California Passes Stricter Pollution Targets: Bringing Business Around

California’s legislature approved a bill (SB 32) in August, 2016 that extends the climate targets from reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from 1990 levels by 2020 (the former target) to just 40 percent of 1990 levels by 2030.[1] A second law, which includes increased legislative oversight of California regulators and targets refineries in poor areas, passed as well. Diane Regas of the Environmental Defense Fund pointed to California’s climate leadership. “As major economies work under the Paris Agreement to strengthen their plans to cut pollution and boost clean energy, California, once again, is setting a new standard for climate leadership worldwide.”[2] At first glance, it would seem that the legislature had freed itself from big business to pass the bills, but the sector itself was split. I submit the anticipation of a refreshed “cap and trade” program as an alternative (or mitigating factor) to stricter regulations played a role. Simply put, using the market mechanism in government regulation makes the stricter targets more palatable to market-based enterprises.

To be sure, oil companies and some manufacturers fought the bills hard. Of the higher costs and out-of-control regulators supposed or at least advertised by big oil, Governor Brown labeled the lobbying campaign a “brazen deception.”[3] Given the companies’ vested commercial interests, that lobbying effort could have been flagged as a conflict-of-interest situation. Accordingly, that campaign’s credibility should have been hard won, with Californians applying strict scrutiny to the “information.” Sadly, it is not uncommon for regulators to cast aside such a conflict because they are fine with relying on information provided by the very companies being regulated. 

That big oil did not dominate the debate may be due in part to Governor Brown’s use of the market mechanism to appeal to business in spite of the higher target in the legislation. Specifically, the legislation increased the government’s leverage in getting wayward polluting companies to participate in the cap and trade program, which requires companies to buy permits in order to release greenhouse gas emissions. According to Governor Brown, the passage of SB32 would increase the leverage that the government has to “reach an elusive deal with businesses that would prefer a flexible program like cap and trade instead of more stringent requirements to slash pollution.”[4] Business managers prefer flexible programs, and bringing in the market mechanism provides a sense of familiar ground.

Therefore, it is possible that the anticipation of a renewed, fuller utilization of the market-based method increased support for the bills from the business sector, or at least mitigated possible opposition, such that big oil and the climate-denying stalwarts in manufacturing could not dominate the lobbying. Put another way, incorporating the market mechanism either directly or indirectly as an alternative to tougher regulations applied across the board is a political strategy that can split the business vote such that the sector itself does not dominate lobbying campaigns in one direction and thus thwart the voters’ judgments, which should consider the arguments of both sides of a proposal.  

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[1] Chris Megerian, “’A Real Commitment Backed Up by Real Power’: Gov. Jerry Brown to Sign Sweeping New Climate legislation,” Los Angeles Times, August 25, 2016.

[2] “Landmark Climate Bill Passed by California Legislature,” August 26, 2016.

[3] “Landmark Climate Bill Passed by California Legislature,” August 26, 2016.

[4] Megerian, “A Real Commitment.”

Global Markets and London Overreact to the British Vote to Secede from the E.U.: Missing the Bright Spots

The world’s financial sector may be excessively sensitive to increasing uncertainty associated with major changes—that is, changes that impact how large institutions, including governments, relate to each other. In such cases, so much is at stake that forces (i.e., the major powers) tend to manage the large-scale change with a minimum of disturbance. In short, the status quo has too much at stake for the market’s feared uncertainty to actualize. The British referendum on whether the E.U. state should secede is a case in point.

The full essay is at "Essays on the E.U. Political Economy," available at Amazon.

Big Soda Campaigning against a Proposed Tax in San Francisco: A Vested Interest Thwarting Democracy?

With a proposed 1-cent per ounce tax on sweetened beverages such as soda-pop on the 2016 ballot in Oakland and San Francisco, the effected industry reserved about $9.5 million in television-ad time.[1] As of August 10^th, the American Beverage Association had already spent $747,267 on campaign consultants and advertisements against the proposed tax in Oakland, whereas supporters of the proposal had spent only $23,297.[2] The imbalance itself could mean that business was subverting democracy by overwhelming voters. If big-soda’s ads were unethical as the pro-tax camp contended, the subversion would be especially harmful.

We’re “up against a campaign that’s willing to lie,” Campbell Washington, an Oakland Councilmember said.[3] As if the industry’s massive ad blitz were not enough of a problem for people like her, the industry was claiming that the tax would increase the prices of eggs, bread, and milk. “It’s an incredibly painful and unethical lie,” said Oakland Councilwoman Rebecca Kaplan. “People worry about having to pay for their groceries. To threaten that their groceries are going to be taxed when it’s not true is a totally despicable tactic from the soda industry.”[4] Hoe Arellano, a spokesman for groups opposing taxes, retorted that grocers “have shown repeatedly that they will pass on those costs to their consumers.”[5] He was assuming that the grocers would not up the price of sugary drinks, but would do so on other foodstuffs.

With the proposed tax being only 1-cent per ounce, Arellano’s assumption that consumers would see a significant increase in the prices of other foods and drinks seems a stretch. The industry’s strategy does seem to include scare tactics, which are unethical. The question of whether grocers would up the prices of soda to fully capture the tax increase is more difficult to answer. The evidence from Berkeley’s tax from 2014 shows that consumption of soda, energy drinks, and other taxed items fell by 21 percent in some neighborhoods after the tax took effect.[6] So People would likely cut down on their purchases of soda. It is possible, therefore, that grocers would not try to capture all of the tax with price increases on the drinks. Even so, the grocers’ profits could take a hit instead of prices of other foods and drinks being affected. I must conclude, therefore, that the industry’s advertising campaign contained untruthful fear-mongering and hence was unethical.

The broader question is whether the huge imbalance in advertising spending was getting in the way of the will of the people being found by democratic means. That is, aside from the fear-mongering, does a large imbalance of campaign spending cause voters to lean too far in one direction when they would otherwise weigh both sides as each having a point. Put another way, such an imbalance can keep a side from getting its message out. To be sure, the pro-tax camp was relying on a grass-roots approach, but that has its limitations in reaching the mass-electorate which has been saturated with ads from the opposing side.

It may be that business has a social responsibility, being within a democratic system, not to overwhelm it with spending on political ads. When an industry has a vested interest in the vote, it may be best for the industry to limit itself to providing facts to the public discourse. To be sure, election results do not always favor the party that spent most; money isn’t everything. Even so, it seems unethical for business to dominate society simply because the bottom line is affected. Free speech is of course a right, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that spending is speech can be regarded as problematic. If so, the use of public policy to reinforce good social responsibility would be possible and perhaps even advised in the interest of protecting the democratic process from being overwhelmed.

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[1] Michael McLaughlin, “Big Soda Spends Millions on ‘Unethical’ San Francisco Area Ads Fighting Drink Taxes,” The Huffington Post, August 24, 2016.

[2] Darwin Graham, “Big Soda Is Spending Big Money Against Oakland Surary Beverage Tax Proposal,” East Bay Express, August 10, 2016.

[3] Ibid.

[4] McLaughlin, “Big Soda.”

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid. See the following: http://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/abs/10.2105/AJPH.2016.303362

Apollo Global Flew Too Close to the Sun: Personal and Institutional Conflicts of Interest

I submit that people tend to get more upset over the exploitation of personal conflicts of interest than the institutional sort. That is to say, our blood boils when we learn of another person contravening a duty in order to gain financially, yet we don’t mind when a CPA firm falsely gives a qualified opinion on an audit so the company being audited will continue with that audit firm the following year. Logically, as the money involved is more in the case of the CPA firm and individuals within the firm stand to benefit personally as the firm is enriched by the continued business, yet even so, we cannot stand direct personal enrichment resulting from a conflict of interest. In August, 2016, Apollo Global, a large private equity firm, settled with the SEC. Both personal and institutional conflicts of interest brought on the $53 million fine. Hence, this case is useful in comparing the two sorts of conflicts of interest.

The S.E.C. accused the private equity firm of misleading investors and failing to supervise a senior executive who was twice caught “improperly charging personal items and services” to Apollo’s funds (and, by extension, to the investors).[1] Misleading investors here is an institutional conflict of interest because the activity is 1) systemic in an organization rather than being done by a person and 2) premised on the institutional relationship between the investor class and the firm. A person improperly charging personal items constitutes a personal conflict of interest because the individual’s personal gain is put before the person’s obligation to the company. In both cases, a narrower gain supplants a wider benefit, which in turn is usually associated with a duty.

The misleading of investors involves the private equity firm’s failure to inform its investors of “so-called monitoring fees.”[2] Apollo had been charging the fees to some of the companies it owned as compensation for the consulting and advice it had provided to them. The Apollo executives were essentially breaking out the supervisory aspect of owning a company and charging the latter for it. In short, Apollo was charging some of its companies for being owned. The private equity firm was even accelerating the monitoring fees when one of its companies was about to be sold or gone public. Specifically, “Apollo would accelerate the remaining years of monitoring fees into lump-sum payments.”[3] According to the S.E.C., these payments effectively reduced the “amounts available for distribution to fund investors.”[4] Apollo, and therefore its management, stood to gain. This represents a narrowing of the beneficiary group (from the companies and the fund’s investors to Apollo itself) by exploiting the fund’s duty to inform its investors. This is known as an exploitation of a conflict of interest.

Regarding the personal conflict of interest, one of Apollo’s senior executives submitted “fabricated information to Apollo in an effort to conceal his conduct” from 2010 to mid-2013.[5] The SEC charged Apollo’s management with knowing of the manager’s misconduct yet failing to do anything about it. In charging the fund for personal items, the manager gained personally, while the fund paid the price. Hence, here again the narrowing of a benefit is involved. The manager exploited his duty to report only work-related expenses in order to gain personally.

Which conflict of interest here aggravates you more? Another person enriching himself—stealing, in effect—or the fund’s charging its companies for functions that are part of ownership and misleading investors about it? I contend that most people would say the former, even though the misleading of fund investors has been a recurring problem. “A common theme in our recent enforcement actions against private equity firms is their failure to properly disclose fees and conflicts of interest to fund investors,” said Andrew Ceresney, the S.E.C.’s head of enforcement.[vi] Ceresney could cite the Blackstone Group and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Company as just two such cases.

I submit the following explanation. We humans are more easily resentful of other people enriching themselves unethically than of organized groups of people doing the same thing institutionally. A person found stealing raises our ire more than a company found misleading investors so to profit more at their expense. Something about groups and institutionalization mitigates our reactions. As a result, better legislation and improved regulatory enforcement oriented to breaking up institutional conflicts of interest (even before they are exploited!) find insufficient political will. The Dodd-Frank financial reform law of 2010, coming on the heels of a major financial crisis, thus leaves the CPA and rating company conflicts of interest in tact. We can expect, likewise, that private equity firms will continue to be tempted to exploit their conflicts of interest even as individual managers found to be stealing from the company "trough" will face prosecution. I contend that American society, including its business sector, could do worse than regard institutional conflicts of interest as more rather than less harmful than the personal variety.

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1. Ben Protess, “Apollo Global Settles Securities Case as S.E.C. Issues $53 Million Fine,” The New York Times, August 23, 2016.

2.Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

Homeless “Campers” Starting Wildfires: Outside the Social Contract

Nederland, Colorado. A town in Boulder County that had embraced marijuana dispensaries for profit, found itself just outside a wildfire that burned 600 acres in July, 2016. Two homeless men were charged with fourth-degree arson for failing to put out their camp fire. The townsfolk reacted in anger, pointing to the increasing number of homeless people in the nearby national forest. Officials had been forced to deal with “more emergency calls, drug overdoses, illegal fires and trash piles deep in the woods.”[1] Some residents urged the U.S. Forest Service to crack down on the homeless by imposing tighter rules on camping, or banning it altogether in certain parts of the woods most popular with the homeless. An analysis drawing on the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, a seventeenth-century English philosopher can be employed to reveal a broader perspective on the problem.

In his masterpiece, Leviathan, Hobbes theorizes that people in the state of nature once made a social contract wherein they ceded their political freedom to a sovereign, who could forestall civil strife and war. Self-preservation is the dominate motive here. In agreeing to give up some freedom to a system of laws and police, agreeing to be bound by them, people believe themselves more likely to survive.

Social-contract theory more generally is not limited to the political dimension. In living in society, people agree to give up some of their economic self-sufficiency that comes from living off the land. Economic interdependence comes from specialization of labor, trade, and even the use of money. In an economy, people are interrelating parts rather than being wholly self-sufficient. As recessions and the loss of particular industries demonstrate, being a part in an economy is not necessarily best for a person’s self-preservation.

Therefore, it is hardly surprising that people for whom the socio-economy—a system of interdependence—does not make self-preservation more assured would head to a forest to live off the land. The homeless in the national forest near Nederland can hardly be blamed for doing what is necessary to survive. Hobbes maintained that people have the right (of self-preservation) to fight off execution even though the punishment is issued by a sovereign who rightly holds all political (and theological) power.

To be sure, a state of nature in a forest located next to a modern society may be inherently problematic. That one homeless man camping long-term in the national forest outside of Nederland asked a forest official when the trash would be picked up points to the problems entailed—problems that would not exist were we all in the state of nature. If modern society can no longer tolerate people living in the state of nature, then places must be found for the extricated humans within the socio-political economy consistent with their self-preservation.

In the E.U., the operative principle is solidarity. Social policy is the typical means by which governments implement the principle wherein self-preservation is taken to be a human right that a society is obligated to protect. In the U.S., the principle is scant—eclipsed perhaps by that of economic liberty within interdependence. Hence, the safety net within American society has gaps. It is only natural for people falling through them—for whatever reason—to seek self-preservation outside of society. It is also natural for people accustomed to the safety in society to fear the human landscape outside of society, where liberties given up in society are taken back up. These liberties are feared by the people in society as they have given them up in exchange for safety. Therefore, we can see, using Hobbes’ theory, that it is in the interest of the residents of Nederland to petition the government of Colorado to accommodate the forest people back in society rather than continue to fight their nearby presence by pushing them further away from society.

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1. Jack Healy, “As Homeless Find Refuge in Forests, ‘Anger is Palpable’ in Nearby Towns,” The New York Times, August 21, 2016.

Hillary Clinton's Extreme Recklessness with National Security: A Rigged Justice Department or Failing Short of Gross Negligence?

In July, 2016, the FBI came to the conclusion that while Hillary Clinton was serving as U.S. Secretary of State, she risked classified information by using private computer servers for email and other purposes. The FBI’s director explicitly stated that she had been extremely reckless. In legal terms, that means gross negligence. At the time, a 99-year-old statute whereby gross negligence is sufficient for a fine or imprisonment of up to ten years was still on the books. Whether or not the person knew the actions were wrong is not relevant to the statute, and thus the enforcement.  So it was perplexing to a significant number of Americans—including prosecutors and other lawyers—that the FBI director did not recommend prosecution. Crucially, extremely reckless is the same as gross negligence in legal terms.

The FBI director pointed out that the statute had not been used as a basis for prosecution, and therefore it was not fitting to apply the statute in 2016. Does this reasoning mean that just because nobody has been prosecuted for lynching black Americans since, say, 1916, a person who lynches a black man in 2016 should not be prosecuted? I have simply increased the seriousness of the crime, but is being extremely reckless with national security not also a serious crime?  Is the American legal system prepared to say that any statute not used in a prosecution is therefore unenforceable?  Only statutes already utilized could be used to prosecute people. No legal basis exists for such a view, and yet the FBI director got away with it.

That Hillary Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, boarded the Attorney General’s jet on the tarmac at Phoenix’s airport to have a discussion with Loretta Lynch presumably about grandchildren just a week before the FBI director’s announcement opens the door to the possibility that the president who had appointed Lynch to a lower office made a deal so his wife—who was running for president at the time—would not be prosecuted. The FBI’s extremely reckless logic adds more support to that possibility. In short, where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.

At the very least, the appearance of corruption is noxious and thus unacceptable. CPA firms look not only at material conflicts of interest, but also the appearance thereof as being problematic. Such conflicts are rather obvious and they are avoidable. Perhaps Bill and Hillary Clinton were desperate to make a deal—appearance or not—because they knew she had been reckless in going against the State Department’s policy; even freshmen congressmen know not to put classified material on private email servers. Hillary engaged in such traffic even when she was on hostile soil, such as China and Russia.

What amazes me from this case is just how easy it was for the FBI recommend no prosecution—given the extremely bad rationale rationally speaking—and how easy had been for Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch to get away with the 30-minute discussion on her plane “on the grandchildren.” That the American people take all this at face value quivers my faith in American representative democracy. Put another way, if the players could get away with corruption and, at the very least, incompetence in such a blatant case, other players could get the message that the American system of justice is no match for corrupt deals made by powerful people. Are the people really so naïve, or are we simply apathetic? Either way, the message from this case is not good regarding accountability. 


Note: This essay is not meant to convey an opinion on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election, and more specifically on Hillary Clinton as a candidate. Rather, the question is whether an inter-institutional conflict of interest exists between the White House and the U.S. Department of Justice (i.e., whether that department is immune from political pressure).

On the Business Ethics and Technology of Self-Driving Cars at Tesla

During the summer of 2016, Tesla was under fire societally with charges regarding the technology and ethics. Both of these issues can be put into a wider perspective in the company’s favor. Put another way, both technological and ethical analyses can be enhanced by putting the specific problems within a larger perspective—even in terms of time.

The full essay is in Cases of Unethical Business, available in print and as an ebook at Amazon.com.  

Reefer Madness: One of Nixon's Dirty Tricks

Journalist Dan Baum wrote in the April cover story of Harper’s about how he interviewed Ehrlichman in 1994 while working on a book about drug prohibition. Ehrlichman provided some shockingly honest insight into the motives behind the drug war. From Harper’s:

“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

SEC Investigating a Hedge-Fund Priest: Christianity’s Pro-Wealth Paradigm Lapsing into Greed?

It is against U.S. securities law to knowingly make false statements or publish false information about a company you are shorting (selling stock now and buying the shares later, hence betting the stock price will go down). In other words, you can’t try to drive the company’s stock price down you are shorting so you can profit from the trade. Besides being illegal, the practice is unethical. Just go to Kant for that! The guy was fanatical against lying.

You wouldn’t expect to read, therefore, that the SEC is investigating a Greek Orthodox priest who sidelines as a hedge-fund manager for trashing commercial reputations in order to make money off shorting stock.  BloombergBusiness reported on March 18, 2016 that the SEC was “examining whether the Reverend Emmanuel Lemelson of Massachusetts made false statements about companies he was shorting.”.”[1] He reportedly referred to his trading skills as a “gift from God.”[2] Such a claim is on a slippery slope, theologically speaking.

The priest who may have lapsed off the plank of Christianity's pro-wealth paradigm onto outright greed hidden under rationalizations as to means and ends. Is Christianity itself at risk for having gone so far into this worldly realm? The again, the Medieval Roman Church was very worldly as a political power.

When the story broke, I had just days earlier finished revising my second book on Christian attitudes toward profit-seeking and wealth in relation to greed. Lemelson’s “gift from God” language reminds me of the pro-wealth writings during the Italian Renaissance two centuries before the Calvinist work-ethic of industriousness. The Italian theologians of the fifteenth century tended to lighten up on profit-seeking and wealth. Cosimo de Medici got a pass from Pope Eugene IV in spite of a fortune based on usury (lending at interest). One priest, Fancini, went so far as to claim that humans are gods on Earth, given the dominion we have over its resources. Far from the camel who could not get through the eye of the proverbial needle, a Christian during the Renaissance (and after) knew he had to be rich in order to exercise the Christian virtue of munificence. Whereas liberality pertains to typical gifts, munificence involves donating money to build a cathedral, for instance. Being able to make a lot of money was a “gift of God” that would enable the successful Christian to give philanthropically on a scale worthy of God’s majesty.

Of course, the pro-wealth paradigm in Christianity is vulnerable to lapsing into love of gain (i.e., greed). Luther’s extremely anti-wealth stance can be interpreted as an effort to put on the brakes before the by-then dominant pro-wealth attitude in Christianity hit the skids and flipped over into greed. Luther did not succeed. Nor did Calvin or the Puritans, though they were more accommodating to the dominant perspective. The result was a clear line to the Prosperity Gospel—the notion that God rewards true believers with not just salvation, but material wealth as well. This idea came from the Old Testament, wherein God promises Israel that material wealth would come if His People hold to the covenant.

In my book, God’s Gold, I search for a theological undercurrent below the graduate shift from anti-wealth to pro-wealth dominance. I discount the impact of the commercializing context. With regard to the hedge-fund priest, I would be hesitant simply to say he was a manifestation of a pro-business American culture. This may be so, more significant, I submit, are the rationalizations presumably going on in the guy’s head. Bearing false-witness (i.e., lying) to harm others is difficult to view as a gift from God. Even as a means to a salubrious end, the juxtaposition of a gift from God and lying without concern for others’ welfare is odd at best.

In the book, I come to a discussion of how the human brain functions in the domain of religion. If we are vulnerable to certain “short-circuiting” cognitively and yet we have a religious instinct, are we not as a species in a double-bind? Put another way, if Lemelson can neither cognitively nor perceptually recognize his own rationalization, is his urge to be religious compromised? I don’t think so; rather, other aspects of the brain, or mind, may obstruct or circumvent it as it manifests itself. I do think these short-comings can be made transparent, and thereby reduced at least somewhat in severity, or swollenness, but denial is indeed a formidable and intractable obstacle. I suppose the dominance in Christianity since the Renaissance of the pro-wealth paradigm (i.e., profit-seeking and wealth decoupled from the stain of greed) renders the “mind-games” that much more harmful in terms of rationalizing some rather un-Christian behavior toward others. For one thing, in order to make money in order to serve God better can enable some pretty nasty means-ends justifications.  In this way, Christianity itself is now more vulnerable than the religion was when being wealthy and Christian were presumed to be mutually exclusive (i.e., greed was assumed to be tightly stapled to virtually any wealth). Ironically, the theology may be partially to blame, in so far as anthropomorphism unwittingly lifts the religious status of money and property.[3]

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1. Matt Robinson, “Hedge Fund Priest’s Trades Probed by Wall Street Cop,” BloombergBusiness, March 18, 2016.

2. Ibid.

3. The secret to that sauce is in chapter 12 of the book, God’s Gold. I got so into the writing of that chapter in revising it that in retrospect the chapters on the historical shift seemed a bit like a very long preface.

Picking a U.S. President: Excessive and Insufficient Democracy

The Electoral College has never performed as intended. Instead of functioning as a buffer against "mob rule," the method of selecting the U.S. federal president has been at the mercy of the two major political parties. While they have made certain that their electors vote for the party candidate, the parties have lost control of the presidential-election process itself. The void given the demise of the Electoral College as a check-and-balance feature has enabled the process to deteriorate. Even as this is not good for democracy, the American electorate has refused to demand that the process be fixed. Both the failure of the Electoral College to function as intended and the related elongation of the presidential-campaign "season" indicate that the system, or process, has run amuck, yet even so, the voters of both parties don't seem to mind. Both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, as per their letters in retirement, would be very concerned about such an electorate. The viability of the American republics, including the Union is at risk, these Founding Fathers would no doubt warn us.
That American voters would elect electors by state, and said electors would in turn then meet in their respective state capitols to caste votes for the candidates reflects the Convention's delegates' fear that the masses voting directly would be risky because people have difficulty resisting their immediate passions. Additionally, because the number of voters for the federal-level office was so large even when the U.S. initially had a population of 7 million, only a tiny fraction could have personal knowledge of the candidates--even just from seeing one in person.  Having a much smaller number of electors actually vote for the candidates would enhance the quality of the democracy, theoretically speaking, because those electors were few enough in number to actually meet the candidates in person. Additionally, the electors could have "inside information" not available through the media and thus to the American people generally. Put another way, the empire-scale of even the Union of thirteen republics renders direct representative democracy less than optimal. Other things equal, the larger the electoral district, the lower the direct contact between the electors and the candidates. The electors thus, as a group, have less information going into the decision.
That so many of the 310 million Americans in 2016 depended on the news media for information on the presidential candidates explains in part why the "primary season" took on the air of a circus. Debates on public policy easily succumbed to titillating personal barbs, including, unbelievably, the size of a candidate's hands and how much another candidate sweats!
The sheer length of the presidential-campaign "season" had also gone out of control. In 2015, Canada's official election season was extended to 11 weeks from its typical five or six weeks. "Many Canadians saw the extension as an excruciating marathon."[1] It is odd, therefore, that Americans put up with a campaign "season" that started during the Spring of 2015 and would not end until November of the following year! Most Canadians thought that the length of the presidential-election cycle had become truly absurd.[2]
American presidential-campaign "seasons" were not always so long. In 1960, John F. Kennedy did not announce his run until 11 months before the election. In 1972, however, Iowa moved its caucuses to the first month of the year, requiring candidates to begin campaigning well before then.[3]
Ironically, the excess democracy is compatible with insufficient democracy. Most notably, the longer the campaign "season," the shorter the period that elected representatives have to viably govern. Less time for governing makes it more difficult for the People's will to be enacted into legislation and executed in regulations.
Furthermore, even though having the various primary elections and caucuses spread out over months can entertain the masses week after week, that the "weaker" candidates can drop out of the process in the process means that voters in a state having a primary weeks or months into the season who want to vote for such a candidate are effectively disenfranchised. That Americans never stop to realize this point suggests to me that the gladiatorial excitement has taken on a life of its own. In effect, nominating party candidates becomes a reality television show even as (strangely) the American people are oblivious to the gradual slide. The reigning assumption in the status quo is that the process by which one candidate is made a federal president is not broken. For an assumption to be so utterly wrong and yet so widely (and unconsciously) ascribed to should cause us perhaps the most concern, for an electorate out of touch with itself is perhaps the most dangerous thing in a republic. Moreover, the presumption of not being able to be wrong renders such a people very vulnerable.
For a people to recognize and accept its own weaknesses and go on even to build procedural safeguards to check even democracy itself is what led to the Electoral College. It was meant to be a check on the excesses possible in an electorate--especially a big one. Doubtless, the device was an utter failure, but this does not mean that no alternatives to the status quo are possible.
In the federal convention, for instance, delegates considered having the governors elect the federal president. We could conceivably add even more possibilities, such as having the newly elected Congress meet in joint session to elect the president. Having elected representatives themselves select among candidates for a federal post is actually very consistent both historically and theoretically with ancient federalism (i.e., confederalism). In the E.U., another empire-level federal system, officials at the federal level select the presidents of the Commission and the European Council.
My basic point is that with such historical and comparative knowledge at hand, even a people wedded to the status quo can realize the brokenness of a system and go on to come up with alternatives. Sadly, viable fixes can be labeled as outlandish or impracticable to a People used to slow, incremental change. They miss the point that rearranging desk chairs on the Titanic falls short when a system has become fundamentally broken. As John Adams and Thomas Jefferson both wrote in their exchanges of letters in retirement, a viable republic requires an educated and virtuous citizenry.  

1. Daniel Victor, "The U.S. Election Is in Its Final 11 Weeks. Canadians Wonder, 'Why So Long?'," The New York Times, August 23, 2016.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.