Recalling Recall

You can be forgiven for having forgotten.

I began my own forgiveness by reviewing a box of clippings gleaned last year.

Yes, it was only a year ago that we had the opportunity to decide whether Gavin Newsom was going to continue to be Governor Newsom for more than just half of his elected term.

No fewer than forty fellow Californians got their names as alternatives to Newsom on the November, 2021 ballot. It didn’t take much to be so listed – just fifty signatures. Most of those on the ballot ran as kind of a joke. Newsom defeated the recall easily. And raised mega-millions of unneeded dollars in the process.

If you’ve wondered why there’s little or no mention of the recall in the media (new, old, on-line, daily TV et al), it’s part of the “down the memory hole” nature of U.S. politics.

That was then. This is now.

And that’s true not just in California, or course. The Big Enchilada, the Presidency, isn’t on the menu this November. So we forget about that, too. And have our attention directed to what sauce is put on the Biden presidency now.

About half of “us” – those eligible to vote – will bother try to concoct that sauce. About zero per cent of media coverage devoted to the election and its outcome will try to figure out why it looked it would be one way, and why it didn’t turn out that way.

One obvious answer is multi-part.

First, elections, before and after they take place, are presented to the public in an impossibly complicated manner. One California citizen – me – got two separate “Election Guides” in the mail this week. One, “The Official Voter Information Guide,” from the State, is 125 pages of mostly impenetrable legalese about ballot measures and candidates. The other, from the County where I live, also sent a “Voter Information Guide.” This one seems to be about half the size of the State guide (its pages aren’t numbered) and of even greater complexity. There’s no index to its often impenetrable wordage.

Secondly, people have become increasingly distrustful that much – or even all – of what they know, or think they know, about the political system is biased. There are multiplicities of those who would like us to think so. Not just the “election deniers” who insist, against all evidence, that Biden’s victory was faked. But also casual followers of “news,” who seem to think that outside of pictures (hurricanes, dead Queens etc) that what’s being conveyed to them isn’t trustworthy.

Rather than improve the information situation, the increasingly instantaneous electronic communication system is making things worse. And worse now isn’t yet the worst, according to Geoffrey Fowler, the Washington Post’s technology correspondent.

He points out that there is no control over what tech giants like Google pass on to hundreds of millions of computer users world-wide. Who use it to find political information daily. There is a law about this and the Federal Election Commission is supposed to enforce it. But this year the commission voted 3-2 not to do so (the three majority commissioners were holdover Trump appointees.)

So, guess what? “Google is not obligated to monitor deceitful person to person messages,” only deceitful “posts,” writes Fowler. Which they don’t do anyway. Or if they do monitor, them it takes much time – sometimes years – to spot untruths and get them “taken down.” Doing it faster would mean hiring many more highly qualified people and paying all of them sufficiently to keep them working. And increasing fines that Google might begin to feel. (“Political spam is out of control. Now Gmail is about to make it worse.” Washington Post 10/5/2022)

The situation is similar with two other info-giants, Twitter and Apple. After a recent new procedure was adopted in September, users of Apple now can edit a message up to five times within fifteen minutes of sending. Users of Twitter, which eccentric libertarian multi billionaire Elon Musk is trying to buy, can edit a Tweet five times in 30 minutes after it’s posted. (“The Promise and Peril of the Edit Button,” Time, 10/10/17.)

This assumes of course that a major army of i-mail and Twitter users stay on it, quickly and thoroughly and productively, while neglecting other aspects of their lives. Miss the cutoff time for editing and the post/mail that perhaps says you’re a sex criminal or embezzler, and it’s on the record. Picked up. Sloshed hither and yon to all virtual corners.

The mother of all suspicion stoker electoral doubts are the “deniers,” who have claimed that Trump and other defeated Republicans actually won in 2022. Contrary to dozens of court decisions (even from Republican judges) that they didn’t. Now eleven of them are running in various states for the deservedly obscure office of Secretary of State. If they win, they could delay or deny elections, including in the 2024 Presidential contest.

There are some 225 other “deniers” running for various elected offices around the country. They may join legitimate investigative journalists in pointing out that there are now upwards of fifty-five million official secrets, up from six million in 1993, when New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan began investigating the CIA and twelve related intelligence agencies (there are now eighteen.) (“Spooked.” By Amy Davidson Sorkin. The New Yorker 10/2/2002)

So it’s impossible to separate historical misinformation and disinformation from what goes on contemporaneously. Which is why Donald Trump’s legal troubles around handling of documents will never get anywhere. Too many lawyers will fling anything remotely probative at government representatives, who dare to claim that when laws say things like you can’t take secret documents anywhere you please because you once were President the laws don’t really say that.

Even in the most extreme cases, like deaths from drug overdoses, public political discussion involves a basic supposition: industrial corporations, business interests, and wealthy people who finance political campaigns can be trusted. We don’t need a government to regulate them. Or even to monitor their decisions. No way to bring them into line, even when they do deadly things, these things are part of the normal course of business. Which is legally protected.

Like, for example, manufacture and distribution of powerful chemical substances like fentanyl, a synthetic opioid, which it can easily be cut to nine times its medically recommended dosage, with dire consequences.

The Drug Enforcement Administration can and should be acting on this. But, typically, it temporizes by “monitoring” various studies, many of them done by fentanyl’s Chinese, Mexican, and Indian drug manufacturing companies. The U.S.Coast Guard, backed up by the U.S. government’s extensive air and sonar tracking capabilities, could find out where fentanyl is heading, and how. It is not coming across the Mexican border in backpacks carried by desperate smugglers. It is coming by freighter, air drops, and railway cars. Its distribution in major cities is done by gangs who frequently kill and wound each other, unhampered by police, who are not required to come from the communities they “serve,” And therefore have trouble figuring out what’s going on.

Supposedly anti-crime pro-police Republicans see to it that the DEA budget is kept inadequate, and that police grants go largely to weapons and armor that are never used, rather than on the ground cops who might take effective action if well trained. They hope they can change the subject from the Republican dominated Supreme Court’s restriction on freedom of reproductive choice to crime. Street, not corporate.

We’ve been here before. In the Vietnam era, chemical giant Monsanto manufactured an aerial herbicide for weed control on farmlands and forests. It was adopted by the U.S. military as “agent orange” in Vietnam, supposedly to attack and destroy guerillas fighting against a corrupt U.S. supported government. Tens of thousands of acres that produced nearly all of Vietnam’s food were destroyed, many of these permanently contaminated. Workers in the fields were shot from U.S. helicopters. An estimated two million Vietnamese (in a country of ten million) were killed or wounded. Monsanto made enormous profits. Which were never fully taxed or controlled. “Agent Orange” which the military used at twenty times the prescribed strength, was found to be dangerous in the U.S.

The philosophical basis for unregulated and untaxed corporate activity like Monsanto’s can be found in documents such as the one produced in June, 2021 by the “philanthropic” Pacific Legal Foundation. Among the entities Pacific says are destroying the “California Dream” are The California Coastal Commission, the California Judicial Counsel, The California Agricultural Labor relations Board and the federal Department of Fish and Wildlife. Abolishing these would free businesses from “restraints.”

Trumpism, in addition to enabling and encouraging armed insurrection like January 6, picks up this theme. For example, it has demanded that the Securities and Exchange Commission be “defunded.” Because the SEC is examining the proposed merger of a Trump controlled media corporation with another megabucks company, Digital World. If the merger went forward, megabucks provided clandestinely would immediately become multi-megabucks. The SEC has held up the deal, because it involves a nebulous, hard to define Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) supposedly consisting of “shareholders” who are in fact gambling on massive profits for promised investments. Nobody has to have skin in the game, including lawyers, who may be working on contingency. (“Defund the S.E.C.” is Now rallying Cry on Trump Site” NY Times 10/6/2022)

And the leaky line between the communications business and politics may well grow leakier. Texas, where so many bad ideas and practices seem to originate, now has a cable TV provider owned by right wingers which has a locally granted monopoly on service. Its profits then go to not only the campaign funds of city council members who grant its monopoly, but also to candidates for local school boards like that in the Grapevine district, which ran on a platform objecting to teaching about sex, gender and race, supposedly antithetical to “Christian” principles.

The historical (and sometimes hysterical) conflicts and contradictions within and between religions offer hope in a strange way. Humans (and animals) have always found ways to unite as well as ways and reasons to divide. You can perhaps point out to loosely or non-regulated money interests, like real estate, that instead of providing housing, their decisions transform and cheapen the communities they purport to be improving.

Downtown Berkeley is a good example. There are now exactly no movies to go to, local and chain theaters having seen their properties bought up and destroyed to build high-rise dorms for middle and upper class university students and work at home zombies. The once “progressive” Berkeley City Council now seems mostly concerned with granting “development” rights to anonymous corporations who build what they want, when they want. They are granted tax exemptions. Roads are built (and homes destroyed to build them) to facilitate car traffic. Pools and parks are closed, cafes go out of business. If you want to buy a lawn mower or dress or a hammer and nails you have to get to Emeryville, where chain stores abound.

You can read up on these. And maybe spend some time in person, rather than on-line, with friends, neighbors and relatives. Point out that they have elected representatives, though few can name them, and no organized opposition takes them on. Point out that finance capitalism has made it impossible for even those with jobs to live where they work. And more debt with more inadequate promises is advocated in measures like Propositions L and N in Berkeley.

A recent union-funded study says San Francisco workers would have to make $61 an hour – plus benefits – to afford a one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood. This won’t happen until “progressive” elected officials stop being terminally proud of racial and gender diversity, with no thought given to what that diversity actually produces for its “beneficiaries.”

We’ll soon through with this year’s election.

And be free to wonder and work on if, and how, we may be able to navigate the immediate and distant future with hope, not just anger.

(Larry Bensky welcomes comments: LBensky@igc.org)