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At a recent conference bewailing the loss of civility in political discourse (now there’s a lament for the ages), former Republican Congressman and current head of the NEA Jim Leach, was quoted on an allied concern: the role money has played in the decline of media credibility.

Leach connected our information infrastructure to Citizens United, saying corporate campaign money has harmed civil discourse in Washington and elsewhere. “Money is the elephant at the door in Washington,” Leach said. (The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, which defined corporations as individuals with First Amendment rights to free speech, is widely seen as facilitating negative political campaigning. There has been less focus on its effect on the availability of the accurate information on which citizens rely to participate in the political process.)

“Rather than conflate a corporation with a person, and money with speech, should not the focus be shifted to the transactional relationship inherent in speaking and listening?” Without limits on independent expenditures made by corporations, more money will be spent on negative attack ads for political campaigns that will further taint the tenor of the debate and erode the focus on real issues, Leach said.

“At one end, uncivil speech must be protected by the courts, but filtered by the public,” Leach said. “At the other, moneyed speech must not be allowed to weaken the voices of the people. The Constitution begins, after all, ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Corporations.’”

A recent (May 27) issue of the New Yorker carries a perfect example of the behavior Leach indicts. 

The article reports on the fate of two documentaries. The first, by Alex Gibney, an Academy Award winning filmmaker, was called “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream.” It was scheduled to air on PBS on November 12th. The movie had been produced independently, in part with support from the Gates Foundation, and was intended to be an exploration of the growing economic inequality in America and a meditation on the often self-justifying mind-set of “the one per cent.” It focused on the lives of wealthy inhabitants of a very expensive apartment building in Manhattan.

Unfortunately for Gibney, one of the residents of the building was David Koch. Among other things, Koch was a member of the board of WNET, the New York PBS station, and was being solicited for a large contribution. It doesn’t take much imagination to predict how difficult the battle between journalistic ethics and money became–even at PBS. WNET offered Koch the opportunity to rebut the reporting, and ended up doing a “roundtable” immediately following the show, to facilitate a critique of its message.

At least that movie aired. Others–as the New Yorker piece reported–did not. Another documentary–this one about the influence of money on American politics after the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in the Citizens United case, had been accepted by the Sundance Film Festival and would compete for Best Documentary. In the wake of “Park Avenue,” it lost its funding. Money not only talks–it silences opposing views, and suppresses unfavorable coverage.

Recently, the billionaire Koch brothers have expressed interest in purchasing a string of newspapers. Given their willingness to silence opposition and engage in propaganda, that’s a chilling proposition.

However benighted the decision in Citizens United, I doubt seriously that the Justices understood the dimensions of the Pandora’s box they were opening. We’re just beginning to see what happens when money manufactures “fact.”

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It’s always newsworthy when some survey or other identifies Indiana as a good  place to do business–the media jump on the announcement, and whatever administration is in power trumpets the result as evidence that its economic development policies are working. (Pay no attention to the data showing slow-to-no job growth and wages well below the national average–we’re awesome, I tell you!)

Typically, these “surveys” are conducted by organizations with, shall we say, points of view. But they are eagerly accepted, at least by those who share that particular ideological perspective. So it was interesting to read this column by Neil Pierce on a research study conducted by Good Jobs First, debunking the entire “survey” enterprise.

“If there’s one thing people need to take away from our study,” says Greg LeRoy, executive director of Good Jobs First, “is that there’s no such thing as a state business climate. Businesses’ needs for various kinds of services and facilities vary too much.”

LeRoy makes a point that should be obvious: cities are what matter.

States aren’t the important entity that businesses should be looking at anyway. The real theater of action is the metro area. Metro areas in a state differ, he notes, and sometimes differ dramatically – in local property tax levels, in skilled labor, quality of infrastructure, schools and colleges, transportation linkages, and proximity to customers and suppliers. Tally those real-world conditions, he suggests, and one sees more of the truly significant factors that qualified site-selection experts advising companies actually look for, but which the raw state rankings miss.

Peter Fisher is a researcher with the Iowa Policy Project. As he notes,

All the studies have major technical faults. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council, for example, has a scale that gives states better scores for such features as low progressive tax rates, no state minimum wage, absence of family leave, fewer government employees, less government spending and no renewable energy mandates.

But as Fisher notes, the same scoring omits (and clearly fails to value) what’s likely to matter a lot more – the quality of public school and university programs, state investment in infrastructure, business incubators or entrepreneurship programs at public universities and state venture capital funding.

Whatever one may think businesses should value when making decisions about relocation, the proof of the pudding, so to speak, is in the results. When researchers compared the economic growth of states identified in the “good business climate” surveys with those not so identified, they found absolutely no difference in economic performance.

Evidently, a pro-business climate (as measured by these surveys) doesn’t translate into a state’s superior attractiveness to real businesses. It’s sort of like that gorgeous girl we all envied in high school, because we knew we couldn’t compete–all the guys would be drawn to her, like the moth to the flame. When we drag our husbands to the 25-year reunion, she’s still gorgeous–and still single.

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Every once in a while, I glance at “Let It Out,” the Star feature that showcases reader remarks. Yesterday, I was stunned to read the following:

“It appears our President is more willing to risk the lives of people flying than to cut entitlements. A sad and dangerous state of affairs.”

In two brief sentences, the writer displayed two of the traits most responsible for today’s toxic and retrograde political environment: ignorance and lack of empathy. Ignorance, because the flight delays resulting from the sequester—while inconvenient—pose no risk to safety; because the terms of the sequester (a result of Republican intransigence) gave the president no discretion to determine what budgets would be affected; and because the power to “cut entitlements” rests with Congress, not the president.

It’s one thing to be uninformed or willfully ignorant of basic facts. What struck me most forcefully about the remarks, however, was their mean-spiritedness, their absolute lack of awareness or empathy for the recipients of what the author dismisses as “entitlements.”

Despite the disproportionate attention paid to them, flight delays are merely an annoyance—albeit an annoyance to the more privileged among us. Other consequences of the sequester have included delay or termination of cancer treatments for people on Medicaid, and cutbacks to Head Start, to nutrition programs serving pregnant women and children, and to Meals on Wheels, to name just a few. That these cutbacks are causing real pain to less fortunate, less politically-empowered people evidently hasn’t occurred to the commenter–or doesn’t matter.

Too bad those who contribute to “Let it Out” don’t have to sign their names. We’d know who to avoid.

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