Over five decades ago, in 1970 with the Vietnam War dividing the nation, US citizens’ lobby Common Cause, where I got my first real job, ran the ad below in the NY Times. The ad was terrifically successful, Common Cause was launched.
Ever since, CC has advocated, more often than not successfully, for campaign financing reform, lobbying disclosure and government ethics rules; won lawsuits on these issues, including at the Supreme Court; and all along investigated and exposed how special interest money – vast amounts of it – is the ‘mother’s milk’ of politics.
Last week Common Cause again made me proud to be an alumnus.
They attempted to run this ad on the front and back covers of the Washington Post, owned by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.
After first accepting, the Post then refused the ad.
The distance the US has traveled in fifty years – in terms of both political corruption and media servility – is breathtaking. The tools available now to violate civil liberties and subvert government integrity with alacrity are truly frightening.
Whatever one thinks of the Musk/Trump bromance team’s substantive policies – on the economy, social issues, geopolitics – I am mystified at how anyone can tolerate the utter lack of moral compass on display daily as measures are taken by fiat to dismantle constitutional principles and foundational safeguards and use dubious powers to neuter (indeed punish and remove) the people and even whole agencies charged with upholding law. The acolyte pseudo-media is avidly cheering this on; the others are mainly sucking their thumbs, perhaps hemmed in by owners’ agendas.
The US is a strong, resilient country and can probably withstand and then recover from four years of idiotic policies. One can hope.
However, what is not as clear is whether the country, with every governmental branch in the hands of zealots (including Supreme Court justices) and others patently unqualified but obsequious, can withstand four years of naked political reprisal and systematic dismantling of the rule of law.
Nothing in NZ’s history or political character would prepare New Zealanders to comprehend the scale and destructiveness of what’s unfolding in the US, or the powers and forces behind it. NZ’s political ethics lapses are trivial by comparison … pre-school.
Try this:
Imagine the absolute most venal and egomaniacal New Zealander you can, make him or her a multi-billionaire, and empower that person with a desk in the PM’s office, a private seat in the Cabinet, and carte blanche to crash through any agency, settle any political score, copy any official data, and line their pockets in the process. Then you might begin to have someone who could aspire to shine Elon Musk’s shoes!
Quite right, Tom. And what about Trump’s position on the invasion of Ukraine by Putin? Outrageous, really.
Terrifying – so much for the champion of democracy that has loudly and proudly proclaimed itself to the world throughout the 20th century. How can this have happened? Has it been a political delusion? If it wasn’t then it is now
Not politically correct but what if we imported a few Americans and taught them to shoot accurately? No that’s stupid! But what’s happening over there is going to have a massive effect on the world one way or another – and not in a good way. I never thought I’d see the day when the US President would put the ambitions of their enemy ahead of their own people and allies. And the greed!—take 50% of the earnings of another country as well as sole rights to raw materials without any support against that country’s invader, and to tell outright lies about everything – if Trump was Pinocchio his nose would be about 20 miles long by now!
The people who voted Donald Trump and his Billionaire Oligarch friends into power did so because the Capitalist money grubbing economic system made them very very poor. In the world richest country. As simple as that. It can be fixed. The cure is called Socialism.
I suggest that you might visit the US and talk to the numerical majority of the citizens there (wealthy and poor) – about why they voluntarily chose to vote Trump in. I believe you will find that they don’t much like him, but he was a better option than continuing with a liberal regime that was blowing their tax money in wasteful and un-mandated ways. Not really an issue with Capitalism per se.
What is really interesting is the scale of NZ news media resource that covered the US election, and left us with no clue that Trump would win, or why.
There might be some pre-school level warnings in all this for NZ …
When I studied at a European university, one of the first advertising lectures stated “It doesn’t matter how they talk about you, as long as they talk about you”. Trump is about my age….he must have gone to the same lecture.