have been written by her -- is ridiculous, bordering on pathetic."
And Weigel's right. Those Facebook postings are nothing more than modern-day press releases, yet they're treated as news. In the not-so-distant past, newsroom trash cans (both physical and email) were filled with politicians' press releases, tossed aside by dismissive scribes who would never dream of lowering themselves to regurgitating quotes typed up on some hand-out. Media elites didn't waste their time with press releases.
First of all, it's considered an embarrassment and a public acknowledgment that journalists don't have any juice; that they don't have real access to important people. Second, typed-up statements don't lend themselves to context or understanding. But for covering Palin, regurgitating press releases has suddenly become the accepted norm.
From a recent Wall Street Journal news article:
Wall Street rallied. Bulls hope that weak jobs data will postpone monetary tightening: a silver lining in every catastrophe, or perhaps a further exhibit of market infantilism.
![[In this Feb. 23, 2009 file photo, a home is seen in San Antonio, facing imminent foreclosure without assistance. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, file) ]](http://www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/helpforeclosure.jpg "helpforeclosure.jpg")
In this Feb. 23, 2009 file photo, a home is seen in San Antonio, facing imminent foreclosure without assistance. (AP Photo/Eric Gay, file) Realtytrac says defaults and repossessions have been running at over 300,000 a month since February. One million American families lost their homes in the fourth quarter. Moody's Economy.com expects another 2.4m homes to go this year. Taken together, this looks awfully like Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath.
Judges are finding ways to block evictions. One magistrate in Minnesota halted a case calling the creditor "harsh, repugnant, shocking and repulsive". We are not far from a de facto moratorium in some areas.
This is how it ended between 1932 and 1934, when half the US states declared moratoria or "Farm Holidays". Such flexibility innoculated America's democracy against the appeal of Red Unions and Coughlin Fascists. The home siezures are occurring despite frantic efforts by the Obama administration to delay the process.
This policy is entirely justified given the scale of the social crisis. But it also masks the continued rot in the housing market, allows lenders to hide losses, and stores up an ever larger overhang of unsold properties. It takes heroic naivety to think the US housing market has turned the corner (apologies to Goldman Sachs, as always). The fuse has yet to detonate on the next mortgage bomb, $134bn (£83bn) of "option ARM" contracts due to reset violently upwards this year and next.
US house prices have eked out five months of gains on the Case-Shiller index, but momentum stalled in October in half the cities even before the latest surge of 40 basis points in mortgage rates. Karl Case (of the index) says prices may sink another 15pc. "If the 2008 and 2009 loans go bad, then we're back where we were before – in a nightmare."
David Rosenberg from Gluskin Sheff said it is remarkable how little traction has been achieved by zero rates and the greatest fiscal blitz of all time. The US economy grew at a 2.2pc rate in the third quarter (entirely due to Obama stimulus). This compares to an average of 7.3pc in the first quarter of every recovery since the Second World War.
Fed hawks are playing with fire by talking up about exit strategies, not for the first time. This is what they did in June 2008. We know what happened three months later. For the record, manufacturing capacity use at 67.2pc, and "auto-buying intentions" are the lowest ever.
The Fed's own Monetary Multiplier crashed to an all-time low of 0.809 in mid-December. Commercial paper has shrunk by $280bn ($175bn) in since October. Bank credit has been racing down a hair-raising black run since June. It has dropped from $10.844 trillion to $9.013 trillion since November 25. The MZM money supply is contracting at a 3pc annual rate. Broad M3 money is contracting at over 5pc.
Professor Tim Congdon from International Monetary Research said the Fed is baking deflation into the pie later this year, and perhaps a double-dip recession. Europe is even worse.
This has not stopped an army of commentators is trying to bounce the Fed into early rate rises. They accuse Ben Bernanke of repeating the error of 2004 when the Fed waited too long. Sometimes you just want to scream. In 2004 there was no housing collapse, unemployment was 5.5pc, banks were in rude good health, and the Fed Multiplier was 1.73.
How anybody can see imminent inflation in the dying embers of core PCE, just 0.1pc in November, is beyond me.
Mr Rosenberg is asked by clients why Wall Street does not seem to agree with his grim analysis.
His answer is that this is the same Mr Market that bought stocks in October 1987 when they were 25pc overvalued on Shiller "10-year normalized earnings basis" – exactly as they are today – and bought them at even more overvalued prices in 2007, long after the property crash had begun, Bear Stearns funds had imploded, and credit had its August heart attack. The stock market has become a lagging indicator. Tear up the textbooks.
I've always been pro-choice. Abortion is not pretty, but the effects of prohibiting them are far worse. There was a video accompanying this that didn't transfer. It was very short, it showed an anti-abortionist woman protester following a woman into a clinic saying the most heart wrenching things to the lass who'd decided to abort. It was really unfair. This is not my usual stuff, but it's important. Women need to control their own bodies, not religious fanatics who, in an honest society, would simply not get an abortion themselves and let others make up their own minds.
Chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop chop clatter chop skitter crash bang—FUCK!
Stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir stir skid bang skitter bang crash—SHIT!
Hello. For those of you who don’t know me, I would like to apologize for my brief outburst there at the beginning, but I am the Cursing Mommy, and occasionally I do blurt curses, break crockery, give people the finger, and hurl objects to the floor. Well, all I can say about that is, anyone who can make a Bolognese sauce and not get a bit flustered has my heartfelt admiration! I expect we’ve seen the last of that behavior today, however, as I turn to one of my favorite dishes, a delightful and relaxing seafood risotto in the Venetian style.
Whipping up a risotto is a marvellous way to give a sense of occasion to an intimate dinner party, because of the careful timing that is required, and the pinpoint attention to detail right up to the moment of serving. If done correctly, every risotto will be unique, its own irreproducible concoction. That’s the fun of a risotto, you see! In order to pull off this feat of cookery, the chef must be completely relaxed, and to that end I like to start with a robust Chianti such as I am pouring here, forestalling any necessity of immediate repouring by using an ample glass like this snifter-type thing in which my ten-year-old recently brought home two goldfish after some kind of a project at his school. (Don’t ask me where the goldfish are.) A little more than halfway full should be fine.
At some point in your past, all of you have no doubt been under pressure to prepare a dinner party in which everything is really special and “just so.” As it happens, that is the very situation I find myself in tonight, when the party will be for only six—two other couples besides Larry and myself. The men are both clients of Larry’s, and Larry, who is as a rule somewhat worried, anxious, and useless when it comes to almost anything, has been talking rather wildly about how he’s going to be fired and we’ll end up on the street. I know, and you know, that this is another of Larry’s whiny manipulations that his mother was always dumb enough to fall for and I’m not, but, in any case, this dinner party seems to be sort of mandatory, which means the risotto had better be up to par. Now, you may ask, will Larry himself be around during the preparations for this important dinner party?
Well, actually, no. Larry will not—beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-
As you see, when I set out to make a delightful seafood risotto à la vénitienne, I always like to get off on the right foot at the very beginning by HAVING THE FUCKING GODDAM SMOKE DETECTOR GO OFF!!! Fucking goddam piece of useless stupid garbage—what could have set it off? The steam from the fucking dishwasher? beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-
Thankfully, this is nothing I can’t deal with, because I have learned in past encounters with this lousy piece-of-shit smoke detector that although I cannot turn the fucking thing off once it starts, because it is the ridiculous battery-less kind or something, all I have to do is stand on a chair, remove it from its ceiling-attachment thing, and take it down to the basement, as you observe me doing now. Then I simply place the smoke detector here in the corner, and bury it under an enormous heap of bedding near where my son has his TV. beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-
Ah, that’s better. . . . No, it’s not. Because, as I stand here once again in the kitchen, I notice that the stupid fucking smoke detector can still be heard. The sound is faint, but definitely still quite annoying, and enough to distract me, or any skilled cook, from the concentration necessary to pull off a high-maintenance dish like risotto. Luckily, though, I have just the solution for that: my Three Tenors CD, which I was planning to play anyway! I’ll put on the Three Tenors, let them take me to sunny Sicily or wherever the hell, and drown the fucking smoke detector the hell out. Larry’s new CD player, which I have already plugged into the kitchen outlet here—is there a CD already in it? why won’t it open?—if I push this—no—fucking goddam stupid Larry can’t even get a CD player that works—beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-beep-
All right—you know what I am going to do? I’m going to drain off the last little bit that’s left in my snifter, pour myself a nice big refill, imagine a lovely and relaxing tropical vacation scene, and scream “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs. Then I am going to go back down to the basement, get one of Larry’s hammers, and “disable,” as they say, the smoke detector. Meanwhile, I will leave some onions browning in a skillet here on the left front burner so as to have a head start on my risotto when I return.
[Pause.]
beep beep beep beep beep CRASH SMASH CRUNCH POP SMASH beep
With that little detour behind us, we can now proceed to the preparation of the lovely bits of fresh seafood—the shrimp, squid, and snow crab—which we are going to add to the risotto when the time is right. I begin by giving the seafood a thorough cold-water rinse, like so, and then—beep be...e...e...p, bip—
What was that? bee bee beep beep, bip, b’b’b’b’, beeeeeeee. . . .
Those of you who have followed this column for any length of time know that once in a while, at moments of extreme frustration, the Cursing Mommy gets so totally fucking fed up that she starts to scream curses, say what a stupid fuckhead that fuck Dick Cheney was, and generally let off a good cursing out all around. But now the Cursing Mommy is older and wiser, and she’s not going to do that today . . . unless . . . what’s that smell? Was that stupid smoke detector trying to tell me something? JESUS CHRIST, THE FUCKING BURNER UNDER THE ONIONS HAS SET THE PAPER TOWELS ON FIRE! OH, GOOD GOD! THE WHOLE FUCKING ROLL IS GOING UP! NOW THE CURTAINS ARE ALSO ON FIRE!! Oh, where’s that fire extinguisher? Behind the basement door? Yes! Thank God! But what is this pathetic drizzle it’s spraying? AHH! I’LL HAVE TO SMASH THE FIRE OUT WITH THE EXTINGUISHER ITSELF! smash smash smash shatter smash crash crush shatter smash
[Pause.]
After a vigorous session in the kitchen, I often like to relax and recharge by taking what I call a “mini vacation,” as I’m doing now. I simply recline on my back on the kitchen floor with my feet in the bottom tier of my cookbook shelves, my head propped against the useless spent fire extinguisher, and a clean dish towel, moistened with cool water, across my forehead and eyes.
Then I drift away in my mind to some far-off place and take some deep breaths to expel the remaining acrid and possibly toxic smoke from my lungs. Let Larry deal with this shit when he gets home. He can call Gianelli’s for takeout and put it on whichever one of our credit cards still works. I’m not even going to think about it. I would look forward to a future when we will be living in our car if I thought it meant that then I wouldn’t have to cook, but you know what? I will still have to cook. . . . O.K., I know people are coming. In just a minute I’m going to get up. beep...beep...beep...beep...beep
Oh, what a fucking terrible day this has been.
Look for the Cursing Mommy’s next column, “Get Out of My Fucking Lane, You Fuck: Defensive Driving Tips from the Cursing Mommy,” which could be along pretty soon, depending. ♦
Perhaps you've noticed that the blossoming shopping malls of America seem to share a core of perhaps 50-100 stores. I talking here about Ross, Bed Bath and Beyond, Old Navy, etc. The mall just a couple miles from the last will feature the same collection of major stores, making one wonder why the malls have been built. I suspect this has to do with our purchasing massive fractions of what we buy from foreign, principally Asian, suppliers. Companies that can offer the greatest demand can martial the best and largest supplier deals. This tends to concentrate wholesale purchasing in the US amongst those marketers that can sell to the biggest audience of consumers. I think this piece more or less speaks to that theory. I found it interesting and informative. Have a read.The following is an excerpt from the first chapter of Cornered: The New Monopoly Capitalism and the Economics of Destruction, published by Wiley Press.
Even with a GPS and a good map, I have a hard time finding Diane Cochrane’s home, which is tucked in the crease of a hill a few miles east of Prescott, Arizona. The one-story green frame building sits at the bottom of a steep driveway that drops from a rocky road that cuts off a maze of streets that, as I drive along in my rented Pontiac, seem more like a mad Motocross track than the arteries of a neighborhood.
Yet it is easy to understand why Diane settled here with her husband after they fled the monotony of a Ford assembly line in Ohio. The landscape is a testament to the creativity of both humanity and God. Every one of the hundred or so houses in the community is unique. There are ramblers, chalets, A-frames, ranches, and log cabins. The terrain, meanwhile, seems to change in character almost inch by inch as the roadway drops and twists vertiginously into deep and scrubby ravines, only to crest a moment later to stunning views of a far shimmering horizon.
A few miles down Highway 69, the Wal-Mart Supercenter at the edge of Prescott is a different world. The parking lot alone is the grandest swath of flat space I’ve seen in the last hour of driving. Then there’s the store itself. To fit the big box into the undulating land, the builders had to cut deep into the side of a hill, carving away as much as six or seven stories worth of dirt and rock.
Once I am inside Wal-Mart’s door, it takes me nearly two minutes, striding swiftly, to walk from one end of the store to the other. Along the way I pass twenty-seven checkout lines and what seems like a whole town -- a savings bank, a McDonald’s, a portrait gallery -- tucked under this one roof. I almost wish I’d brought along some music to entertain myself, because there isn’t much new to look at on my stroll. Other than having a rack of cowboy hats, this Supercenter is filled with the exact same collection of products as every other Wal-Mart Supercenter in the United States, be it in Ohio, California, or Virginia. It also has the same empty feeling. When I arrive, it’s early evening and the parking lot is full. Yet the store seems almost vacant, and the few shoppers I do see wander listlessly and almost silently through the aisles.
Diane, who is sixty and has cut her gray hair short, wears a salmon-colored cotton shirt on this ninety-seven-degree April day. She tells me that until recently, she shopped in this Wal-Mart almost every day, often on her way home from her job managing a party store. She doesn’t anymore, though, and that’s not because filling a basket at the Supercenter can be more exhausting than a trip to the gym. Diane has tried to avoid all Wal-Marts everywhere ever since her two kittens, Bones and Moses, died of kidney failure on the same day in 2007. Diane believes that the food she purchased here -- Wal-Mart private label Special Kitty Gourmet Blend foil pouches filled with whitefish and tuna in sauce -- is what killed them.
My intent is not to blame any one person at Wal-Mart for the deaths of Diane’s kittens, nor to blame the rather abstract entity that is Wal-Mart taken as a whole. It is to reinforce the idea that monopoly exists just about everywhere in America today. It is also to add two new facts. First, today’s monopolies increasingly appear in the shape of giant trading firms like Wal-Mart, which are designed to govern entire production systems, even entire swaths, of our economy. Second, monopoly does not eliminate competition, nor does it automatically result in a rational and efficient governance of the production and service systems under its sway.
On the contrary, monopolization merely shifts competition from a horizontal plane to a vertical plane. That is, rather than having a winner-take-all battle among automobile makers or between Wal-Mart and Target, for example, we have competition between the monopoly and all the people under its power. In the case of Wal-Mart, this includes its workers and its suppliers as well as its customers. The real competition, in other words, is between the billionaires who make and wield monopolies like Wal-Mart and people like you, me, and Diane.
I could have started this with dozens of stories about the deaths of dogs and cats just before and after the great pet food recall of 2007. I chose Diane’s story not because we have absolute proof that Wal-Mart cat food killed Bones and Moses -- the kittens were cremated days before the first recall was announced. Rather, it was because the circumstantial evidence is so strong. Bones and Moses were healthy kittens. There were two of them, and they died at the same time. During their whole lives Diane fed them only Special Kitty pouches. Diane’s veterinarian told Diane that the kittens’ blood-urea- nitrogen measurement was the highest she had ever seen. Diane also owned other animals at the time, including a seven-year-old cat named Little Bit and a seven-year-old collie named Sailor, both of whom ate food that was not included in the recall; both of them, she tells me, remain quite healthy.
I chose to focus on the pet food fiasco in general because it was one of those stories that comes along every so often that rips away the veil to reveal how the mechanisms of our economy really work. That’s what happened in March 2007, when an Ontario-based company named Menu Foods announced a recall of cans and pouches of wet pet food that had been packed at plants in Kansas and New Jersey. At first, the story seemed simple enough: another case in which poor food-handling techniques resulted in contamination that resulted in sickness and, in a few cases, death, just as we have seen in such other products as spinach and peanut butter.
That’s why the initial reports on the recall focused on empty store shelves and terrified pet owners. Within a week, however, the Menu Foods story began to morph into something entirely different: a horror tale about the dangers of food, drugs, toys, and tires made in China. The turning point came on March 23, when three things happened.
First, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced that it suspected that some toxin had been mixed into the wheat gluten that was used to thicken the canned meats. Second, an independent lab reported that it had found rat poison in the recalled cans. Third, Menu Foods pointed a finger at a shipment of wheat gluten that had been purchased from a supplier in China. Although rat poison was later replaced as the main culprit by a chemical named melamine, the story line had now taken shape: cheap and adulterated Chinese products were poisoning Americans, their children, and their pets.
Throughout the coming months, journalists and officials would drag vast piles of horrifying facts into the light. Some Chinese toothpaste makers had used diethylene glycol, a component of brake fluid and antifreeze, as a sweetener. Some Chinese toy makers had coated their products with lead-based paints. Some Chinese farmers had fed unapproved drugs to catfish that were bound for U.S. dinner plates. Some Chinese slaughterhouses had mixed “oversulfated chondroitin sulfate” into the pig intestines that were used as the raw material for the blood thinner heparin.
The details were so nauseating and so terrifying that two of the most important revelations of the Menu Foods meltdown were all but lost. The first was that the corporations we rely on to stock our shelves with food had allowed the production of wheat gluten -- which is used to thicken wet foods, bind dry foods, and condition dough -- to be captured by a single foreign nation, China. Similarly, these corporations had allowed the production of numerous other vital inputs -- like most of the ingredients in our drugs -- to be captured by that one nation.
The second overlooked revelation was that almost the entire U.S. pet food industry had come to depend, to various degrees, on a single supplier of canned and pouched pet food. In this case, five of the top six independent brands -- including those marketed by Colgate-Palmolive, Mars, and Procter & Gamble -- had hired Menu Foods to stuff meat into at least some of the cans and pouches that as of early 2007 bore their labels. So had seventeen of the top twenty food retailers in the United States that sell “private label” wet pet foods under their store brands, including Safeway, Kroger’ s, and Wal- Mart. In total, the Menu Foods recall covered products that had been retailed under a phenomenal 150 different names.
Perhaps even more disturbing, especially for those pet owners who had been spending their dollars on a premium product, was that the recall revealed that high-end, expensive brands like Iams and Hill’s Pet Nutrition Science Diet rolled off the exact same Menu Foods packing lines as the cans that were wrapped in labels bearing such names as Supervalu and Price Chopper.
Without access to internal documents from all of these companies, it is almost impossible to know exactly what percentage of wet pet food in the United States came from Menu Foods factories in the months before the recall. The last thing an established brand wants to advertise is how much of its product it buys from outside suppliers. My own figures indicate that Menu Foods accounted for somewhat less than a quarter of the total pet food sold in the United States, by weight.
Even so, Menu Foods' octopuslike reach throughout the pet food industry resulted in disruptions that were far greater than would have been the case a decade earlier. Back then, the big pet food brands largely operated their own factories and packed their own cans, and they also actively managed their supply bases to avoid concentration. This means that they would have been able to isolate any supply problem far more swiftly and with far less disruption at the point of sale.
In 2007, the sheer number of brands affected by the Menu Foods recall meant that, as the Wall Street Journal noted, it was now much “harder for consumers to find a safe substitute.” 10 In some instances, confused store managers pulled all pet food off their store shelves. In other cases, confused consumers did not trust what was still for sale.
For those Americans who believe in what we were taught in civics class and Econ 101, the most disturbing revelation was not even the fragility of our food systems, but that some of our most cherished beliefs about how the U.S. economy works appear no longer to be true. We are told that companies are engaged in a mad scramble to discover exactly what we the U.S. consumers want and to devise perfectly tailored systems to supply those want as efficiently as possible. We are told that our economy is characterized by constantly chaotic yet always constructive competition and that any American with a better product and bit of gumption can bring that product to market and beat the big guys.
Yet the reality, as Menu Foods now taught us, could not be more different -- at least not in the pet food aisle in Wal-Mart or Kroger’s. Instead of having infinite choice, as we thought, we are really presented with a wall of standard-issue cans and pouches that are distinguished only by the words and colors on their labels. The secret ingredient of U.S. capitalism, at least in this corner of the industrial kitchen, could have been cooked up in the Soviet Union.
More disturbing yet is that such concentration is not the exception in the United States but increasingly the rule. A quick tour of almost any grocery store reveals degrees of concentration that make Menu Foods look like a novice. Let’s take a quick walk around the average U.S. grocery or big-box store.
Over in the health-care aisle we find that Colgate-Palmolive and Procter & Gamble split more than 80 percent of the U.S. market for toothpaste, including such seemingly independent brands as Tom’s of Maine.
In the cold case we find that almost every beer is manufactured or distributed by either Anheuser-Busch InBev or MillerCoors, including imports like Corona, Beck’s, and Tsingtao; regional beers like Rolling Rock; once independent microbrews like Redhook and Old Dominion; and even “organic” beers like Stone Mill Pale Ale.
Perhaps Americans are comfortable with the fact that Campbell’s controls more than 70 percent of the shelf space devoted to canned soups. After all, the firm grew to prominence after its launch in 1869, thanks to its pioneering successes in integrating advanced chemistry, mass manufacturing, and modern advertising.
But what are we to make of the modern snack aisle, where Frito-Lay in recent years has captured half the business of selling salty corn chips and potato chips?
And what about the business of selling tap water in plastic bottles? Here, if anywhere, is an activity that any enterprising young American should be able to master. All you would seem to need to enter the local market for water is a spigot, some bottles, and a cool label. Yet nine of the top ten brands of bottled tap water in the United States are sold by PepsiCo (Aquafina), Coca-Cola (Dasani and Evian), or Nestlé (Poland Spring, Arrowhead, Deer Park, Ozarka, Zephyrhills, and Ice Mountain).
Furthermore, what can we learn from the size of the corporation in whose store we now stand? Until we elected Ronald Reagan president, both Democrats and Republicans made sure that no chain store ever came to dominate more than a small fraction of sales in the United States as a whole, or even in any one region of the country. Between 1917 and 1979, for instance, administrations from both parties repeatedly charged the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company, the chain store behemoth of the mid-twentieth century that is better known as A & P, with violations of antitrust law, even threatening to break the firm into pieces.
Then in 1981 we stopped enforcing that law. Thus, today Wal-Mart is at least five times bigger, relative to the overall size of the U.S. economy, than A & P was at the very height of its power. 13 Indeed, Wal- Mart exercises a de facto complete monopoly in many smaller cities, and it sells as much as half of all the groceries in many big metropolitan markets. Wal-Mart delivers at least 30 percent and sometimes more than 50 percent of the entire U.S. consumption of products ranging from soaps and detergents to compact discs and pet food.
For that matter, what can we learn about our twenty-first- century consumer arcadia by looking at how the Supercenter in which we shop was constructed? The price of the steel in the frame reflects the nearly complete roll-up of the world’s main sources of iron ore by three firms (two of which recently tried to merge). The price of the store shelves reflects the nearly complete roll-up by these same three firms of the capacity to process bauxite into aluminum. The price of the concrete in the foundation reflects the recent roll-up of the world cement industry by a few immense firms like Mexico’s Cemex. The price of the crushed rock in the parking lot reflects the roll-up of control by a few corporations over many of the biggest quarries in the United States.
Big corporations have played a big role in this country for a long time. Companies of men began to build big interstate railroads even before the Civil War, and they began to assemble giant industrial combines soon after. Big companies began to centralize control over the butchery of cattle and hogs, the milling of grains, and the canning of fruit and vegetables and soups in the late nineteenth century.
By the early twentieth century, men had enclosed in the walls of a few corporations the capacity to make automobiles, chemicals, and farm machinery. For much of the last century, however, the American people took steps to disrupt the efforts to completely dominate these businesses, and, as we saw with A & P, we took special pains to restrict the reach of pure trading companies.
That’s why we have never before seen such power to govern our industries concentrated in so few hands. That’s why we have never before seen such physical concentration of production -- be it of vitamin C, wheat gluten, heparin, or aspirin in China, of semiconductors in Taiwan, or of package- sorting capacity in Memphis. That’s why we have never before seen such a lack of compartmentalization of our systems and therefore such a socialization of the risk in these systems. That’s why we have never before seen such top-down competition and thus the destruction of so many of the real assets, skills, and products enclosed within the fences of these corporations. That’s why we have never before faced such a lack of real options.
I know that this last point -- that the U.S. consumer faces fewer and fewer options -- is, on the face of it, hard to believe. The world we shop in every day appears to be full of choices. Yet in real life, our political economy is filled with hidden monopolies almost everywhere, and these monopolies increasingly control, restrict, and determine what we buy, with little or no regard for any real market forces.
Just ask Diane Cochrane. As much as she wanted to cut Wal-Mart out of her life, she quickly found that she could not. Although Diane was eventually able to find a new -- much more expensive -- source of pet food for her surviving cat and dog, there are certain items she just can’t find in Prescott outside Wal-Mart, which now runs two Supercenters in this community of forty-one thousand people.
“It’s getting to where for a lot of things you have to go to Wal-Mart,” Diane says. This is true even when she knows that the quality is bad. There is, she tells me, “no other choice.”
