Speechless: Why Citizens United and Its Critics Are Both Wrong

[Author's Note: I wrote this essay a while ago, and I had hoped to actually publish it somewhere so that it could reach a wider audience, because I think this angle on the question of corporate personhood is important. But I now believe I'm unlikely to find a market for it, because it's too lengthy and rigidly philosophical to have a place in any popular magazine, but too brief, playful and topical to have a place in a philosophical journal, which I have no access to anyway. So I'm just putting it out as a blog post, instead, and hoping for the best. Fair warning: at five thousand words, it's longer (and perhaps drier) than blogs are supposed to be.]

What I've Been Watching: Twin Peaks

It’s been a while since I’ve posted any commentary about film or television here. Toward the end of changing that, it seems worthwhile to point out that I recently finished watching the entire run of Twin Peaks. It was wonderfully compelling, in large part because of the skillful blend of soap-operatic, don’t-miss-an-episode plotlines, potentially revelatory themes, and wonderfully artistic imagery. Despite an almost perfect pilot movie, a thoroughly satisfying season and a half, and a finale that was the most eye-poppingly surreal bit of television I’ve seen since the last episode of The Prisoner, Twin Peaks has also allowed me to experience, twenty years after the fact, one of the most rapidly disappointing declines in television history.

I am assuredly not going to be saying anything that hasn’t been said a million times since 1991, but it is stunning how clearly season two of Twin Peaks demonstrates the destructive potential of television networks. If any controlling interest in work of fiction has ever made a more glaring error in judgment than ABC did in insisting upon a solution to the Laura Palmer murder, let me know about it. I cannot fathom how anyone could have thought that that would be a good idea, when even the most casual observer should have recognized that that was what held the show together, that without unresolved questions about the slain prom queen the show didn’t really exist.

If they’d wanted to resolve the storyline out of some sense of duty to their audience, I suppose I can understand that, especially if they were confident enough in the rest of the series to expect it to maintain its appeal on its various other merits. From what I understand, though, the network never had much faith in the show, even when the public was obsessed with it. Of course, the ratings at the end of the first season and the beginning of the second should have made it clear that the accountants and executives didn’t know what they were talking about, and they should have thus been motivated to stay the hell out of the way.

I can begin to understand insisting on the resolution to the initial A storyline, but how in God’s name could anyone see value in ending it mid-season? I started viewing the show in almost complete ignorance as to what to expect, and I certainly didn’t realize that the murder would be solved when it was. Even so, the revelation was extremely powerful for me, and I was quite disappointed in myself for not determining who the killer was ahead of time. But upon viewing that extremely early climax and knowing how many episodes were still left, I assumed that what I had watched was just the beginning of the end, and that the rest of the season would entail the characters pursuing a killer whose identity the audience now knew. I also assumed that they would continue to piece together layers of the mystery, tying the minor storylines into narrative of Laura Palmer’s death.

It’s not that the latter half of season two is bad, but when neither of those things happened, and when the primary driver of the plot was wrapped up very quickly and neatly, I was utterly disoriented. I imagine that the majority of fans of the show, like me, had to force themselves past that point just to see what happened next. Once I came to terms with the fact that the bottom fell out of the show, I rediscovered its appeal from a completely different standpoint. But even though it remained good television, what could hurt a series more than several episodes of the audience collectively wondering why they were suddenly watching an altogether different show.

Because of the catastrophic effect of ABC’s insistence on something that was about as obviously bad as bad ideas come, it’s a terrible disappointment that Twin Peaks didn’t constitute a breaking point in the tradition of interference by moneyed interests in art and media. But unfortunately that was just a particular high water mark in a still-ongoing history of networks and studies derailing promising projects and preventing good stories from becoming great.

Twin Peaks was still great, but it could have been great for so much longer. Oh, there were other problems with the post-resolution portion of the show, too. The recovery period might have been quicker and smoother if it weren’t for the fact that even minor storylines were dropped and new ones with new characters had to be unexpectedly introduced in large part, based on what I’ve read, because Kyle McLaughlin was unabashedly shitting where he ate. Nevertheless, all of this built through the development of a beautifully complex mythology to a final episode that kept my mind constantly racing to keep up with a parade of nightmarish riddles.

And that final episode was intellectually gratifying but emotionally devastating. David Lynch and Mark Frost had apparently arranged to put multiple characters in peril in hopes of generating demand for continuation to a third season. This also was something I didn’t know going into it, so I, and presumably many of those who watched it when it was on television, was expecting a closed ending. But when I read the final scenes that way I came away from the show grappling with the implication that there are dire personal consequences for trying to do good in a world that possesses precious little hope.

I heard whispers that the film, Fire Walk With Me might provide some resolution to the oppressively bleak ending of the show, but it didn’t. It tauntingly hinted at the possibility of a resolution, but it didn’t follow through with it, so I get the impression that David Lynch just enjoys screwing with his audience for kicks. That said, I’d be happy to be screwed with again. Hopefully I am part of an ongoing growth of retrospective interest in Twin Peaks. If so, I honestly think Lynch should revisit the town, since Twin Peaks has the unique distinction of having specifically placed one early scene twenty-five years in the series’ future. That’s right around the corner, underneath the sycamores, behind the red curtain.

Only Taxing the Rich is Bad, Says O'Driscoll

The Yahoo! Finance web series the Daily Ticker today consisted of an interview with Gerald O’Driscoll, former Vice President and economic advisor at the Dallas Federal Reserve, and a senior fellow at Cato Institute. He was asked whether there was anything that either the Fed or Washington could do to spur job creation, and naturally O’Driscoll quickly turned to criticizing President Obama’s tax policies, describing the raising of marginal tax rates on millionaires and billionaires as economically destructive.

The interviewer reminded O’Driscoll of the counter-arguments that would come from the presidential administration and its supporters, then asked: “Do you make a distinction between taxes whether they’re aimed at individuals or corporations, or is it – bottom line – raising taxes on anybody is bad for the economy?”

I think that question presented O’Driscoll with a pretty clear choice: is the problem simply taxation in general within a weak economy, or is it taxation of businesses? Yet O’Driscoll appears to have avoided that simple choice and opted to advance an entirely different perspective.

He began, “Well I would say that raising taxes on the…” and then paused at length, searching for the right synonym for “wealthiest Americans.” I found that pause very telling. He knew about whom he was talking, but he needed to phrase it in a way that served his ends. Using the phrase “the rich” is perfectly clear to every viewer, but using the phrase “the source of savings and investment” obfuscates what we’re talking about and makes it harder to attach an image to the subject, but easier to affix it to a concept. So that was the phrase that O’Driscoll settled on, saying that raising taxes on the source of savings and investment is bad for the economy.

Now, did you notice how that avoids the simple one-or-the-other choice that he was given with the question? For simplicity, let’s drop the more pleasant synonym and just acknowledge that he’s talking about the rich. So when he’s asked whether it’s bad, in a weak economy, to raise taxes full-stop, O’Driscoll’s answer is really no, it’s bad to raise taxes on the rich in particular. Theoretically, his point of view leaves open the possibility of raising taxes on the poorest American’s without expectation of consequence. Of course, this is something that several Republicans have actually advocated, but it’s quite amazing to see that such callous initiatives have a theoretical underpinning.

O’Driscoll continues by rebuking the president for ostensibly failing to understand that most business are not C Corporations and thus are not taxed separately from their owners, “So when you raise taxes on individuals, you’re raising taxes on the business, and hence… you’re inhibiting job creation.”

I almost admire how the language of this quotation allows O’Driscoll to exclusively designate millionaire business owners as “individuals.” Raising taxes on lower or middle class workers doesn’t raise taxes on business. Even raising taxes on millionaires who primarily earn their income from things like investments in businesses they don’t own is not equivalent to raising taxes on businesses. Do neither of these groups count towards the discussion? That seems suspiciously convenient for O’Driscoll’s argument.

Essentially, that argument seems to be that it’s destructive to raise taxes on extremely wealthy individuals, because they might use some of their own wealth to invest in the businesses they own or from which they profit. Meanwhile, by this line of thinking, there is no particular problem with raising taxes on people who will definitely use a portion of their slight income to purchase things like food, clothing, and gas.

I admit that my understanding of economics is rather rudimentary, but it seems to me that a sure-fire way to create jobs is by raising demands for goods and services, thus increasing the size of the workforce required to supply that demand. Unless I’m wrong about that, it’s pretty asinine to suggest that allowing the wealthy to hoard their money while thinking nothing of depriving the poor of theirs is the best way to stimulate the economy. Sure, business owners need personal wealth to invest in their industries. But why on Earth would they do so if demand for what they’re offering remains flat.

By contrast, if a wealthy American is legitimately interested in earning the highest margins from his business, he would be a fool not to make investments to match growing demand, unless of course his wealth has been taxed out of existence. But I hardly think anybody’s proposing that, and I certainly don’t think that paying a thirty-five percent marginal rate would cripple a billionaire’s investment capabilities.

My Lengthy Rant Against Verizon

I don’t expect anybody to really read this. It’s just my petty effort to make a record of all the myriad frustrations I had with Verizon during the years I was a customer of theirs. It’s nothing important, except in the sense that it’s meant to discourage anyone from doing business with this horror of a company. That’s all I really need to say, here: Never give your money to Verizon. But if you’re skeptical and need good evidence against them, feel free to read my lengthy narrative diatribe. Presently, I will return to blogging about things that matter to more than just me.

I got new internet service hooked up yesterday after having been offline for several days. That put me behind with work, but I’m not nearly as bothered by that as I am about having permanently lost my office telephone number. The silver lining in both of those setbacks is that I will never again have to deal with the Verizon company. I would sooner run lengths of fishing line to coffee cans in the homes and offices of the people with whom I have to communicate than I would ever trust Verizon to provide me with any type of service.

There is a bit of history behind the reason for the severed internet and telephone connections. When I moved into the home out of which I currently work, I was living with an ex-girlfriend. I had signed up for internet elsewhere, and when we wanted to move the DSL to the current address, she called to have phone service installed as well. Somehow, merging the two services into one caused my name to be wiped clean from Verizon’s records. So far as billing was concerned, my both services belonged exclusively to my cohabitant.

It remained that way after she left me to move in with a new man, and it remained that way as I continued paying the bill, with my name above the return address, for two entire years. Not long after she left, I called the company to try to update the account information, but as it turns out that is impossible to do. On one attempt, I was told that they could attempt contacting the former account holder at the number listed on the account. I wasn’t okay with Verizon calling my ex, and I didn’t even know if she would be reachable at that number or at whatever time I happened to be on the phone with the company. Deciding that I couldn’t make the update myself, I sent an e-mail to my ex at some point, asking her to take care of one of the loose ends she had left behind. She never saw fit to do anything about it until, with no occasion or warning, she e-mailed me to say that she would finally make the change.

In the meantime, I had frequent problems with the service that was not in my name. My internet service blinked out of existence for a week out of each of two months. Getting it fixed was a horrible struggle. First, it involved calling their automated telephone directory. When I was able to navigate through it, I was connected to call center representatives in South Asia, who sometimes identified themselves by names like Carl or Cindy while speaking through heavy, obfuscating accents.

These workers were apparently trained to follow a series of prompts without the option to bypass or modify them. Each time I lost internet service, I was made to reset the modem, no matter how many times I had done this on my own before calling. I was always interested in minimizing my exposure to their technical support, so I confirmed ahead of time that the problem was not on my end. Toward the end of tediously confirming this, they then ran a line test, controlled from India on lines that ran about three miles from my home.

This, however, was the process only if and when I got through on the phone. On one notable occasion, the recorded voice asked me over and over again to enter the phone number about which I was calling. Each time I did this, it reported hearing nothing, and the messages started to berate me about refusing to provide needed information. On several occasions I got past that first step and followed the prompts all the way to the point where it told me to press 4 for high speed internet tech support or 5 for dial-up internet tech support, at which point I pressed 4 and was connected with dial-up internet tech support. This happened without fail over the course of about half a dozen consecutive calls, proving that it was far more than a momentary glitch.

It’s problems like that that make me wonder whether Verizon is aware of the fact that it is a telecommunications company. If the proper maintenance of phone lines is the entirety of its business, and it can’t even handle the structure of its own internal communications, or even respond to problems with that structure in a timely fashion, it has no business providing such a service outside the walls of its own offices. Let me be an analogy. I am a writer and editor. If I was incapable of e-mailing my clients without multiple misspellings and grammatically vague run-on sentences, it would be crazy of me to think that I could help other people develop their communications. If that was the case, it would be time for me to find a new line of work.

But despite all of this, I stuck with Verizon mostly because my service wasn’t in my name, I had put my home number on all of my business cards, and I wouldn’t have been able to keep that number if I had changed service. Also, the price was reasonable if I pretended that there was never noise on my phone line and that I was receiving consistent internet speeds. I wasn’t, though.

After one technician’s visit restored my connection, I found that my speeds were literally less than one-tenth of what I was supposed to be receiving on DSL. That began a new series of struggles to get a customer service issue resolved. One Verizon operator to whom I spoke actually downplayed the problem of waiting for simple web pages to load on a DSL connection by telling me that the speeds associated with my service were quoted as being “up to one Meg,” and that that maximum wasn’t guaranteed. She did not, however, agree that by that same logic I could agree to pay the company “up to eighty-five dollars” for internet and phone, and then pay whatever the hell I wanted.

When I was finally returned to reasonable – though not at all good – service, it was immediately time for a new conflict over billing. Verizon offered me no reduction whatsoever to my bill on its own accord. They did, however, agree fairly readily to a discount of ten dollars, in exchange for having been without service for two weeks, having had drastically reduced service for another week or two, and for overall inconvenience. Because I’m unreasonable, I didn’t think that was good enough, and I committed three hours to arguing with various operators before they discounted my outstanding bill by twenty-five percent. It required waiting until I was connected to that one Verizon operator in twenty who knows the definition of the phrase “customer service.”

Make no mistake, there are some good employees at the company. Visits from their technicians are generally quite pleasant, in no small measure because they freely admit that they work for a terrible, terrible company. One of them pointed out that if he has a full schedule of repairs to do in a day and an order for new service comes in, he is always told to do the installation first. It is seemingly no secret that Verizon, which has local media plastered with advertisements but never improves its local infrastructure, is committed to getting customers in the door, but has not an ounce of care as to whether it provides decent service once a person is on the hook. That is not just a former customer’s assessment, but an employee’s. I know other technicians have reported that they won’t sign up for their own company’s service, opting to have a spouse sign up for a competitor under her name, instead. Having a different name on the bill might be a problem if they were Verizon customers, though.

The only problems I’ve had with technicians were really problems with their dispatchers. When I was trying to get my service speed raised above 0.1 Megabits, the technician simply never arrived. No one called to make a new appointment, and as near as I could tell, the company had decided to ignore my problem and hope it went away. It took another trip through the labyrinthine phone system to get someone to acknowledge the missed appointment.

The operator got in touch with the technician and said that he claimed I never answered his phone call. But I was home the entire day, and my phone never rang. So that couldn’t be true unless they were referring to my cell phone, but I can’t figure out why they would call my secondary contact number if I was meeting the man at my home. And if his primary attempt to contact me via my secondary number failed, why would he not secondarily attempt to contact me on my primary number? Do Verizon employees just not trust Verizon telephone lines, and avoid them at all costs?

This is another point at which I think it bears repeating that Verizon is a telecommunications company. What hope could there be for providing a customer with that service if they can’t even be trusted to contact a customer through it? It couldn’t be simpler: If Verizon doesn’t know how to use phones it can’t possibly provide service for them.

The other issue that I had with a tech visit was when I sat on the phone scheduling an appointment for later in the day while I was looking at a Verizon technician out my window. That fellow had somehow managed to cut my phone line at the source while he was doing some work on the school across the street from me. I noticed that my internet went out, and then saw the Verizon truck parked on my street and the man in a hard hat standing on a ladder. I picked up my phone and confirmed that there was no dial tone, and then watched the truck pull away before I could run outside and kindly ask the driver to reconnect my service.

So I called Verizon’s technical support line and explained the situation. After asking me to check all of my phone’s connections, they let me know that they’d get somebody out there to look at it a few hours later. In the meantime, the first technician drove back onto my street, and because I was still naïve, I figured the company had done the right thing and sent him back to immediately fix the problem he’d caused. Instead, he went back to work on the school. I walked outside to speak to him and see if he realized what he had done. He had not. I asked him if he could plug my service back in while he had his ladder out. He informed me that he could not, as it wasn’t on his schedule of repairs. Another technician came out later that afternoon. I still wonder how much ground there was between his previous appointment and my home, but I’ll bet it was more than two hundred yards.

Maybe it was because it was silently agreed that my service could be cut off without warning, at any time, for no reason that I sometimes received sales calls at my residence from Verizon while I was a Verizon customer. This would come from India and they would inform me that the representative could sign me up for phone, internet, and television service. I would tell them that I already had two of these through Verizon and didn’t need the third. They would then say, “Oh, you’re a Verizon FIOS customer?” And I would have to tell these people – these people who worked at Verizon – that no, I was not a FIOS customer, because I had long ago been informed that FIOS was not available in my area.

The first of these sales representatives responded, “Oh, it’s probably available. Verizon works hard to get the new networks installed in all of its service areas.” He then asked me to hold the line, which I did despite the fact that I knew he was talking bullshit, because other former Verizon customers had told me that when the company told them that the new infrastructure wasn’t available in their area, they added that the customer could sign up for it anyway, and once they had enough subscriptions in the neighborhood, they would actually install it.

A minute after putting me on hold, the first sales representative came back to the line sounding crestfallen and said, “We don’t have it. Sorry.” It’s probably not a good sign when one’s customers know more about his operations than his employees do. As a telecommunications company, you’d really think that Verizon would be able to manage its call directories. If it’s to be regarded as an expert in communicating information, it damn well better be capable of keeping abreast of internal changes as to who is and isn’t a customer, or who is and isn’t accessible to some of its services.

Another sales representative who called me with the exact same offer put me on hold for the same reason, and rather than sheepishly acknowledging that I knew what I was talking about, she disconnected the call. Or maybe the call was just disconnected. It happened to me when I was fighting to get back my phone number just the other day. I managed to reach one of the rare helpful employees, and when I explained why I had lost the number after my ex saw fit to finally disconnect service, she asked “Well why don’t we just put your name on the old account?”

I was stunned, because I’d been told many times over the course of two years that that could not be done, and my ex had been told the same thing before she went ahead and had me cut off altogether. This particular operator asked me for a contact number for my ex, and then put me on hold while she tried to call her. After a moment, the line went silent and was disconnected. Dropped customer service calls are hardly the hallmark of a good telecommunications company.

My chances of reaching the same operator again were slim to begin with, but dropped to nil when the automated directory gave me a different set of options from what it had given ten minutes earlier. The next operator was rather less helpful. Amazingly, she agreed that a change could be made, but she insisted that the only way she could do it was to try to reach the contact number that they had on file for the person whose name was on the account. I figured that would be fine if the number was correct, so I asked what it was. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I told her what the current contact number was and asked her if the one she had matched it. She said she couldn’t give me that information. I asked her what she would do if the number was wrong. She said nothing.

It bears repeating just one more time: Verizon is a freaking telecommunications company. Also, it’s the twenty-first century. We have home phones and phones that we carry around with us, physical mail and electronic mail, SMS text messaging, call waiting, voicemail. Surely in this environment a telecommunications company can come up with more than one method for trying to confirm information between two parties. It would have been a simple thing for me to call my ex and ask her to call Verizon to release my number. Or they could have checked her IP address via e-mail to confirm that she doesn’t live in my area anymore and doesn’t need a local number, and thus Verizon could elect not to hold the number for her for eighty days. But as it is, they can’t elect not to do anything, because the computers are in charge and policies can’t be overridden in favor of common sense.

I called one more time, and received an operator who offered yet a different set of information. Though she thought that adding my name might have been possible before my ex cancelled the service, she insisted that it absolutely could not be done now. Despite being unhelpful, she strove to sound sympathetic, repeating that she understood my frustrations. So I trust she understood my decision to never come near her company again.

My contact number is gone, turning my current business cards into unique bookmarks, but at least I’m free of the egregious service that Verizon had subjected me to. I’ve got internet through Time Warner now, and it is already infinitely better. I’m a little afraid I’ll never have a problem and thus never be able to compare their customer service. I’ll probably get my new office phone number through the Magic Jack. I don’t know what to expect from it, but Verizon has set the bar for my satisfaction very low.

So in case it hasn’t be said clearly enough with the preceding 2,900 words: Stay the hell away from Verizon!

Please Stop Working for Free

I was pleased to see that Stephen Colbert levied brilliant criticisms against CNN’s iReport social network on his Monday night show:

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It’s wonderful to see a satirist or critic taking on the topic, but it’s important to keep in mind that CNN is far from being the only organization to uncompensated labor from the public, at the expense of actual jobs. If CNN is the worst offender, it is only by virtue of its being an exceptionally large and visible organization. But some content on the front pages of Yahoo! is drawn from its amateur contributor network. And while it does allow people to earn nominal payments based on page views, ultimately Yahoo! is relying on a large pool of writers and photographers who are willing to work for free and consider any compensation whatsoever to essentially be a gift. AOL and the Huffington Post utilize the same model, and of course the latter is also infamous for simply reposting paid content from other news sources. On top of that, there are various sites whose sole concept is to gather creative content from as many people as possible and then present some sort of prize to those that pay dividends on nothing. And each of them seemingly finds a steady supply of willing participants.

That willingness seems unlikely to become the focus of other critics, but I think it is the main issue here. So long as news outlets remain primarily concerned with making money, it is only natural that they will latch onto business practices that allow them to maintain output without the need to pay formerly requisite salaries. Quality be damned, if it brings them any revenue, it is worthwhile because it contributes nothing to overhead. There’s even a business term for this kind of acquisition of labor: crowdsourcing. It serves much the same purpose as outsourcing work to foreign countries, but is even better for the business, as outsourcing exploits the necessity of workers accepting appalling low wages because of their local conditions, whereas crowdsourcing exploits the willingness of workers to accept no payment at all because of their imagination of some future reward.

Certainly, I would be thrilled if there came a breaking point for the news media, and they came to realize that they have an obligation greater than the acquisition of capital. Each person can play a role in promoting that realization, primarily through his choice of what media to consume, but ultimately that breaking point is up to the executives of several corporations, and out of our hands. What ordinary people should realize instead is that they are enabling this sort of exploitation, and contributing to the rampant decay in the quality of news and popular culture. There is a breaking point that every writer and artist must reach, whereby we come to understand that we are being used, and that we are allowing ourselves to be used.

There’s really nothing in it for us if we keep giving away work for free. I’m sure that many people provide content for major websites purely in pursuit of fifteen minutes of fame, but I expect that many people also do so on the assumption that it will lead to some discovery of their brilliance, that the exposure to a wide audience of CNN viewers or Yahoo! readers will open doors for them. What they ought to understand, though, is that that pursuit of self-interest will ultimately prevent those doors from opening to anywhere. Every decent writer who offers free content in hope of future opportunities is evidently expecting someone to come along and pay for what everyone else is getting for free.

Of course, if the decent writers and artists realize this and drop out of the crowdsource, I suppose that would just leave behind the terrible writers and artists, and raise the question, would CNN, Yahoo!, AOL and the like continue to drink from a tepid pool? They might. But the subsequently accelerating deterioration of quality just illustrates the way breaking points work. If we keep quality content out of the hands of those who would exploit it for free, won’t there come a point at which the dreck they’re channeling into public view just isn’t worth looking at anymore? There simply must be a lower limit to what we’re willing to accept and popularize. There must be, even though there is apparently no lower limit to what many people are willing to accept as compensation for their creative efforts.