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Monday, November 4, 2024
Opinion: Oligarchs are beholden to the bottom line, not democracy
Keith McNenly says when newspapers can have their editorial departments controlled by billionaire owners, the threat to democracy is grave and imminent.

Keith McNenly
Special to The Lake Report

The vast majority of us are politically invisible, and political invisibility is a form of freedom that the uber-rich might not enjoy.

We also have balanced values where money holds a critical position but is still subject to the better angels of our empathy and sense of right and wrong.

While it may take a little courage to put yourself out there, such as by placing a candidate sign on your lawn during an election, you can be relatively certain it won’t blow back on you with financial repercussions.

That’s the case in a functioning democracy anyway. Those with little to lose have little to fear.

That is not the case in a fascist country, where, inevitably, all are at risk. 

The current American election is shining a spotlight on big business and the oligarchs who own them.

Having so much to gain, and so much to lose, they are quaking in absolute fear over this election, it being a contest between fascism and democracy.

Their hundreds of billions of dollars in wealth might as well be lead chains around their necks. For some, morality and empathy weigh but a feather to the lead chains of vast wealth. Democracy doesn’t even enter into the equation.  

This election cycle we see large corporations and billionaires cozy up to the fascist side of the electoral battle.

Why is that? They know that fascist wannabe dictator’s very first act upon taking power will be to turn the entire legal infrastructure into his own personal retribution law firm.

The free press is always the first target and domino to fall.  

Last week, we witnessed stalwart Pulitzer Prize-winning American newspapers, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times owned by billionaire oligarchs, succumb to the Republican candidate’s threats of retribution against any who oppose him.

Rather than stand up against his threats, they rejected their own editorial board’s editorial endorsing the Democratic candidate for president.

This moral cowardice is the inevitable evolution of the mindset of significant numbers of the vastly wealthy.  

That is how democracies fail, and that is how even the one south of our border might fail.

Even before his potential electoral win, the Republican candidate has cowered the newspaper that exposed the Watergate crimes and brought on the resignation of former president Richard Nixon.

Knowing that the Post’s commitment to truth and facts, free from the fear of government retribution has succumbed, not in the face of a governing power, but even just in anticipation of an authoritarian, has rendered that publication rather valueless as a source of truthful and factual information.

How will readers know if their editorial opinions are based on truth, fear or mutual collusion? 

Contrast the Washington Post owned by one of the richest persons in the world to The Lake Report.

Recently, The Lake Report editor took on the politics and misleading messaging of a potential next prime minister of Canada in a challenging editorial.

The Washington Post editorial board by comparison was overruled by its vastly wealthy owner.  

This is a very big deal. Around a hundred years ago, American Supreme Court associate justice Louis Brandeis said, “We can have vast wealth in the hands of a  few, or we can have a democracy. We cannot have both.”

That prescient insight will come to fruition this Nov. 5 at hundreds of thousands of voting locations in the United States.

Money wins elections in the U.S. where donations and spending on campaigns is almost a free-for-all.

A few oligarchs can easily donate enough to drown out the financial voices of millions of ordinary citizens.  

The greed, fear and lack of moral character of some oligarchs having hundreds of billions in wealth, have direct consequences on the freedoms the rest of us enjoy.  

Why is this important to us north of the border, and to the rest of the world? We may very well find out next week. 

Keith McNenly was the chief administrative officer of the Town of Mono for 41 years until his retirement in 2016.

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