The Collusion Fund
Tired of the lies? Let’s do something about it.
If you follow me, you’re probably expecting a film review. I do cinema artistic, cultural and financial analysis. Years ago, when print was the media that informed and influenced opinions, I’d have analyzed books. No longer.
Visual media have assumed the role long (and short) form print used to hold. Humans watch series and features much as we used to read novels. We watch video clips as though reading short stories.
Print of all kinds has lost out to visual media of all kinds. Whether the visual media tells a story better, or we’re just too lazy to read isn’t really important, it’s still happened.
Want to influence people? Write a book and sell tens of thousands, if it’s a blockbuster, hundreds of thousands, maybe a million copies, or — make a movie and reach tens of millions, maybe a hundred million. It’s that simple.
People wrote about global warming for years, then came “An Inconvenient Truth”. Decades of print — who cares? One movie — the earth’s on fire.
QED, as we say in the world of logic.
I stray into history or sociology or politics if a film in question touches on them, but that’s not this. This isn’t a film review. This is strictly politics.
Ahhhh! Please, leave me along! Can’t we just ignore it?
We can, but consider the last election — that’s what happens when you ignore politics.
Turn on the television and all you’ll hear is “Collusion! Lies! Collusion and lies! Lies and collusion!” It collects in your brain, like plaque, the stuff that causes dementia, choking synapses, making you feel like you’re wading through intellectual molasses. Painful. Not to mention the nonsequiturs and hysterics.
We’re doing the emotional equivalent of abusing our spouses, running up our bar tabs, tearing our hair out, and chasing our tails — all at the same time.
“Collusion and lies! Lies and collusion!”
We’ve spent tens of millions of tax dollars trying to find out if one presidential candidate (or his minions) colluded with foreigners to dig up dirt on another presidential candidate, only to find out it was she (or her minions) who colluded with foreigners to invent dirt about him.
And what have all this time and money taught us?
Zilch! We’re still chasing collusion!
What the hell is collusion, anyway?
It sounds legalish, but only when it’s applied to a crime. If an act is criminal and you collude in commission of that act, you’re guilty of criminal collusion.
But colluding in a noncriminal act isn’t criminal, it’s called cooperation.
No one has thus far accused either campaign of doing anything criminal. Nothing either side is accused of doing changed the electoral result, although — had the vote been closer, Clinton’s sneaky “collusion” ploy might have worked, and cost Trump the election.
But, it wasn’t, and she didn’t.
No one’s accused of rigging machines or changing votes — not even the Russians. The election wasn’t “hacked”. Neither did foreigners change the outcome. Putin didn’t endorse Trump. Most foreigners endorsed Clinton. If, in your mind, endorsements from foreigners are interference, the foreigners and Hillary are guilty, and Trump’s not.
How did Clinton come by her endorsements? Secret promises, a la Obama’s to Putin? Nope. Her claims to fame, the Arab Spring and Russian Reset were such spectacular busts, in the poker game of world relations, she was the fish. Foreigners were beating her at the table, so why not keep her in the game?
Not so Donald Trump, a man on tilt, a wild card if not a wild man. No one in his or her right mind wanted to play diplomatic poker against Donald Trump.
And so far it appears neither campaign committed any secret sins, like offering to sell Alaska or the Port of Miami for foreign contributions. All they’ve been accused of doing is trying to dig up dirt on each other.
And that’s not criminal, not even immoral. In fact, we want them to do it, just do it better.
It’s why we have criminal records and sex registries. We want to know if there are bad people among us. Knowledge is power. Knowing is being forewarned. If we monitor other miscreants, shouldn’t we monitor our politicians?
Suppose Donald Trump’s minions colluded with the Russians to dig up dirt on Hillary Clinton. Should we care? Absolutely. Dig away, Donnie! If a nefarious Russian’s got dirt that would allow him to blackmail Hillary Clinton, we want to know before she becomes president.
Or, suppose Hillary Clinton’s minions colluded with the Russians to dig up dirt on Donald Trump. Should we care? Damn right! Dig, Hillary, dig! If a dastardly Russian’s got dirt on Donald Trump that might sway his policies, we want to know before he becomes president.
We want the truth, good and/or bad, about all of our candidates. We don’t want reporters waiting until after an election to tell us, too late — one candidate was a crook and the other belonged in a psych ward.
If you’ve been paying attention, no matter where you stand in the political spectrum, you know the media isn’t telling us the truth, before or after the election. Media bosses have their own agendas, that don’t include the truth.
That’s why we need collusion — and honest colluders, who’ll give us the truth, even if we have to pay them.
And clearly, if we want to know the truth we are going to have to pay for it.
The truth isn’t free, and never has been.
It takes time and money to find the truth, reporters and investigators who want to dig up and verify the truth about political candidates before elections. It’s going to cost, millions, maybe tens of millions, more than we can afford to spend on our own.
But not more than we can afford to spend together.
We need to collude. We need a cooperative joint venture — a collusion fund.
How many members does Medium have? Millions? If each coughed up $10 we’d have as much cash to pursue the truth as the media have to pursue lies.
Cash in hand, we offer a bounty: Dig up verifiable dirt on candidates, and we’ll pay you! But — other investigators will get to review your dirt, and if they can shoot down your story, we’ll pay them instead of you!
Imagine how the political landscape might have changed if we’d done this early in the primary season. At the peak I think we had two dozen contenders. Most were steamrolled by the best financed candidates, and their own political parties (or their own mistakes).
Suppose we’d had the cash to dig up the real dirt on Hillary Clinton’s private server, and dig deeper into Donald Trump’s business and private behavior. Might we have seen different names on the November ballots? Might true dirt, exposed during the primaries have changed the election?
People thought Bernie Sanders lived by his socialist ideals. Had we paid someone to dig deeper we’d have known he owns three multi-million dollar homes and his wife’s excessive pay and mismanagement bankrupted a local university.
Ted Cruz was looking good until Trump accused him of lying. Had we paid someone to dig deeper, then publicized their findings, we’d have known during the primaries whether “Lyin’ Ted” was a liar or not.
The “Collusion” dossier dogged Donald Trump before the election. Had we paid someone to dig we’d have found Clinton’s campaign paid for the dossier via the DNC, Fusion GPS, and Christopher Steele, who paid unknown Russians for the unverified (and we now know, false) information.
Hillary Clinton’s health rumors dogged her, because no one in the media dug deep enough to find out if she had serious problems, or not. If we’d paid someone to dig deeper, we might have found out she was perfectly healthy.
“Trump University” looked suspiciously like fraud. If we’d paid for dirt, we might have known before the election whether Trump was a financial predator.
Hillary Clinton’s private server raised alarms. If we’d paid someone to dig deeper we’d have known before the election that Clintonites within the FBI and DOJ didn’t just decide not to prosecute, they decided not to even investigate her.
Donald Trump’s rumored affair with porn star Stormy Daniels might have been exposed. If we’d paid someone to find out about it before the election, and it might have swayed the “moral” vote.
Questions about Hillary Clinton’s role in the Uranium One scandal went unanswered — but if we’d paid for information we might have known before the election whether she was just incredibly lucky, or guilty of pay-to-play.
When Lisa Bloom offered to pay up to $500,000 for witnesses, rumors bubbled of assault accusations against Donald Trump. The issue’s died since, but Bloom’s money turned up apparent witnesses. If we’d paid someone to dig deeper we might know whether Trump is a sexual predator.
If we’d paid people to dig up dirt we might have changed the election.
OK, but how might we do that?
Actually, Ev Williams willing, we might be able to do it on Medium.
Solicit cash from members, list political candidates and issues of interest, post the bounties to be paid and requirements to be met, collect the stories, check the facts and publish the truth —all on Medium.
We’d pay judges to appraise the facts (or ask Medium’s members to serve as juries) and pay the reporters or investigators who came up with the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
Real truth — provable truth.
They’d have to submit their stories and proof, allowing time for assessment and for other reporters and investigators to confirm, or shoot them down.
File an unprovable story, you don’t get paid. Shoot down a false story, you get paid. Intentionally file a false story or use fake facts, and you not only don’t get paid, you get blackballed.
If we offer a Times or Post reporter several times his or her annual salary to find dirt, we’ll get dirt. Offer millions of dollars for big stories on political candidates and we’ll get them. Offer those same millions to other reporters to shoot those stories down, and if they can, they’ll shoot them down.
We’ll get the best truth money can buy, to battle the best lies money is buying.
Would this have changed the past eighteen months?…Maybe.
Unlike the mass media, our people would have dumped “collusion” because, in Peter Strzok’s words, “there’s no there, there.” (All this hoopla over a non-crime appears to be simply an effort to trick someone into committing one.) Anyone digging into “collusion” would have found zip, so smart reporters would have moved on fast.
Imagine how ignoring that one huge red herring might have changed the election. We’d have had more time to dig into real issues, the candidate’s economics, health care, and foreign policies, with facts instead of fabrications.
But — some people don’t care about facts…
“True, but not exhaustive.” (Churchill)
We each have our own values and priorities, we don’t and won’t agree on all of them. We shouldn’t, we’re unique. Some care about sexual mores, others about finances, others about integrity, others about economics, others about patriotism. Not all facts matter, or mean the same things to all people.
But it doesn’t matter what we individually care about, as long as we get the same truth. We’ve got our own scales. We can each weigh it as we see fit.
And we don’t have to have the same goals or be in the same political space to cooperate on the truth.
Once we know it, we can make our own decisions, based on the real truth, not the RNC’s truth, the DNC’s truth, The New York Times’ truth, The Washington Post’s truth, Breitbart’s truth, Politico’s truth, or NBC’s or CNN’s or Fox’s truth.
Objective truth isn’t a fable. Real truth is objective.
And with hard work it’s often, if not always, findable and provable. If we want the truth, and we cooperate — we collude with each other — we’ll find it, or at least more of it than we’re finding now — then make of it what we individually choose to make of it—
— and we can get back to living our nonpolitical lives again.
