It's Strictly Business

 

The title of this piece is probably known to most Americans, since it comes from that classic of all classic films, The Godfather. And actually, there are several iterations of the line in the film, whose characters repeatedly insist that “It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.” The “It” of course, refers to murder—which is always said to be done not for personal reasons, but only for business reasons. This theme may be one of the reasons The Godfather was and is so popular: it encapsulates, in vivid form, the dominant American paradigm—the primacy of business over all. “The business of America is business,” said Calvin Coolidge in 1925. And that paradigm has never varied. In the United States, equality—of opportunity, of access, of legal rights—may be trumpeted more loudly and get the most press, but the real ethic that defines everything is business. Business in its rawest, and often most deadly form. 

My thoughts have  turned in this direction because of an incident that occurred a couple of weeks ago, and was then brought home forcefully two days ago. The initial event took place when my remote to operate my Insignia TV suddenly stopped working. I immediately figured that it was a problem with the batteries (though I’ve had the TV for less than a year, so I was a little dubious that they could wear out so soon). The problem was that I couldn’t see where the batteries were hidden: there was no obvious cover to lift off, though there was a kind of latch. But when I tried to manipulate that latch, nothing happened, and, moreover, I could not see an opening or edge to lift. So, next day I went to Google, and keyed in ‘problem with remote for Insignia TV.’ I figured that the manufacturer’s website would come up and afford me some help, or at least a look at the manual (which I’d lost). But the very first entry Google presented was this: https://www.justanswer.com/insignia-tv/troubleshooting. Not looking closely, I figured this was connected to Insignia, so I clicked on it, and got justanswer’s website, which led me to fill in some personal information (I should have stopped there, but was eager for a solution), and then offered me instant help via a chat with one of their “experts”—for one dollar. That seemed reasonable enough, and I agreed to have $1 taken from my PayPal account. They also offered me continuing help for $46. a month, but I declined that. Then the guy they gave me on chat simply wrote, ‘remove the batteries and replace them.’ But of course, that didn’t solve my problem at all; I couldn’t find the removable cover to access the damn batteries. I kept trying to convey this  to the “expert” but he was impervious to my pleas, finally offering me the phone number for Insignia’s tech help. That was more like it, so I signed off justanswer and called Insignia. Within minutes, a very helpful woman talked me through the removal of the cover (it’s the whole back of the remote, the openings being very smoothly hidden) and I found the batteries, with a now-simple solution. 

So my problem was solved. But two days ago, a week or so after my actual problem, I got an email from PayPal, saying that my account had paid the $1, which was fine, and that $46.00 was being deducted monthly from my bank account!! WTF?? I had expressly indicated that I did NOT want the monthly service. But this scam operation, Justanswer, had somehow slipped the monthly service into active mode, and got me on their monthly service plan. Bastards. I realized that there was no use trying to argue with these swine, and that I needed to get in touch with my bank to stop payment (this after making sure no charges had been paid yet). So I called the bank, and after objecting when they said it would now cost me $31. just for a stop-payment order (I explained loudly that if they charged me, a long-time customer, for that service, I would cancel all my accounts. They quickly found a way to do it free of charge), I got them to issue the stop order to prevent Justanswer or PayPal from billing me through my bank. Then I called PayPal (can’t reach these guys either, so I started a chat), and after much manipulating, found a page to cancel the justanswer order. PayPal subsequently sent me emails to say that they had found in my favor and would reimburse me for any charges (there weren’t any.) I then rested; but after a little reflection, I decided to go back to PayPal and transfer the small amount I had out of there and to my bank, figuring there was no sense leaving anything for the bandits at justanswer to try to steal. I have since received numerous emails from both PayPal and justanswer apologizing profusely for any inconvenience, and wanting me to rate their service! My response has been a repeated request for them to go fornicate themselves.

Now, what I am still left with is my discontent, no, my outrage, at the casual way Google routinely enables this larceny. Because it was Google, in the first place, that made most prominent the Justanswer solution to my problem. Placing this option first led me to believe that I was being sent to the manufacturer, or its agent, to solve my remote problem (and by the way, I have since used the Duckduckgo search engine to ask my remote question, and the first response they offer is a link to Insignia; so it’s by no means necessary to place ads first). This means that Google, because these Justanswer fools pay them for advertising, gives their scam prominence and pride of place such that the unwitting like me tend to go there and get bilked. 

I have posted angrily about this on Facebook, and they, too, are complicit. Because what Facebook did was turn my angry rant into an opportunity to dominate my post with a huge visual of a Justanswer mechanic working on a car. So my complaint is turned into favorable publicity for the very scam I was complaining about! Both these giants—Google and Facebook—are thus in the business of serving not you and me, but their ruthless advertisers (and using you and me as fresh meat for these vultures). What’s more, several friends who saw my post have patiently explained to me that, usually, the first option that Google posts in response to a request for information is—you guessed it—an advertisement or two from one of their paying customers. 

        Now rather than this explanation mollifying me, it got me even more pissed. What is happening is that those who “know” how the internet works are cautioning me to be careful, to ignore the first answers from Google, because they’re usually ads. But this is not just an explanation; this is rationalizing what Google does—It’s just business, after all. I say, bullshit! This is larceny. It’s a way of taking advantage of those who don’t look too carefully. It is saying, “this is how America works.” It is implying that since the system works this way, the burden is on the consumer to be ready, to be wary. Caveat emptor—buyer beware: there are always sharks in the waters, and you have to assume that this American-business axiom means that the buyer is solely and exclusively responsible for the condition or quality of what he buys, and that the company is not.

But what I want to know is: where is the outrage? Where is the demand for regulation? Have Americans been so brainwashed that they readily accept that fact that they will always be fleeced if they don’t have their antennae raised to protect against crooks? That business is essentially a form of larceny? That one must always assume that every business is always looking for the opportunity to make a killing? And that, in fact, the ethic that pervades The Godfather, and organized crime, is not some foreign outlier, but really and truly the dominant ethic of America, the natural way, the homegrown and time-tested way of doing business? And that the guns and the enforcers we see in The Godfather are only metaphors for normal business practices? That Coppola’s masterpiece is really not about organized crime as perfected by Italian immigrants at all, but about the real America—the America of ruthless, anything goes, cutthroat capitalism. 

It’s actually what my father, himself an Italian immigrant, used to say regularly: “The only thing that counts in this country is the almighty dollar.” No one cares about quality (he was especially concerned about this because, as an expert hairdresser, he saw rivals, who turned out inferior work, thriving due to their lower standards and prices), but only about how much they can put over on a gullible public to make the most money. The cheapest, shoddiest products are the ones that sell, and make the most profit. 

And I am beginning to believe that he was pretty much right. That Google, and the internet itself, both of which started with high ideals to extend communication and information more widely than ever before, for free, have become mere money-making machines, perfectly adapted to that still-reigning American ethic that absolves every crime: It’s strictly business. 

 

Lawrence DiStasi

Fascism For Real, II

 

Just before the 2020 election, I wrote in a blog that the stage was being set for a real outbreak of fascism in these United States. This was prior to the January 6 assault on the Capitol, i.e., the Trumpers’ attempt to disrupt the normal (Constitutional) congressional certification of the election results—i.e. that Joe Biden had won a convincing victory over Donald Trump. Now, that assault has developed and led to a further outrage against democratic rule. The Republican Party has just voted to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney from her post as chair of the House GOP Conference, where she has served since 2019. Cheney, of course, is the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney—one of my least-favorite government officials of all time. His daughter, a representative from Wyoming’s at-large district since 2017, is not all that different, it seems, from her father. But she has proven, since the advent of Trump to the presidency, that she is, in part at least, a conservative of the kind we used to see more of in Washington: a conservative with a kind of minimal conscience and respect for the Constitution. 

Anyone who has looked at Liz Cheney’s career knows that she is by no means liberal or even moderate in her conservatism. From her earliest years as a government operative in the State Department, she has focused on foreign policy in the most hawkish fashion, advocating regime change in Iran, and founding with William Kristol a nonprofit organization called “Keep America Safe,” and partnering with the likes of the nefarious Elliott Abrams, and Richard Armitage of Iran-Contra fame. Some of her initiatives have been severely criticized for plotting covert actions against both Syria and Iran. As a card-carrying neocon, and a western free-land zealot advocating greater freedom for ranchers, she has fomented movements against environmental groups like the Sierra Club and the NRDC, up to and including asking the Justice Department to investigate such groups’ supposed support by China. So for someone like this writer, there is very little reason to like or respect Liz Cheney. 

But when it comes to Donald Trump’s attempt to invalidate the 2020 election, to promote the fiction that the election was illegal due to massive fraud, and thereby needed to be overturned, she has been a rock of integrity. The turning point for her seems to have been the assault on the Capitol when the U.S. Congress was attempting to fulfill its constitutional duty. After that devastating and wholly illegal assault, Cheney went public in blaming Trump, without mincing words:

The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing. None of this would have happened without the President. The President could have immediately and forcefully intervened to stop the violence. He did not. There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution (emphasis added). 

Powerful words. And Cheney followed that statement with a vote in favor of Trump’s impeachment, one of only ten House Republicans to do so. In response, the Trump Freedom Caucus of the Republican Conference, led by that rabid attack dog Jim Jordan, attempted to censure her, and remove her from her leadership position in February of 2021. It didn’t work. Cheney survived that attempt when many Republicans, still aghast at what had actually happened at the Capitol, voted to keep her as a leader.  

But more recently, the agitation and calculation by the House Republican leadership that they could not regain the majority without Trump and his die-hard supporters, and Cheney’s repeated statements condemning Trump’s “Big Lie,” have led to yet another attempt to drum Cheney out of her leadership position. Led by Republican House leader Kevin McCarthy (who originally agreed with Cheney and others about Trump’s role in fomenting the Capitol invasion, and still, even after the vote, claimed that Republicans do NOT dispute the election and Biden’s presidency), House republicans have coalesced around support for Trump and his Big Lie that he is the rightful President, and censured Cheney on May 12, 2021, ousting her from her leadership position. Rather than use a recorded vote—which would put Republicans who voted against Cheney on record—the Republican leadership employed a voice vote, so that individual votes would go unrecorded. Covering their cowardly asses as usual. 

The fire between Cheney and Trump, and with him the craven Republican leadership, has not gone unrecorded, however. Cheney’s statement upon her removal continued her defiant stance: 

“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Cheney said. “We have seen the danger that he continues to provoke with his language. We have seen his lack of commitment and dedication to the Constitution and I think it's very important that we make sure whomever we elect is somebody who will be faithful to the Constitution.” (rawstory.com.) 

 

Like most of what Cheney has said, these words seem commonsensical and appropriate, even for a rock-ribbed conservative and neocon. Trump, on the other hand, relished his certain victory over someone who, heresy of all heresies, wanted the truth—of his clear election defeat, of his culpability in the attack on the Capitol—to be acknowledged. He released this statement, full of his usual vituperative comments about an opponent, just before the vote:

“The Republicans in the House of Representatives have a great opportunity today to rid themselves of a poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger, and a person with absolutely no personality or heart.”

 

Vintage Trump. And now the Republican Party, or most of it, has not only confirmed its fealty to this fraud of an ex-President and his Big Lie about the 2020 election, but has cemented it by deposing one of the few politicians on their side to call it out for what it is: the biggest lie ever perpetrated about an election in American history. 

This, folks, is no small matter. One of the two major political parties in the United States has now fully committed itself to a falsehood that is obvious to nearly everyone. The Big Lie. The one that Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels is said to have described as follows:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it…It becomes vitally important for  the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. 

 

That, indeed, seems to be the current Republican position. Someone like Liz Cheney, in a leadership position, who has the temerity to not only tell the truth but keep telling it, is an enemy who must be judged unfit to hold that position in the Republican Party. The truth, in this case, is poison because it conflicts, publicly, with the constantly reiterated “alternative truth” of the big leader, Donald Trump. Trump, that is, is specifically following what the website Meidas Touch calls “the rules of the demagogue.” Such rules follow the time-tested method of “manipulating” the “weak-minded” masses by 1) establishing a common enemy, 2) telling simple stories “with no regard for the truth,” 3) attacking democratic institutions and the media, and 4) cultivating a cult of personality. We have seen all of them in Trump’s four years of behavior. But now, the Republican Party has gone beyond these simple Hitlerian rules. Now we have a major American political party—one that, irony of ironies, began as a radical party combating slavery—so fearful of opposing its putative leader, that it must silence and excommunicate Cheney for her unforgivable ‘sin’: telling the truth. Calling out the big man’s Big Lie. 

This strikes me as no less than astonishing. Have these people no shame? No sense of honor, or even simple logic? Do they not see—does Kevin McCarthy not see that censuring and removing Cheney for contesting Trump’s lie in one breath, and then asserting that he and Republicans accept the 2020 election in the next breath—does not make elementary sense? Does he not see what even a 4^th grader could see: that his two positions conflict directly with each other? Apparently not. Evidently, the House minority leader now thinks it’s perfectly acceptable to assert one “truth” for breakfast and assert the polar opposite “truth” for lunch. Which means that “truth” for Republicans now means whatever seems most expedient at the time. 

And that, friends, is the beginning of fascism. Authoritarian rule. Dictatorship. For that is what dictatorship essentially is: ‘Truth is what I say it is. Don’t give me your bullshit need for evidence. For proven facts. For the integrity of the process of arriving at your facts. Truth is what we say it is.’ And anyone who disputes that what we say is truth is persona non grata. A heretic. Excommunicated. And, if need be, burned at the stake. 

Nor has all this proceeded without internal dissent—precisely what leader McCarthy has said he was ‘only’ trying to stifle. Organized by Miles Taylor, formerly with the Trump Department of Homeland Security, a group of over 100 current and former Republican officials and office-holders is threatening to form a new political party if the current Republican Party does not change its pro-Trump-at-all-costs stance. Apparently these officials—including former PA governor Tom Ridge, and former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman—have agreed that the cashiering of Liz Cheney is the last straw. The preamble to the statement released by Taylor briefly outlines their grievances:

“When in our democratic republic, forces of conspiracy, division, and despotism arise, it is the patriotic duty of citizens to act collectively in defense of liberty and justice…”  (NY Times, May 11)

 

Taylor himself added: “I’m still a Republican, but I’m hanging on by the skin of my teeth because of how quickly the party has divorced itself from truth and reason…” 

That pretty much sums up the problem. 

The question now becomes how far this accelerating drift toward fascism will go. Are Republicans so intimidated by this demagogue, so fearful of losing his idiot supporters, that they are willing to turn their backs on dignity, truth, integrity, liberty and justice to win another election? With the move to sacrifice Liz Cheney, who has been called Republican “royalty,” it appears that they are (not to mention their willingness to deprive millions of their right to vote). And though we may find it hard to believe that men and women who have sworn a sacred oath to uphold and defend the constitution could actually make such decisions, perhaps we should not be so naive. This nation has always harbored a vicious undercurrent of hatred towards its outsiders, its poor, its people of color, its aboriginal inhabitants, and has never been particularly shy about expressing and acting upon those hatreds—so long as they could be hidden beneath some legalism, some rational pretext. Now, however, with the arrival of Trump and his moronic minions, the need for any pretext has all but withered away. Now, it seems quite acceptable to many lawmakers for legions of overt racists and white supremacists to storm the very temple of democracy in a violent attempt to make the Big Lie a reality (GOP Representative from Georgia Andrew Clyde recently called the riot “a normal tourist visit”). Fortunately, Trump’s legions were thwarted this time. But with the blessing of one of the two major parties in the United States, they may not fail the next time. All right-thinking Americans should work and pray that the next time does not, can not happen here. For if it does, none of us can safely predict whether a nation “so conceived and so dedicated,” and now, so assaulted by the forces of hatred, cynicism and ignorance, can any longer “endure.” 

 

Lawrence DiStasi