RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Opinion) Deliciously isolated in the mata, happily far away from Covid and Delta, Texas abortion battles, US and Brazilian electoral politics, the financial problems of Chinese property giant Evergrande Group and all the rest of the dystopian goings-on that fill the media ecosystem, it should be easy just to enjoy the monkeys cavorting in the trees, the myriad symphony of bird calls, just commune with nature and ignore all those things turning the world upside down.
But it isn’t.
Unless you have the strength and discipline to simply shut down all outside contact (and I’m afraid I don’t), you are sure to pick up at least titbits of ‘breaking’ news or hear a campaign boombox from the beach through the trees. And along with reading fiction, you can get sucked into the proliferation of recent books and articles dealing with the increasingly dangerous fragmentation of democratic societies. That’s what has happened to me.
What is ‘truth’ and what is speculation or downright falsehood is often hard to discern. A good example is the Brazilian president’s clownish performance at the annual United Nations General Assembly. The unvaccinated Bolsonaro lauded the “new Brazil with regained credibility” using what ‘Folha’ labeled “distorted data on the environment, the pandemic, and the economy”.
In addition to having his performance derided by nearly everyone, refused unmasked entrance to a restaurant, he was forced to join other unvaccinated heads of state for slices of pizza on the sidewalk outside the UN. Further, his most recent Heath Minister, Marcelo Queiroga tested positive for coronavirus; worse, under Anvisa regulations he could not fly back to Brazil and is confined in quarantine to a New York hotel room.
Sadly, lies like Bolsonaro’s, have become the common currency in today’s world. As Donald Trump proved: why feel limited by the truth when no one seems to care? Or perhaps, we have become so divorced from reality that we have come to believe our own lies.
Steve Schmidt one of the founders of The Lincoln Project wrote: “The front of that fight is a space where the lie is confronted with the truth. That is the battleground. And it plays out in 1 million ways; But a democracy cannot survive in a world where the lie and the truth stand equally.”
This disruption of previously held ‘truth’ didn’t happen by accident. In his excellent book, ‘Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America – a Recent History’, journalist and historian Kurt Andersen, with almost forensic detail, traces the laser-focus of a cabal of America’s richest and most powerful CEOs to follow economist Milton Friedmann’s “doctrine”: that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.”
With that as the intellectual foundation, what became (and still exists as) ‘The Business Roundtable’ channeled billions of dollars into transforming the largely liberal civil debate on real issues into weaponized conservative talking points for the largely white male and uneducated ‘base’. These lies and conspiracy theories are amplified by talk radio hosts and the largely right-wing media controlled by the billionaires.
If the public could be turned on to the 1984 political campaign television commercial, “Morning in America”, promoting the candidacy of the increasingly popular Ronald Reagan, that public was seen by the billionaires to be ready to let greed become respectable and applaud as private profit and market values became supreme over all other American values.
For the influential lawyer Lewis F. Powell, author of a memo, ‘Attack on American Free Enterprise System’, it was time for the right to wage war to claw back the social and political gains that followed Roosevelt’s ‘New Deal’: this war was, in Powell’s view, to be fought fiercely at the level of academia, the law, politics, and the media.
It was not long before there was a proliferation of Think Tanks, funded discreetly by the super-rich. The ‘Cato Institute’, ‘Heritage Foundation’, ‘Federalist Society’, ‘Law and Economics’, and their ilk were producing ‘authoritative’ research papers providing support for Powell and the subsequent belief that profit was king and was to be maximized at every opportunity. If that meant cutting health care, pension, and other employee benefits, so be it.
One can almost smell the cigar smoke from contented CEOs capping a Business Roundtable lunch in 2019 when their PR agents released a new policy statement, without irony, overturning an earlier one that defined a corporation’s principal purpose as “maximizing shareholder return”.
Why shouldn’t they feel their strategies had paid off handsomely: whilst in 1980, about one fifth of national income went to the least wealthy 50% of Americans, that figure had now dropped to 12%; the top 1.5 million American households now owned 39% of America’s wealth (with the top 0.1% of households, those worth over US$100 million, owning a staggering 22%), as well as 56% of all stocks. For ‘Roundtable’ participants it was certainly a sunny morning in America.
The new policy statement flipped from the old one and committed members to serve “not only their shareholders but also deliver value to their customers, invest in employees, deal fairly with suppliers and support the communities in which they operate.”
One would have thought that’s what they should have been doing all along, while cynics looking at Amazon’s warehouse culture, fast food chains, and the poultry and meatpacking industries, might take the statement with more than a grain of salt. These were bromide lies perhaps believed by the speakers but with about as much credibility at Bolsonaro’s “new Brazil”.
A flock of chirping birds just dove into the pool for a drink, disturbing a seemingly resident dragonfly who always keeps swimmers company. How much better to enjoy all this unfettered frolicking than all that outside noise.