BREAKING!
Who Really Determines What You Will Or Will Not See On TV Or Read In The Newspaper?
Fox News.
Faux Snooze.
That, its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its Panting Boy Wonder Boss, Roger Ailes, makes it one of my least favorite subjects (due to massive personal ennui and fear of retching) to even mention any part thereof, but it has attracted
Charlie Pierce's journalistic needle, and he elucidates its new secret coding spellbindingly.
oward Kurtz, who generally has so many interests in conflict that it's a wonder he doesn't get perpetual cramp in his 1099s, has landed at Fox News, where nobody gives much of a fk about ethics, or the truth, or anything else that gives Roger Ailes a pilonoidal cyst, and he doesn't have to worry about those sad dingleberries of credibility that still cling to his career.
I know that television stations are licensed in the public interest. It's fair for the FCC to examine how much news a station offers, as opposed to lucrative game shows and syndicated reruns. But the content of that news ought to be off-limits. The Fairness Doctrine, which once required TV and radio stations to offer equal time for opposing points of view, is no more, and good riddance (since it discouraged stations from taking a stand on much of anything). The Obama administration swears it's not coming back. How, then, to explain this incursion into the substance of journalism, which seems utterly at odds with the notion of a free and unfettered press?
Steve M does a good job of answering the "How, then, to explain..." part of Kurtz's quandary. (The answer: the FCC has a legal obligation to do this, and has done it for years without setting the flying monkeys aloft.)
But that won't stop Kurtz and other, less responsible hysterics from howling their conjuring words until somebody in the saner precincts of the media - my money is on my man Chuck Todd, who is still beside himself over the White House's authoritarian attitude toward releasing doggie pictures - catapults it into Our National Dialogue. (Although Mediaite is already sadly ahead of the game.)
But I'm most amused by Kurtz's invocation of The Fairness Doctrine, which is what wingnut talk-show hosts use to scare their children into going to bed on time. ("Get upstairs right now or The Fairness Doctrine will get you.")
Oh, look. It's already happening.
Paranoia is supposed to drive the news because freedom.
Almost eight years ago, in the course of beginning research into a book, I went to a national convention of talk-radio hosts and everybody there was talking about how terrified they were that the new Democratic majority in the House was going to bring back The Fairness Doctrine, and how they would all stand tall as part of The Resistance. (Bear in mind that Harry Reid already was on record as saying he had no intention of doing so.)
There was even louder screeching about it in 2008, when the towering incompetence of the C-Plus Augustus administration gave the Democratic party nominal control (briefly) of the entire government. The president said (again) that he had no intention of bringing back The Fairness Doctrine. (In 2008, let's face it, it would have been pretty far down on the to-do list behind Clear Out The Rubble From The Entire Government.) And yet...
The questions the study asked, Republicans say, tread too close for comfort to the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine, a controversial federal policy that required radio and TV news to present opposing views of the news stories they covered. The policy was in effect from 1949 through 1987 and was formally wiped from the books in 2011...(H)ouse Republicans shared similar concerns with Wheeler in December, calling the study a "Fairness Doctrine 2.0."..."
The proposed design for the [Critical Information Needs] study shows a startling disregard for not only the bedrock constitutional principles that prevent government intrusion into the press and other news media, but also for the lessons learned by the Commission's experience with the Fairness Doctrine," Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee wrote.
And what, exactly, was "the Commission's experience with the Fairness Doctrine"? Well, having grown up as a news consumer in that benighted tyrannical age, what I remember was that there were a number of media companies, large and small, national and local, and that they actually competed with each other to present original programming from a pretty wide spectrum of political opinion.
What I also remember was that you couldn't at that point drive from New York to Los Angeles while listening only to the same three or four nationally syndicated radio hosts, all of them wingnuts.
And was political debate stifled?
Well, I seem to recall the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement and the rise of the women's movement, and all of them taking place while the Fairness Doctrine was in place, and, again, my memory may be dimming, but I recall hearing vigorous debate about all of them -- especially that Vietnam War thing - from every corner of the AM dial that wasn't playing the latest single from the Lemon Pipers. (Hell, I remember the late, great Jerry Williams in Boston putting former Bostonian Malcolm X on the air for two hours, which freaked out his local audience for years.)
The Fairness Doctrine fell under Reagan, with the assistance of Antonin Scalia, which should be all you need to know about it.
In any case, the Fairness Doctrine has no constituency anywhere in government, and it certainly has none in the current monopolistic mass media culture - Hey, anybody hear about that Comcast-Time Warner merger? - which is a far more worrisome thing than whether or not the FCC is stopping by to make sure you're fulfilling your public obligation to the public airwaves, but which is something Howard Kurtz doesn't seem to worry about. A man never knows when he might need another gig.
It was an interesting fantasy, wasn't it?
Imagine how it was to think up a scheme whereby you pay your
controlled media to broadcast to ordinary taxpayers that they will get massive benefits (dribbling down lazily) from millionaires and billionaires if they increase their own taxes in order to let the rich taxpayers
not pay taxes so they can voluntarily use their non-taxed income in any manner they please to eventually invent/create jobs and opportunities for the less well off. (Of course, you don't mention the necessary increase to the little guys' taxes to make up the deficit during the sales scam.)
What nice guys. Rich guys. Will the Lord ever bless us more?
Oh, to live in such a country.
God is good.
The following array of events only proves that when you allow the rich to rule unobstructed by the public interest for so long, it goes to their heads and causes loss of mental acuity (à la perceptions of themselves as royalty).
(And I personally
really enjoyed the performance art of the following old guy as he smiles broadly throughout his speech at his own cleverness (and the stupidity of his listeners).)
Ain't he a sweet old Grand Dad?
Thursday, Feb 20, 2014
Nothing like using your immense fortune to stick it to the little guy
VIDEO
Dave Johnson
Alternet
Tom Perkins (Credit: Bloomberg TV)
Dave Johnson
Here is how it works these days: You start hearing about a big, national problem and then it becomes a drumbeat. First there are a few articles and columns mentioning that such-and-such is a problem. Then a number of articles appear, then a “study” from a “think tank” confirms the problem and sounds the alarm about how terrible it is, and then just as the issue seems to be the only thing you are hearing about a solution is presented.
Of course, the solution always involves taking something away from you and giving it to some company or industry standing in front of a billionaire or three. The right question to start asking when you hear about these “problems” is "which billionaire is driving this?"
Here are five-plus examples of billionaires who use their money to try to get us to think what they want us to think in order to enact a right-wing economic agenda.
1) Pete Peterson’s deficit/debt scare campaign and his ongoing effort to gut Social Security and other entitlements. Leading every list of billionaires pushing an issue is billionaire Pete Peterson and his forever war on government doing things to make our lives better, especially Social Security. Peterson leads the list because of reports of his pledge to spend $1 billion on his pet issue.
Have you ever heard anywhere that the budget deficit and national debt are a problem? You can’t pick up a newspaper or magazine, turn on the radio or TV, or listen to any politician from the so-called “center” to the far right without hearing that, and the reason is Pete Peterson and his money.
Peterson and his money are a big part of the backing for the Concord Coalition, Fix the Debt, The Can Kicks Back, the Comeback America Initiative, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, the Moment of Truth Project, the Committee for Economic Development, America Speaks plus contributions to many other groups. As Michael Hiltzik worded it in Unmasking the Most Influential Billionaire in U.S. Politics at the LA Times,
“The shame of Washington … comes from the fact that almost every organization promoting the grand fiscal bargain in which those programs will be on the table has accepted, somewhere and somehow, money from Pete Peterson.”
Last week one of Peterson’s deficit-scare groups was in the news.
The Can Kicks Back is an organization named after the narrative that not cutting Social Security is just kicking the debt can down the road. They claim this is because there is a generational war where older people are living high on the hog and younger people will have to pay for this. The group tries to make legislators think younger people want them to cut Social Security, etc. using astroturf videos, Twitter posts, etc.
Well, the Peterson spigot seems to have dried up. The anti-debt group is… wait for it… in debt. All of that astroturf hype about younger people demanding Social Security cuts? When the Peterson money ran out, the urgency went away.
Here’s the thing about this massively funded deficit-debt scare the country has been put through. Getting people whipped up about budget shortfalls (when raising taxes on the rich or cutting the bloated military budget are off the table) necessarily leads to certain conclusions that benefit a wealthy few. It leads people to believe that our government should cut back on the things it does to make our lives better — also called “government spending.”
Meanwhile the country’s real deficit problem is our trade deficit, especially with China. The trade deficit is the measure of jobs and factories moving out of the country. Fixing this deficit just happens to create jobs, lift wages and repair our economy.
If you are hearing about how terrible the budget deficit is and how it is so important that we all make sacrifices in order to bring that deficit down, it’s Pete Peterson ‘s money talking. Too bad there is no billionaire pushing us to fix the trade deficit.
2) Billionaire John D. Arnold’s attack on public-employee pensions. Have you heard that the biggest problem facing our states, counties and cities is the bloated, lavish, insane level of money that goes to public-employee pensions? Of course you have, and that’s partly thanks to billionaire John Arnold. Arnold got his start at Enron trading natural gas derivatives. After Enron he used his Enron money to form an energy-trading hedge fund. Now he is using his fortune to fund various philanthropic causes, including helping to keep Head Start running when Republicans recently shut down the government. Unfortunately he has also dedicated part of his fortune to gutting public-employee pensions.
In a September report for the Institute for America’s Future, the Plot Against Pensions (which has excerpts posted on Salon), David Sirota showed how the Pew Charitable Trusts was working in partnership with (and funded by) Arnold. The findings in Sirota’s report include:
- Conservative activists are manufacturing the perception of a public pension crisis in order to both slash modest retiree benefits and preserve expensive corporate subsidies and tax breaks.
- The Pew Charitable Trusts and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation are working together in states across the country to focus the debate over pensions primarily on slashing retiree benefits rather than on raising public revenues.
WNET severed the relationship. According to the New York Times, “WNET, the New York City public television broadcaster, said on Friday that it would return a $3.5 million grant it received to sponsor an ambitious project on public pensions in the face of charges that it solicited inappropriate underwriting for the series.”
To its credit the Times’ story gave full credit to Sirota’s reporting,
“Earlier, after a critical report on Wednesday by David Sirota on the website PandoDaily, WNET officials said they were comfortable with the foundation’s funding. Mr. Sirota sharply criticized WNET for accepting the Arnold Foundation money because John Arnold, a former hedge fund manager, has financially backed efforts to persuade municipalities to cut public employee pension benefits.”
Note that Arnold allies are pushing a ballot initiative in California to gut public-employee pensions.
P.S. A while back I also took a look at the campaign to turn the public against public employees. In Discover The Network Out To Crush Our Public Workers I looked at some of the names behind the network of “institutes” and “policy centers” and what I called “cookie-cutter think tanks” that were issuing “reports” that basically claimed that the world would end if we didn’t “reform” (gut) the pensions and other compensation of public employees and stop them from being allowed to organize unions.
Tracing through the directors of the various “institutes” and “pulling the threads” of partner organizations they listed, I found that many or most of the strings lead back to Wall Street. I wrote then:
“These corporate/conservative organizations are very good at manipulating the media and public opinion — it is their purpose. Their “experts” are well paid and always available to talk to reporters, appear on TV and radio shows and write articles and opinion pieces for newspapers, blogs and for their network of similar organizations.
Their “reports’ and “studies” reach the conclusions that fit the strategy, and are crafted to sound just right. And there are so many of them! The result is development of “conventional wisdom” about what is going on in our society. This is why that conventional wisdom more and more reflects the corporate/conservative line.”
Of course, getting these things enacted often runs up against a troublesome problem: democracy. There are still places where voters have enough of a say to block some of the things the billionaires are demanding. But never fear, there are a few billionaires working on fixing that pesky democracy problem, too.
3) Charles Munger Jr. (near-billionaire and son of a billionaire) bankrolled California’s Proposition 20 in 2010 to create a “citizens redistricting committee” that took the process of drawing political districts out of the hands of California’s politicians. Munger and many Republicans believed this would immediately turn the state over to the Republicans because the districts were “ gerrymandered”— rigged — to have a majority of “safe” Democratic-voting districts.
Prop. 20 passed, but it didn’t work out the way Munger and Republicans had hoped, not by a long shot. The earlier Democratic gerrymandering process had been “too clever by half.” To make sure Democrats would have a guaranteed majority in the legislature they drew up districts in a way that moved Republican voters into a minority of “safe” Republican districts.
The problem with this is that it takes a two-thirds vote in the legislature to pass a budget, and Democrats had rigged the system in a way that left Republicans with just over one-third control. So year after year Republicans blocked everything, demanding big tax breaks for corporations as a ransom for passing anything that helped any actual people. (Why does that sound familiar?)
It turns out that fair redistricting is a gift to citizen control and democracy. After the citizens commission got rid of the gerrymander, voters kicked out enough Republicans to give Democrats two-thirds control. Prop 30 increased taxes on the wealthy, while also bumping up the sales tax . Now the state has a budget surplus, schools are starting to get re-funded, infrastructure is starting to get repaired and things are getting done again.
Other Munger-financed propositions include Proposition 32, a failed attempt to keep unions from being involved in politics and Proposition 14, which passed and gave California an “open primary” which keeps political parties from being able to choose their own candidates — instead the top two vote-getters in the primary go into the general election regardless of party.
4) Billionaire Tom Perkins laid out his own solution to the democracy problem the other day in an interview at the Commonwealth Club INFORUM in San Francisco, saying, “The Tom Perkins system is: You don’t get to vote unless you pay a dollar of taxes,” Perkins said. “But what I really think is, it should be like a corporation. You pay a million dollars in taxes, you get a million votes. How’s that?”
There you go: one-dollar-one-vote plutocracy vs one-person-one-vote democracy is now openly part of the public discussion. Think Progress’ Igor Volsky explained how Perkins’ idea is “already in the works.”
“The nation’s growing gap between the rich and poor has become a full-blown crisis, with the top 1 percent of families experienced a 278 percent increase in their real after-tax income from 1979 to 2007, while families in the middle 60 percent saw an increase of less than 40 percent. A large body of research suggests that high inequality leads to lower levels of representative democracy and a higher probability of revolution, as poorer citizens become convinced that the government is only serving and representing the interests of the rich.
Wealthy people’s disproportionate impact on democracy also has the effect of perpetuating income inequality. During the 2012 elections, “the top 0.01 percent of campaign donors — one percent of the one percent — contributed more than 40 percent of all the money spent in the 2012 elections,” compared to 15 percent in 1980. Harvard economics professor Edward L. Glaeser argues that as the rich become richer and secure more political influence, they support policies that make them wealthier at the expense of everyone else.”
But wait, there’s more. Conservatives really are advocating migrating to a plutocracy. The conservative National Review’s Kevin D. Williamson argues that progressive taxation in which the wealthy are asked to pay more than others sets a precedent that should apply to votes.
He writes, “If our political liabilities — taxes — should be as a matter of justice proportional to our income, then why shouldn’t our political input be likewise proportionate? Why should proportionality be the rule in one context and not the other? The leap from ‘No taxation without representation’ to ‘proportional taxation with proportional representation’ is not a very dramatic one.”
5+) Silicon Valley billionaires Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt and others pushing low wages for people who work for them.
Speaking of Silicon Valley billionaires…did you think billionaires were in favor of “free markets” and such? Well, it turns out not so much.
In one (more) example of billionaires rigging the free market for their own gain, a lawsuit alleges that the top executives of Apple, Google, Intel, LucasFilm, Pixar, Adobe and others conspired to set up a scheme to drive down the pay of executives, engineers and others.
The class-action lawsuit was filed on behalf of more than 100,000 employees and claims that around $9 billion was stolen from these employees in the 2000s.
E-Bay and Intuit are involved in a similar suit. See Pando’s The Techtopus: How Silicon Valley’s Most Celebrated CEOs Conspired to Drive Down 100,000 Tech Engineers’ Wages.
Comments:
Pete Peterson is right, the debt is a problem, but not in the way he claims. And his cure would make matters worse.
The problem works this way:
When Ronald Reagan cut taxes (1981) the deficit and debt exploded. He then rescinded most tax cuts in 1982, but not on the aristocracy.
Those multimillionaires and billionaires ran to the Treasury to load up on debt instruments when interest rates were in double figures rather than invest in new businesses. They bought enough that they are now the fourth largest holders of US debt, slightly behind China.
The following year (1983) Reagan got Congress to raise the payroll tax substantially. That produced massive surpluses that a 1938 law requires to go to the Treasury rather than sit idle in exchange for IOU's that go to the Social Security Trust Fund. Those surpluses now in the Treasury pay the interest on the debt instruments that the aristocracy loaded up on. The end result is the working middle class is supporting the aristocracy, that includes Peterson, and has to the tune of nearly $3 trillion since Reagan's payroll tax increase.
Peterson wants to cut Social Security benefits to address the debt, but that would make the debt worse, not better. It will get worse because cutting benefits without cutting its supporting taxes would make the surplus larger and that larger surplus going to the Treasury for IOU's would become larger debt.
The realistic method of reducing the debt is to increase Social Security benefits and reduce the payroll tax so that Social Security operates in the red. That would force the Treasury to redeem with cash some of that $3 trillion in debt the Trust Fund holds. Of course, the IRS might have to tax people like Peterson to get the cash to reduce the debt and he is certainly against that, so he proposes something that makes things much worse.
The man thinks like a true conservative - like an idiot.
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If you think Professor Roberts is kidding, don't gasp too much as you read his latest column. Oh, and if you haven't kept up, he's read by millions who don't think it's funny.