So Fox News took up the cause. The subject of the Bill Sammon October 27, 2009, e-mail was: “Friendly reminder: let’s not slip back into calling it the ‘public option.’”120
This e-mail was later obtained by the media-watchdog group Media Matters. It read in fulclass="underline"
1) Please use the term “government-run health insurance” or, when brevity is a concern, “government option,” whenever possible.
2) When it is necessary to use the term “public option” (which is, after all, firmly ensconced in the nation’s lexicon), use the qualifier “so-called,” as in “the so-called public option.”
The e-mail continued with two more “reminders” from Sammon about how to talk about the Public Option:
3) Here’s another way to phrase it: “The public option, which is the government-run plan.”
4) When newsmakers and sources use the term “public option” in our stories, there’s not a lot we can do about it, since quotes are of course sacrosanct.121
Fox anchors did as they were told, and suddenly the phrase “Public Option” vanished from the Fox News airwaves.
Why the name change? Why call it a “government option” rather than its legal name, the “Public Option”?
The answer: polling.
About two months earlier, on the same airwaves, Republican pollster Frank Luntz went on The Sean Hannity Show and let slip a critical Republican messaging strategy. In regard to the Public Option, Luntz told Hannity, “If you call it a ‘public option,’ the American people are split… [but] if you call it the ‘government option,’ the public is overwhelmingly against it.”122 After all, a “government option” implied a government takeover of health care, which meant socialized medicine.
Hannity himself was blown away and immediately noted that Luntz made “a great point” and that from then on Hannity himself would use the term “government option.”
A new message was born.
Here was the Washington managing editor of Fox News, Bill Sammon, instructing his news anchors to use poll-tested terms that would help Republicans sway the public’s opinion against President Obama’s health reform law. It was plain-and-simple propaganda.
A few months later, Fox News’s manufactured fear of a “government takeover of health care” successfully forced Democrats to drop the Public Option from the health reform law.
Emboldened, Bill Sammon set his eyes on climate change.
A few months later, in December, the news was about Copenhagen, where world leaders were meeting to chart out a global solution to fight worldwide climate change. And Bill Sammon had another e-mail he needed to get out to his anchors about wording in the climate change debate.
The December 8, 2009, e-mail123 was titled “Given the controversy over the veracity of climate change data…”
Sammon instructed his anchors:
[W]e should refrain from asserting that the planet has warmed (or cooled) in any given period without IMMEDIATELY pointing out that such theories are based upon data that critics have called into question. It is not our place as journalists to assert such notions as facts, especially as this debate intensifies [emphasis Sammon’s].
Like the for-profit health insurance executives, the oil barons believed pending cap-and-trade legislation in the Senate could crimp their profits. And they knew that as long as climate change was in doubt in the public’s mind, there would be no urgency to pass climate change legislation. Once again, Fox News came to a monopolistic industry’s aid.
Fox News became ground zero for faux climate change science, and the soapbox on which every corporate-funded pseudoscientist could stand, raise doubts about climate change, and collect their paycheck or get their grants from the big oil industry, wealthy industrialists, or foundations with allied ideology.
And it worked, the first comprehensive climate change bill for our nation to consider in decades died in the Senate—the American Clean Energy and Security Act which contained the “cap and trade” provision—a proven method to reduce pollution that had been supported by both Republicans and Democrats dating all the way back to Ronald Reagan’s attempts to reduce acid rain in the 1980s.
On Fox News, “cap and trade” was routinely referred to by talking heads as “cap and tax”—another poll-tested term—and characterized as a Socialist plan to seminationalize the American energy market.
Thanks to Fox News, politicians heavily funded by the oil industry kept the status quo in place.
Thwarted
All of this Royalist money and organization worked.
It bought a “false remembering” just as the nation was going through a Great Forgetting in the 1970s. And then two generations later, after another Great Crash, it preserved the status quo of Royalist rule.
Unlike Roosevelt’s “first hundred days,” President Obama’s “first hundred” were far from revolutionary.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was a fifth the size of Roosevelt’s first New Deal including the Public Works Administration, passed in 1933. Roosevelt’s Second New Deal in 1935, creating Social Security, was even larger. And the federal spending effort of World War II was larger still.
Despite one of President Obama’s top economic advisers, Christina Romer, pushing for a $1.8 trillion stimulus, the president whittled down his stimulus proposal to get a few Senate Republicans on board. In the end, only a third of the $787 billion stimulus plan was actual stimulus. The other two-thirds was assistance to states to close budget holes to prevent the layoff of public-sector workers and tax cuts that historically have the lowest bang for the buck in stimulus.
It became clear early on that the president really had no intention of being a revolutionary (with the exception of major steps forward for the LGBT community). The signature legislative achievement of the so-called Obama Revolution was the Affordable Care Act—known as “Obamacare”—which was far from revolutionary.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform bill paled in comparison to Roosevelt’s regulations on Wall Street following the crash of 1929. The so-called War on Terror was expanded, Guantanamo remained opened, and extrajudicial killings increased. And the superwealthy in America, who’ve enjoyed unreasonably low taxes since the 1980s, kept their low taxes.
But the nation was still pregnant with revolution, and so they joined the billionaires’ Tea Party.
But what the average Tea Partier doesn’t understand, and what the millionaires and billionaires who fund the movement do understand, is that nature abhors a vacuum. So when Tea Partiers clamor for smaller government—or in some cases, no government at all—something must fill the void. And what’s always filled the void in the past, from the Gilded Age, to the Roaring Twenties, to Reagan’s America, is corporate power and aggregated wealth.
So fast-forward nearly 240 years later after the Boston Tea Party, and today’s Tea Party is rallying on behalf of some of the very biggest transnational corporations in the world—our own East India Companies.
The private health industry directly benefitted from the Tea Party’s assault on the Public Option, and in general “Obamacare.” The polluting oil industry secured another decade of higher and higher profits thanks to the Tea Party’s denial of climate change and the defeat of a new carbon tax or cap and trade law. Simply, the Tea Party rallies on behalf of the monarchists of the eighteenth century, the Robber Barons of the nineteenth century, and the Economic Royalists of the twentieth century.