To Open The Sky

The Commodification of Humanity

Humans have commodified other groups of humans —
treated them as things — from time out of mind.

But America's Constitution is supposed to prevent that.

Republicans Winnow Voters Like Chaff

They aim to rule America, not to govern it.

11 February 2026

Lives in the Balance (Jackson Browne, 1986)

Slavery

The most blatant form of commodification — slavery — is a documented part of ancient history, including in the Christian Bible.1 Slavery is also part of modern history. It was the American republic's original sin, and the cause of the American Civil War in the years 1860-1865. Though the Constitution made it illegal with Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV, it persists under the radar today — but only as a small part of the problem of commodification.

But I am concerned here with two other forms of commodification more prevalent in modern America. Both involve an in-group whose members regard individuals outside the group as unworthy of being considered as people. The free-market capitalist in-group typically regards most citizens as mere consumers of products who will respond favorably to the flashiest product advertisement. To put it crassly, they sell the sizzle not the steak. The political-class in-group views voters as easily manipulated stooges who will believe the most extravagant political promises from a candidate while ignoring that candidate's track record. This is standard practice for Republicans, and it works.

Commercial Commodification

There are several kinds of capitalism. A family business will often operate as essentially steady-state: after an initial period of growth, it has a fixed number of customers, and its expenses and profits remain fairly constant. The same is true of non-profit corporations. But the kind of capitalism practiced by most large American corporations demands constant growth and maximum profit. This demand leads naturally to downward pressure on employee pay and benefits, cutting corners on quality control, and avoiding (or evading) taxes wherever possible. Regulations are also seen as a problem. Large corporations generally regard them as burdensome and seek to remove them. Removing them becomes easier when a business-friendly federal government holds power. The Trump Regime is very business-friendly. Finally, and most relevant to this discussion, the demand for maximum profit also leads to a preference for gullible consumers. The aim is not to pay less on marketing campaigns; such campaigns often take up a large share of company overhead. Rather it is to minimize the per customer cost of marketing.

Once, commercials for beer were common on television; often played during sports events, they implied with the scenes portrayed that beer drinkers would enjoy the most fun-filled, active lives and have access to the most beautiful women. Alcoholic drinks cannot be advertised on television today, but pharmaceutical drugs can. Like any TV commercial, these ads are upbeat and full of happy people. They promise quick relief from various symptoms. The beer ads ended by imploring the consumer to drink responsibly; the drug ads end with rapidly delivered disclaimers that warn of possible side effects, and are often so vague as to be useless. One example is "Don't take this product if you are allergic to it." How would you know without taking it, or at least researching its ingredients?2 In both cases, the onus to understand the tradeoffs falls on the consumer. Neither would be nearly so successful if most consumers had that understanding.

This is the commercial commodification I am talking about. It aims to make the sale not by straightforwardly describing the merits of a product, so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Rather, it depends on glitz and a rapid-fire presentation of attractive people and scenery. Its success, therefore, requires the maximum number of people who respond emotionally instead of thoughtfully.

Political Commodification

The same desire for mass success at little expense that drives product advertisement to target the lowest common denominator operates in political campaigns. I believe it was the late Lee Atwater who once said something to the effect that the typical American voter has a mind full of mush, and that it is ridiculously easy to get them to vote for your candidate. Ronald Reagan, former governor of California, former Democrat, former Hollywood actor and president of the Screen Actors Guild, rose to the presidency in 1980. As the Republican candidate, he won a landslide victory to lead the US government partly on the proposition that "government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem."3 He also promoted the theory that cutting taxes on the rich would result in wealth "trickling down" through the rest of the economy. That theory is baseless and has been debunked many times, yet Republicans still promote it.

Richard Nixon was a bad president, but it is arguable that Reagan ushered in the era of presidential abuses. He is also known for the Iran-Contra scandal, which involved selling arms to Iran and using the proceeds to support armed revolt against the Sandanista government of Nicaragua. Those abuses soon spread beyond the Oval Office. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich became infamous for establishing the Republican policy of demonizing political opponents.4 It also became common practice for Republican-led Congresses to spend rapidly, running up the federal deficit, then relying on Democrats to stabilize things while calling them the "tax and spend" party.5 As Senate Minority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell declared in 2010 his intent to make Barack Obama a one-term president, and he led the fight that resulted in big money becoming dominant in American politics. He essentially bottled up hundreds of bills the Democrat-led House sent over, proudly calling himself "the grim reaper." He blocked President Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court until Trump won the Oval Office, then rammed through three of Trump's choices to open slots on the Court. He condemned Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election, but voted to acquit when Trump was impeached for that crime. And in May 2021 he declared that his party would block the Biden administration "100 percent."

Which brings me to the present and the 2024 election of Donald Trump to the presidency for the second time. His campaign ads do what is commonly called gaslighting, and they depend for their success on a population susceptible to gaslighting: one without what Carl Sagan called "baloney detectors" — aka common sense. Moreover, it was Trump who brought us the era of wall-to-wall gaslighting; the telling of lies so numerous and outrageous that in the aggregate they became impossible to deal with properly.6 During his first term (2017-2021), Trump lied 30,537 times — often claiming something that was instantly disproven by videotape. The first prominent example from his political career was the lie that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and thus was not eligible to be president. Trump and his allies milked that one for years. The most egregious was what came to be called "The Big Lie": Trump's claim that he had really won the 2020 presidential election, but that Democrats had stolen it somehow for Joe Biden. Sixty court cases attempting to solidify that "somehow" were thrown out for lack of evidence. Following that, factions in seven states came up with bogus certificates purporting that Trump had won the Electoral College vote in their states. These too were thrown out. The last gasp of Trump's plot to overturn the 2020 election came on 6 January 2021 when supporters he had called to Washington stormed the Capitol building. They caused enormous damage but failed to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president.

Nothing daunted, Trump and his supporters held fast to The Big Lie. They still do. The four years when he was out of nominal power did not diminish his hold on his cult followers, or on the many right-wing politicians and corporate executives who supported him. He was even able in 2024 to get Republicans in Congress to kill a tough bipartisan immigration bill because he wanted to be able to continue to run on the issue. Meanwhile, the torrents of absurd lies kept flowing. Notable examples were: Portland, Oregon had been burned to the ground by protesters; Tariffs are paid by the foreign countries they're imposed on; Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating people's pets; boys go to middle school one morning and come home as girls that afternoon.7

The fact that Trump and his enablers would keep lying this way is bad enough. But the point of my recitation is that their lies would not matter if a large portion of the populace were not disposed to take them at face value. These are the poorly educated people that Trump early on said he loves. Well he might, for they put him over the top in 2024 and came close to doing so in 2020 when 74 million of them voted for him. Note carefully: this was after they'd seen him perform in the Oval Office for four years — a performance that included his first shot at tariff wars, which raised the prices of cars and home appliances and spiked the farm bankruptcy rate by 24% in 2019;8 and his gross mishandling of the pandemic in 2020.9 Despite that track record, Trump won over more voters in 2020 than he had in 2016 (though fewer than Joe Biden won), and still more in 2024.10 No government in the history of America has counted so much on the gullibility of its citizens as the Trump Regime. The fact that it has gotten so far by doing so is our great shame.

American Government

Commercial and political commodification have both reached peaks as the Trump Regime exploits the fact that big money dominates politics and ignores any restraints on what it can do. Trump has raked in billions during his second term in the Oval Office, and he still plays the victim, begging his supporters for donations or selling them overpriced merchandise like the "God Bless the USA Bible" (printed in China).11 The Regime's shock troops, ICE, intimidate citizens as they are designed to do, while its captive Department of Justice threatens more influential opponents like big law firms and members of Congress with bogus legal charges. The goal of all this is to consolidate the Regime's power, and it's working fairly well so far. That's due in large part to measures put in place over the past forty years, including the subversion of American education and media, which has induced so many to act against their own best interests.

American Education

So: we have in America a large portion of our electorate who don't know much about economics, or history, or medicine, or science, or even how to tell if the government is screwing them over. What is the reason for this? In my view it is part of a plan. Executives of large corporations, with few exceptions, crave the ability to operate without restriction, so that their profits will be as large as possible. History shows they were able to operate this way during the Gilded Age. They are operating the same way today. They can do so because they can pay politicians to do their bidding, and the politicians go along because they enjoy jobs with high pay that don't require from them either hard work or hard choices. Laws and Supreme Court rulings enabled by corporate largesse over the years, such as the infamous Citizens United ruling that equated corporate money with speech, have brought this about. But it never would have happened without a general decline in the quality of America's public education system and its news media.

Think back. How long have you been hearing complaints that the public education system is "brainwashing" or "indoctrinating" students into "unAmerican" values? Republicans constantly claim this, and push for a private, for-profit system that they say would avoid this danger. Consider Moms for Liberty and their campaign to remove from schools books they claimed promote sexual perversions12 (a campaign generously funded by wealthy right-wingers). Recall that during this period there were widespread calls for parental rights, which meant the right of any parent to dictate not only what books their own children read, but what any child in their school could read. Consider Betsy DeVos, Trump's Secretary of Education during his first term, who worked to set up Christian private schools as an alternative to the public system. Consider Linda McMahon, his current Education Secretary, working quietly to shut down the Department of Education. Consider the Texas Republican Party platform of 2012, with its plank to stop education in critical thinking.13

I used to hear a lot about how American students didn't measure up to their counterparts in other developed nations, and how something really should be done about this. A 1983 report titled "A Nation at Risk" put it bluntly, noting that it could be considered an act of war if a foreign nation had somehow imposed such a result on America. Forty years on, outcomes from American education still need work. However, I don't hear much about this in the news these days. Nor do I hear about periodic assessments of what adult Americans understand about specific topics like the theory of evolution, or about astronomy. (The last survey on any scientific topic I'm aware of was on astronomy. Done in 2012 and published in 2014, it asked whether the Sun orbited the Earth or vice versa. 26 percent of respondents thought the Sun orbited the Earth.)14

Clearly, there's a lot of controversy about the quality of education America provides its students. I think it's fair to call it a political football. Two things are clear, in my view. One is that America's children aren't getting the education they need if they are to compete with students of other nations or, as adults, to keep America working as a free and democratic nation. The other is that, based on observations I will be glad to support, there has been a long-running campaign to keep it that way. That campaign, run by Republicans and some Democrats, has the goal of making Americans easier to bamboozle, and it goes along with support for big money in politics and for politicians who promote the welfare of corporations rather than the general welfare of the people who vote for them. In other words, they treat their constituents more as commodities to be bought than as individuals whose wishes and concerns and constitutional rights need to be respected.

American Media

The same wealth and lax laws that enabled corporations to buy politicians enabled them to buy media outlets, building up media empires they could depend on to feed their preferred narratives to the American public. First it was Rupert Murdoch's New York Post and Wall Street Journal; then it was Fox News, NewsMax, and OAN on cable TV. More recently, corporate moguls have bought control of major social media sites: Facebook, TikTok, and X-Twitter. Through a combination of "lawfare" and corporate takeovers, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News, and CNN have been co-opted. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other newspapers have also fallen victim to some degree. The Public Broadcasting System is being shut down. Radio stations too are largely owned by right-wingers. All of this means that large segments of the public seldom get unbiased reporting. Studies have shown that Fox News viewers are less well informed than people who don't watch news at all.

The Associated Press has been banned from the White House press room. All news sources have been banned from the Pentagon unless they agree to submit their stories for DOD approval. Trump took control of the military newspaper Stars and Stripes. He tried to dismantle the Voice of America and Radio Free Asia in March 2025 but was blocked by a court order.15 His FCC chair has threatened to revoke the licenses of broadcasters who report information unfavorable to Trump.

Just recently (5 February 2026) came the news that Jeff Bezos, who bought the Washington Post in 2013 and generally supported its independence, has now fired 300 journalists (some in the midst of reporting from overseas) and shut down the paper's international, metro, and sports desks. Bezos thus joins a group of billionaires cooperating with Trump's push to cancel news sources that honestly report what he is doing, some of which I mention in the previous paragraph.16

The Bottom Line

To repeat, all this is part of a decades-long plan being worked by certain corporate leaders and politicians. Its goal is to turn America into a two-tiered society in which a well-educated elite enjoy the good jobs and most of the wealth while most of the citizens work low-wage jobs and struggle to attain a decent living. There is nothing new about such inequality. Only in America and other developed nations has anything close to a condition of general prosperity been achieved. History shows us that, without comprehensive education and a civic-minded populace, such a condition is unstable. Indeed, we see American prosperity eroding before our very eyes today. Numbed by the wanton cruelty of ICE actions and the torrents of lies from the leaders of the Trump Regime and their enablers, Americans have fallen under a sort of spell. We must rally together and break that spell.

Now, I've thrown a lot of words and facts at you. So let me cut to the chase.