The depths to which our “4th Estate” has sunk is the result of a deliberate plan to obscure the differences between contrived drama and reality and it will be very difficult to turn around now that several generations have already been indoctrinated.

After the so-called “Liberal Press” had successfully caused the resignation of Richard Nixon and the imprisonment of many of his Administration, the right-wing knew that it had to make changes.

Did the disgraced GOP see the error of their ways and try to conduct themselves as honest lawmakers , trying to help govern in the spirit of compromise and genuine debate?

Are you fucking KIDDING me???.

They decided to just call their friends occupying the boardrooms of America (and elsewhere), get a few financial syndicates together and buy most of the corporations that owned news operations and then control them to the extent that zero “negative” news exposing their criminality would reach the mass market, and only their particular political propaganda would be presented.

The “privatization” of truth.

They then hired the first of their “beards”, a vapid, 3rd rate actor named Ronald Reagan who did what he was told, and, in one of his first acts as President, canceled the “Fairness Doctrine” (which mandated that those who broadcast editorials while leasing parts of the public airwaves allot equal editorial time to the Public who OWNS those airwaves so as to express opposing viewpoints) the last vestiges of a truly free, independent press was sent into oblivion…giving only those with lots of money a forum in which to spread their lies… at the same time silencing the views of all others.

It’s more than ironic that, since Reagan’s ‘claim to fame’ as an “actor” was co-starring with a CHIMP , that the second ‘beard’ injected into the Oval Office was the CHIMP ITSELF.

It’s worse now than ever… even more reason to fight with everything we have… for without honest information, we are lost.

… and it never ceases to amaze me that so many rightwingers feel that an education is somehow a “liability”, that being an “intellectual” or an “academic” is somehow a “fault”.

That to be honored as part of an “elite” group of achievers somehow makes one worthy of contempt.

These are not pejoratives.

These are things to take great pride in.

What I find even more disturbing is that these very same semi-literates insist on controlling the schools in what all evidence points to is a deliberate move to dumb our Nation down even more than it has already been (if that is even possible), not only intellectually but morally as well.

An uneducated populace is easiest to control.

We must no longer allow the thugs and the haters, those who conjure the pounding of jackbooted lockstep with every utterance to hijack the language and sciences.. our history (warts and all) and the arts… just as they have our culture.. a slimy, cynical tactic used by those craving despotic power who once, and still do, sport virtual armbands to try to lull the masses into thinking that they are somehow in danger by those who have dared read a book.

Filling them with ignorance, with fear, with hatred.

Be proud of the hard work you took to get an education, & in your trying to apply it to help better your Country.

Take pride in being a Liberal!

“Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear.”

~~ Wm. Gladstone

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jjgravitas
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jjgravitas

“Government Of the People”? Yeah, right! The rich people.

choicelady
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BSM- what a GREAT quotation from Gladstone! I’ve not read one that summed up the difference better.

In late June the Supreme Court in McComish et al. v. Bennett struck down the Arizona clean elections law. The justification? Public money added to a publicly financed candidate’s campaign to equal out private finance would “chill free speech”.

Huh? They argue precisely the opposite in Citizens United – the MORE free speech the better, and money equals free speech. So how does PUBLIC money “chill” that speech?

In decisions stopping the Fairness Doctrine, in permitting monopolization of media outlets, of any move toward granting huge corporations more power than human beings, the handwriting is on the wall – money is NOT equal; some money is better than other money, and all people are not equal, some having greater free speech rights than others.

There are only two parts of the Constitution referring to property – the 4th and 5th Amendment right to protection from unwarranted searches and seizures and the right to just compensation for eminent domain takings. The right to private property weighs heavily in case law – NOT in the Constitution. Yet those who pay lip service to the Constitution have ignored the framers’ original intent to provide HUMAN rights, not property rights.

We have entered a period that almost entirely replicates the horrific times after the Civil War. There was no real free press then either; the institutions of America including newspapers, were dominated and controlled by large financial interests. They could not, however, stop the small run print papers produced by unions and radical parties – poorly produced sometimes and handed out often for free – to provide real information. Almost nothing of that exists for the general public today. EVen the nationwide News & Review papers focus far more on hot bands than on politics.

In part because people found out easily who was ruining their lives, rebellion was the way of life – between the 1870s and 1920s there were over 80,000 strikes, most of them bloody, including national ones. What prosperity we had after WW II was obtained largely from the willingness of people to go to the wall to obtain equity in all institutions. How people organized lay almost entirely in the fact that they worked AND lived together, something not as true today.

I do agree we are far more diverted by pop culture, but we are even more diverted by a loss of voice – where are those local broadsheets to tell us what is happening and why? The internet and blogs are a huge improvement over voicelessness, but now there are so many competing for our attention whom can we trust? It takes time to figure out which ones produce real information and which ones are just another form of mind twist. We may suffer from information overload and a lack of local focus by which we can test the information and see if it’s true.

But most of all we suffer from a lack of geographic cohesion, a loss of community. People do not live together as communities of working people – they are far flung, individualized, and too tired to drive 10-15 miles to an afterwork meeting, especially with strangers they do not know, cannot inherently trust.

Blogs help. They are not the answer. That is largely why unions once again are front and center in the anti-plutocratic, anti-democratic movements. They and a handful of other organizations, are coherent bodies of people who know and trust one another. What comes out of blogging, tweeting, email alerts, etc. is information. Alone it cannot provide the trust needed to create a sustainable movement, but added to the work of already sustainable communities, it is invaluable. It may be well worth our time to intersect with union news so that once again we have our community broadsheets but now spread through the land.

That is one of the best parts of the Planet and the DAily Planet’s work – it has become a nexus for transmission of coherent communities’ news to people who otherwise would have no idea what was happening. In this way the pride of liberalism spreads, there is counterbalance to conservative lies, all without the self-serving screed of self-interested self promoters such as AH at HP.

One step forward for liberalism and progressive action. May there be more.

coveark
Member
coveark

Thank you for this artical and expressing this opinion. It is so true.