When Secretary of State Tillerson remarked recently that it’s too late for the government to do anything about the Russian intervention in our elections for the 2018 election, he didn’t understand that he was speaking only for our incompetent and uninterested White House and not for the rest of the government. The problem comes from a lack of understanding on Tillerson’s part that the problem is two fold and must be attacked on two separate platforms.
What Tillerson doesn’t seem to understand is that the physical part of the problem, that of actually getting into polling places and disrupting the vote count would be easy to stop if the administration actually wanted to stop it. The problem is that the Trunpites really don’t want to fix that problem because they see it as the only possible way for the Republicans to emerge from November 2018 with a majority in either the House or the Senate.
What has to be done to cause the attacks to fail is to regress from our electronic polling and go back to the individual paper ballot. You can’t electronically affect ballots that don’t depend on the computer driven systems we now employ. Yes, this would be an arduous task and understanding the inability of this administration to function on anything like a normal scale it’s quite possible that it couldn’t be achieved by November of this year. So basically what Tillerson is saying is, “Yes, we’re fuckups and there’s no way in hell we can get this job done in only nine months.” A woman can build a human being in 9 months but his administration can’t get paper and pencils into a few thousand locations in that time. How pathetic are these clowns?
But the more important aspect of the Russian interference isn’t about changing ballots or even getting rid of them. It’s about changing voters minds, filling them with half-truths and out and out falsehoods that affect how they see the world and how they vote.
That’s where the other half, the truly dangerous part of the Russian attack comes in. It brings up a problem with a really difficult solution because that solution calls into question a basic tenant of American belief; that of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. What has been identified by our intelligence systems as the larger part of the Russian invasion of our elections was achieved by their agents obtaining time and space on our computer driven social media systems and flooding them with false information aimed at specific segments of the population. Think targeted advertising like LL Bean sending information to guys who like flannel shirts. So the Russians did the same thing. They sent anti-Hillary stuff to Evangelists, or Benghazi lies to the mothers of soldiers or coalmine re-opening lies to older, out of work white guys from West Virginia and Kentucky.
They flooded the Internet with this stuff and it had a very viable effect. Doctors got tons of material about how Trump was going to repeal and replace Obamacare with something that would make them more money. White guys with black lung and children who had been poisoned by the water in West Virginia got information about how Trump was going to open the mines again and how, instead of dying on the dole, at least they would die being cheated at the company store. Yes, it was all lies but how to stop it?
Well, the solution is very simple and at the same time unbelievably complicated. The lies must be kept off the air and the Internet. The perpetrators of the problem, companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Snap Chat and all the other social media outlets that made billions from carrying this misinformation must be made to control their output. How? Do we really expect these corporate giants to cut off a huge income stream just because we don’t like what they are selling? Do we really expect these corporate giants to have a conscience or any kind of moral values? Are we looking for a bridge to buy?
Actually the only realistic solution does not foresee cooperation by the social media giants simply because it’s hard to conceive of them being cooperative when it could cost them money. So the answer is in legislation. The problem with legislation is that no matter how black & white a problem seems to it’s creators, many disparate points of view, many different interpretations of the problem and even more axes to grind will raise their ugly heads and become problems. Many of them will not even have anything to do with the object of the legislation but will see it as an opportunity to get something else, something completely unrelated, in exchange for their signatures on the bill. And just for openers the problem is anything but black and white.
We are talking about freedom of speech here, but we are not talking about American freedom of speech and that’s very important to this specific argument. We are talking about foreign freedom of speech and how it affects our elections. We are speaking mostly about lies by foreign entities, specifically Russia. Now there are already any number of ways to pursue these lies in court but they are so many and so diverse that it would be a practical impossibility to even get close to chasing all of them in any kind of reasonable time frame.
What this problem needs now is a new law, a law that makes it illegal for a foreign sponsor to buy time or space on American social media for material that has any relationship whatsoever to politics, elections or government. And before you start screaming freedom of speech at me, understand that our constitution does not guarantee anything to anyone outside the United States. There is no such thing as freedom of speech for Russians or any other foreign nationals. We already have a host of laws that apply to foreigners that would be unconstitutional if they were aimed at Americans. One more could do a lot of good.
So basically we’re talking about a law that says; social media cannot carry any material sponsored by any foreign organization or any source that is working for any foreign organization that deals with political material or any kind of material that could be seen as trying to influence any positions pertinent to any election or political person or plan. There are lots better ways to outline this but I’m not a lawyer so I can’t make it complicated enough to obscure the meaning.
For such a law to work the penalties would have to fall on the management of the media companies not the advertisers. And they would have to be draconically severe. None of this; “pay a fine and continue poisoning our elections.” Mandatory jail terms for officers of the companies in question would have to be the order of the day. It’s imperative. If we had done that with our banking laws we would never have had the crash of 2007 and we would not now have the continuing disgrace of daily cases of bank fraud.
Fine the guilty party and they just pass it on to the stockholders. Slap one rich punk in the can and the next one will make damn sure that doesn’t happen to him. Right now there is no real penalty to the CEOs of banks for bank fraud. This new law will not work if all it had to fall back on was a fine. The corporate officers must be held accountable!
Of course with the Trump administration in charge, this blogger is screaming down an abandoned alley. The only help for getting the Russians hands out of our elections is such a massive turnout in November that it simply overwhelms the GOP voters. Then and only then will we be able to address the real problems of this country in some kind of intelligent, functional way.
Dueling memos came to a head this week when the Democratic version of the FISA Court, he said, she said document was released to the public. The GOP immediately condemned the Democratic memo as political and they were right. Of course its political, just as the GOP White House version was political, just like anything that comes out of government is political but that’s not what’s important about them. What’s important is right and wrong, truth and lies and there’ are plenty of both in this contended issue.
Maybe the most amazing aspect of this whole melodrama is the accusations put forth by the White House press liar, Sara Sanders when she takes the Obama administration to task for not doing anything about these Russian attacks which did actually take place during his administration. Of course our intelligence community was just starting to investigate the problem so there was, in fact, nothing to do yet. No one expects Sanders to get that. She has neither the intelligence nor the objectivity, to understand that Obama really didn’t know about the attacks until it was too late. Sander’s boss, the Liar-in-Chief, has known about the attacks from the git-go but because of his thin skinned need to prove he really won the election on his own, he refuses to acknowledge any help from the Russians. The idiot who has sworn to protect this nation is sitting on his fat ass doing nothing while the Russians take apart our election system. Good job fat boy. Just one more example why you must be gone before the end of the year.