Posts Tagged ‘Education’
The Profit Motive, Part Two
Much as I am loathe to take cues from Bill Maher, he had a point recently that spoke to my last entry regarding the ubiquitous “What’s wrong with making money?” dodge.
Put simply, not everything should make a profit.
The news, for example.
As Ben Bagdikan pointed out in The Media Monopoly, in 1983, over 90% of all media (movies, television, radio, magazines, books, newspapers, the recording industry, photo agencies, etc) was in the hands of about 50 corporations.
As of 2004, that number has dropped. To five. Five multinational corporations controlling what we see, hear, read – information itself. That should be enough to make the point, but just to be sure, let’s take a quick look at what passes for news in 2009.
The current headlines are full to brimming with Michael Jackson, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and an assortment of entertainment and sensationalist stories that have similar weight to the preceding two. What’s going on with health care? Who cares? The real burning question is what was Steve McNair’s girlfriend thinking?
Contrast this with the news from just thirty or so years ago.
When networks ran to the bottom line and sold themselves to “parent” companies (one of my favorite euphemisms), those companies put a stop to news for the sake of news. See, before then, the entertainment divisions of the networks carried the financial burdens of the news, as well as advertising. But the news – in order to remain the news – was beholden to nobody. At least, not financially. Fast forward to the takeovers, and the parent companies demanded that the news make a profit – something unheard of before then, unless you count “yellow journalism” like William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer. Of course, news for profit changes everything.
The dissemination of information for the purpose of informing is the news. The dissemination of information for money (or other, less overt gain) is propaganda.
The evolution is well documented and easily grasped. The so-called news now has less actual news in it than the average in-house company newsletter. The rest is fluff, sensationalism, “gotcha” stories, and demagoguery.
A simple piece of evidence, then I’m off to enjoy my weekend: A large majority of voters who cast their ballot for George W. Bush believed that he supported the Kyoto Protocol. What’s wrong with making money? That.
The Profit Motive
I hear it all too often: “What’s wrong with making money?!?”
Of course, this little bit of misdirection is usually delivered in an angry tone by someone who is oblivious to the nonsensical non sequitur it is. Whenever the argument is made that perhaps those who have benefited greatly from the past 30 years of deregulation, massive decrease in taxation, massive public subsidy, criminal refusal to enforce laws protecting labor, the environment, public interest – you get the idea; you’ll be treated to a rousing chorus of that dogmatic propaganda line so inextricably driven into the public consciousness:
“What’s wrong with making money?”
As if (insert any of the following: a national health care plan, tax cuts or subsidies or services or any help whatsoever for the poor, returning taxes on the superwealthy to a minute fraction of their pre-Reaganomics levels, etc) has any effect on the Working Joe who so vigorously defends the very people who keep him poor and wretched – save possibly a positive one.
So, listen, Working Joe: There’s nothing wrong with you making money. But then, you are not a global corporate CEO with a multimillion dollar golden parachute, who feeds off the public trough.
Yes, that’s right, the public trough. You see, we pay taxes, and that money is funneled into research and development in the state/Pentagon system. This R&D eventually produces technological breakthroughs, which then the public again pays private institutions to apply in the marketplace (which, not incidentally, is full of even more subsidies, tax breaks, and protections, all at the expense of guess who), with all the profit channeled back into those private corporations, further enriching the superwealthy.
What’s wrong with making money? The wrong people are making it. You pay in, and someone else gets richer. Isn’t that your whole objection to welfare? Because that’s what it is: welfare for those who couldn’t possibly need it less.
Nobody’s asking for redistribution of wealth, class warfare, or any of the other buzz phrases kicked out by the monumental public “relations” machine that greases the gears of the monumental high-tech feudalism machine. At best, it’s a re-redistribution of wealth, where in the people (that means you) are allowed to reap a tiny measure of benefit for all the money they give to that fragile, teetering-on-the-edge, barely-making-ends-meet class known as The Top 1%.
Turn Faux News back on and get fed another line of propaganda; yours is getting old.