So who is "they?"

As in "they want us not to be able to vote"

So it’s the end of September and I hope you’re holding up ok! I’ve survived my first month of classes. More details to follow, once there’s more to report. In the mean time, thanks for your ongoing support, whether it’s by reading, being a paid subscriber, sharing the newsletter, or maybe most importantly taking action for democracy! I’m grateful to be in this work with you.

A contemporary issue of “they”

So the informal theme this month was “They want us…” They want us less educated, they want us poor, they want us “out of control” (as in, having less autonomy). I never said who “they” was, but there’s an article I read recently in Texas Monthly about a guy named Tim Dunn. The article subtitle was “The Billionaire Bully Who Wants to Turn Texas Into a Christian Theocracy.” The article talks about how he sees politics as a holy war, and his enemies are the environment, public education, and non-Christians…and I would bet the majority of Christians are also the enemy because they support the environment and public education. He’s a key funder of the extreme right wing of Texas politics…to such an extent that many of us have forgotten that Texas was once a purple state with prominent progressive leaders. (I love Texas politician Jim Hightower’s saying that “There’s nothing in the middle of the road except yellow stripes and dead armadillos.”)

Anyhow, Dunn has just sunk millions of dollars into a campaign to place Christian community colleges and trade schools in every county in the US, as well as investing in right-wing media alternatives that you may never have heard of but that he’s aiming to have replace mainstream media over time. Tim Dunn isn’t unusual for the major donors to campaigns across the country, even though he is probably more extreme in his religious beliefs.

Now I am a fan of trade schools and community colleges, but starving public ones so people will have to go to Christian ones, and potentially breaking the connection between trade jobs and unions in the process (although that’s a leap I’m making based on the history of wealthy funders undermining labor and right wing extremists aligning with anti-labor efforts, rather than an explicit part of his agenda) continues to concentrate wealth and access to education to those who already have it.

A population with fewer critical thinking skills and less access to accurate information, with fewer high wage skills and fewer high wage aspirations, and a population with less ability to make their own determinations about what happens to their body or their ability to move freely—that’s a population that, at least in the short term, makes more money for the people who already have money.

My friend Cathy Meyers-Wirt taught me to ask the question “who profits from me believing this thing I’m reading or seeing or hearing?” It’s worth, as we consume media being bought and sold and consolidated, asking who’s paying for it, and what their profit motive is, so we can more effectively analyze the goal of the message. I know that’s asking a lot. Thanks for taking it on.

We’ve been here before!

I want to talk about another time in US history when a few people held onto most of the wealth and therefore held onto power. The gilded age happened from the late 1800s to the early 1900s; as we moved from agriculture to industry, some people really profited and a lot of people really suffered. Conditions for workers were dangerous and pay was small. Meanwhile, the wealthy did things like host parties where people wore costumes that cost up to ¼ million dollars in today’s money. People with money bribed politicians to, for example, keep the transcontinental railroad as profitable as possible for the railroad company, while workers had virtually no federal protections. But back then, labor unions began to emerge, and journalists began to dig for dirt on the “robber barons,” and growing support for progressive values that ultimately led to electing the people who voted in the New Deal, political legislation that created worker protections and curbed corporate excesses. Just a reminder that even if they want us to have no options, our ancestors fought worse conditions and worse odds and won; so can we.

The Bosses of the Senate, Joseph Keppler, Punch Magazine, January 23, 1889

Our ancestors fought back!

The ancestor I want to lift up is Ida Tarbell. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, John D Rockefeller’s wealth came from Standard Oil, a company that worked hard to eliminate the competition. Tarbell’s dad had been an independent oil contractor, so she saw firsthand what Standard Oil did to the little guy, and her investigative journalism from 1902-1904 stoked outrage across the US and led to anti-trust litigation that broke up the monopoly that was Standard Oil. We have a lot of companies now that wipe out competition so they can gouge consumers, and investigative journalists help us learn about that corruption today as well. So here’s to Ida Tarbell, and her tenacious commitment to transparency, accountability, and justice. May we support the investigative journalists following in her footsteps.

One more thing!

GOOD NEWS: A colleague of mine shared this exciting model of efforts to preserve public education through taxing the rich in Massachusetts; anti-education funders have flooded my community (Oakland) with huge sums of money for school board races to move forward an agenda to de-fund public schools (in the name of “school choice”), so when political leaders decide to resist those efforts and instead make sure public education is robust and well-funded, I think that’s great news.