Old "New" News

Movement In The Direction of Right Action

I’m reflecting on how I’ve been reading the same “newsbreaking” stories over and over again, for years, with nothing much in corresponding real life changing in response. An investigative journalist will do a story on something—maybe PTSD in people discharged from the military; or abysmal work conditions in slaughterhouses; or the problems arising from policy makers who profit from the decisions they make. It will be well researched and well written, a lot of people will read it and be appalled or outraged or disgusted by it; and then, a decade later, you’ll read a similar story written by a different investigative journalist on the same topic, identifying the same problems as if they’re new. Little or nothing will have changed in the interim.

There have definitely been articles and books written that have inspired changes. Upton Sinclair’s novel about the meatpacking industry and its lousy working conditions resulted in the 1906 passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act. But then a 2016 NPR story outlined the low wages, long hours, and punishing conditions of slaughterhouse work. So: What did the establishment of those laws in 1906 accomplish? I acknowledge that food safety is not the same thing as worker safety, but surely they’re adjacent.

Ralph Nader’s 1965 book, Unsafe At Any Speed, about how car manufacturers chose profits over safety features led ultimately to the establishment of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA). Mark Dowie’s 1977 article in Mother Jones magazine, “Pinto Madness,” reported on Ford’s profit-driven decision to place its Pinto’s gas tank where it was prone to burst into flames after being rear-ended. (My first car was a Ford Pinto. Yikes!!) This shined light on the cost-benefit analysis that corporations—in this case, Ford—do to determine whether or not to include, for example, safety features that would raise production costs. In order to do this analysis, the corporation needs to assign a dollar value to a human life. Ford used $200,000 per human in its 1970s analysis. The Mother Jones article also suggested that there had been industry-government (NHTSA!) collusion in the matter of safety features and deciding not to include them.

Cars have more safety features today, but we know that corporations’ commitment is to their bottom line, not to consumers. So in that sense, we need these articles revealing these dastardly deeds to appear periodically. Wouldn’t it be nice, though, to feel that safety, or education, or health practices really changed as a result of reporting on and awareness of a given issue? That would feel like progress, like we were moving in the direction of more health, more goodness as a society.

I may be unusually prone to believing both in the power of good information to change things AND in the idea that society as a whole wants to get better, is committed to genuine progress. When I was 15 or 16, I read a long article in Newsday, a daily newspaper, about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It profiled soldiers who had returned from Vietnam, their symptoms, their paths to diagnosis, and the difficulty of treating the disorder. Most of these men were likely going to live with symptoms forever. The article also noted that veterans of World Wars I and II had experienced PTSD as well, but that codes of silence and a societal value placed on men sucking it up, as well as a less-developed understanding of the disorder on the professional side, meant that many went untreated. I remember reading the article and thinking, “This is so great that we know about this. Now we won’t have wars any more since war is clearly so damaging to people.” Friends, I was that naive! I believed so innocently and completely in the power of information made public to translate automatically into new policy and practices, to change things. I believed that the decision-makers valued human life and would take action to protect and cherish it.

Exposing corporate, industry, and governmental bad acting is like whack-a-mole. You shine a light on Ford and its Pinto production, and people’s new knowledge will reduce Pinto sales. Meanwhile, Doritos comes out with a new artificially flavored “lime” chip that has green sparkles in it, defying everything we know about good nutrition, and more than nine million people spend more than three hours every day playing Candy Crush.

Big Food, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Farming, Big Banking, Big Education, Big Military—They’re all working all the time to churn out product that vacuums money out of our pockets and into their coffers, while they’re simultaneously securing government subsidies and bailouts and funding that we also pay for through our taxes. So many things in our world have been set up to require us to be profligately generous with the corporations in our lives.

Here’s a non-comprehensive list of the “new” news stories I find myself reading again and again:

*Policymakers benefit financially from insider information. These days, you read a lot about Nancy Pelosi’s exploits, but the practice is widespread and bipartisan.

*An adjacent idea that gets periodic airplay is the porousness between industry and government. Lloyd Austin, our current secretary of defense, is a good example. A retired general, he sits on the board of defense contractor Raytheon, which clearly benefits from any decisions Austin brokers that funnel more Pentagon dollars to the military-industrial complex.

*War, war, war. I read recently that, in 2017, the US had been at war for 222 of its 239 years. (By now, of course, it would be more.) Over the years, I’ve read so many articles, heard so many reports about why we absolutely have to go to war; about the horrors of war; and about the costs—financial, ecological, spiritual, cultural, social, human—of war. Still, we keep warring.

*People in Flint, Michigan continue to watch toxic water flow when they turn on their taps. People in East Palestine, Ohio continue to live with health problems from breathing toxic air.

*Processed food is killing us.

*Monocultural farming practices are killing ecosystems.

*Children are becoming fatter, more diseased, mentally ill, and suicidal.

*We now understand x thing about how people learn; this could help so many people. But it never gets implemented into our educational system for y reason.

I gotta stop, although, sadly, this list could be much longer.

So what is to be done? These are vast issues. To look at one: We know what’s right in terms of our congressional “representatives” benefitting financially from policy they make—It shouldn’t happen. I’m sure they know what’s right too. We all know this, but having people regulate themselves is always a lousy idea. We need a hard separation between industry and policymaking, but how will that come about? I have often wondered how many people of great integrity walking the halls of Congress it might take to turn this big rig around so it points in the direction of justice and right action. Three? Thirty? Three hundred? Who knows? Our current system of voting once in a while, making a selection from crummy options in a multiple choice question is unsatisfying, doesn’t feel like freedom, and ultimately seems an insult to what our hearts know is possible, to paraphrase author Charles Eisenstein.

So what, then? Some thoughts.

*We do need to be looking into different systems of governance, like sortition, in which citizens who have self-identified as being interested in public service are chosen randomly to, for example, sit on city councils. This gets the money out of campaigning, which is poisonous and keeps out good people who don’t have big business ties. It also creates the possibility of more genuine representation. Instead of everybody on the city council being educated to the same level at the same four universities, vying for cash from Big Real Estate and Big Old Money, you have the possibility of genuine diversity. Sortition could mean that a plumber, a teacher, a nurse, a lawyer, a janitor, a performance artist, a security guard, and a trust fund baby all sit on a city council together, bringing their varied concerns and observations to bear on decision-making for the good of a diverse population. I love the idea, and wish it would take hold in more places.

*I’m a localist. I believe in small solutions. Our families and neighborhoods and communities deserve our attention, energy, and input. It’s where we know we can actually make a difference; the scale makes sense. Gathering, getting together with even one other person, to do a thing, to discuss while you do a thing is radical and meaningful. Everything now is pretty much set up so we worship at one or another screen every hour of the waking day. Efforts to counter that, to interact; to garden; to prepare, eat, and share real food; to talk; to make; to help each other out, this is goodness at work. It’s cumulative, it builds, it means something. And we are in charge of it in a way that we are not in charge of whether our country goes to war (again) or not.

*I have faith. I have hope.