The Corporate Media Ignores the Rise of Oligarchy. The Rest of Us Shouldn't

By Bernie Sanders, Guardian UK

16 March 18

We need to hear from struggling Americans whose stories are rarely told in newspapers or television. Until they are, we must tell these stories elsewhere

he rapid rise of oligarchy and wealth and income inequality is the great moral, economic, and political issue of our time. Yet, it gets almost no coverage from the corporate media.

How often do network newscasts report on the 40 million Americans living in poverty, or that we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of almost any major nation on earth? How often does the media discuss the reality that our society today is more unequal than at any time since the 1920s with the top 0.1% now owning almost as much wealth as the bottom 90%? How often have you heard the media report the stories of millions of people who today are working longer hours for lower wages than was the case some 40 years ago?

How often has ABC, CBS or NBC discussed the role that the Koch brothers and other billionaires play in creating a political system which allows the rich and the powerful to significantly control elections and the legislative process in Congress?

Sadly, the answer to these questions is: almost never. The corporate media has failed to let the American people fully understand the economic forces shaping their lives and causing many of them to work two or three jobs, while CEOs make hundreds of times more than they do. Instead, day after day, 24/7, we’re inundated with the relentless dramas of the Trump White House, Stormy Daniels, and the latest piece of political gossip.

We urgently need to discuss the reality of today’s economy and political system, and fight to create an economy that works for everyone and not just the one percent.

We need to ask the hard questions that the corporate media fails to ask: who owns America, and who has the political power? Why, in the richest country in the history of the world are so many Americans living in poverty? What are the forces that have caused the American middle class, once the envy of the world, to decline precipitously? What can we learn from countries that have succeeded in reducing income and wealth inequality, creating a strong and vibrant middle class, and providing basic human services to everyone?

We need to hear from struggling Americans whose stories are rarely told in newspapers or television. Unless we understand the reality of life in America for working families, we’re never going to change that reality.

Until we understand that the rightwing Koch brothers are more politically powerful than the Republican National Committee, and that big banks, pharmaceutical companies, and multinational corporations are spending unlimited sums of money to rig the political process, we won’t be able to overturn the disastrous US supreme court decision on Citizens United, move to the public funding of elections and end corporate greed.

Until we understand that the US federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour is a starvation wage and that people cannot make it on $9 or $10 an hour, we’re not going to be able to pass a living wage of at least $15 an hour.

Until we understand that multinational corporations have been writing our trade and tax policies for the past 40 years to allow them to throw American workers out on the street and move to low-wage countries, we’re not going to be able to enact fair laws ending the race to the bottom and making the wealthy and the powerful pay their fair share.

Until we understand that we live in a highly competitive global economy and that it is counterproductive that millions of our people cannot afford a higher education or leave school deeply in debt, we will not be able to make public colleges and universities tuition free.

Until we understand that we are the only major country on earth not to guarantee healthcare to all and that we spend far more per capita on healthcare than does any other country, we’re not going to be able to pass a Medicare for all, single-payer program.

Until we understand that the US pays, by far, the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs because pharmaceutical companies can charge whatever price they want for life-saving medicine, we’re not going to be able to lower the outrageous price of these drugs.

Until we understand that climate change is real, caused by humans, and causing devastating problems around the world, especially for poor people, we’re not going to be able to transform our energy system away from fossil fuel and into sustainable forms of energy.

We need to raise political consciousness in America and help us move forward with a progressive agenda that meets the needs of our working families. It’s up to us all to join the conversation – it’s just the beginning.

The Loon Ranger; All the Fits That Are News to Print

By Mort Rosenblum, Reader Supported News

16 March 18

 

he torrent of head-spinning, heart-stopping news this week can be easily summarized: We are sooo screwed. It is not yet too late, but it will be soon if enough Americans cannot revive national integrity, sanity and basic common sense.

Before the storm, I talked with David Cay Johnston. His new book title has it right: “It’s Even Worse Than You Think.” He sees Donald Trump’s snow job swaying too many uninformed voters while too many others opt out. The America we’ve known for 229 years may be over.

Adding in the global context and repercussions of this week’s fresh lunacy, we need a sequel: “It’s Even (Much) Worse Than Johnston Thinks.”

Rex Tillerson shunned reporters and drove off half our seasoned diplomats. At ExxonMobil, he masked climate crises and hobnobbed with his good buddy, Vladimir Putin. Still, knowing the world, he kept shards of foreign policy intact.

He survived calling Donald Trump “a fucking moron.” But a day after he singled out Putin for poisoning a turned agent, he was fired publicly with an early-morning tweet. That triggered, and coincided with, the total collapse of Trump’s thin façade.

Most disturbing of all is how many people dismiss this as fevered exaggeration. We can thank have-it-your-way news and a flood of misleading babble disguised as news by corporate profiteers or others with nefarious motives.

In fact, people who cared could have seen this coming, step by step, from the first day Trump tossed that ridiculous red cap into the ring.

The irony is tragic. Good reporting has never been better, more easily available, or so crucial to us all. Yet despite wondrous new technology – really, because of it – Americans in the main are stupendously clueless about what we now face.

There is no “the media.” Finding solidly reported news around which the world turns is like sifting for nuggets in a manure heap. Each of us has to zero in on our own reliable sources, test their credibility, and add in missing background. This takes work.

When The New York Times came up with its hoary slogan, “All the News That’s Fit to Print,” editors sifted through firsthand reporting by seasoned pros, and they prioritized news according to what matters.

The Times at its best is better than ever. Yet it struggles to attract young readers who don’t read and older ones with selective interests. Subscribers risk hernia picking up the Sunday paper. No one can absorb it all, let along its 24-hour updates, podcasts, and the rest.

The Washington Post, flush with Jeff Bezos’ cash, faces the same challenge: to be more accessible without dumbing down. In any case, both papers still reach only a small fringe of Americans. Far more people feed at the bottom.

The Sinclair Broadcast Group, for instance, blankets the country with thinly veiled Trump propaganda. Newsweek, once a stalwart source, pays its people according to how many hits they can generate with often meaningless crap.

As a master snake oil salesman, Trump exploits this new reality to cast doubt on all reporting. His faithful remain unmoved by whatever real facts emerge. Too many others simply tune out. And our Loon Ranger charges ahead unchecked, stampeding us toward the unthinkable.

As Trump said with undisguised glee, he is now getting the Cabinet he wants: amateur sycophant ideologues who are swiftly dismantling America – its schools, courts, civil liberties, environment, natural wealth, and underlying morality.

Abroad, he alienates allies, heartens foes, speeds climate calamity, undermines human rights, and condones press censorship. He spurns millions of hapless refugees who could enrich our society but instead will end up loathing us.

I talked with Johnston at the Tucson Festival of Books in between panels of reporters who know Trump best. One was Katy Tur of NBC, who returned from London in 2015 expecting to cover his campaign for a few months until he flamed out. Now she covers the White House.

Trump, Tur said, is basically simple: a gifted huckster with no moral compass who seizes upon any emotional lever or big lie that stirs a crowd. He didn’t care about the Wall, or Mexico, until he saw those buzzwords resonate. He sees everything, including America’s fate, only in terms of how it affects him.

That explains North Korea. Trump sees a showy summit as his Nixon-in-China moment. He alone can sway the madman who has broken all past agreements and wants exactly what Trump has already given him: equal space in the spotlight.

The Loon Ranger charges on without consulting his foreign minister, now fired. His North Korea expert has quit in disgust. He has no ambassador in Seoul to consult blindsided South Koreans. He ignores warnings from those who understand groundwork essential to summitry.

To replace Tillerson, Trump picks Mike Pompeo, already over his head at CIA. If H.R. McMaster bails as national security advisor, a leading candidate is John Bolton, the hard-ass old warrior who bombed as George W. Bush’s ambassador to the U.N.

For CIA, he chose Gina Haspel, now under fire for overseeing torture. One victim was waterboarded 83 times in a month; his head was bashed into walls. That stopped when interrogators decided he had nothing to tell them. Trump also looked at Tom Cotton, the young senator-zealot who sidestepped Barack Obama to try to sabotage the Iran nuclear accord.

Beyond the big news, Trump’s trusted private secretary was ejected from the White House for unclear financial misdeed so fast he could barely scoop up his briefcase. Then he immediately resurfaced on Trump’s re-election campaign. There is so much else.

Those Florida high school kids offer hope: smart, aggressive response to a screwed-up world they do not want to inherit. Gun violence is only one issue, but they might energize good people to run for office, with a wider turnout at the polls.

Still, two smart young women I know well reflect a daunting picture. One, a Portland, Oregon, high school senior, sees little interest in the Parkland phenomenon. Her friends are busy with their own lives. The other, at the University of Arizona, has spent summers in Europe and worked with refugees in Southeast Asia. But when we started talking about Syria, she asked, “What’s Aleppo?”

Right. Gary Johnson had the same question about the ancient city in which a brutal despot, his Russian backers, free-world governments, Islamists, and fragmented rebel forces fight to define a new world order. And he was a two-term governor of New Mexico, the Libertarian candidate for president in 2016.

At the Book Festival, David Cay Johnston detailed what he said were Trump’s ties to an international drug lord in the 1980s among other continuing mob ties. “I think I protected myself by sticking to the facts,” he said. “Listen, Donald, I just called you a criminal. If you think you’re not, I invite you to sue me.”

Johnston recalled that Trump, the evangelists’ champion, once described Christians as “fools, schmucks and idiots” and wrote that he took pleasure in ruining the lives of people who slighted him.

The most chilling Book Festival speaker was a Duke University historian. Nancy MacLean outlined her new book, “Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan to America.” She called Trump a symptom of a potentially fatal malady.

She traced how the Koch brothers continued work by James Buchanan, who preached libertarian ideas in the 1950s before winning a Nobel Prize for Economics in 1986. This, she wrote, was “a stealth bid to reverse-engineer all of America, at both the state and national levels back to the political economy and oligarchic governance of mid-century Virginia, minus the segregation.”

The Kochs first shunned Trump but found his ability to promise populism and then do the exact opposite was a perfect vehicle to hoodwink an easily misled society. Charles, the elder brother, recently told followers he accomplished more in the last five years than in all the previous 50.

Then, MacLean electrified Gallagher Theater in a calm professorial tone. Already 28 of the necessary 34 states have agreed to a constitutional convention that could rewrite anything, or everything, we once believed was set in stone. She concluded:

“If they are able to bring in the world they want, I believe as a historian and as a citizen that this is absolutely unsustainable, and for the rest of us – socially, economically, environmentally and, frankly, psychically – it will be very difficult to live in this world.”

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Mort Rosenblum has reported from seven continents as Associated Press special correspondent, edited the International Herald Tribune in Paris, and written 14 books on subjects ranging from global geopolitics to chocolate. He now runs MortReport.org.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.