WaPo And The LA Times: He Who Has The Gold Makes The Rules

In Ferdinand Lundberg, The Rich and the Super-Rich (1969):

Those few newspapers that make a practice of printing foreign news occasionally survey Latin American countries. The writers are invariably grieved to find a small oligarchy of big landowners in control, with the remainder of the population consisting of sycophantic hangers-on and landless, poverty-stricken peasants. But I have never seen it remarked that the basic description, with the alteration of a few nouns, applies just as well to the United States, where the position of the landowners is occupied by the financiers, industrialists and big rentiers and that of the peasants by the low-paid employees (all subject to dismissal for one reason or other just like the peasants).

If anyone in the past few days seeks vindication of Ferdinand Lundberg's views, he need look no farther than the events surrounding the decisions by the once-totemic Los Angeles Times and Washington Post not to endorse a presidentiual candidate in this year's election, which amount to an effective endorsement of Donald Trump. And as I covered Thursday, the wealthy plutocrat who owns the LA Times overrode the paper's editorial board in this matter, as did Jeff Bezos, the plutocrat who owns the Washington Post.

These events come in context, though. As I pointed out in Thursday's post, the influential and plutocratic Chandler family, whose fortune had been behind the LA Times, disinvested from the losing business a generation ago. The Graham family, which had owned the Post since 1933, sold the paper as a losing enterprise to Jeff Bezos in 2013. On one hand, the mere fact that the papers continued to be owned by Lundberg's class of financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers is nothng new, as he would be the first to point out.

On the other, the Chandlers and the Grahams both sold out simply to different financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers. Bezos in particular, although noted for highly aggressive business practices, has supported leftist politicians and causes:

According to public campaign finance records, Bezos supported the electoral campaigns of Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell, two Democratic U.S. senators from Washington. He has also supported Democrats U.S. representative John Conyers, as well as Patrick Leahy and Republican Spencer Abraham, U.S. senators serving on committees dealing with Internet-related issues. Jeff Bezos and MacKenzie Bezos have supported the legalization of same-sex marriage, and in 2012 contributed $2.5 million to Washington United for Marriage, a group supporting a yes vote on Washington Referendum 74, which affirmed a same-sex marriage law enacted in the state.

Neither Bezos nor Patrick Soon-Shiong, the current owner of the LA Times, had previously interfered with the generally leftist editorial positions of either paper, and their refusals to allow their papers to endorse Harris has come as a surprise. We must assume that both Bezos and Soon-Shiong spent many millions to buy these papers, and they did it with their business interests in mind, even if, at least at the time of the purchases, the papers were losing money.

Did something change? Let's assume for starters that Lundberg's view of financiers, industrialists, and big rentiers is correct, and the nature of their interests hasn't changed. If that's the case, we can see that the social environment in which they operate also hasn't changed -- by and large, they're selling their products to the population of sycophantic hangers-on and de facto landless, poverty-stricken peasants, while their papers are at least seeking to manipulate the collective opinions of that same population.

Up to very recently, it was to the advantage of corporate media's owners to project an image of sympathy for leftist agendas, although especially in the case of Bezos, he tended to conduct his day-to-day business much more in the style of post-Civil War industrialist robber barons. Whatever the Post said editorially was neither here nor there, and indeed, his donations to liberal Democrats were mostly to keep them off his own case. But somehow, late in this election campaign, push came to shove for both Bezos and Soon-Shiong, and what their papers said editorially actually made a difference, to the extent that they overrode their editors, who apparently had forgotten they were only hired help on the plantation, and effectively dismssed them.

Let's keep in mind that modern public relations was developed by John D Rockefeller, who was notwithstaning never acknowleged for saving the whales, as a means of humanizing his public image. His son, John D Jr, devoted his own career to remaking the Rockefeller family image as benevolent and public-minded. This strategy was generally adopted by the descendants of all the robber baron families, and my surmise is that they saw this as a means of temporizing with the threat of world proletarian revolution -- give them a little, make it seem like a lot, and defer the worker soviets for a few more years.

This strategy was then modified by the great social theorist Charles Manson, who envisioned an apocalyptic race war. In effect, this gave the rentier descendants of the robber barons a whole new worry -- it wouldn't be just the proletariat, but the inner-city lumpenproles who'd rise up against them, which created a whole new set of interests to be paid off and temporized with.

This was the basis of the race grifts of the 1960s and 70s, which resulted in vast sums of public money being sent to inner-city programs with either no result or unintended consequences. In fact, much of this multitrillion-dollar transfer was simply passed through to Latin American drug cartels. The Black Lives Matter movement was little more than a last-ditch attempt to blackmail the public apparatus into maintaining this charade for a few more years.

I've run into a puzzle over the term "Fabian socialism", which is conventionally defined as "aiming at the gradual rather than revolutionary achievement of socialism". But why would the likes of George Bernard Shaw and the Webbs pattern their strategy after Fabius?

Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus (died 203 bce) was a Roman military commander and statesman whose cautious delaying tactics (whence the nickname “Cunctator,” meaning “delayer,” which was not his official cognomen) during the early stages of the Second Punic War (218–201 bce) gave Rome time to recover its strength. When Rome resumed the offensive against the invading Carthaginian army of Hannibal, Fabius waged a war of slow attrition, avoiding direct engagement whenever possible.

Wait a moment. A strategy of delay and attrition is a defensive strategy, not offensive. But Shaw and the Webbs were, at least ostensibly, promotimg an offensive strategy for implementing socialism. I think this gets things backward. The Victorian bourgeoisie were hardly revolutionaries, at least in a socio-political sense (what they did privately was their own business, and they sure did do it). If anything, we can characterize the strategy of the US post-Civil War industrialists and rentiers as gradually giving in to what they perceived as proletarian demands as a way to temporize while preserving their privilege.

I think this is a more accurate understanding of the "Fabian socialist" project -- it's primarily a way to maintain a privileged class while appearing to give in to potentially revolutionary demands without surrendering what's important. The problem with this model is that the concessions are made at the expense of the lower middle class, and indeed, one of the insights of current commentators like Mike Rowe is that this class is harder and harder to distingush from the proletariat.

Thus the Fabian model -- not the Fabian model of Shaw and the Webbs, but the Rockefeller-based model of gradual but unimportant concessions at the expense of the upper proletariat -- is collapsing, and a current, more avant-garde set of plutocrats including Trump, Musk, and Bezos has begun to see the need to rethink this social strategy.