A recurring example of the self-defeating nature of political handling of economics is the looming insolvency of Medicare and Social Security. Like energy issues, the problems have been identified for decades but political will favors short-term spending to gin up reelection support at the expense of long-term planning. So the government borrows against the programs’ surplus during flush times to support present concerns such as corporate subsidies and defense spending, leaving the difference to be made up during someone else’s term. The demographic event of Baby Boomer retirement will also strain the system precisely when incoming payments will see a dramatic decline. The current projection has Medicare insolvent by 2019 (Social Security will hold up until something like 2041), and the growth of the two programs would eventually consume all federal revenue (a parallel to the growing weight of interest on the national debt). Yet any proposal to address the underlying factors by raising taxes, reforming health care, restricting or delaying benefits, or rolling back subsidies or other spending all have unpleasant political consequences, hence the characterization of Social Security and Medicare as the ‘third rail’ of politics.

The $53 trillion asteroid

The comments to the article fall into two, largely partisan groups - those who place the blame on Republican spending and rail against the establishment, and those who blame Democratic spending and call for tangential conservative planks such as expelling illegal immigrants, repealing the Teachers’ Union, etc. More instructive are comparative discussions of programs in Canada and Australia and how they’ve dealt with their own respective shortfalls.

In a provocative yet sensible thought experiment, David Foster Wallace asks if the American idea(l) is still considered worth the price of innocent lives, if “ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life” as is frequently heralded in our history for past generations. While it is always easier to consider any sacrifice in the abstract, the quick rejoinder to Wallace’s notion - that the Americans who died on 9/11 could be considered a fair trade, the martyrs for our freedoms - is to dismiss it as tasteless and disrespectful. Yet how else can we penetrate the shroud of rhetoric that surrounds the War On Terror in the inviolable tones of righteousness? With the very meaning of ‘freedom’ diluted with its repetition as the basis for exchanging civil liberties (freedoms to) in return for the promise of protection from further attacks (freedom from), Wallace invokes the Benjamin Franklin caution that, “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

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Lately, I see systems. This is less Sixth Sense and more Little Man Tate, although without the glowing blue lines or floating numerals. Simply put, subjects that previously held no interest for me - politics (particularly political rhetoric), international relations, macroeconomics, business organization - are suddenly fascinating because they share a common platform of complex systems. This revelation ought perhaps to come as little surprise, given the predilection among the geek set for the systematic and ordered. In a post detailing aspects of the nerd psyche (with workarounds!), Rands describes the obsession with systems as a coping mechanism. For example, the nerd “sees the world as a system which, given enough time and effort, is completely knowable. This is a fragile illusion that your nerd has adopted, but it’s a pleasant one that gets your nerd through the day.” This system-centric perspective is also broadly attributed as the cause for abnormal geek socialization, since most social conversation is not directly results-oriented (I once gave up on conversational segues, much to the bewilderment of my interlocutors, before reading S.I. Hayakawa’s Language in Thought and Action). Likewise it could explain the attraction of conspiracy theories, which neatly knit together compelling fact or fact-like statements to make a reassuring whole that explains some otherwise puzzling event.

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It is eerily apt that on the 402nd anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ foiled attempt in the Gunpowder Plot, we find ourselves again observing a series of failed revolts against oppressive rule. The most recent is the swift conversion of Pakistan from an outwardly-democratic junta to a thinly-veiled military dictatorship. General Musharaff, facing the loss to his political legitimacy under a likely ruling by the Pakistan Supreme Court, pre-emptively declared a state of emergency. His first acts were particularly telling: dismissal of the Chief Justice and substitution with a loyal subordinate, armed guards impounding the rest of the court, acting judges forced to swear an oath of loyalty, widespread arrests of lawyers, and suspension of the Constitution - all undermining any judicial opposition. Political opponents and civil rights activists have likewise been put under house arrest. Following his televised announcement of the state of emergency, all private television stations were shut down, leaving only the state-run Pakistan Television Corp in operation, while FM radio is forbidden to broadcast news, and the press is forsworn from engaging in any criticism of Musharraf or his government. None of these actions seem even remotely related to the militant threats laid out in the televised announcement, although the judiciary is widely condemned for “constant interference” and embarrassments of the current administration.

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So if we accept for a moment that the system of government is driven literally by the flow of money, then what are some structural changes that could constrain its abuse, to rechannel it along primary tributaries instead of individual eddies? One first step is rolling back the anonymity, and thus the appeal, of earmarks on legislation that amend spending to include ‘pork‘ projects. Some progress was made earlier this year by requiring names and some proof of non-interest in attached earmarks in both sides of Congress. But more recently the pendulum is swinging back towards obfuscation, with Congress sidestepping the issue simply by renaming the practice something other than ‘earmarking’ (see also: ‘enemy non-combatant’).

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Political coverage has been slow to grow on me. In the current media environment, though, it is pretty hard to escape. And one theme keeps occurring to me as I listen to stories on the umpteen presidential candidates, the daily do-nothing travails of Congress, or some new scandal of lobbyist influence - so many of the prevailing problems are endemic to the system itself, which reinforces all the behaviors we seem to complain about. The foremost mechanic at work in the system, of course, is the currency of favor. Money buys elections in both straightforward and underhanded ways, and the favor is returned. After all, the government is responsible to We The People it purports to serve at only irregular intervals - 4 or 6 years apart - whereas the drive for money for personal and professional gain is everpresent (does re-election fundraising ever really end?). So it only makes sense that the underlying business of government is to service its true constituencies in the form of corporate donors, private industries, and political patrons. To accomplish this, however, they need at least some cover for their activities to forestall a revolt at that 4 or 6 year interval, which comes in the form of political theater (wedge issues, ideologues, and non-binding resolutions) and is conveyed by the commercial press. How might we explain this improper relationship between the press and politics, previously one of debutante and chaperone, now increasingly a morally-bankrupt pas de deux?

In a timely selection, today’s St. Louis On The Air segment covered the intersection of politics and media. Missouri state Senator Jeff Smith spoke about the factors behind his own failed national campaign, many of which seemed to boil down to the circular, “I’d like to vote for you, but you won’t win.” He also recalled a recent address to the Missouri Scholars Academy, where of the 300-plus MSA attendees, many were following the presidential race - but while almost all knew the cost of John Edwards’ haircuts, only one was familiar with his health care proposal. The superficiality of modern political coverage is persistent - we see Obama in a swimsuit, Hillary Clinton spoofing the final Sopranos episode to pick a campaign song - creating a ‘celebrity politics.’ And The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart gets referred by a caller as a more reliable source for political news than CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. This in turn recalled Jon Stewart’s interview with Bill Moyers, which dealt with the abdication of press responsibility in political oversight and the need for the satire of The Daily Show, as well as his now-infamous appearance on CNN Crossfire where he criticized the hosts for their ‘partisan hackery.’

The segment ended with a brief discussion of the Supreme Court ruling yesterday on a provision of the Feingold-McCain Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, which said in part that “the restrictions on television advertisements paid for from corporate or union treasuries in the weeks before an election amounted to censorship of core political speech unless those advertisements explicitly urge a vote for or against a particular candidate.” The core precept of this, and indeed most conservative/liberal/Libertarian public opposition to campaign finance reform, is that Money Is Speech, and thus restricting money violates the First Amendment. The twin boomerang effects of the decision are that the Act was originally challenged by Wisconsin Right To Life specifically to punish Feingold for his role in blocking Bush’s judicial nominees, and that the decision will likely harm McCain’s own bid for the presidency by reminding conservatives (who resented the restriction) of his role in the original bill. Yet while this narrow ruling was made possible by the rightward slanting of the Court with the appointment of Roberts and Alito (who reversed Sandra Day O’Connor’s previous support for the provision), the three Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas refused to join Roberts’ majority fully because it did not overturn the campaign finance reform in its entirety.

In an even more bald-faced example of the entanglement of journalism and money, we have the New York Times portrayal yesterday of Rupert Murdoch’s recent bid for the Wall Street Journal in terms of personal power (subtly collected under the moniker “Murdochracy”). “His vast media holdings give him a gamut of tools — not just campaign contributions, but also jobs for former government officials and media exposure that promotes allies while attacking adversaries, sometimes viciously — all of which he has used to further his financial interests,” such as courting Trent Lott to reverse his position on TV market ownership to avoid disbursement of his Fox TV holdings. The enticement? A $250,000 book deal through his Harper-Collins imprint (a the memoir which went on to sell a miserable 12,000 copies). Similar book deals with Senators Arlen Specter and Kay Bailey Hutchinson gave him influence over three members of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees with jurisdiction over media policy. More chilling yet is a $1 million deal struck between Harper Collins and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Murdoch also threatened former FCC chairman Reed Hundt with retribution in the private sector if Hundt were to remove any of Murdoch’s TV licenses as the result of an investigation into questionable acquisitions, saying he would not be able to “get a job as dog catcher” if crossed. All this on top of his transforming The New York Post into a self-serving right-wing tabloid, and establishing Fox News as his rejoinder to the perceived liberal bias in mainstream news, contribute to a portrait of Murdoch as ruthlessly committed to the expansion of his holdings by any means necessary and then leveraging his influence via that media to sell his agenda. Where else might that description prove apt? What stalwart member of the current administration would it not characterize?

Even the media feeding frenzy around someone whose name rhymes with Ferris Milton and their potential payment for an interview after their latest misdeeds reveals a clear pattern of a media system that rewards bad behavior. With reported interview deals up to $1 million, not to mention lucrative ‘tell-all’ book deals and made-for-TV rights, the road to riches for the least deserving, even the most reprehensible (cf. “If I Did It”), is well-paved. But while the case for mass media stooping to appeal to the lowest denominator for an audience and thus advertising dollars may be clear-cut, why would venerable news organization abrogate their own responsibility as watchdogs of government? First, perhaps because they are no longer much different from their entertainment-only brethren. CNN created the niche of a 24-hour, all-news format, which now they have to fill - that ticker doesn’t write itself. Competition from other networks and other media such as the Internet further put pressure on the news system to struggle for the sensational ’scoop,’ and leave boring analysis for the back pages of the Times or Wall Street Journal. Unless the WSJ gets bought out by Murdoch, of course, in which anything goes. And second, conflicts of interest are almost impossible to avoid with media ownership so consolidated, which raises the revenue demands of each and thus heightens the risk of economic damage from not playing the game (see also: the hollowing out of original content in the movie business, where sequels and based-on adaptations aim to provide the assurance of a built-in audience for the blockbuster-dependent studios). In the reverse example of Murdoch, speak too critically of a member of a powerful subcommittee, or even a political party, and you may find yourself on the wrong end of substantial FCC punitive fines (ironically established as an response to the ideological straw man of the “wardrobe malfunction” that so paralyzed our nation) or even lost licenses. The payola system works both ways, which makes all of the entangled parties more and more entrenched by the mechanics of the influence trade over time. And ultimately the system favors no party exclusively, only incumbents and those in a position to benefit from the largesse.

In recognition of this mounting challenges to governance, jurisprudence, and journalism, Lawrence Lessig has announced that he will be changing his focus from copyright issues to focus on this “corruption.” The continued popularity of The Daily Show’s irreverence and biting sarcasm show the growth of a new, more media-savvy generation. Knowing how to read behind the PR spin and party rhetoric, and past hot-button distractions, to the structure beneath the system of the political machine is the first step towards dismantling or altering it for the better. Noblesse oblige is dead; in a system of monied political capital, caveat emptor is the watchword now.