Here's an article that drives home the point that Capitalism is only
good for the Billionaires. Sure, some folk grab off a few more scraps
from the heavily laden Billionaire banquet tables, but by and large
the wealth stays at the top. No trickle down for the rest of us. Of
course we've been conditioned by the Empire's schools and the Empire's
stories of rags to riches, and the self made man tales. And of course
there is some weight to the stories that anyone might make it to the
top. Donald Trump began as a small time millionaire, and rose to
become the nation's most popular con artist.
I say that Capitalism has outlived its time in the sun. Let's start
rewarding those who look out for their fellow citizens. Like teachers
and care providers and street cleaners and gardeners and farmers and
mothers.
Carl Jarvis
On 1/22/20, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Media Stupidity Is Uniting Left and Right
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone
22 January 20
After CNN’s debate ambush and MSNBC’s body-language analysis, loathing of
media is becoming a crossover phenomenon
Just a few elections ago, the national press policed the boundaries of both
Democrat and Republican politics. You couldn’t sniff either party’s
nomination without media assent.
After more high-profile crackups, including a few over the weekend, the
press might be months from being pushed all the way to the outside of a
general election campaign. Having declared war on Donald Trump and his
voters years ago, news outlets are committing to a similar pile-on of
Bernie
Sanders.
Maybe this will end as an inspirational unity story, like Independence Day,
when an invasion of gross aliens brought America together. At present, it
just seems short-sighted.
The low point came Saturday, when Joy Reid on MSNBC’s AM Joy show had on a
“body language expert” named Janine Driver to declare Sanders a liar,
because his posture reminds her of a turtle. There’s not much to say about
this except it’s the same combo of junk forensics and yellow journalism
that
Bill O’Reilly made infamous.
Times columnist David Brooks, meanwhile, blew up the Internet last Friday
comparing Sanders to Trump. The onetime author of a book about the superior
taste of America’s urban rich took aim against the politics of class
resentment, ostensibly as practiced by both:
This is a golden age for “Theyism.” This is the belief that there is some
malevolent, elite “they” out there and “they” are destroying life for the
rest of us.
Brooks self-identifies as “they.” In Bobos in Paradise, he wrote that the
term “establishment” too often comes across as sinister. “I’m a member of
this class… we’re not so bad,” he said, adding: “All societies have elites,
and our educated elite is a lot more enlightened than some of the older
ones.”
The Times has been trafficking in the Trump-Sanders comparison for a while,
most explicitly in a bizarre interview with Sanders on January 13th.
That piece was part of a series in which candidates “interview” for the
Times endorsement with a panel of “opinion journalists whose views are
informed by expertise, research, debate, and certain longstanding values.”
Drawing upon his “certain longstanding values,” Times panelist Nick Fox
asked Sanders about plans to keep his “revolution” going after election:
Given what we’ve gone through over the last three years when Democrats hear
about the president flying around the country holding rallies, they might
cringe. And I’m wondering how you flying around the country in 2021
rallying
the people would be different than what Donald Trump has been doing?
Because Bernie Sanders threatens to use airplanes and draw big crowds, he
is
Trump.
(The Times humorously ended up endorsing an Amy Klobuchar-Elizabeth Warren
parlay for the Democratic nomination.)
Brooks meanwhile says Republicans are already “swallowed up” by Trump’s
brand of “they-ism,” a culture war targeting coastal elites. He worries
Democrats are “rushing” to sign up for a similar campaign against
“billionaires who have rigged the economy to benefit themselves and
impoverish everyone else”:
Each of these stories takes a genuine tension in society and blows it up
into an all-explaining cartoon in which one part of America is trying to
destroy the other part.
When prominent media voices compare the Trump and Sanders movements, it’s
always the same insult: Trump sucks and is evil/wrong, and Sanders is like
Trump. The establishment fantasy is that both are illegitimate
opportunists.
The diagnosis of Trump is that he rode to power appealing to a collection
of
humanity’s darkest impulses, in particular racism, sexism, and xenophobia.
Few other explanations, importantly even negative ones (like that Trump
took
cynical advantage of both racism and legitimate economic grievances), are
accepted.
The explanation for Sanders is naiveté. Neither the politician nor his
followers understand how the world works. They want expensive things for
free and blame billionaires when their actual gripe is with reality. Oh,
and
theirs is also a movement for sexists and anti-Semites and people who
refuse
to accept the unique role of racism in America.
Dating to 2016, we were told the chief commonalities between Trump and
Sanders were ambition and strategy. They were “populists” who played on
voters’ emotions because they had to, being denied normal avenues to power:
connections, donors, endorsements. As a Harvard professor put it in the
Washington Post, “both are self-described political outsiders, the most
likely actors to use anti-elite language.”
Brooks argues that “capitalism is doing what it’s supposed to do,” i.e.
“rewarding productivity with pay, and some people and companies are more
productive.” He insists the gap in America is between “superstar companies
and everybody else,” i.e. if you’re on the wrong end of the curve, you
aren’t bringing the right skills to bear in an economy that is still
fundamentally meritocratic.
The reason people are abandoning traditional political solutions on both
sides of the political aisle is that most people can see how easy it is to
put a thumb on the scale of such rosy Adam Smith market theory. They know
companies buy regulatory and tax relief through political donations,
offshore profits, export labor to unfree political zones like China, use
central banking mechanisms to obtain heavily subsidized capital, and
dominate debate through investment in media.
About that last point: One of the areas where systematic unfairness is most
visible is through the aggressive suckage of the establishment press.
If inequality – not just in income but in influence as well as regulatory
and criminal accountability – is a problem, the average media consumer
knows
by instinct what side of that problem the owners of major media companies
represent. The average person, who is probably an illness away from
bankruptcy, sees that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos makes the median
Amazon salary every nine seconds, the CEO of Disney makes 1,424 times what
his line worker earns, Google has been parking profits in Ireland, and CNN
busts its unions.
When a politician rises by talking about ending the rigged game, only to
get
a uniformly negative response in media outlets owned by some of the
riggers,
people make that obvious connection, even when the rhetoric is coming from
someone like Donald Trump.
When Trump jumped into the presidential race in 2015, it would have been
easy enough for members of the media to decry his ignorance, personal and
professional venality, and racism.
But they couldn’t help themselves, declaring every word out of his mouth a
Satanic lie. This made the occasional things that he said that were true,
like that Jeb Bush was a puppet for corporate donors or NATO was a bloated
and outdated organization, pack significantly more punch.
The transparent full-of-shitness of the corporate press reaction to Trump
was probably the leading argument for his credibility. Trump wrongly pushed
voters to blame minorities and foreigners, and when he did identify correct
targets for public opprobrium, like Goldman Sachs, it wasn’t believable
that
he would oppose them in office. But media figures gave his “drain the
swamp”
message a huge boost by scoffing at it with their inimical obnoxiousness.
They then spent years doubling down, backing conspiracy theories about
espionage with Russia, mis-predicting the end of the Trump presidency, and,
yes, employing tactics like body–language analysis to say all sorts of
silly
things (“What is Donald Trump hiding? His body language says it all,” wrote
Newsweek, interviewing an analyst who’d made “interesting observations
about
Hitler’s salutes”).
People in the media business underestimate, by a lot, the damage the last
three years have done to their ability to reach not just Trump fans but
non-Trump Republicans, independents, libertarians, Greens, and other
groups.
The latest fiascoes with Sanders double as confirmation for these people of
their worst conclusions about media, and an additional insult that such
goofball messaging is only now attracting the notice of some on the “other
side. “
Sanders now looks poised to receive the same kind of bump Trump got in 2016
from media stupidity. As was the case this past summer when the Bezos-owned
Washington Post went so far as to put the term “corporate media” in
quotation marks while denouncing Bernie’s “bogus media beef,” the
institutional dismissal has been so over-the-top that it’s likely to earn
him sympathy even with disinterested parties. Is there a word for
propaganda
in reverse?
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