Less Government, more Fascism!

Do you remember the Good Olde Days? When government kept its fucking mouth shut and let the market do whatever the fuck it wanted to? They're kind of hard to remember now - the only people still alive from that Golden Age are currently hooked up to machines in Elderly Deathcare Centers, dripping their lives away while their great-grandchildren work hard at trying to remember a time when these decrepit carcasses were ambulatory.

That's right - it was a long time ago, but history repeats itself frequently, and bringing back a semblance of the Good Old Days is what our friends in the Libertarian Party are hoping to do. It goes without saying that Government is a collection of lying fuckers whereas the Market is where American Do-Gooders strive to sculpt our Rugged Values into something that we can pass on to our children and our grand-children. Never has anything been more clear: if we could reduce the size of our government and free up the market to find its natural, Gawd-Given Equilibrium, the common man would walk taller, save more money and not need to masturbate so much. Frustration is not a pretty thing: guvmint stands in the way of my happiness. There's the marketplace right over there waiting to make all my freedoms come true if those lazy, elitist sodomites in the guvmint would get the fuck out of the way of progress.

I hear these people all the time - not on the regular Conservative Media: ABC, CNN, the Big Papers - but on the Lunatic Fringe Conservative Media: Fox and the various Talk Show Clever Bastards. Their mantra: if government were to fade into obscurity like chastity belts and ox-plows and quill pens, then the market would bring us into balance. If it's said on Talk Radio, it will soon blather out of the mouths of the Common Man - the same people who shop at Wal-Mart, eat at buffets on Sunday nights, and believe that there's a significant difference between Chevron gasoline (with "Techron") and BP gasoline (without so much Techron, but plenty of baby seabirds). These are the folk who are too busy watching "Jersey Shore" to pay attention to the news and investigate the issues - they listen to Talk Radio and say, "Think for me, Sean Hannity! I'm too busy - tell me what to think!" And it's a service Hannity is happy to provide - all his life he's wanted to control what people think, and how they think, and suddenly we have a society where the Common Man requires his services, his prejudices and his subjective opinions.

Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, and their ilk have in common a belief that the Market can do no wrong - indeed, that the Market philosophy as all the answers, whether we're talking about family, education or government. New Gingrich proposed, in 1994, that the Government solve the Big Issues of the day by asking the CEO's of the biggest Multi-National Corporations what they would do. This was the logical conclusion of a reality that had been in the Secret Social Laboratories since the end of WWII: the Bidness Man was the Common Man who stood against the brutal repression and prejudices of the Liberal Elite. Gingrich and the New Wave of Conservative Thinkers posited a "Marketplace Democracy" where the masses were Democracy Consumers who could "invent their own futures" in a way that Old World Europe never could, because "inventions often remained the province of the wealthy and aristocratic".

According to the Libertarian Party - the True Party of the Marketplace - we can solve nearly all our woes by reducing the boogerman of Big Guvmint with all its smartass elites who loathe Freedom; the Marketplace of Democracy will then surge forward and God will smile upon this great nation as He once did.

When did He? Well, if we're following the logic of the Libertarians and the Reduce Satan's Government Philosophers, I guess we can go back to really the only model we have of a relatively unregulated marketplace and a government that kept its nose in its own business, which was making business happier - The Gilded Age, which was anything but Gilded for the vast majority of suffering masses.While there were some beautiful mansions built in Asheville and Newport, Rhode Island for the big shots, the workers and laborers often times were kept as virtual sharecroppers, if not indentured slaves, to the Corporations that employed them. This was the age of Child Labor and Sweat Shops and Strike Breakers. This was a time when Upton Sinclair and various "Muckrakers" exposed Standard Oil, and the obscenity that was the meat markets in The Jungle.

This was an age when: 

The industrialist George Pullman built a model community devoted to constructing his luxurious passenger rail cars south of the city. Pullman provided his workers with churches and cultural facilities, but denied them the opportunity to own their own homes or govern themselves. Pullman also made his town run at a distinct profit. All Pullman workers were obliged to live in the town and pay rents some 25% higher than those in Chicago. 

When the depression of 1893 undermined Pullman's business, he cut workers' pay by up to 25%, but did not reduce their rents. Despite other businessmen's advice, he refused to negotiate with his hard-pressed workers. The Pullman employees went out on strike. 

He also sold city water and gas to his population - at a 10% markup. There was no Big Government to step in and regulate the situation. The workers themselves had no money to move out of the villages because they were purposefully kept impoverished. They had no recourse to the Famous Market philosophy of  Mistreated Workers Will Vote with Their Feet, finding a new job. They couldn't - they were so in debt to Pullman - like the sharecroppers in the the rural South - that their salaries were gone before they were paid, put up against the massive debt they had accrued simply by working for this company.

Plutocrats are NOT democrats (little "d" - not the party but the political philsophy) - they never have been. Gilded Age plutocrats like William Vanderbilt damned the public and saw democracy as a threat to his wealth; John D. Rockefeller claimed "God gave me my money" which meant that guilt was tantamount to sin; mining big shot, George Baer, used these immortal words to address a 1902 coal strike: The rights and interests of the laboring man will be protected and cared for - not by the labor agitators, but by the Cirstian men to whom God in his infinite wisdom has given the control of the property interests of this country.

Inhuman working conditions, child slave labor, starvation and the threat of death and dismemberment within the maw of industrial machines. Those people who benefited - a tiny minority - built massive homes. We call them "Robber Barons" for good reason. Another good name for them is Plutocrats. Everyone else involved became so increasingly marginalized that eventually government had to step in. Laws were drafted after things got so bad, even the President had to step in. Teddy Roosevelt led the fight to reign in Corporate excesses and slave-labor and child-labor and monopolies and the entire panapoly of Grotesquery that resulted from unregulated Big Business. There was so much outcry that something had to be done. An entire network of regulation was created to prevent Big Business from perpetrating these sorts of abuses ever again. In 1929 when the markets crashed, it was because Big Business hadn't been regulated enough.

There are a lot of differences between government and business but perhaps the most obvious one is that business operates under a singular philosophy: make money. It is money driven. We know instinctively that "money is the root of all evil"; we know deep in our bones that the pursuit of money, for money's sake, brings pain and suffering and unhappiness virtually always. We know this - therefore it strikes me as being incredibly - well, insane - to believe that a system that is built on greed and selfishness and cut-throat competition can give us a model for how we're supposed to comport ourselves in everything: education, family, society. 

Thomas Frank puts it this way: "A system that takes the pursuit of self-interest and profit as its guiding light does not necessarily satisfy the yearning in the human soul for belief and some higher meaning beyond materialism."

Look: the business model basically works this way - you want to maximize profits while at the same time cutting costs. Businesses may pay lip-service to providing benefits to their employees but that's all it ever is. The sensibility of the Marketplace is, if you don't like your job find another one. Some other smart guy will snap you up because he realizes that benefits will make employees happy and that revelation will push him to the front. People will want to work for him instead of the competitor. That's the dynamics of competition! But not really because there's no place to go and no one has any money in the bank and the competition to get those jobs means that people are forced to put up with a lot of shit, just to hold them. They sacrifice their dignity and their humanity and their hope.

If the market is unregulated.

When the market is unregulated the money flows in one direction - into the coffers of an increasingly exclusive plutocracy. It's happening that way right now. Currently the gap between the uber-wealthy and the poor is larger than it has ever been since the Gilded Age. That's why recent studies have found that there's much less class mobility present in the current US than in Europe. In a land where we're supposed to be able to make our own destiny - which put us as a radically new idea vis-a-vis old corrupt Europe, we're actually less able to do so.

The unregulated market allows a Wal-Mart reality to exist without boundaries - Wal-Mart is scary enough as it is. Massive companies move into small towns and, with their huge coffers, are able to temporarily underprice their competitors and drive them out of business. The bigger the company, the more they are able to crush the opposition. Soon you have four or five huge businesses that control everything - if you need an example, look at the Oil Industry. How many small guy operators are there, undercutting BP and Exxon and providing healthy competition? You only have to look back to about 2005 when Hurricane Katrina caused the fear of an oil shortage. The oil industry reacted in a singular way: the four or five major oil companies colluded to raise their prices despite the abundance of real oil reserves, including oil from America's newest economic colony, Iraq. A monopoly can exist when you have a few companies who work in conjunction to artificially set prices and conditions. By the end of 2005 when oil prices were higher for the working man than ever in history, oil companies recorded record profits while simultaneously poor-mouthing through Talk Radio Assholes. 

Big Oil is a perfect example of unregulated industry. Money and power become concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Small operators disappear so that eventually, because the market is unregulated, the marketplace and all its supposed values is replaced by a hegemony. Competition disappears.

The unregulated market does not work for you, humble American worker guy. In today's global economy, companies can maximize their profits more easily by exploiting weak labor laws in Third World Countries - China and Pakistan. Your workers are agitating for insurance? Fuck them - save some money and relocate to Pakistan. Or Mexico. Those niggers will be happy for a fucking job paying twelve cents an hour. Increasingly, jobs are going overseas - it makes good business sense. And somehow, we're supposed to benefit from that - the same way we were supposed to benefit from Reaganomics Trickle Down theory: if the rich get richer, they will bestow largesse upon us. Their monies will become our monies. Their wealth and ease and comfort will somehow bless us in some amorphous way. I'm not sure how that will happen but it will because Rush told us so.

A Requiem for the Liberal Media

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." 

"The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly - it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over."

Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister to Adolph Hitler

"Make the lie big, make it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."

Adolph Hitler

Lately my inbox has been troubled by "Fwd"s from several well meaning but misguided older gentlemen who assume that their politics are my politics and that it's meet and good to spread The Word among like-minded folk. What kills me is that these emails come straight and un-homogenized, without even so much as a query regarding what I might actually believe or a disclaimer to disregard said email if it doesn't jibe with my own political beliefs; they are so bloated with their own cocky arrogance that they can't conceive that anyone they regard as mildly intelligent wouldn't love to receive such messages, weekly. Usually I earmark them for the the Junk folder so I don't even have to witness them but sometimes I don't. Sometimes I get fired up.

Early this morning I received one of these Fwds, reproduced in its entirety below: 

We were in slow-moving traffic the other day and the car in front of us had an Obama bumper sticker on it.  It read: "Pray for Obama.  Psalm 109:8".    My husband's Bible was lying on the dash board & he got it & opened it up to the scripture & read it.  He started laughing & laughing.  Then he read it to me.  I couldn't believe what it said.  I had a good laugh, too.    Psalm 109:8 "Let his days be few and brief; and let others step forward to replace him."   At last - I can voice a Biblical prayer for our president!   Look it up - it is word for word!  Let us all bow our heads and pray.



I am not an Obama apologist, though I make no excuses about voting for him. He's the President and a Big Boy and he's on his own now. He doesn't need me to hold his hand. The successes and errors of his Presidency will be diagrammed by Time and History. Like most Presidents, he's sure to have a balance of both. As an observer of all things political in this society - a typical smartass who doesn't mind seeing himself as outside the fray so that I can't be held accountable for anything at all - I am mostly struck by the mediocrity of his Presidency. There have been some good things done for sure - America's Healthcare Industry was a shambles and the scandal of the Western Industrialized World; Wall Street's shenanigans over the past thirty or so years required some stout parenting; the chokehold Credit Card companies had on the American consumer were closer to mafioso usury than anything resembling Fair Market Practice. He got us out of Iraq in a timely manner too, which I salute. There's more I'd like to see him do, but he hasn't done them yet - and he might not at all - and those are the things I quibble with. Be true to your message, etc.

But he's not been a barnstormer of a President in any sense of the word, not like Reagan or George W. He's been - well, mediocre. Nothing more or less. His health care reform - that under No Cirumstances can be called even mildly socialist - didn't go far enough for moderates and liberals. The whole idea that he would throw away his Government Option because of vitriolic outrage from Talk Radio Nazis whipping up populist furor was seen by us as so much a gesture of bipartisanship that it smacked of weakness. But there you go. He's not a Savior, not by any definition.

And just to show you that I'm not a partisan yes-man, I also take issue with the President for the following reasons: I want more than lip-service given to Immigration Reform. I love Latinos but really, this thing has gotten out of hand; I think he should take a stronger stand vis-a-vis the September 11th Islamic Center. I believe utterly in religious freedom and tolerance but I can't help but think that the sponsors of this center are sticking their fingers up to us - and it's not like NYC doesn't have many, many mosques already. Why there?

He's not a savior, no, - but he's not the devil either, and that's where I begin to get pissed off - because we just came through eight years of some of the most dysfunctional, illegal and elitist Presidency in American history and none of these people who are sending me these fucking emails said a word. Why now? Why are you sending me these snickering, carping emails now - with a President who can, at worst, be described as mediocre or ineffective - where were you doing the last Presidency? Did you have nothing to say? Were you happy and satisfied? Were there no prayers that George W. might safely go on his way, or condemnations of, well, anything at all?

I mean, let's recap: beyond running a shamelessly dirty campaign, there are serious questions as to what happened in Florida when they office of Presidency was handed to George W. by none other than the Governor of Florida, George's brother - despite plenty of allegations of voter fraud and trickery. Al Gore won the popular vote but lost the Electoral votes because George's brother was in charge of retabulating the Florida ballots.

That's pretty bad right there, folks. How many outraged emails did I receive from Concerned Citizens? Zero.

Four years later, another filthy campaign in which allegations of John Kerry being a coward who lied about his war record are covered as if they were facts, and another curious vote tally - this time in Ohio. For those of you not paying attention, Ohio was infamous for the fact that every single exit poll showed Kerry as clearly ahead of Bush in that state. Then, when the ballots were tallied, lo and behold! Bush wins! What are the odds of every single exit poll being wrong? One in 959,000. According to Republican Strategist Dick Morris:

“Exit polls are almost never wrong,” Morris wrote. “So reliable are the surveys that actually tap voters as they leave the polling places that they are used as guides to the relative honesty of elections in Third World countries. … To screw up one exit poll is unheard of. To miss six of them is incredible. It boggles the imagination how pollsters could be that incompetent and invites speculation that more than honest error was at play here."

What happened in Ohio might have been cleared up if Michael Connell, Republican internet strategist in Ohio and - ironically -  the guy who developed the website that hosted the vote tallying for Ohio - didn't mysteriously die in a plane wreck on his way to testify before Congress on this very issue.


Again, number of emails fwded to me on this issue by concerned citizen? Zero. The irate American electorate was curiously silent. Why?


This brings me to my final issue: Where was the Liberal Media when all this was going on? Shouldn't the Liberal Media have been trumpeting these issues left and right, filling our heads with their slanted and biased reporting to create the stampede of fear-mongering they're so justly famous for? They seriously missed the boat on these issues - both of the election irregularities mentioned here were pooh-poohed by the Media, liberal or not, as if they were nothing more than Conspiracy Theories whispered in corridors by mutants who believe in UFO abductions, etc. Really, the Liberal Media was as culpable as the Conservative Talk Show propaganda machine in creating an aura of Let's Just Sweep These Issues Away and Get On With Business.

I mean really, Liberal Media - I'm starting to doubt your existence! Where are you when we need you? God knows that there's a strong Conservative Media - a creature created when Talk Radio exploded in the eighties, after the Reagan Administration deregulated news and stopped requiring news servers to broadcast "both sides of each issue." Now a news server could broadcast only one side of any issue and not stand accused of being criminally biased. Suddenly we had Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly and Anne Coulter and the grand-daddy of them all, Rush Limbaugh. Everybody knows these guys - they're household names. Where are the virulent, dangerous, one-sided Liberal Fear Mongerers? Surely the multi-billion dollar media machine could whip up some convincing liberal crybaby to counter this alarming trend on the other side?

Again, another failure by the Libs! Why did they allow the Conservative Backlash Movement to take the initiative? Are they not even trying? It boggles the mind! All those billions of dollars they could throw towards their Barely Hidden Scheme to turn America into a Socialist Worker's Paradise are just sitting there, going to waste.

I don't get it. Unless - no, that's too crazy to even consider. Could it be that, despite everything we've been told, there is no Liberal Media?That would be a frightening thought, wouldn't it? Like the Nazis who united their people by creating a Straw Enemy - the Jews - so that they could form a rigid opposition, this theory means that we've been lied to! Maniupulated!

Let's step back now and look at this Liberal Media thing. In theory, if there was a Liberal Media that threw the weight of its power and wealth towards creating a liberal bias in the American electorate, would we not see some of that bias during the first post-Reagan Democratic Presidency? Wouldn't Bill Clinton's Presidency be given a "free ride" with all the power and prestige of the American Media Industry championing his every move?


Go back in time and look at how the Liberal Media handled Bill Clinton: from the very beginning they seemed willing to sacrifice their Liberal Bias by reporting every "scandal" perpetrated by the Clintons as fact without investigation, and without retractions when they were found to be patently false. Remember "Haircut Gate"? The scandal of Clinton tying up an entire international airport so that he could take his ease on Air Force One and get a personalized hair cut? Go back to Lexus Nexus and read how many headlines that one generated in the Liberal Press.


Remember Whitewater? Do you? Well, if you do - can you tell me what it was all about: I mean, before you Google it and try to put together something out of nothing? If you don't, Whitewater was a development scheme that the Clintons invested in and lost plenty of money. It was first printed in that bulwark of Liberalism, The New York Times in 1992 when allegations that ex-Gov of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, put pressure on David Hale to loan hundreds of thousands to the McDougals, business partners of the Clintons in this land-deal. The NYT did not mention the fact that Hale never said anything about Clinton's "pressure" during hours of FBI investigations of this deal previous to Clinton becoming President. Whitewater spun out of control, with the willing collusion of the Liberal Media so that eventually a Commission was set up under Ken Starr to investigate Clinton's involvement in fraud. This Commission lasted the length of Clinton's Presidency and, at untold millions of tax payer's dollar spent, proved conclusively that - nothing happened. Nothing. 


"Nothing Happened" was certainly not the verdict in the Monica Lewinsky scandal where Bill became coy when asked if he had sex with a fat girl in the White House - a scandal on all kinds of levels. I mean, did you ever see her? I know some guys like Chubbies, but really! And in the White House? Bad taste, man! For Godsakes, man! A Grand Jury was convened to find out if this thing happened, presumably because there was a law against it and the reality of it might alter America's place in the hierarchy of nations. At the cost of another fist full of millions, a kind of neutral vote was given and we all schlepped back to business, somewhat ashamed that we were interested in this at all. In fact, if the Liberal Media didn't devote hundreds of square footage of newsprint on this story, no one would have cared. Another Liberal Media failure, dammit!


Which wouldn't have been so bad if the Liberal Media was doing its job and applying the same scrutiny to George W. Bush and taking him to task for this and that. Certainly they started off by giving W. a bye in such matters as non-investigating rumors that Al Gore claimed to have "invented the internet." They gave that man absolute HELL over that issue, didn't they? Fucking Liberals! Can't even back up their own man! Even when he clearly didn't say any such thing. Gawd, they fucking suck! Fail!


What about the whole Swiftboat Veterans for Justice, a group of so-called concerned Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had invented his war record and received medals that were not warranted. The Libs missed their (swift)boat on that one too: following the story closely yet, curiously, without investigating any of it. When the facts came out that the allegations of this group were anything but quantifiable facts, the Libs were silent again! Probably drunk or stoned or some damn thing. Bastards.


Still, you'd think after September 11th that the Liberal Press might have sobered up long enough to look into the Bush Administration's claims that Saddam Hussein was developing Weapons of Mass Destruction, the cassus belli for the US to declare war on Hussein, with the blessings of the UN, and topple that regime. Clearly, lying about these so-called Weapons of Mass Destruction to Congress and the UN were not on the same level as lying about a blow job from a fat girl in the White House - but still, you'd think that the Liberal Media might get off its ass for this one.


Despite the fact that over four-thousand Americans have died and an estimated 31,000 have been maimed, blinded, crippled and mentally destroyed at a cost of over one trillion dollars - one trillion dollars! all over the felonious misinformation that Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction - there has not been any effort to convene a Grand Jury or a Commission or some fucking thing to look into this. If there was ever a Impeachable Offense by any US President in the past fifty years - surely lying about facts to Congress in order to orchestrate an illegal war would be one. If there was a Liberal Media worth its name, this issue would have been looked into with the same Eagle Eye for Details that we saw them focus on Clinton's Blowjob and his Haircut and Whitewater, ad nauseum. Surely this was almost as important.

We'll never know. They let us down. They never touched the issue. Why not?

This is where some smartasses like myself begin to wonder if, in fact, there is a Liberal Media at all?

“Years ago, Republican party chair Rich Bond explained that conservatives' frequent denunciations of ‘liberal bias’ in the media were part of ‘a strategy’ (Washington Post, 8/20/92). Comparing journalists to referees in a sports match, Bond explained: ‘If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is “work the refs.” Maybe the ref will cut you a little slack next time.’” (Seth Ackerman, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, August 2001).

Bill Kristoll, arch-Neo Conservative editor goes Bond one better: ‘I admit it,’ Kristol told The New Yorker in 1995. ‘The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.’”

Bill's a liberal when compared to ex-Nixon speechwriter and one time All The Way to the Right Presidential Candidate Pat Buchanan, who is quoted as saying, “‘The truth is, I've gotten fairer, more comprehensive coverage of my ideas than I ever imagined I would receive,’ [Patrick] Buchanan acknowledged in March 1996. He added: ‘I've gotten balanced coverage and broad coverage -- all we could have asked.’”


What the fuck? The Liberal Media gave him Fair and Balanced press coverage?


In fact, the Myth of the Liberal Media is one of the grossest lies ever perpetrated on the American Electorate. According to Eric Alterman, in The Nation: 

"Conservatives are extremely well represented in every facet of the media. The correlative point is that even the genuine liberal media are not so liberal. And they are no match--either in size, ferocity or commitment--for the massive conservative media structure that, more than ever, determines the shape and scope of our political agenda. 


"In a careful 1999 study published in the academic journal Communications Research, four scholars examined the use of the "liberal media" argument and discovered a fourfold increase in the number of Americans telling pollsters that they discerned a liberal bias in their news. But a review of the media's actual ideological content, collected and coded over a twelve-year period, offered no corroboration whatever for this view. The obvious conclusion: News consumers were responding to "increasing news coverage of liberal bias media claims, which have been increasingly emanating from Republican Party candidates and officials."

In point of fact, there is no such thing as the Liberal Media and there never has been. In fact, in a study of 
ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News in the year 2001 shows that 92 percent of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.”(Who's On the News?: Study shows network news sources skew white, male & elite, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, June 2002).


Those media scamps aren't liberal at all! They're Republicans! And it shows, too:

Examining the "Liberal Media" Claim, David Croteau, Virginia Commonwealth University Department of Sociology and Anthropology, (archived at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), June 1998:
“The findings include:
“ ·  On select issues from corporate power and trade to Social Security and Medicare to health care and taxes, journalists are actually more conservative than the general public.
“ ·  Journalists are mostly centrist in their political orientation.
“ ·  The minority of journalists who do not identify with the ‘center’ are more likely to identify with the ‘right’ when it comes to economic issues and to identify with the ‘left’ when it comes to social issues.”

This is frightening stuff, because we're told over and over again that the Media is Liberal and that charge gives moral integrity to the very existence of a Conservative Backlash in the Press. If the Media wasn't liberal then Rush wouldn't be Right and Bill O'Reilley wouldn't need his No-Spin Zone to counteract it. If the Media wasn't Liberal, these guys would not need to exist.

Price of the 'Liberal Media' Myth, Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com, January 1, 2003
“[T]he larger fallacy of the ‘liberal media’ argument is the idea that reporters and mid-level editors set the editorial agenda at their news organizations. In reality, most journalists have about as much say over what is presented by newspapers and TV news programs as factory workers and foremen have over what a factory manufactures...

“News organizations are hierarchical institutions often run by strong-willed men who insist that their editorial vision be dominant within their news companies. Some concessions are made to the broader professional standards of journalism, such as the principles of objectivity and fairness.

“But media owners historically have enforced their political views and other preferences by installing senior editors whose careers depend on delivering a news product that fits with the owner’s prejudices. Mid-level editors and reporters who stray too far from the prescribed path can expect to be demoted or fired. Editorial employees intuitively understand the career risks of going beyond the boundaries.

“These limitations were true a century ago when William Randolph Hearst famously studied every day’s paper from his publishing empire looking for signs of leftist attitudes among his staff. And it is still true in the days of Rupert Murdoch, Jack Welch and the Rev. Sun Myung Moon.”

And more:

Big media pushes news to the far right, San Francisco Examiner, undated:
“The biggest lie fed the American people by conservative pundits is that the United States is dominated by the ‘liberal media.’ As if Rupert Murdoch, Michael Eisner, General Electric, Time-Warner AOL and Viacom are owned and operated by liberals. 


“Not only are these folks ultra-conservatives, but the people they hire to voice their opinions are so far to the right, they give independent journalism a dirty name. No, my friends, the corporate media is in the hands of right-wing kooks parading as moderates and pushing the political envelope further and further to the right.”
 And that's the whole point, right there: they're pushing the political envelop further and further to the right. The entire reason for the existence of the Conservative Backlash Media, after all, was the perceived bias of the Liberal Media which desperately needed to be counter-balanced. But go back and look at those quotes that begin this overly long essay - create a lie, make it big but simple, and create your own reality.

The masses will follow . . .
 

Jacoby Laquan Smith, 33, was charged with beating up his quadruple-amputee girlfriend in St. Paul, Minn., in March because, he said, she had blocked his view of the television. The girlfriend, 28, who lost both hands and part of both legs from a childhood illness, fought back, punching Smith and dumping her bedpan on him. Said Smith, of his frequent fights with her, "She'll swing, push me down, and choke me with her nubs." [St. Paul Pioneer Press, 3-29-10]

The Last of the Italians

When I was a kid, my Uncle Pooch could do anything. Literally. Even live down the nick-name "Pooch", a name his wife tried to bury when they moved out to St. Croix, USVI, but which my mother resurrected on her first visit, only to have it spread like cancer.

There are a variety of stories behind the nickname, but the one that sticks - the one most recently told - was that it was assigned to him by Italian-American celebrity Don Ameche - you may remember him from Cocoon. You may not. I have no authority over your memories. Why should I?

My grandfather had a swing band that was moderately successful back in the Twenties and Thirties - it toured all over North and South America. The emcee for their shows was none other than Don Ameche, before he hit it big in Hollywood. While my grand dad was on tour, my Uncle George was born. Don Ameche took the call and yelled out across the practice stage to my grand dad: George - your wife gave birth last night! You got a pooch of your own, back home.

George Jr. was forever known as Pooch - back when he was travelling with his father's band as roadie; back when he contracted with a local Italian American Businessman to drive a hearse, no questions asked, daily from the hospital to the airport, where it would be unloaded quietly and quickly onto a plane by night. Pooch said they'd use the same body in the back until it "Wore out." Then they'd get a new one. Pooch joined the Marines in WWII and fought in all the major engagements. He was recalled to duty for Korea during the Dark Days of the Pusan Pocket.

The Pooch we knew became bored with life in the Allegheny Highlands of Western Pennsylvania. He built a boat and sailed to the US Virgin Islands where he lived for decades, becoming a fixture on the island. One time when I was moonlighting at the bookstore in Athens, Georgia a woman with an obvious West Indian accent came in. I asked her where she was from and, when she told me Christiansted, St. Croix, I asked her if she knew Captain George. She threw her head back and laughed a throaty, West Indian laugh. "Sure! Ev-ery-body know Cap-tan Cheorge!"

Everybody did know him. We would visit the islands when winter had Connecticut locked down, and Captain George - our own Uncle Poochie - was a celebrity at all the bars, all the restaurants, with all the cabbies and all the police officers. He was a showman with a million stories, jokes and anecdotes and everyone revelled in being in his presence. He had been a tourist boat captain, sailing the quality folk out to skin dive on Buck Island, regaling him with his mostly true stories and jokes, his olive Italian skin turning a dark, Island mahogany. He began working his way up the captain scales, taking the requisite tests until he was certified to skipper any size ship in any water. When we used to visit, he was the skipper of a US Navy research contract vessel - a huge ship that would come into dock in the late afternoons with Pooch on the flying bridge wearing nothing but shorts, brown as a monkey, his curly hair and Neptune beard white as snow but his body still young and athletic.

Pooch especially enjoyed young people - children. And all children loved Pooch. They still do. His corny jokes and ridiculous stories and affected voices are geared towards making young children laugh. He is the barstool philosopher and raconteur, with a magical instinct for talking to kids. All my life he was my hero - my brother's hero too. In fact, my brother's ambition is to be the Uncle Pooch to my kids, a role he is flourishing in. I wanted my kids to meet Pooch and so we trekked down to Crystal River Florida where he and Aunt Mickey have retired.

Pooch is in his eighties now, but has lost none of his sharpness, none of his ability to make kids laugh. That first night my youngest son was sitting in his lap, laughing at his stories. When he went to bed he told me, apropos of nothing at all, "I really love that old guy." Pooch is older now and his forearms look as if he survived a fire - evidence of massive skin cancer from exposure to the tropical sun. He's become heavier since his heart began to fail - but he still took us to the zoo where he made friends with the lady taking the tickets, the guy operating the boat, the woman giving the tour, and people sitting next to us on the trolley. We went to the post office so my cousin could mail a letter. It was crowded but Pooch said, "I'll go in with you - I have friends here." And sure enough, they were in and out.

I wanted my kids to meet my hero. I wanted them to sit across from him while he told about bomb disposal during WWII: one of us would dig a hole about a hundred yards away - the other would work on the bomb. We took turns. The one working on the bomb would keep a steady description of what they were doing through headsets to the guy in the hole. Inevitably you came down to turning that last screw. As you did it, you would inadvertly flinch and put an arm up in front of your face. I used to love that. When my partner did that I'd always say, "That's right! If it goes off, you don't want to get any in your eyes . . ."

I loved to see him pull out the coins and work the old tricks, or show the back of his hand where a rattle snake bit him, or the places where the barracuda got him when he was skin diving off the reefs of Buck Island.

Later, when we came  home, my oldest son asked me how I felt seeing him old like that, using a walker to get around. "Sad, I guess - but he's eighty. What a life!"

My Aunt Rose is in her nineties and she still works with the elderly, taking care of people twenty years younger than she is. She's my grandmother's sister, the last of her generation - the last of the first generation Americans and, though she is American all the way through, still her voice inflections are foreign, vaguely Italian. She totters through the house and puts her hands on both your cheeks and peers at you through her glasses, one lens noticeably thicker than the other. I told my kids - who never got to meet my mother - your great-great Aunt Rose is as close to my mother as you'll ever know.

On the Nature of Vacuums

The Following is paid for by the Mad Dog Moderate Party:

Did it ever occur to you that nature abhors a vacuum? Nowhere is this more true than in politics. Remove one political mass from the equation and that space will quickly be filled by another mass of equal density, etc. Remember, it must be an equal mass in order to fill the space left behind. There can be no amorphous, matter-less thing floating around in that newly empty space.

I'm always piqued by the idea that Right Wingers want to reduce the size of the Federal Government. By the laws of politics, which have been valid since God first made judgement on Cain and Abel, vis-a-vis political entities, if you reduce the size of Federal Governement you then leave a vacuum that will quickly be filled with a mass of equal density. In the case of American History, as well as most history in general, the Yin to government's Yang is Big Business. When we shrink the power of the Government, the new power is Big Business. That's all.There is no third thing that can exist between these two colliding beasts.

Someone might argue that I am being extreme, that Free Market Forces will fill the vacuum and that's a good thing. I would argue that the Free Market, without governemental regulation, creates a paradigm where the Biggest Hugest and Richest devour the middle and the weak, creating a vast amount of power at the head, with virtually nothing left behind. This has been true since - well, forever. The Medieval Period of Europe offers us the best idea of what happens when the Few have the power, only slightly controlled - and that infentestimal control coming from within - and the Many exist to prop them up. I believe that the end of Feudalism as practiced in Europe led to two of the bloodiest revolutions in European history: the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution.

Our own history has seen  a steady and intelligent encroachment on the unmitigated power of industry since the time of the robber barrons and child labor and sweat shops. It's when we remove these controls that Banks run amok and Stock Barons run amok and the economy crashes. The more we deregulate, the further our economy teeters at the abyss . . .

You take a think like Economics and The Free Market - each of these two things is motivated by one singular goal: the creation of wealth. Money, a thing which has rightly been called The Root of All Evil. How can we expect Restraint and Goodness and Empathy to arise out of something that is motivated by the lowest of all human cravings? Can we expect Romance and Beauty to arise from XXX Porn? The pursuit of money mines deeply the lowest of all human emotions and desires. It devours and destroys; it is insatiable and creates victims far in extreme of its benefits.

At the very least, Government is far more accountable to the people than Corporations are. At its best, Government exists to benefit all people equally. Corporations cannot be made accountable to the people without Government control. Corporations, unbound by regulation, exist to make a select few wealthy and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Corporations devour those smaller businesses that can't compete, can't match prices, can't defend themselves. Those smaller businesses and farms disappear, swelling the size of the Devourer until it meets something it can't devour. Then those five or six massive entities exist uneasily alongside each other, agreeing to maintain their own power while crushing those beneath them.

It's also a curious fact one of the largest facets of Big Government is The Military. Twenty percent of the budget goes there. What facet of the Government is larger? Yet this Huge, money burning, completely wasteful government entity is the only one that the Right Wing doesn't want to see reduced. In fact, according to several of their loudest voices - Sarah Palin - is should be increased.

There are no vacuums in human politics. Pick your poison. Which do you feel is more accountable?

 The Mad Dog Moderate Party would like to formerly request that Sarah Palin shut the fuck up.

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