DownWithTyranny!: Right-Wing Paradise

Over the weekend I was disgruntled that the media-- particularly Fox, where Paul Babeu is a regular contributor ("border expert")-- chose to ignore my favorite news story, the outing of Republican hypocrite, Sheriff Paul Babeu. Babeu, an anti-immigrant fanatic who went from being the headmaster of a troubled-- now shuttered-- boarding school in Massachusetts to a right-wing political icon in Pinal County, Arizona, is running for Congress. Or was. The story was made for sensationalistic TV and, had Babeu not been a Republican, it is all Fox would have broadcast all day Saturday and all day Sunday. (As Andy Borowitz pointed at on Twitter, not even a nuclear attack by North Korea could have pulled that network away from its Whitney Houston funeral coverage.)

Of course, thinking about it more closely, it isn't inconsequential to realize that the corporate media gets its walking orders from interests that not only don't want to see Babeu destroyed the way they made sure Anthony Weiner was destroyed but that don't want anything of real importance that might spark critical thought, covered on their networks.

Late last week Charles Pierce, author of Idiot America-- yes, he's someone you can think of as a literary Green Day-- published an essay, Livin' In A Bankster's Paradise, in Esquire, that should have attracted massive media coverage. But it's precisely what our corporate media avoids like the plague. Holding banksters accountable is not something corporate media is pushing... or mentioning. Pierce absolutely loathes "the notion that the best way to deal with things is to 'look forward, not back'."

This is especially true as regards the undeniable fact that, over the course of a decade, a bunch of cheats, thieves, and suited mountebanks stole most of the national economy and then wrecked whatever was left of it. But what's most extraordinary about the whole thing is that, after they swindled their swindles and heisted their heists, and got paid off by the rest of us for having looted our naional economy, they all kept doing the same things they were doing before. These included extravagant bonuses and, of course, continued crimes of capital that ought to be capital crimes.

This is extraordinary. All this Citigroup fraud and thuggery took place after the events of the great meltdown had taken place. This whisteblower's co-workers, instead of checking for fraud or making reports about underwriting defects to the FHA as required, argued with her over the soundness of the loans, she said. Employees who acted as "gatekeepers" applied "what they describe as 'brute force' to pressure Citi's quality control managers" into downplaying defects, according to the government's complaint.

Some colleagues had pay incentives tied to reducing the number of reported problems, and they spent hours trying to get her to relax her warnings, including those about the most basic deficiencies, Hunt said. "They started beating us up over the quality-control reports," she said. Last year, she said, she became convinced she was being asked to look the other way on serious flaws. That's when she decided to become a whistle-blower.

Last year. The more I think about it, the more I believe that we, as a society, gave up on the pillory too soon. And $158.3 million is tip money for CitiGroup.

This is what happens when real punishment for real crimes is considered to be too inconvenient, or too difficult, or too traumatic for the nation, which is made up completely of candyglass children incapable of existing with the knowledge that their financial lords of the universe are really no different from stick-up kids in a bodega. This is what happens when nobody goes to jail. This is what happens today.

And it's what happens when real journalism-- an actual 4th estate-- is tossed away and replaced with the corporate media, feeding us a steady diet of... Whitney Houston funerals and whatever else it deals appropriate to take our minds off the crime spree the corporations that own them are engaged in or complicit with. Joshua Holland addressed this phenomenon in the introduction to his enlightening book, The 15 Biggest Lies About The Economy as a way of explaining why Americans seem so complacent "in the face of the tectonic shift in their economic fortunes." He dissects the highly influential message machine built by all the tremendous plutocratic money behind the so-called “New Conservative Movement” which works so tirelessly to "obscure not only the economic history of the last four decades, but the very notion of class itself."

The Lies That Corporate America Tells Us

Let’s return to the early 1970s, when a rattled economic elite became determined to regain control of the U.S. economy. How do you go about achieving that in a democracy?

One way, of course, is to depose the government and replace it with one that’s more to your liking. In the 1930s, a group of businessmen contemplated just that-- a military takeover of Washington, D.C., to stop Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s dreaded New Deal from being enacted. The plot fell apart when the decorated general the group had tapped to lead the coup turned in the conspirators.

A more subtle approach is to convince a majority of voters that your interests are, in fact, their own. Yet there’s a big problem with this: if you belong to a rarified group, then the notion of aligned interests doesn’t reflect objective reality. And in the early 1970s, the media and academia provided a neutral arbiter of that reality (of sorts).

We’ve all grown accustomed to conservatives’ conspiracy theories about the corporate media having a far-left bias and college professors indoctrinating American youths into Maoism. In the early 1970s, a group of very wealthy conservatives started to invest in what you might call “intellectual infrastructure” ostensibly designed to counter the liberal bias they saw all around them. They funded dozens of corporate-backed think tanks, endowed academic chairs, and created their own dedicated and distinctly conservative media outlets.

Families with names such as Olin, Coors, Scaife, Bradley, and Koch may not be familiar to most Americans, but their efforts have had a profound impact on our economic discourse. Having amassed huge fortunes in business, these families used their foundations to fund the movement that would culminate in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 and eventually bring about the coronation of George W. Bush in 2000.

That's why media consumers will never forget who Anthony Weiner is and will never even hear of Paul Babeu. And it's why the banksters will continue living-- along with the rest of us-- in a Bankster's Paradise.

UPDATE: More-On Media

Afer I finished writing the post above, a friend spent me, coincidentally, a pst by John Cory from RSN called The Ugly Circus, which I'd like to recommend. He starts my mentioning a question from Barbra Sreisand asking where the hell the fourth estate is when we need them most. "Well Ms Streisand," he replies, "they ran away from home and joined the ugly circus of pundit shows and cable news, with big floppy shoes and red rubber-ball noses and lots of money in the trunks of their clown cars.

The fact that news has become a product for sale is not new, nor is the fact that media has embraced celebrity over content and corporate sponsors over substance, and mindless entertainment over education and illumination. Edward R. Murrow warned of these things in his RTNDA Convention speech in 1958. And now, 54 years later, it echoes with immediacy as though written yesterday.

Television news is an ugly circus of innuendo, gossip and tabloid sensationalism. Whether ABC or CBS or NBC, the news is read by celebrity personalities between self-promotional appearances on late-night talk shows.

The nightly news is anything but news. Seven minutes of shallowness, two car chases, the latest celebrity divorce/trial/book/or murder-mystery followed by a feel good human-interest story. Information, elucidation and perspective are sacrificed for pharmaceutical elixirs of youth and sex, insurance lizards, and the latest in-dash tracking system that monitors and synchs up with your Blackberry/iPhone with a voice that guides your every waking movement and thought. Everything you don't need and can't possibly afford but must have.

Cable news is nothing more than nightly WWE cage matches between hot-air blowhards and giggling snark. Yes, I'm talking liberal and conservative programming.

I don't want to be entertained. I read books or go to the movies for that. And, I might add, they do a much better job than anything on cable news. Why sometimes, movies and books even make me think.

FOX News Channel is pure unadulterated propaganda for the far right. I don't care whether it's morning, noon or night, that's what I see and hear. And that is certainly their right, as it is my right to dislike their product and not watch.

...Where is the liberal host that offers an in-depth examination as to why Americans pay $7800 per person for healthcare with the same or worse results of other OECD countries that pay $2800-$4800 per person per year? Are Americans being ripped off? Where does all that money go? Why do Americans pay double or three times the amount other countries pay for the same pills and procedures?

Surely there are real experts for a panel to discuss these issues, and I don't mean talking-head partisans or corporate shills. How about a panel consisting of Maggie Mahaar, author of Money-Driven Medicine, Jonathon Cohn, author of Sick: The Untold Story of America's Health Care Crisis, and others who would deal with why America is the only industrialized nation in the world that does not offer its citizens universal healthcare. And how much could we save through preventative care?

Does being born in the wealthiest country in the world simply mean: Welcome to the world. You're on your own now so goodbye and good luck! Sickness is a profit center with potentially high profit margins. Do your part and shop well!

Of course this would require a network and sponsors willing to give us, the viewing public, credit for being interested in learning and understanding the issues. That would empower us and make us-- informed.

That's bad for corporate-owned pundits, bad for corporate-owned networks and their corporate sponsors, and even worse for corporate-owned politicians. An informed public is just plain bad all the way around for our would-be masters and their court jesters.

People say all the time that we are an Attention Deficit Disorder society. The media says that they only give the public what they want. None of that is true. The corporate media simply wants to think they have trained us to that end for their profit.

Murrow said: "One of the basic troubles with radio and television news is that both instruments have grown up as an incompatible combination of show business, advertising and news. Each of these is a rather bizarre and demanding profession. And when you get all three under one roof, the dust never settles..."