Where The Rubber Meets The Road

Pardon my harping on the subject, but, oh, how the profiteers of our symptom-treatment-for-blood-money wail at the prospect of a so-called “public option”.

The Lewin Group, cited beyond reason and out of context by the henchmen of the opposing industries, is a wholly owned arm of the private insurance engine.

And right now, that arm is flailing madly, trying to distract the public from what everyone knows and has known for a long time now: that despite unprecedented (in scale) attempts by private insurance companies and pharma giants to indoctrinate the public with the privatized-is-best dogma, three-quarters of U.S. citizens have continued to demand a national health care plan.

For decades.

It begs the question, since the propagandists are well aware of this. So, who is all this noise aimed at? Because they’ve failed repeatedly to sway the public in the past, the message they’re sending now can’t be intended for us.

Sometimes, it’s instructive to ask these little questions…

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.

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.

One of the many reasons why – despite having almost universal conformity with the policies of the left – I refuse to align myself with liberals is this example:

Calling Barack Obama “articulate” is racist.

Really?

Is there perhaps one, small, contextual reason why it might not be racist? Perhaps if you were saying so in relation to – oh, I don’t know, maybe another prominent figure to whom the President will be compared, one who (just clutching at straws, here) wasn’t very articulate?

Acting surprised that a black man is articulate is racist.

Acting relieved that we at last have a President who is articulate might – might – just be something else.

Another fun brain teaser: Is acting surprised that a black man could ascend to the presidency:
1. racist.
Or:
2. a lament regarding the inequality of opportunity in our United States.

I am reminded of a passage from America (The Book): A Citizen’s Guide to Democracy Inaction, stating that (paraphrasing) Republicans seek to return the country to a 50′s-style golden age that never existed, while Democrats seek to create a Utopian society so fair and equal that life becomes an unendurable series of apologies.

Lucky us.

Well, the government now owns a controlling share of General Motors.

What could possibly go wrong?

Of course, while the federal government is an unwieldy, sluggish, blundering, rarely competent, bureaucratic behemoth, at least it’s not an unwieldy, sluggish, blundering, rarely competent, bureaucratic behemoth with the sole purpose of sucking the blood from the dessicated revenant of of the American consumer base. Mind you, they have been the biggest enablers of the people who’s sole purpose is to suck the blood from the dessicated revenant of of the American consumer base, so don’t get your hopes up.

Anyway, I sincerely hope the Obama Administration is merely spinning when they make all that laissez-faire noise about injecting 30 billion into GM without demanding anything in return. If they haven’t learned that handing rich white men a ton of money guarantees only that the rich white men just got richer – scratch that. Of course they know. My bad.
What I mean is that they’d better be lying about not running GM. Because I’d rather have the snail-paced, tunnel-vision, hidebound bureaucrats calling the shots than sadistic cash-junkies.
General Motors ran their company into the ground through a mixture of greed, arrogance, greed, stupidity, and blind, ugly, gimmie-gimmie-fuck-piggy greed. They were the architects of planned obsolescence; they pushed dreadnought-sized cars and trucks out of union-busting, third-world, sweatshop industrial-vaginas when the entire world was moving toward smaller, more fuel-efficient cars; they laughed at the Japanese (always a bad idea – just ask Sylvania) for their efforts, fought tooth and nail against environmental regulation, unions, anything remotely resembling business sense, and bunnies. In short, they failed in every way possible.

I can’t imagine the government doing worse. Of course, I said that about Reagan, and then we got George W. Bush.

Good luck, all.