by Louis Vandenberg

Tue Sep 19, 2006

My Republican opponent, Ken Calvert, has been in office since 1992. He's had a pretty easy time of it, since this district has been gerrymandered to favor the Republican Party, producing a twelve and a half point difference in party registration.

But there's more at work in his otherwise vacuous and hopefully soon-to-be-terminated, tenure than just that. Despite the 44th's proximity to Los Angeles (fifty miles east, halfway between LA and Palm Springs), this district is a pretty fair representation of the "What's the Matter with Kansas?" phenomenon. (To be fully accurate, it should be noted that the most recent district redraw ( http://www.vandenbergforcongress.com/... ) did take in a sliver of Orange County, including the lovely city of San Clemente, which is certainly coastal.) The demographic in what is known as the "Inland Empire" is largely working and middle-class, and as Thomas Frank wrote about Kansas, people here also vote against what must reasonably be considered their own interests.

What beguiles the working people of the Inland Empire to vote for Mr. Calvert year after year after year? Rationally they shouldn't, because Mr. Calvert has, in his own very under-the-radar manner, unquestioningly supported the whole failure-is-success Orwellian Bush worldview, which does nothing for them in any practical sense.

Readers here don't require an exhaustive rundown, but basically, if Bush wants it, Calvert--a willing tool--votes for it: the endless Iraq war for a dubious Mullah-driven "democracy" that grows more distant and illusory daily, the injurious Patriot Act, domestic spying, a bankruptcy bill written by credit-card companies, a MediCare bill written by pharmaceutical companies, No Child Left Behind, and so on...  

And being a well-paid fully-fledged life member of the Republican puppet show hasn't been enough for Mr. Calvert.  According to a front-page above-the-fold story in the Los Angeles Times, Mr. Calvert's earmarks have "enhanced" the value of property he purchased and sold profitably in a suspiciously timely fashion.  His emoluments have also been covered on the CBS Evening News, local papers, a variety of websites, blogs and here on DailyKos.

I've lived here in the IE more than two decades, at first merely observing Inland life's rich pageant and then becoming active in the '90's. What I've seen unfold here is part of a larger phenomenon, regionally and nationally.  In the state of California, the blue-red/liberal-conservative divide in California used to be north-south; no more. Now, it's coastal-inland. The red in this otherwise blue state is now on the inside.  

People who live in the Inland Empire are not idle-rich country club Republican types.  Many are former Reagan Democrats who never came home.  They work hard and don't have much time to read the newspaper, surf the net, etc. Most of the information they get is received during their long daily commutes.

Commutes? Yes. Many people who live here do so for the cheaper housing. They can live in bigger, better homes than they could ever afford in Orange, Los Angeles or San Diego Counties, but they pay with time spent on the I-15, or 91 and 60 freeways.

When Ronald Reagan eliminated the broadcast Fairness Doctrine in 1987, these commuters became captive prey for the demagoguery and propaganda of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, who creating a sub-genre of talk radio that took off to great success beginning in 1988.  From then to now, the right wing saturated the popular mind in radio talk shows from coast to coast, hosted by a rogue's gallery of bloviators, pulling huge ratings and creating a mighty wurltizer of disinformation.  The gravitational pull they created in the media market caused a tectonic political shift to the right in all media.  

With the Fairness Doctrine gone, the right wing did something which would have been previously inconceivable: they actually made partisan propaganda profitable. Wingnut broadcasters have made hundreds of millions spouting lies, distortion and vilification. It was a delirious "win-win" for them.  They "won" by making money beyond the dreams of avarice, and they "won" by gaming the media, which tilted elections to Republicans.  

With elected power came the ability for Republicans to game the system even further (they're doing this again right now), with FCC deregulation of radio and TV ownership restrictions giving even more broadcast licenses to fewer corporations with which to amass ever more influence over the public mind.  Private partisan profit and governmental power, hand in hand.  

Advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry because it affects consumer choices.  What if you had propagandists masquerading as talk show hosts, airing what amounts to Heritage Foundation/Frank Luntz-style GOP "commercials" for legitimate content, to affect voter's choices?  You couldn't afford that type of partisan "advertising;" the dollar value would be astronomical.

What we have come to now in American media is the racketeering of information and it's system of distribution--an ideological monopoly, married to media corporations, the craven functions of which are to make money, regardless of the public interest FCC license obligations, and to politically herd the passive listener with hate, fear, piety and greed to the desired GOP vote outcome.  Profitable for media corporations and the Republicans yes, but at the price of American democracy.

With that kind of unprecedented broadcast power, it wasn't that hard for the GOP to swindle the hardworking people of Southern California's Inland Empire, who were trapped in their cars for two or three hours a day, assuaging loneliness and boredom by mainlining narcotic radio wingnuttery and transmuting, per their self-description, into dittoheads.  Studies showed that they perceived themselves to be informed, but actually knew little compared to newspaper readers or NPR listeners.  These lonely drivers, after years of listening, would come to bay at a Republican paper moon on Limbaugh's cue.

Corporate media today is beyond the dreams of Orwell, or the 20th Century totalitarians who inspired his dystopian world, in its breathtaking reach and impact on popular thought.  The formerly gray process of mass control, which Orwell codified, is not now about state-controlled media, per se.  With profit and power in lockstep, Big Brother is now ruggedly handsome, privatized, commercial and attractive--a human face, focus-grouped to give you confidence in bad policy and keep you safe from terror.  Transformed by modern marketing and technology, today's propaganda sparkles with graphical or auditory flash and sizzle. The lies are packaged, marketed, made appealing and sold as gold-standard truth.  Fool's gold, sadly.  

As lies get bigger, the commuting dittoheads find their paychecks shrinking, their jobs shipped offshore, their medical costs soaring and their futures looming in shadows.  If their kids won't have health care, a good education, Social Security, a decent job, or peace and prosperity, at least same-sex marriage will remain illegal.  

That's the Bush social contract.  

That "contract" should be called "The Old Deal," because that's what it is.  His goal seems to be a return to the Gilded Age.  Is it a mere coincidence that we now have the greatest separation of rich and poor since that time?  And that the Middle Class of the 20th century--the greatest standard of living for the greatest number of people in the history of the world--is going away fast?  Bush has become the "reverse FDR," which is exactly what he wanted to be. The Bush family never cared much for FDR, nor his Social Security, the antipathy for which G.W. has made abundantly clear. (By the way, I hear that Dick Cheney ordered FDR's New Deal kidnapped and renditioned to Eqypt for torture interrogation, a bit of water-boarding, and some long-time standing in a hypothermia cold-room. A signed confession will be ready in time for a no evidence show trial.)  

As things get worse for the average American, the mighty Wurlitzer of the Republican Party plays on, despite the growing gap with reality.  As the gap grows, the question the GOP media-industrial-political complex asks is: who are you going to believe--Rush Limbaugh or your lying eyes?  Problems they can't spin away, they blame on liberals and Democrats.  But reality will have its day.  For the working and middle-class commuters of the Inland Empire, it has been gas prices which have been the cruelest dose of Bush reality.  Many drive guzzling SUV's and trucks, and are seeing what they saved in buying cheaper homes in the IE being lost by the sheer cost of commuting.

And where is journalism today in reporting these issues?  Henry Lewis (H.L.) Mencken said that journalism should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted."  Today's corporate media journalism, with some few exceptions, comforts the comfortable and afflicts the afflicted.  How did this happen?

Reagan's FCC chairman, Mark Fowler, drunk as many were in the Reagan administration on Adam Smith's marketplace miracle kool-aid, held that a television is nothing but "a toaster with pictures."  In their feral ideology, information is neither good nor bad, nor balanced or unbalanced; it's only a commodity, over which the marketplace should have the only say.  This "Reagan's toaster" thinking has toasted this country to a crisp.

The Republican noise machine makes reasoned democratic discourse impossible.  Nothing true, fair or real can be heard over the ranting GOP spokesmodels, with their symphony of Frank "define and destroy" Luntz wordplay.  Their think-tanked talking points are a swindler's list designed to have good-hearted hard-working Americans give away their democratic birthright and their futures to corporate criminals such as Ken Lay, crackpots such as Pat Robertson, and miscreants such as George W. Bush.  

The problem with an unregulated broadcast media "marketplace" is that demagoguery will trump fact and reason in popularity every time.  Anger is emotional energy.  It's exciting.  Factual information is soooo boring and reasoning is hard work.  Demagoguery gets good ratings, and reason gets cancelled.  But a democracy needs fact and reason in order to survive.  Fairness doesn't happen on its own in a marketplace driven by sensation, scandal, terror, shark attacks and missing blondes; the oxygen of democracy needs to be supported by law.

In my non-candidate life, I have a number of pursuits.  I criticize the media, but I'm also involved directly in media.  For a number of years, I have produced a weekly public radio show in Los Angeles (Kos himself was on the show a few months back). Several years ago, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was featured on the program. He said some things on the air that I had been thinking since the early '90's and talking about publicly since I first ran for office in 2000. I was happy to hear Kennedy independently echo my own convictions: the two core problems of our democracy are 1) we need to fundamentally reform campaign finance, and; 2) we need to reinstate the broadcast Fairness Doctrine.  

By campaign finance reform, I mean that we need public financing. Everything we see today, from war to deficits, from toxic politics to toxic waste, emerges from our defective political infrastructure, which starts fundamentally with how campaigns are financed.

A true American patriot sounded a seminal warning about campaign finance forty-five years ago.  Dwight Eisenhower's 1961 Farewell Address, spoke of "the military-industrial complex," saying that the potential for a "disastrous rise in misplaced power exists . . . We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.  We should take nothing for granted."  The military-industrial complex is a product of our defective campaign system.  And Eisenhower's is the paradigm statement describing the "complex" symptom of the larger disease--campaign finance laws. (The original draft said "military-industrial-congressional complex," making the case even more explicit.)  America did not heed Eisenhower's warning.  Now there are a number of "fill-it-in"-industrial complexes, (like the media-political-congressional industrial complex) besides just the one that serves military suppliers and war profiteers.  With its penetrating insight, so relevant today, history will regard the Eisenhower Farewell Address as one of the most important American speeches of the last century.  

Without campaign finance reform, we default to a form of legalized bribery--the worst democracy money can buy. And without a real media, a balanced media, our democracy suffocates.  The crisis we face prompts me to recall an important historical question: "Well, doctor, what have we got," Benjamin Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention in 1787.  "A republic, if you can keep it," responded Franklin.  Can we?

Where we are now, with this system and this media, with Bush in office and the neocons in power, controlling all the branches of government, is where Nixon's Attorney General John Mitchell, in 1972, predicted we would be.  In a moment of exultation, Mitchell boasted "This country is going so far to the right you won't recognize it."  It's thirty-four years later.  Among other things, Bush has taken us into an unnecessary war, the world despises us, we have the biggest deficits in history, Bush is engaging in mass spying on America, and arguing for torture and the elimination of habeas corpus.  Do you recognize the United States in all that?  And there's much further to fall. We may well be on the brink of something much worse-- a man-made or, rather, Bush-made, American disaster.

I've been told by many of the supposedly better minds in politics that reform is hopeless, that we must live with our bad system and try to make the best of it.  You know, the kind of thing the DLC says.  Americans who love this beautiful country cannot accept that.  We must engage to make things better, individually and collectively-- where, how, and when we can.  I believe our nation is in peril and that we all must try, despite the odds, to preserve, protect and defend it. Isn't this what patriotism means today?  For me the "where" is the California's 44th congressional district, the "how" is being a candidate and the "when" is now.