Always right: Reading The Wall Street Journal

MIAMI – I was being offered a free copy of the Wall Street Journal every day for the next several weeks. “How in the world?”, I thought. I am not exactly a high-flying financier. My opinions and the editorial positions of the WSJ are pretty much diametrically opposed on virtually every major issue, with the partial exception of immigration. I finally decided that it was probably for the same reason that I got the Financial Times (which incidentally is better and much less conservative) free for a few weeks some years ago.

The mathematical model these papers, or more likely their computers, use to decide who might be a potential subscriber is based on a few crude indicators. Stuff like having an advanced degree. Owning your home, or more accurately paying a mortgage to a bank that borrows money from the government at just above zero percent and charges you five percent if you’re lucky. Approaching the age when many people stop working for their money. The fortunate few among them who have more than Social Security and a meager pension instead start watching carefully how well their money is working for them. The Journal tells them that.

I was amused and intrigued when I started getting the paper. I knew their editorial positions were very conservative. I remember that once, when I wrote a piece in the Miami Herald agreeing with Elian’s rescue by the federal government, Alberto Ibarguen, then the publisher of the Herald, called me to dress me down. I wasn’t intimidated. I told him that almost every newspaper in the United States shared my opinion. He protested, citing just two contrary examples: The Washington Times (the Moonie paper) and the Wall Street Journal.

So I was expecting a decided ideological bent to the right, but I discovered much more than that. The WSJ is a publication for and by the one percent, who in this country have proportionally much more wealth and power than in any other Western democracy.

As an example, last Friday’s edition of the paper had a whole section (M) simply titled Mansion, a good indication of the social class the WSJ caters to. One story was about “luxury boat-houses.”

This focus was not really a shocker, although I wonder if any other paper in the country carries anything comparable. But what did exceed even my jaded view of what and who the WSJ represents was the sheer ideological extremism of the editorials and, especially, the opinion columns.

Kooky conspiracy theories, paranoia, the vilest form of Obama bashing, are all there in abundance. Also, sometimes the ideological bent of the editorial pages bleeds over to the reporting of the news, albeit in a milder form and mainly in the headlines.

It’s only been a few days but I have already received quite an education about the mindset of right-wing America. Among the most memorable columns was the one that argued, allegedly seriously but possibly tongue-in-cheek, that Donald Trump is really working for Hillary Clinton. Why else would he be attacking Republicans, forcing them to hit him back instead of bashing Hillary? Why else would he be making the Republican Party look so mean-spirited and silly? The writer never considers the possibility that for the most part the GOP is just those things and Donald Trump is only a particular frank and obnoxious reflection of it.

There was nothing tongue-in-cheek about another OP/Ed piece that accuses Obama of having “a racial blind spot.” The writer excoriates Obama for reaching a deal with “Iran’s Jewish-hating fanatics” and predicts it will spark a global wave of racism. It is an understatement to say that comment is reaching. The folks who hate the agreement, especially those itching for military action, seem to have run out of arguments.

Another column on the same subject argues that “History Contradicts the Dream of Iranian Moderation.” But history can be read another way. It was the United States that overthrew a moderate, democratically elected Iranian government in 1953. The Iranians have never interfered with U.S. internal governance. And it was the United States that enabled Saddam Hussein in a war of aggression against Iran, which ended up being a bloody disaster for both Iraq and Iran. How is that for moderation?

On a different subject, last week a WSJ editorial made much of the weakness of the current recovery. And an OP/Ed columnist knew just where to lay the blame: “An unhinged regulatory state is our doomsday machine.”

The funny thing is that the right has had much success over the last three decades dismantling the regulatory machinery of the state. So why has growth slowed. Indeed, in the boom years from the late 1940s to the late 1970s, the economy was much more regulated and grew much faster. And, when the Great Recession hit in 2008, it was an almost total lack of regulation of financial wheeling and dealing that was at the root of the debacle.

Another columnist bemoans the consensus on global warming, calling it anti-Science. Really? The 99 percent of scientists from different countries and fields who have come to the same conclusion on the reality and the causes of climate change must be suffering from the most massive instance of collective delusion in human history.

That’s only a few examples from just one week.

Earlier this week I read that a number of physicists believe that there exist parallel universes outside our own. The folks at the Wall Street Journal, those in the one percent crowd who lack any social conscience, and the right-wing ideologues in and out of the Republican Party, must be living in one of those.