The Two Greens
There’s the green loved by the earth, and there’s Murdoch green
There are two greens. One of them is chlorophyll, which helps plants absorb energy from the sun. It is part of a life process in which elements of an environment work together to keep things in balance. The other green figures out how to reverse the process, and force the plants to give their energy to the sun. They die, of course.
Rupert Murdoch, the Australian billionaire who knows what people want when they don’t follow the path of knowledge, said, “It’s not red or blue, it’s green.” He was being deposed by lawyers for Dominion Voting Machines, which was essentially raped and murdered by Fox commentary, about why he didn’t stop his people lying when he knew they were lying.
They didn’t care what was true or not true because telling the truth is not their underlying purpose. Making money is their raison d’être. This was established in 1916. Henry Ford said the main purpose of a corporation is to serve the public good. He cut dividends to investors to that his workers could afford the product they were making. The Dodge Brothers, minority stockholders, sued him. The court ruled that the purpose of an American corporation is to provide maximum return to the shareholders. Right there, at that moment, Fox News was born in spirit, though there would be a gestation period of almost eighty years to get to, “It’s not red or blue, it’s green.”
“When somebody says it’s not about the money, it’s about the money.” (H.L. Mencken)
Once it was established in law that a corporation exists to provide maximum return to shareholders, the public interest became a byproduct, and it was only a matter of time until this morphed into “Trickle Down Economics.” It perfectly describes the reality of our legal situation in regards to corporations. The profits go to the shareholders and there’s no obligation to the public good. This is in theory compensated by paying taxes and leaving the public good to the government. But of course it’s never enough. Now they don’t want to pay taxes. And they own the government. With the complicity of the Supreme Court, they bought over half of it, which was all they needed.
Here’s a teardown of the vehicle we’ve designed:
Corporation is defined as a group of people united in one body for a purpose, an accurate definition when it defined a group of investors in a project too expensive for individuals or partnerships. The corporation was a separate entity from the individuals, limited liability, and had a purpose. When the purpose was done the corporation disbanded. The Erie Canal, for example, was expensive but was needed for the public good as well as economic expansion, as it connected the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean.
The New York State Legislature created a Canal Fund and sold bonds to private investors. Notice that at this time the government was governing, not the investors. The bonds were funding the public good, which was determined by the legislature. When the canal was finished the investors had their profits in the paper they held.
When the Transcontinental Railroad was built, the investors, primarily Leland Stanford, Collis Huntington, Mark Hopkins and Charles Crocker, reverse engineered the process so that instead of serving the public, the public served them.
“They put little of their own money in it — they didn’t have much. It was built on land grants, government loans, and government guaranteed bonds. When their loans came due, they refused to pay and the government had to sue. In effect, they stumbled into a business model where the public takes the risk and those taking the subsidies reap the gain.” (Richard White. “Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America”)
This new business model has now been perfected. Even the tax money provided to the public became debt, which we now owe. The ravenous appetite for more money accelerated with the Ford lawsuit of course, and with the corporation gaining the legal status of a human citizen. Incidentally, that change in corporate status was made by a clerk and let pass by the judge. Nobody got paid off there, I’m sure.
Corporations are not inherently evil, but there are plenty of evil corporations. Normally they are run by people who don’t like government handouts to the people they’ve shafted. This is understandable. The evil corporations like to take the money from the government by sly device and brute force. These are thus the defining characteristics of the Republican Party, which is financed by evil corporations. And that’s not just my thought, it was said by Elon Musk.
Musk is in the process of upsetting the existing position of public interest and shareholder profits. On Technology Day what interested me most was his saying that the goal is a price low enough that more people can afford an electric car, and this is the purpose of his reinvention of the assembly line production. When Tesla recently lowered the prices of cars, they were selling everything they were making. But the assumption of analysts was that if they were lowering prices it was because of softening demand for the product. They assume that Musk’s goal is money, instead of completing what he starts, for which capitalization is essential. What gets in his way is going to upset him. He is autistic. That’s how they roll:
“They enjoy taking part in activities that they can predict the outcome for. When such activities or scenarios are disrupted, they may lash out due to the unplanned nature of the situation.”
Musk’s lashing out turned Twitter into a rural Georgia Waffle House on Saturday night, which is breathtaking performance art.
So Musk behaves like an 11-year-old boy on Twitter, and, at the same time, he is revolutionizing manufacturing and getting rid of fossil fuel vehicles faster than anyone could have imagined. The rest of the industry is reacting to what he is doing, not leading. It is unfortunate for the Democratic Party that because Tesla isn’t unionized, the Biden Administration tried to hinder, rather than help him meet his goals to moderate climate change. I’m in favor of workers having power through unionizing, but I’m also in favor of profit sharing and paying better than scale to avoid the disincentives that come with unions.
I’m not in favor of praising Gail Wynand for Howard Roark’s designs.
That is, after all, what workers really should have had from the beginning of the assembly line, a share of profits. But the lawyers figured out how to make all the profits from their labor flow to the wealthy, even if their wealth consisted initially of a scheme or ploy to reverse the flow of energy from public interest to private interest.
So I’m wondering what Musk is up to with Twitter. Is he drawing in the workers by meeting them where they are? If so he’s slumming, but it’s exactly what works. You have to meet people where they are to lead them out of where they are. If you aren’t getting the response you want you have to change that, not keep insisting that the meaning in your head is part of the communication.
“The meaning of a communication is the response it gets, and there is no other meaning. The impression that there is other meaning is in your head and is not part of the communication.” (Milton Erickson, greatest medical hypnotist of the 20th Century)
But I don’t know if Musk is playing three dimensional chess developed at the expense of emotional intelligence. I hope he’s not just AI Chucky. He is promoting DeSantis because he can operate without regulation under a Republican. But he may be just too autistic to think beyond solving his frustration. I agree with him on some things, one is that he allocates capital better than the government, so it makes no sense for him to give his capital to the government for reallocation after watching Biden hail GM’s Mary Barra as the cutting edge of innovation. GM is good at getting public bailouts, and that wasn’t a thumb on the scale, it was a sack of hammers.
My personal view is that when you have an asset like Musk you just ask what he needs, hang a Presidential medal on him, and STFU. If he starts talking about politics he’s frustrated, and if he is autistic this is going to be a problem. Anyone who wants to judge him should probably read up on autistic behavior, first. Don’t expect him to think like you expect he “should” think. He is focused on achieving his goal.
When news is the business of an evil corporation, profits are more important than truth.
What Rupert Murdoch is saying is that his “News” corporation‘s first obligation is to the shareholders. It’s not there to provide truth or accuracy. It’s there to make investors rich and that’s it. To demonstrate this, Fox just supported an American version of “The Big Lie,” a device perfected by Hitler and Goebbels to gain authoritarian control over a population.
The OSS psychological profile of Hitler describes Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, because they borrowed “technique” from him.
His (Hitler’s) primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.
That description fits Fox Commentary. The Republicans who don’t support the big lie that Donald Trump won the election are afraid to speak out because the party leadership prefers power to truth. In fact, the truth becomes the enemy, because it will bring down the entire operation. And there is a reason the big lie works. Again, quoting Hitler:
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation….”
When the Republican party moved to an authoritarian position, and began to promote the big lie, thus opposing democracy, Fox moved with it, not against it. The lie was acceptable to Fox executives even though they knew it was a lie. “It’s not red or blue, it’s green.” The central issue was the stock price, i.e., return to shareholders, and blocking competition from the right, like OAN.
That means it was deliberate political propaganda. And we have a perfect mirror in which to see it. We can look at Putin’s big lie, and the Russians who believe it, and see our own MAGA, our own conspiracy theorists and anti-government propagandists, whether they are attacking public health and vaccines or cars that don’t use fossil fuels. We can see our politicians who are afraid to speak up because they might get thrown out a window, or off a committee.
It’s all on display for anyone who wants to open their eyes and take a good look. We are not where we are by accident. We are here because of bad faith actors, who stood on the cliff and decided power and wealth are just too good to resist. They traded qualitative merchandise for quantitative merchandise, and that is what selling your soul is all about. It keeps the devil in business, so to speak.
