Kudos to this gentleman for saying all that he did on MSNBC. And I saw a piece last night that expanded on his comments, in which Joy Reid stated that the extremely wealthy have played a great trick on the populace, fooling them into thinking that being rich makes them more deserving. That, too was welcome.
However, these critiques don’t go nearly far enough. The overarching point missed (so far) is that the corporate media have not, for many years now, taken seriously their role in challenging and speaking truth to power. This overarching goal of journalism was thrown out the window by TV news decades ago (thanks, Bill Clinton), leading these programs to actually morph into cheerleaders for and friends of entrenched power. So, the problem is deeper than the likes of MSNBC not having their finger on the pulse of the people or rich people fooling poor people about their supposed superiority. The problem is that the corporate media today amplify the many messages of the powerful without any push back or demands for proof of their claims, that they are complicit in misinforming the populace to keep them aligned with the interests of the powerful, and that they distort the relevance and meaning of fringe topics or groups into having as much weight as the concerns and realities of the vast majority.
Observe, report, be fair about context, challenge power and occasionally opine…all legitimate functions of a much needed press. MSNBC, you do very little of this. And we don’t have time to hold your hand while you come out of denial about it. Our country is in shambles, and we’ve been suffering from your journalistic malpractice for decades now. You have stood in the way of progress for far too long. So, hire respectable journalists to replace the current slate while they go for treatment of their denial, and do penance for the messes you have made. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be allowed back in future. At present, a great shame is upon you.
Because Bloomberg is a kinder, gentler fascist?
If you’d answer the question concerning the destruction of the planet by the Multi-National Corps. ( The Amazon just being one ), under the guise of development and growth ( GDP ), I’d pay attention to you. Not so much, though, currently.
As it sits today, the upward growth as a % of The Billionaire Boys Club, has come at the expense of the quality and future lives of the 99ers of the world. There’s no future in a destroyed planet.
Geo-Engineering and charitable acts won’t mitigate that inconvenient truth.
Just sayin’.
By “unseasoned” I meant that the author doesn’t seem to have been seasoned by as many Democratic Party national conventions as I have, over the decades. But I’m more frequently wrong than right, and the times they are a-changin’.
You are kind of silly.
About this penchant that you have for defining the term ‘collectivist’ according to your personal point of view? This time around you conflate the communists (Soviet style big ‘C’) with socialism. Such muddying of the facts does not warrant discussion. For clarification an example… Social Security is a socialist program but not a communist one. Try to puzzle out the difference, okay? Social Security does not try to overthrow the bourgeoisie, in fact the bourgeoisie are pretty much the main beneficiaries and wildly supportive of the program.
I hesitate to ask you as to what exactly do you mean by your apparently much beloved term ‘collectivist’? Would the existence of socially productive programs like Soc Sec or Medicare and Medicaid mean that Americans who participate in these programs are then ‘collectivists’? Are you in fact a closet collectivist yourself or plan to be one in the future? Moreover are public schools collectivist? Are taxes actually a telltale sign that collectivist views have infiltrated our system? Goll dang it - the damn Post Office too? Dang collectivist from the get go by cracky!
Save us rwburcik… you are our only hope!
Astute observations. We live in a fractured society these days where commonly held definitions and understandings are no longer so commonly held by everyone. Most obvious is the TV reality and the real world reality. As part of that perhaps is the TV understanding of history. Unfortunately most people will never pickup a history book but many will watch a historical movie or documentary etc… From this we get a divergence of understanding about many historical events or situations.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that our modern culture extracts essences (albeit shallowly) and uses these shallow definitions as descriptive adjectives or adverbs. Thus the term Nazi represents fascism with little distinction between the murderous Nazi (death camps) and the pomposity of Mussolini’s ineffectual posturing. Franco in Spain was a fascist too. The term Nazi may be hyperbolic but it stands for fascism nonetheless in many people’s minds.
So too a similar hyperbolic redefinition process accompanies the name Goebbels. Now the name represents a hyperbolic comparison to propaganda that is over the top, incessant and false.
Your point is appreciated by many that feel similarly.
Easy their Mr. Neo.Your slinging other people’s opinions around, not your own.
" You have a mind of your own, why don’t you use it? You know your way home, or did you lose it? "
David Bromberg
The only thing I can say is “Wow… three full pages of half truths, distortions, and lies”.
And quoting Ayn Rand was your opening! I wish I had stopped reading there, but I forced myself to keep going. It didn’t get better.
I am going to be honest with you and so I must therefore apologize ahead of time. That said…
You think that by repeating bits and pieces of disparate sources out of context and selected to fit at that, is the same thing as you understanding the meaning of it all yourself? Do you feel that all these quotes show intellectual vigor on your part? In other words… can you present your argument in your own words and convey the substance effectively? You quote but that is all you do. What was your point in doing this quote fest? You need to get some self esteem and learn how to debate by saying things yourself. Those people said these things not you. It is not the same thing as you having a grasp of your subject. Put down your scripted talking points and selected quotes. You obviously only wanted to rant rather than debate. Big deal. It was boring because you merely stated what other people said and cited a few select figures. You then add a comment or two implying that your quote should settle all further argument. You must be joking.
You need to stop quoting and discuss or debate (if you even can) without needing to rely on what other people have said. Did you notice that your rant against socialism did not address anything I said to you? So tell me… by your definitions are Americans socialists because they participate in Soc Sec, Medicare and Medicaid? Are we collectivists (you are so silly) as you put it because people cooperate to achieve an end? Is a state highway a collectivist undertaking because taxes from everybody paid for it for the collective good?
In other words your reliance on words is not the last word in wording. You rely on labels so much that you have failed to account for the symbolism inherent in a word. The famous French painting by Magritte of “This is not a pipe” (a painting of a tobacco pipe) says it all. Lol.
A word or a label is not the thing it stands for. Labels are merely symbols that substitute for actual things. You say collectivists but what does someone else hear when that word is used?
Try talking in your own words if you would see how smart you are… or not.
It is your own fault. Lol. And I had had such high hopes early on but he piffled out. Sigh. It is so strange that people still find Rand appealing. Collectivists… I bet that’s a naughty word in his circle of friends … friend… people who nod politely and then walk away… people who just walk away when they see him coming with Rand’s book in hand. Fine… his goldfish likes him.
(When he is feeding it)
The Green Party nominates its candidate in July 2020. Most articulate is Howie Hawkins – who in Jan 2020 predicted this round of MSM corporate Dem attacks on Bernie. His Feb 4 2020 blog responds to #45’s SOTUS. ttps://www.gp.org/howie_hawkins
My time is more valuable than to argue with nonsense.
Your choice of what/who to quote, and selectivity makes it a fool’s errand.
At some point even a dog chasing its tail has to realize that his butt stinks, and he stops.
Denial about what? You are chastising a zebra for wearing stripes. MSNBC and commercial broadcast media along with the advertiser-driven press are indeed corporate-captured, because that is their business model. Advertiser-driven mass media does not serve the masses, it serves up the masses to its advertisers. The advertisers and underwriters are the clients who pay money for access to glazed eyeballs, stunted critical thinkers with tin ears and a paralytic body politic twitching from Weapons of Mass Distraction aimed at them through a tube or screen.
The media critics who still teach in some of the finer journalism programs within U.S. schools of higher learning (and they tend to do their work not at the wealthiest underwritten programs like USC’s Annenberg, UCLA’s Media Studies or Milken Institute for Law and Ethics or other such pipelines to the commercial mass media, public relations, legal services and advertising industries but rather teach out in the provinces or latifundia of empire where the focus of a Mass Comm or Media Studies program would be like at U.C.-Berkeley, structured as an inter-disciplinary with course requirements drawn from the sciences and humanities as well as the arts and journalism departments) and who tend to appear with regularity in a analytical, critical and educational capacity on the singular nation-state networks and in non-profit press dedicated to the PUBLIC INTEREST.
Ideally, these national Public Interest broadcasters do not even accept corporate underwriting and are insulated entirely from market pressures. As university Media Studies scholar (and commercial sports media production practitioner for many well-paid decades) Dennis Mazzocco outlined in the concluding chapter to his book on Z Magazine co-founders’ South End Press release NETWORKS OF POWER much earlier in his dual careers in academia and commercial sports broadcasting, it only takes about 1% tax on the national advertising and public relations industry along with such minimal tax on the profits that flow from the licensing of the “Public’s Airwaves” and “Cyber Spectrum” to fund a parallel broadcasting, net-casting and publishing network insulated from market pressures and designed from the bottom up with plenty of ombudspersons liaising with the political and activist classes to make sure the PUBLIC INTEREST remains insulated from the unceasing attempts at subversion by PRIVATE INTERESTS. A healthy democracy whether a republic or more direct form of democracy would have both sorts of mass media, PUBLIC INTEREST and PRIVATE INTEREST.
Expect like the CBC up in Canada that the PUBLIC INTEREST broadcasters’ and publishers’ consumer numbers would be lower and imported commercial entertainment would appeal to the lowest common denominator. Hollywood and the U.S. media centers provide bigger viewer, listener and reader ratings\numbers to the Canadian broadcasting systems via the Weapons of Mass Distraction than any of their PUBLIC INTEREST production. Yet, I’d argue that even with the political catastrophes and awful policy outcomes in Canada to our north that so mirror our own, Canada’s body politic is healthier and the nation’s sense of civics is stronger. A multi-lingual national broadcaster also paradoxically provides social cohesion and national identity with greater representation and ethnic inclusion of an immigrant and indigenous first nations formed country.
That we in the United States have not seen an organized and sustained demand for such educational, ethical, civic-oriented public affairs and fine arts broadcasting, net neutral cyber-space and publishing without commercial interruption since the early color-coded national radio networks of the early 20th Century (see McChesney & Nichols OUR MEDIA, NOT THEIRS: The Democratic Struggle Against Corporate Media . By Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols. New York: Seven Stories, 2002) that is the mystery worth exploring. And worth holding organized labor’s feet to the fire for refusing to ever coordinate:
A demand and never-ending protest in front of every CPB, NPR, PBS broadcast facility for a return of those Weapons of Mass Distraction to the People who are the rightful owners of the facilities, spectrum and means of production that must be insulated from market pressures for democratic process to survive and for the Public Interest to remain privileged over the Private Interests.
Forget about political reform without mass media reform first as that is where the money all goes, to buy influence and air time. By the bye, that was not called communism and not even socialism back when the founders provided free U.S. Postal service to publishers big and small, corporate catalogue clearing houses like Sears\Roebuck, the Farmers’ Almanac and pinko utopian and\or parody\satire self-published 'zines alike regardless of ideology or perspective and national radio networks allocated spectrum and facilities to labor unions and religious denominations who made such a demand to materialistically and morally uplift the revolutionary technologies of mass communications emerging in the late 19th Century and continuously since from the clutches of snake oil salespersons, rapacious market forces and what was seen in the revolutionary early 20th Century as a national dumbing-down via the temptation of jazz and swing records and musicians playing live on the air and brought into fine and proper homes by vice producers who monopolized the commercial national radio networks and broadcast air space programming then as now.
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Disc-US-sion List
Bernie is trying to restore democracy as the OECD members demonstrate and the Democracy Index leaders illustrate. Democracy Index by country 2019
| Rank | Country | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Norway | 9.87 |
| 2 | Iceland | 9.58 |
| 3 | Sweden | 9.39 |
| 4 | New Zealand | 9.26 |
Corporate socialism is tax credits to big petroleum while they use USA’s military for their own admiration of Monroe, and I don’t mean Marilyn. Those companies even have their own security forces and contract with mercenaries in the spirit of Walter Raleigh, a pirate before being Knighted.
Sweden has built its economy on egalitarian social structures, health for all, and education for all. It does not focus trillions on endless wars nor propping up fossil fuel exploitation companies. Even J P Morgan is getting out of that dirty business.
J P Morgan Chase is not yet a Public Interest institution, although the Corporate Welfare subsidies it has enjoyed are on par with more THIRD WAY NORDIC nation-states who trade freely on global markets and try to pursue Public Interest privileging policy outcomes rather than the U.S.'s Political Economy since the Cold War weaponized Blowback of federally subsidized Mighty Wurlitzer Gray Propaganda with the continuing privileging of Private Interest over Public Interest in policy making and in state legislation. Consider the bi-partisan participants in the ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council - Wikipedia)
corporate capture of state’s rights, public health, shelter and welfare along with industrial legislation.
Chief Cold War industry propagandist and accredited economist (although his wife Rose Director Friedman earned more respect among her academic peers) academician Milton Friedman’s irresponsible promotion of the GREED IS GOOD mass media meme was also hypocritical in its absolute embrace of Shrinking Big Government except for the sole legitimized socialist sector of national defense. This includes what WW II General President Dwight D. Eisenhower termed too late (on his way out the White House doors after his second post WW II administration) the dangers of an unfettered Military Industrial Complex and the privatization of national security functions. Daddy Warbucks remains the most mainstream U.S. economic sector to remain overwhelmingly popular despite its socialized structure apart from other National Defense programs like Social Security, MediCare and MedicAid across the political spectrum. Even Lefties and Libertarians tend to approve massive military budget increases, see the recent approval President Trump received from the Democratic Party and from Libertarian GOP Senators even long past the dissolution of our Cold War ideological rivals in Communist China and the Soviet Union. Albeit more quietly trimming Public Assistance of all stripes from budgets.
Those two global Cults of Personality (perhaps that is what Communism and National Socialism are destined to devolve into once mobs have been mobilized and weaponized domestically) have favored and pursued the ruling elite structures of Command Control Robber Baron State Capitalism.
Of the kind enjoyed by the U.S. Republic’s pillars of philanthropy and Feudal Lords of High Finance\Industry\Life Science Tech right up until Teddy Roosevelt passed the first national anti-trust\anti-competition legislation.
Third Way Nordic nation-state Finland has proportionately out-performed North American nation-states and most of the EU as well as Eastern Asia while recovering under their government’s well-coordinated private sector partners from Global Trade downturns and the sin of overlooking diversification of national economy in finding Third Way socio-econ policies to pursue in the Public Interest.
Finland’s government and better educated and mass media informed body politic has made corrections on a national scale even after Nokia’s displacement as narrow TeleComm sector global cartelier. Even during times of prevailing Neo-Liberal and Neo-Con economic doctrines that have replaced “Diversification of economic sectors” as Post WW II received economic wisdom with the Larry Summers and elite Ivy League and London School of Financialization advocated Supply Line organization of national economies, as controlled and guided by self-appointed Feudal Lords of Globalization.
Search online for what we can’t find in our U.S. mass media’s (not even in the Business dominated Public Broadcasting non-commercial spectrum) presidential primary and national election cycles. No links allowed on Common Dreams Reader Comments so search this headline from dot com Global Business Media publication QUARTZ. The key words via browser: ARCTIC MIRACLE Nokia’s collapse turned a sleepy town in Finland into an internet wonderland
October 29, 2019
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Discussion List
I think arguing about socialism v capitalism is a distraction from the existential threat of pandemics, displacement, and climate disruption. Probably more comfortable, though, to have the robots punch each other back and forth interminably inside one’s head than open one’s eyes to face the reality of sentient needs at the door.
Thanks for the reply. I couldn’t agree more with what you share here. And yes, the corporate media are profit- and power-driven entities, as you rightly say. My statement about them being in denial was a clumsy attempt to address the observable shock they displayed at their messaging being challenged and their being exposed as liars for claiming to be impartial public servants following a duty to inform the public. They seemed genuinely shocked to consider that they may have to face a reckoning with the public for this deception, which is long overdue. But, many days later now, and with Biden having won Super Tuesday, I see they are all back in their comfort zones. Too bad. We nearly had them up against a wall.
Thank you djpfl for showing U.S. your internal struggle and it makes me feel less alone. Let’s each continue to search out ways to press the never-ending struggle for Public Interest rather than Private Interest underwritten broadcast and cyber spectrum at the national level. Like clean water and air these are national resources and should not be up for auction or left in a Pay2Play de facto feudalistic form at the whims of This Week on Wall Street, excluding Clock Puncher and Wage Slave nation’s perspectives and opening Main Street up to gentrification via financialization brokered by the trans national Corporate Caliphate.
Bad enough Civics was dropped from Public School curriculum in K-12 concurrent with about the start of our Wage Stag-Nation and era of Food Stamp Nation. More barely considered encroachments after the Neo-Liberal\Neo-CONservative E-CONomic Revolution that was not televised during the Cold War and permanent war economy years when professional propagandists like Milton Friedman and the Chicago school contracted with the government to spread false Free Trade\Libertarian doctrines like Shrinking Big Government and eliminating taxes on corporation and on idle wealth. That and de-regulating The Supermarkets of Financial Services and unfettering global capital without truly unfettering global labor to cross borders as freely as capital, which classical Liberal Economics’ philosophical founder Adam Smith insisted on in his much debated birthing guide of market directed economics. THE WEALTH OF NATIONS.
All in our Washington policy-makers’ struggle to win hearts and minds over to some barely recognizable topsy-turvy form of predatory capitalism. Where Hollywood and Wall Street amplified and repeated the central doctrine’s essential tenet manifest in word, deed and legislation as: “GREED IS GOOD.” Entrepreneurial was substituted for Civics in our national programming of U.S. as Indoctri-Nation via Weapons of Mass Distraction.
The Blowback from Washington’s and U.S. tax-payers’ Mighty Wurlitzer of global institutional and academic propaganda in 3 shades (White, Gray and Black) has hollowed U.S. out as a nation or a polis. Neither Neo-Liberal nor Daddy Warbucks Neo-Conservative doctrines of privatization in the name of the omniscience and benevolence of so-called rational market forces, socializing the costs and risks while privatizing the profits in Public\Private Partnerships and the inherent self-justification of excellence and accomplishment winning out in our Calvinist mirage of a meritocracy structured like Calvin’s notions of a pre-destined Preterite and Elect bears any resemblance to our dumbed-down and off-shored broke social institutions and never fabricated social safety nets.
In our battle against a Soviet Empire that was always more cult of personality than anything resembling Communist or Socialist Doctrine we gave up the ideals we never came close to realizing but that formed a struggle from the first Federalist papers and arguments about building a New Nation. How telling that not long after the “charismatic cult leaders” vanished from the scene leaving the Secret Police Chief Andropov and technocrats like Brezhnev and Gorbachev at the head of the rubber stamp Politburo the whole Evil Empire system collapsed in on itself, never even regaining the footing it had before becoming the front lines for WW II v. the Nazis and Fascist Axis powers. Those powers did not shatter Russian Revolutionary infrastructure, social safety nets and esprit de corps for decades dovetailing with cult leader Uncle Joe Stalin’s auto-genocidal collectivization and expansions into Central Asia and impoverished East Africa. The Cult of Personality and Washington’s Robber Baron connivance left behind nothing resembling a coherent vision to compete with the Cult of Personality’s self-interested objectives. Sound familiar?
Let U.S. all find ways to cooperate in a Top to Bottom and Bottom to Top cross-class ongoing struggle to win a national broadcast and cyber platform system that is fully insulated from market force pressures and is chartered and whose programming and operation is based on privileging the Public Interest rather than the Private Interests. This can be easily done as outlined in Mass Comm professor and lengthy careerist in commercial broadcasting Dennis Mazzocco’s early book NETWORKS OF POWER outlined in its concluding chapter by applying a 1% flat tax on the profits of the advertising and public relations industries whose broadcast licenses and cyber platforms resulted from public spending on research and development that created these greatest of human advances in mass communications, which only the U.S. has auctioned off in a Pay2Play winner take all broadcast\cyber spectrum given away to our Feudal Lords of High Tech\Finance and the trans national Corporate Caliphate.
Without media reform there will be no political or social reform in the pay2play U.S.
Keep on doing djpfl, struggling and sharing what you learn!
Warmly yours,
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Shifters and Song Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa
Media Discussion List