Kochs Move To Acquire Ownership In Time/Life, Which On The Political Spectrum Was Previously. . . (Let Me Tell You) - Our Media, Never In a Good Place, Shifts Toward. . ??

Before we get to the "Time Goes Bye" part of this article (Koch Brothers stalking ownership of the once mighty Time Magazine), let's speak of "times gone by." 

I want to tell you a story that involves looking way back.

At the time of which I am speaking I was quite certainly in college, although when I think back remembering it feels almost as if I was still in high school, that I was so recently out of.  Since I was listening to WBAI on the radio, I had to have been in college and that means the year was probably 1970 or 1971.

On WBAI I heard a truly startling and appalling story about recent events in the Vietnam War.  I was sure it was going to be big news and probably would have a big influence on a lot of people when they too learned about it.  I wanted to see how else it would be reported, and I waited with eagerness for my weekly Time Magazine to come out and see how the story was featured.  When Time came out I scoured the week’s Vietnam War coverage and the event wasn’t there at all, not even a hint.  I was fit to be tied.

Once upon a time I had supported the Vietnam War, in high school seeing it in the basic good guy/bad guy terms in which my father had explained it to me: We were helping good guys against bad guys.  By the time of the story I am telling, I had shifted over in my thinking to oppose the war, having been chagrined to learn that by that time I did shift I was only just catching up with father’s own changed thinking to oppose the war.  Somehow, father and son, we had neglected to have that updating conversation before I told my father how increasingly troubled I was by the way I could not reconcile and sort through to believe that there were any truly good reasons for fighting a bad war.

My father, who voted for Lyndon Johnson instead of Barry Goldwater, was a Republican.  He was firmly against the war before he died at the end of 1968.  In addition, although I knew there were reasons my father had disliked Robert Kennedy based on my father's own early personal, youthful encounters with Kennedy (my father was from a similar Irish Catholic family that had contacts with the Kennedys), my father supported Robert Kennedy and his campaign for the White House that terminated with his assassination.  My father liked Kennedy’s stance on race relations (about which my father was growing increasingly passionate) and on the war.

Unfortunately, my memory is dim so I cannot tell you exactly what incident happened in Vietnam that went unreported by Time, but I was outraged and I was going to do something about it.  I called the Editor In Chief of Time Magazine to complain.

You might think this was absurdly presumptuous of me to do, and how could I possibly get through to someone of his stature.  I did get through, and I was encouraged to make the phone call by my mother.  My uncle, Ralph Delahaye Paine, Jr., had been an important man at Time/Life.  Among other things he had been Managing Editor and Publisher of Fortune Magazine, part of that Time/Life/Fortune triumvirate.  Part of our family lore (and there were many stories about my uncle) was how my uncle had been in charge of the Time/Life staff as they retreated back as the Nazis advanced through Europe and France and my uncle remembered vividly how vital it was for him to get everyone successfully out ahead of time.  Many of that Time/Life staff he sought to get out safely were Jewish.

The editor of Time Magazine took my call.  I am named after my uncle.  (And to be 100% complete, my daughter, born days after my uncle died in 1991, is now also.)  I played the relationship card, mentioning names, when I made my call as my mother encouraged me to do.  The editor’s secretary took my information and the editor picked up.  I am not going back at this time to check on that editor's name.  As I am telling a story after a long intervening time where my memory has some fogginess, it is probably better to leave names out.

What I remember was that the editor graciously took my call.  He probably enjoyed talking with me as an unusual break in his day.  I remember that he was more than polite, but I think I detected some bemusement on his part respecting my naive passion as he explained that there is lots of news to print and editorial decisions to be made and that not everything can always be printed.  It just doesn’t happen that way.  I was too young to have heard many of these kinds of explanations in my life and, no doubt I was out of my league knowing little about how best to express things in this kind of situation.  Some young people are savants and have natural instincts about these things at a very young age: Not me.

I don’t think my energy on the subject carried me over to write an official “letter to the editor” in hopes that it might get published.  I couldn’t have whipped one out at that point in my life and I certainly didn’t yet know the formula for quickly commanding attention, or tricks to succinctly synthesize the politically complicated.  My unwritten letter with respect to something that Time had not deigned to mention in the first place would not have been published, I’m sure.

I tell this story mostly to emphasize that, back in the day, Time Magazine and the Time/Life publishing empire were not exactly found on the left of the political spectrum in terms of the way they saw the world or what they chose to report.  I also tell the story to bring up and emphasize that where you get your news can powerfully affect your point of view because of what is and is not included.

After a few more years of reading both Time and Newsweek cover to cover every week (they were both weeklies for those who have forgotten or were not around), I finally terminated my subscription to Time because I found it so much more conservative than Newsweek when reporting on the same items.  Part of me felt a bit like a traitor.

And it also seemed as if I was acting against my own self interest: I owned a tiny amount of Time Incorporated stock that had been given to me as a baby present.  Escalating in value in those past decades, it was, in fact, my sole success with stock ownership.  My father had coached me in learning the benefits of investing in the stock market by encouraging me to buy Studebaker stock with some of my saved allowance combined with his contributed subsidy.  The purchase was not a good idea: Studebaker was an American automobile manufacturing company and in 1963 they closed the plant in South Bend, Indiana where they were based.  I learned then that what happens to stock when companies fail to thrive is not pretty.

Nowadays, what is happening to the stock of ever less profitable legacy news organizations like Time is not pretty, except that the stock of Time Magazine after a period of decline has reportedly just jumped up 25% percent because the Koch bothers, Charles and David, are circling around to engineer a takeover of the ownership.

This is yet more frightening news about the ownership of our news sources.  We are seeing that as income and wealth inequality become ever more pronounced, as the finances of news organizations grow increasingly anemic (reducing their relative price to that of play things), and as the government fails to enforce anti-monopoly laws and regulations, the sources of much of our news is increasingly supplied by just a few disproportionately wealthy men (or their corporate extensions) that hold some very peculiar ideas.  Those ideas include bizarre thoughts about how everyone else should sacrifice so that they can become wealthier, how we should continue to destroy the planet with exhumation and burning of fossil furls, and the glories of spending on weapons and waging wars.

But, to go back a bit, this is just the half of it, because however much worse it can be to have “news” provided by the likes of the Koch brothers, what I indicated at the outset with my story about Time Magazine and its previous conservative non-reporting about the Vietnam War, doesn’t do justice in giving you a true flavor for how biased-by-omission so much news media reporting has been in this country over the years.

Last week, Edward S. Herman died on November 11, 2017 at the age of 92.  Among other things, Mr. Herman was coauthor with Noam Chomsky of “Manufacturing Consent.” Some say he was the principal author.  That important and influential book was about how media cooperates with the powerful so that the electorate capitulates to what those in power want.  That consent manufacture includes a lot of non-reporting (and skewed reporting) of events that happen in our world.  In this vein, The New York Times virtually didn’t report Mr. Herman’s death.

The disregard was mutual. . .

. . . We understand that Mr. Herman’s last published work was about the New York Times.  It was about the Times' omissions and some very unreliable reporting on the part of the Times over multiple decades, a complete disaster if for those endeavoring to formulate their world view. His article ran in the July/August 2017 edition of Monthly Review: Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies- The New York Times, 1917-2017.  The article covers a lot of ground.  And, (to get around, in a sense, to where we began) it includes a section about misleading reporting about the Vietnam War by the Times, with criticisms you might not have thought of until you hear Mr. Herman express them eloquently with many others.

I suggest you read it next.  Consider your read of Mr. Herman's last solemn article as a commemorative mediation on things missing: the lost, the departing, and things lost when they were never included in the first place.

How Big Was Women’s March On Washington (Just in DC Alone)? Here Are A Few Clues (Including That It Was Much, Much Bigger Than The Trump Inaugural And Magnitudes Greater Than The Biggest Tea Party March)

(Click to enlarge- if you dare.) Was D.C. Women's March crowd "over million" marchers by a healthy margin? Probably!  Images of D.C. Metro, eventually too crowed to us from NY1reporting.  See below for aerial comparison views.  Two crowd pictures upper right from avenues north of National Mall.

How big was the Women’s March on Washington?  There were crowds marching everywhere, all over the world and all over the U.S.A.  But how big was the Women’s March on Washington, just the people who were in D.C.?

Click through to see sweeping video of a portion f the Women's March crowds flowing through Washington DC

We know it was really big, bigger by far than the gathering for Donald Trump’s inaugural, but let’s obsess a bit about exactly how much bigger and how big, because it’s fun: The more we obsess, the more fumed DT gets. You know how Trump wants to insist that he had a really big inaugural crowd (asking the Parks Department to scour for pictures as proof) . . . It’s with something of the same urgency that he wanted to tell us he had “big hands.” . .

. . . O.K. Donald: tell us how “big” your hands are: We enjoy all your “alternative facts.”

How big was the Woman’s March crowd?  It’s true that very large crowds like this are hard to count.  A company called Digital Design & Imaging Service, is trying to make an estimate of attendance at the Women’s March and says it will put its data up for others to assess when it is done.

Washington DC.  Washington Monument in distant background.

Meanwhile, some clues:

(click to enlarge) Hard to get a perfect three-way overlay (its best to use the available interactive sliders to do two comparisons at a time), but here are three event overlaid: The Woman's March on right, On left the Trump inaugural with an upper middle square patch showing the much more populous Obama inaugural.

The First Obama Inauguration in 2009 Estimated To Have 1.8 Million People.- Trump Had a Fraction of That and Women’s March Had Multiple of Trump Crowd.  The figure that has long been widely given and accepted for the number of people who attended Obama’s first inaugural address is 1.8 million. Perhaps 460,000 of them were back on the National Mall rather than closer up (it is believed to have been the largest ever crowd in D.C.).  The New York Time recently reiterated this as it made comparisons (via pictures and graphing on a map) of that crowd to the relatively scant groupings of people at the 2017 Trump inaugural.  See: Trump's Inauguration vs. Obama's: Comparing the Crowds, by Tim Wallace, Karen Yourish and Troy Griggs, January 20, 2017.

(One estimate of the size of Obama’s 2013 crowd is about 1 million.)

Professor Keith Still, of Manchester Metropolitan University in England, a crowd safety consultant providing his assessment to the Times, estimated the Trump inaugural at “about one-third the size of Mr. Obama's,” although looking at the side-by-side pictures of the number of people on the mall those days the estimate seems generous to Mr. Trump.

New York Times article: Crowd Scientists Say Women's March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump's Inauguration,

In another article (two days later), with more sets of side-by-side pictures and graphs on maps, the New York Times published that the “women's march in Washington was roughly three times the size of the audience at President Trump's inauguration, crowd counting experts said Saturday.”  (The experts: Professor Still again, this time with his colleague, Marcel Altenburg also at Manchester Metropolitan University.)  See: Crowd Scientists Say Women's March in Washington Had 3 Times as Many People as Trump's Inauguration, by Tim Wallace and Alicia Parlapiano, January. 22, 2017.

Does this mean, ergo, that the crowd at the Women’s March was somewhere around the size of the 1.8 million crowd for Obama’s first inauguration?  It would seem like it should put it somewhere near that number and it would be nice if it were that simple and easy to know for sure. People will probably settle on some kind of lesser number when all the analytical dust settles.  A much more seat-of-the-pants estimate from ThinkProgress estimates the Women’s March crowd at just double that of the Trump inaugural.

Interactive CNN overlay with slider for comparison

CNN has a fascinating interactive visual where you can use a slider of fairly exactly overlaid photographs to go back and forth to make enormous crowds either appear or vanish by going back and forth between the Obama 2009 inauguration and Mr. Trump’s.  CNN also gives that Obama attendance figure at 1.8 million.

Interactive USA overlay with slider for comparison: Trump inaugural left vs. Woman's March right

And, oh joy, USA Today has such an interactive feature where you can similarly use a slider to go back and forth to compare the crowds between Trump’s Friday inaugural on the 20th and the Woman’s March the next day on Saturday.  PRI has more interactive sliders that do the same thing.  Trump railing about the subject of crowd size when speaking to the CIA the day of the march (with his traveling clap-track- or “claque” in attendance) said that he’s seen an unspecified “network” report his inaugural “drew 250,000 people.”

Washing D.C. Metro System Ridership For Woman’s March Was Second Highest Ever.  The Washington Post reported that, the day of the Women’s March, the Washington D.C. Metro rail system had the second highest ridership day of in the system’s history, 1,001,616 trips.  The highest in history was Obama’s 2009 inauguration, 1,120,000 trips.  Obviously, even though this Saturday figure for the Women’s march is 89% of the figure for the Obama inauguration day it doesn’t mean that the Woman’s March crowd was 89% of the 1.8 million from 2009.  That’s because there are other users of the system, a base number of riders to start with.  And with to and fro, each ride does not represent a single person each.

As a barometer, on Saturday, September 12, 2009, the day of the Taxpayers March by the Koch brothers funded Tea Party, the total DC Metro rail ride figures for the system came out to a total of 437,000, which was, according to Los Angeles Times reporting, 87,000 over the average daily ridership of 350,000. That accompanied an  “expert” research professor crowd estimation of about 60,000 to 70,000 for that crowd at the beginning of the event.*  The Washington Post reports that 570,000 trips were taken on the rail system the day of Donald Trump's inauguration.

(* Looking at pictures to gauge the size of this largest ever Tea Party rally can be deceiving because some of the people looking to brag about the size of the crowd put up a picture of someone else’s event apparently from the 1990's when the buildings on the National Mall weren’t even the same- “alternative fact” visuals?  Also in the `false crowd image’ category is that Trump’s campaign apparently hired a crowd of actors, $50 per, to cheer him when he made his June 16, 2015 announcement that he was running for president, arriving in the lobby of Trump Tower descending an escalator. .  And then it didn’t pay the $12,000 bill for the actors until October.)

If the daily D.C. Metro ridership is roughly near the 350,000 it used to be then, by subtraction, the other differences in ridership would work out to: 220,000 extra rides the day of the Trump inauguration, 651,616 extra rides the day of the Women’s March, and 770,000 extra rides the day of the 2009 Obama inauguration. . . If proportionate ridership was a perfect measure, then Trump’s crowd would be about 28.57% the size of Obama’s 1.8 million (514,260) and the Women’s March would be about 84.6% the size of Obama’s 1.8 million (1,522,800).

Click through to watch fast motion video of a zillion Woamen's Marchers in Lincoln Park Washington DC (a mile and a half away) walking two miles to the march because the DC metro was too jammed to handle so many people and walking was faster.

But ridership is not a perfect measure.  I went to the Women’s March and our bus, due to problems, was late starting out and getting there (so much for getting up in NYC at 3:30 AM).  When it arrived with other buses behind us, the forty or so people from my bus were advised not to use the Metro because it was too overcrowded.  We all took the advice that it would be quicker (about an hour) to walk the two miles from RFK Stadium and like so many others, we did.  Returning at the end of the day, we walked again, an hour and half with another stream of marchers, because the line to get into the entrance of the DC Metro was two blocks long.

Marchers waiting "in line?" at Shady Grove station to get into Washington DC Metro station to go to the March.

Other friends of ours who also came by bus didn’t use the D.C. Metro because they successfully arranged to have their bus drop them off and pick them up close to the site of the march.

Those who traveled to D.C. by train, and there were many of them, got into Union Station, a close walk to the march and probably never used the Metro either.  Some people stayed with friends or at a hotel nearby enough to walk.

One thing that probably helped the 2009 Obama inaugural crowd attain the size that it did is that Washington D.C. is a largely black town in terms of its inner citizenry: There were certainly a lot of people nearby to the mall who had an interest in attending the inauguration of the nation’s first black president, and, if we may venture an understatement, probably had much less of an inclination to attend Trump’s . .

. . As we walked our hour-and-a-half return to the stadium we saw people arriving at a church with an apparently mostly black congregation who were apparently returned from the Women’s March. Going to and from the march, as we walked through a neighborhood that seemed to have a significant black population we were, time and again, warmly greeted by residents.  Along much of way, obviously the result of some organizing effort, there were a multitude of signs in the front yards with marvelous quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Quotes like:

•    “Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.”
•    “I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.”
•    “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”
•    “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
•    “Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.”

It did not immediately occur to me that these signs might have been, not only for our viewing, but also for attendees of the Trump inaugural the previous day, although those attendees would have been less likely to have been walking two miles due to a overcrowded Metro system.  By the way: The day of the Trump inauguration there were also many people there to protest, not applaud.

I grabbed my camera: Here's a small fraction of the parked buses we were rolling by.

Requested Bus Permits For Trump Inauguration Were Less Than On-Quarter Those For the Women’s March.  In the days leading up to the Trump inauguration and Woman’s March it was clear that the escalating number of city bus parking permits for the respective events meant that the bus-delivered attendance component of the attendance at the march was far outpacing that of the inaugural.  By January 18th, two days before the inaugural, the Chicago Tribune was reporting that 1,800 buses had registered to park in the city on the day of the march while “in contrast” approximately 400 buses (22.22% as many) had registered to park in the city the day of the inauguration.

How many finally arrived in the end?  Reportedly, charter bus parking spaces that can be available at RFK Stadium number 1200.  That’s just one of the locations buses could park in the city.   As of the 15th The Hill reported they had all been booked for the day of the Women’s March.  It’s anecdotal, but when our bus arrived to park at the stadium it was one, like other buses before and after it, that the parking lot managers were directing to park on the grass rather than the asphalt, indicating the lot was over capacity.

Other Indicators? 

It is important to remember that the crowd of the Women’s March was everywhere in the city.  It was not only on the Mall, but all the side streets and avenues.  I realized this when I reached an intersection and in all four directions, as far as I could see, I saw crowds bigger than I had ever seen before.  The Woman’s March in Washington was just one location in the U.S. that day where the crowd arriving was so unexpectedly large that the idea of routing it on a formally directed march route had to be abandoned.. .   So when one compares visuals of Obama’s 2009 inaugural with the Women’s March one needs to think about how far the crowds were roaming for the March.

Obama 2009 inauguration crowd

Enlargement of area of photo above that shows the absence of a crowd far back near the Washington Monument

Picture from a New York Times article of pictures from around the world with Washington Monument much closer in the background shows how crowds in Washington D.C. roamed all the back at the Monument. 

Although pictures of the 2009 Obama inaugural looking over the Mall toward the Capital where the inauguration was held show thick crowds coming back all the way into the foreground (i.e. towards the Washington Monument), pictures of that inaugural looking back the other way, where you can see even further toward the Washington Monument, show that there was space vacant of crowds way back close to the Washington Monument, far form the inaugural itself.  The New York Times, starting off its article of collected pictures from around the world, showed this same space crammed with Women’s March marchers.

“Summing” Up

It will be a while before people settle on their conclusions about how many people were at the D.C. Women’s March.  When we arrived at the RFK Stadium parking lot with still another hour’s walk to go before we joined the crowd, city employees ushering us on our way were relaying to us that the reports they’d received before 11:00 AM said the crowd we were headed to join had already topped 500,000. . . . The Million Man March of October 12, 1995, originally estimated by the Parks Service at just 400,000 marchers was ultimately more formally estimated by experts at around 837,000 (The service doesn’t do estimates anymore).

When we got back to New York City (where there had been one of the many sister Woman’s March that same day clogging the streets for hours- 400,000 according to a New York Times article lamenting the insufficiency of NYC public gathering space, vital cornerstones essential to democratic ideals that they are), our local NY1 news station reported that the D.C. Woman’s March had a crowd of over one million.  Could that be the number?  While we will probably never know for sure, whatever the number, when zeroed in, may ultimately have been, it seems safe to say that there is a good possibility that. in D.C. alone. the number exceeded one million by a very healthy amount. . .

. . .  That said, obsessing further almost doesn’t matter because the D.C. march was just one of the marches that was held that Saturday.  There were sister marches of remarkable proportions with millions more jamming the streets and plazas and public spaces of cities, towns and, localities all around the U.S., and all around the world.  (National Notice published images of crowds at more than 80 U.S. localities, while naming and linking to such images from other cities around the world.)

To know the numbers of all those other marches will take a whole lot more of this kind of obsessive calculation. . . Has there ever been a larger demonstration all around this country or the world?- Probably not.

. . . To be continued?

From National Notice collection of Women's March crowd images at 80+ localities in U.S.A.: six of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left: Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Denver, Boston, New York City, Austin

From National Notice collection of Women's March crowd images at 80+ localities in U.S.A.: six more of the demonstration cities, clockwise from upper left:Montpelier, San Jose, Asheville ,St. Paul, Indianapolis, San Diago

Hot News Connection: 62 Billionaires Now Own More Than Half The Planet’s Population And 2015 Far Outpaced 2014 as Planet’s Hottest Ever Year

Headlines and accompanying graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change- Are hey related

This week brings two jaw-dropping headlines accompanied by graphs that document significant progressions of some unwelcome change.  With the news of each, arriving together, one must wonder about the possible relationships between the two. .

The Guardian reports that, according to a new report by Oxfam, our accelerating inequality means that the richest 62 people in the world are now as wealthy as half of world's population.  What's more, 1% of people on the world own more wealth than other 99% of the population combined.  See: Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world's population, says Oxfam- Charity says only higher wages, crackdown on tax dodging and higher investment in public services can stop divide widening, by Larry Elliott, 18 January 18, 2016.

More than half the world's wealth held by just 1% and just 62 people owning as much as half the world's population?  If you believe that we live in a world where money is power and probably increasingly so, then an exceedingly small set of individuals hold an awful lot of power.  As for how fast this situation is getting worse, the Oxfam report tells us that only five years ago in 2010 this power of holding as much wealth as half the world's population was dispersed among 388 multi-billionaires.

On this side of the Atlantic the New York Times has just reported that 2015 was earth's warmest year by the widest margin on record; outstripping 2014, the previous record setter.  This means we have "two back-to-back record years," the odds against which are 1 out of 1,500 unless. . .  Yes, worsening climate change with the prospect of annually increasing temperatures is undeniably here.  See: 2015 Far Eclipsed 2014 As Wordls Hottest Year, Climate Scientists Say / 2015 Was Hottest Year in Historical Record, Scientists Say, by Justin Gillis January 20, 2016.

Climate change is definitely here.  It is phenomenally destructive to our planet and yet the world is doing very little about it.  Why?

The Oxfam report on the increasing concentration of wealth tells us a little bit about climate change:

. .  while the poorest people live in areas most vulnerable to climate change, the poorest half of the global population are responsible for only around 10 percent of total global emissions. Meanwhile, the average carbon footprint of the richest 1 percent of people globally could be as much as 175 times higher than that of the poorest 10 percent.

Another Oxfam report cited in a footnote to the above amplifies that, "The richest 10% of people produce half of Earth’s climate-harming fossil-fuel emissions,"  See:  World's richest 10% produce half of global carbon emissions, says Oxfam,  the Guardian, December 2, 2015.

Probably more important than the correlation between wealth accompanied by disproportionate consumption, and therefore much larger carbon footprints, is that the poorest in the world are the most vulnerable to the costs of climate change.  That's exceedingly relevant because, if money is power, then those worst affected by climate change are those least powerful to compel civilization to adjust and chart a better course.

It is clear that large carbon footprints and excessive consumption can be laid at the doorstep of the wealthiest, even citing the those amongst the tippy-top 1% with alarmingly cavalier consumption.  A recent hard-to-believe report, "Elite Emissions: How the Homes of the Wealthiest New Yorkers Help Drive Climate Change” by the Climate Works for All coalition concluded that with NYC buildings being responsible for "70% of New York City’s emissions" that generate the "greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming . . a mere two percent of the city’s one million buildings use 45% of all of the city’s energy."  See: New York Post- Rich New Yorkers' homes are ruining our air, by Hana R. Alberts, November 20, 2015.

Using the Forbes’ World’s Billionaires list to investigate The Elite Emissions report was able to present a list of  buildings with their high energy consumption figures.  It includes buildings with the homes of those ranking among the top 62 wealthiest people in the world, among them: The apartment building housing the home of David H. Koch (740 Park Avenue- the building made infamous by a book and an Alex Gibney documentary about it,) Alice Walton (515 Park Avenue in a a $25 million apartment), and Donald Trump (721 5th Avenue- "Trump Tower").  David Koch, along with is equally wealthy brother Charles, are, in whatever order you want, the sixth and seventh wealthiest multi-billionaires in the world.  Alice Walton is the eleventh.  Christy Walton and Jim Walton are higher up the list than Alice, right after the Kochs.  Climate science denying Donald Trump, with only an estimated $4.5 billion to his name, is way down the list of the world's wealthy at #405 with only a fraction of their wealth.

Of much more concern than whatever may be the aggregate personal carbon emissions are of these particular, exceedingly wealthy individuals, is the effect these individuals have on what systemically contributes to and establishes the societal infrastructure for climate change throughout the world.

An article in the New York Times wrote about how the richest multi-billionaires are now so wealthy that they are forming their own political parties: How Billionaire Oligarchs Are Becoming Their Own Political Parties,
by Jim Rutenberg, October 17, 2014.  Certainly, many already perceive the Tea Party, in view of its funding, as being essentially the party of Koch.

Of course, there is very visibly also Trump.  And, now, apparently, goaded or "galled by" the success of the relatively small-change Trump in this election cycle, Michael Bloomberg (multi-billionaire #14 on the Forbes list of the world's wealthiest) has disclosed renewed ambitions to run for Unite States President.  Mr. Bloomberg's credentials are environmentally dubious despite a lot of PR to the contrary.  Endorsed fracking he was  then appointed `Climate Change Envoy’ by the United Nations.  Bloomberg is looking to run as an independent candidate declaring that he would spend "at least $1 billion" of his estimated $35.5 billion fortune to run.  Mr. Bloomberg reportedly doesn't like the Wall Street-critical Sanders and 'laments' what he considers Hillary Clinton’s "lurch to the left" to keep pace with Sanders. See: Bloomberg, Sensing an Opening, Revisits a Potential White House Run, by Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman, January 23, 2016.

Trump, Koch and most particularly Bloomberg present examples of the cycle of how money and power reinforce each other.  Some may regard Bloomberg's $1 billion proposed to be spent on his campaign, or the cash similarly splashed around Trump as expenditures.  Others may view it as an investment that will more that repay itself no matter who is elected.  When Bloomberg declared his interest in politics to launch his career he was not exceptionally wealthy, but when he completed his third term as mayor he was, having for a time become the richest man in the city.  In the process he far outpaced the wealth increase of most others on Forbes list.

From Noticing New York: Two charts overlaid, showing how Bloomberg's increasing annual wealth makes the increasing annual average wealth of the rest of the "Forbes 400" look virtually flat by comparison

   
The question is what these multi-billionaires do with the huge influence they wield. In theory climate change will adversely affect everybody.  Indeed, we have heard some billionaires tell us they are mobilizing efforts to do what they think should be done to curtail climate change.  See: Bill Gates forms billionaires' super league against climate change- With the COP21 conference starting today in Paris, wealthy investors including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg team up to give governments a helping hand, by Adam Gale Monday, 30 November 2015 and Top 10 Billionaires Saving the Planet, by Sarah Backhouse, August 21, 2015.

That doesn't necessarily mean that one should agree with the solutions the multi-billionaires promote, or trust their motivations.  One reason to be skeptical about the solutions that get fielded when multi-billionaires mobilize is if you believe that, as we grapple with climate change, there won't be one "silver bullet" top-down solution.  Instead there will be a "mosaic of solutions" generated myriad fashion mostly from the bottom up. What's more Jane Jacobs ("The Economy of Cities") suggested that one upside to large populations is the multiplication of individuals and groups who can innovate to advance society and improve what we do.  If that's a theory you subscribe to, then leaving the half the world's population high and dry of a share of resources with which to participate negates that advantage.

Whatever good some billionaires like Tom Steyer may do with respect to climate battles like Mr. Steyer's opposing the Keystone XL oil pipeline there is all the weight of what is being done to counteract their better efforts.  Steyers is way down the Forbes list of the wealthy (#1190) and not even a multi-billionaire, with only an estimated $1.61 billion to his name.

We find this assessment of the fight between our financial giants at Bill Moyers' Moyers and Company site:

Fred Wertheimer, a long-time advocate of campaign finance reform, tells the Times that a political world where billionaires set the agenda is not a democracy. "This is about as far away as we can get from `representative government,'" he said. And when it comes to politically active billionaires, it would seem that there are more who profit from inaction on climate change than who want to see that action happen - not a good sign for those who agree with Steyer's politics.

See: Bill Moyers- The Billionaires on Both Sides of Climate Change, by John Light, February 19, 2014.

The Koch brothers are the prime example of such "politically active [multi-]billionaires."   With their combined wealth that exceeds that of any individual on the plant they are politically active, spending to fuel climate science denial and inaction about how we are raising the temperature of the earth and they are also fighting public health care (probably it's actually the same thing).

It is not just the first 62 multi-billionaires who are as wealthy as half the world.  What is remarkable is how many more multi-billionaires are up there on the Forbes list in the top sliver of the 1% fraction that holds more than half world's wealth.  You would probably not have to go far down the list before you had collected yet another small set of outrageously wealthy individuals who also collectively own and control more wealth than the poorest half of the world's population. The frightening thing is that many of those multi-billionaires also are either joining the Kochs in stymieing effective measures to address climate change, or they are doing little to prevent it.

For example at #100 on the list we find Stephen A. Schwarzman, head of the Blackstone Group, with an estimated personal wealth of $9.8 billion who lives in the same hugely energy inefficient building as David Koch.  (Great as Schwarzman's wealth is, it is just 8.76% of the combined wealth of the two Koch brothers, and far less than the $121.7 million which is the estimated combined fortune the three Waltons command.) Along with promoting fracking and a list of other objectionable activities, Mr. Schwarzman has been involved in selling off New York City Libraries.  The Oxfam report on escalating income inequality calls for a "three pronged approach" to counter that trend, one prong of which is "higher investment in public services."  Certainly the disinvestment of selling libraries (with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's approval) is the opposite of of such investment and what is otherwise called for if we are to start restoring equality.  The other two prongs called for by the report: are "a crackdown on tax dodging" and "higher investment in public services; and higher wages for the low paid.". .

. . .  As for tax dodging, Mr. Schwarzman has been famously aggressive in promoting what are viewed as dodgy tax loopholes. Mr. Schwarzman may be low on the Forbes list in terms of his wealth, but Forbes has compensatingly ranked him higher on another of its lists:  On the Forbes list of those with power in the world Forbes ranks Schwarzman as number 62.

It seems that Mr. Schwarzman has predilections to tilt the playing field on at least two fronts: Against those who could be trying to catch up and close the gap with him, and secondly, in favor of the tax system advantages that will continue to move him even further ahead.

Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary under Clinton, has a new book out, "Saving Capitalism For the Many, Not the Few," that addresses the escalating income inequality we see in the United States.  Median national household income is declining (after adjusting for inflation, an American family earns less in 2013 than it did in 1989) while productivity gains from economic growth collect at the top.  Mr. Reich tells us to remember these recent changes are not because of economics per se, but because of the way that the rules of the market are being written by those with wealth and power, people like Mr. Schwarzman.  . .

. . . Studying the law of property and property ownership in law school and urban planning school I was taught that the rules of property ownership are formulated based, in part, on concepts of what will ultimately benefit society, husband its resources and forestall waste.  The current decimation of our environment while wealth concentrates in the hands of a very few who mostly encourage this devastation or who sit idly by should be viewed as evidence that the rules we have now are not working and need to be rewritten.

If the Government Shutdown Wasn’t About Obamacare (And It Isn’t), Then It Was About?. . . Ready To Be Hot Under The Collar?

Montage above: Koch funded anti-healthcare creepy Uncle Sam ad, David and Charles Koch from Forbes 400 and from a story about  Koch funding of climate change science denial.

After a national election in which the Republican Party substantially lost the presidential election, lost the U.S. Senate, and lost the popular vote for the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican Party has been deferring to a fractional extremist fringe within its ranks, allowing that faction to steer the whole country into a government shutdown and near default on all its financial obligations, theoretically to prevent the enactment of “Romneycare” (now renamed “Obamacare”).  Really?  Romney/Obamacare is a healthcare plan that was originally developed by and sought by the Republican Party.  It was ultimately adopted by President Obama as a concessional compromise that gave the Republican Party what it once said it wanted.

This is really why the government was shutdown and we went to the precipice of default at huge financial cost to the country?  That’s why we risked complete and total chaos in the economy?

Really and truly?

Absolutely not.  Think again.

There are quite a few theories about why the Republicans, chose to prostrate themselves before their Tea Party faction, shutting down the government.  None of them actually accurate.  They are:

    1.    Republicans believed that the Romney/Obamacare would be a complete and total disaster so damaging to the country that it was worth bringing the country to its knees, incapacitating it and threatening the very worst in order to prevent its rollout.

    2.    Republicans actually believe the opposite, that Romney/Obamacare will be a tremendous success, that Americans will wind up loving it and will become (as predicted by Republican Senator Ted Cruz) addicted to its “sugar” when implemented, making it impossible to repeal.  Since even Republicans, including very possibly subcategory Tea Party members might, when actually experiencing the law, decide they sincerely like the result of having healthcare, it is important to nip this in the bud . . .  because, if the Republican and Tea Party constituency realize that the doctrinaire lies they have been fed about Romney/Obamacare aren’t true, it could, among other things, undermine the future credibility of the Republicans and the Tea Party on other matters was well as this.

    3.    Republicans believe that being generally obstructionist will always benefit them in the polls.  (Not exactly the way things are working out.)

    4.    As expressed in a recent Paul Krugman column, Republicans are “deeply incompetent,” so much so that they “can’t even recognize their own incompetence.”  (See: The Boehner Bunglers, October 6, 2013.)

    5.    Shall we, for the sake of a more profound debate, stay away from the perception, often expressed by comedian-commentator Bill Maher (however much unfortunate truth may actually be in it) that Republicans oppose everything Obama does simply because Obama is black?

What is really going on?

Sometimes things in this world turn out as no one could expect, chance having its way, and unexpected results coming out of the blue.  But there are many other times when it is instructive to look at outcomes and assume they were intended from the start.  In this regard, it is valuable to note the recent and well-documented New York Times report that orchestration of the current shutdown crisis was planned way in advance, going back to at least January/February of this year.  According to the Times, “The billionaire Koch brothers, Charles and David, have been deeply involved with financing the overall effort.”  See: A Federal Budget Crisis Months in the Planning, by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Mike McIntire, October 5, 2013, accompanying timeline graphic here: House Republican Efforts to Repeal or Weaken the Health Care Law, October 5, 2013.

So, are we to believe that the number one priority of the Koch brothers for which they would shutdown the United State government is denying healthcare to American citizens?

Within days of the Times article the Koch brothers through their chief corporate spokesperson issued a denial of involvement in the shutdown as part of an attack on the healthcare program with an October 9, 2013 letter.  Notwithstanding, when that letter is read carefully against the documented facts it is really not much of a denial.  See: Kochs Deny Pushing for Shutdown Over Health Law, October 9, 2013.

One hint that the manufactured crisis was never really truly about opposition to the Democrats’ passage of a  Republican-formulated healthcare law is that in the waning days of the crisis, as an immediate default on government obligations was about to be avoided, the dialogue had readily shifted from being about the healthcare bill to being about other things, mainly broader government spending and general budget matters.  Like defense spending?: No, that wasn't talked about. . .   One of the problems for the Republicans when they tried to halt the roll-out of Obamacare by defunding the government is that Obamacare is self-funded and therefore rolled out nonetheless.  The other indication of what all of this craziness this is really about is that resolutions sought by the Republicans involved kicking the can down the road with deferral of dates so that the nation will potentially be kept in a state of constant crisis with more of this craziness almost guarnteed to transpire again in the future.

If all this drama and damage to the country has not actually been about the Koch brothers wanting to block a healthcare program, what is it really about?   . . .   Instead of believing that the Koch brothers have an intense, burning and paramount desire to deny healthcare to Americans (which seems rather absurd), let's think about what the Koch brothers are really interested in and where they direct most of their other political spending: They direct that money to climate change science denial and to the frustration of any efforts to societally address the issue of global warming.

The Koch brothers are vastly wealthy and their wealth comes principally from the extraction of fossil fuels.  With an estimated personal wealth of $36 billion each this year, Charles and David Koch are now tied for fourth place on September’s Forbe’s 400 list.  If we think of them as a single united unit of family wealth then the Koch’s jump to the head of that Forbes list alongside of Bill Gates and place well ahead of the $58.5 billion that earns Warren Buffett his Number Two status on this list. Lesson to us all: The Koch’s wealth has been rocketing up concurrent with their involvement in politics.

Would American industrialists really do something as outrageous as wrecking the government for the sake of advancing their personal wealth and private industrial pursuits?  Is that so very different from putting the fate of the entire human race and the rest of the planet at risk with climate change— or simply a mere subset of such behavior?

How is the attack on healthcare and the government shutdown connected with efforts to fend off people doing something about climate change?  Just think what would be happening if we had not been embroiled in this silly mess about preventing Romney/Obamacare from going into effect: With a working government we would very likely be proceeding to the biggest priorities at hand.  We might therefore be taking measures to deal with climate change at this very moment.  Even if we weren’t dealing with climate change right now we’d certainly be getting to it considerably sooner.

For how many weeks and months has the issue of the pending government shutdown been consuming all the oxygen in the media for any discussion of anything else?  Attention everywhere has been diverted as we heard about this silliness 24/7 in ad nauseam detail.

It goes further than that.  At the same time that we haven’t we heard anything about what the government ought to be doing about climate change we also haven't heard about the reverse: We haven’t heard anything about the Trans-Pacific Partnership treaty (TPP) which will go a long way to prevent government from doing something about climate change.  In fact, most Americans are probably unaware that the TPP exists at all or that it is a stealth corporatist attack on government regulation, including government regulation of such fossil fuel climate change game-over business activities as hydro-fracking.  It is, if you will, another envisioned form of government shutdown, intended to replace government control of corporations with corporate control of governments.  See: Saturday, October 12, 2013, The Other Government Shutdown Now In The Works (One You Are Not Hearing About): A Corporate Replacement Of Government Via The Trans-Pacific Partnership Treaty.

At first blush it might seem odd that John Boehner, Speaker of the Republican House, would have sacrificed so much of the Republican Party's reputation, deferring to the Tea Party faction, the extreme end of his party financed by the Koch brothers, rather than letting majority rule solve the problems.  Of course, the analysis is offered that with such things as gerrymandered districts, average and middle-of-the-road Republicans are more afraid of being ousted in primaries than in being perceived by the general electorate as extremist, but it is important to know that the Kochs don't just finance the Tea Party.   The "moderates" are beholden to the Kochs as well, even before you consider whether Koch brother money can be used to threaten in primaries.

The visuals below are for the purpose of illustrating something the last set of election results have probably not significantly changed: How the Koch brothers have contributed to over half the members of the House and half the members of the U.S. Senate.  They are from the one-hour Alex Gibney (Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room and Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer) 2012 documentary “Park Avenue: Money, Power & the American Dream” about income inequality in America, including very particularly its corrosive effect on politics.

The Zeitgeist of the Tea Party, and now the Republican Party as well, is an extreme refusal to allow the government to work.  One can't help but notice that for the Koch brothers and their fossil fuel industries gridlock that preserves the status quo is a win.  So, yes, in this regard, those who perceive a working healthcare program as a threat to Republicans are in a sense right: Because if your goals is to have a dysfunctional government you want the public to see as few examples of successful government programs as possible.

But, I suggest to you, in the end, crippling the government is only an intermediate goal:  The end goal is to defer the day of reckoning for the industries like the Kochs' that are fast and furiously bringing us climate change that, unaddressed, we are less and less likely to survive.  Feel any heat under your collar?