ANS -- history of the lying media

this is by someone named Bruce Lindner.  I have no idea who he is.  but I thought this summary of the history of the lying media was interesting.

--Kim

Bruce Lindner ·

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I stumbled into a Facebook thread last night between several conservatives, one of whom I know, the others not, about the Superbowl half-time show. No, not that half-time show. The other one.

Not wanting to offend my friend, who I truly do respect, I'm keeping her identity anonymous. But for a brief overview, she lives in a red state and was born in 1976. They were discussing the nuanced "message" Kid Rock conveyed in his shtick. Whatever.

Me: "Hi ****! I know no one's asked me, but I think it's tragic that we're now so divided as a nation that we've devolved to the point where we have to have two separate half-time shows. Think about the absurdity of that. How do we ever get back to being *United* States? Or do we?"

Her response was cordial. I've trimmed it down a bit, but here's the gist of it:

"But you're absolutely right…the divisions are so deep. How do we heal? […] We shouldn't have to agree on everything to respect each other's humanity! And, not to be too conspiratorial, we may want to ask who is behind all the division and why? Stop allowing ourselves to be so manipulated."

Her reply got me to thinking about our respective "bubbles;" the informational environments we all dwell in. My friend is a highly intelligent woman. And I don't disagree with a single word of her above comment.

If we were to go back in time to the year 1974, two years before my friend was born, there was a major scandal in the American body politic. It was called Watergate. Members of Congress from both parties probed into it until… well, you all know: two Senators from Nixon's own party, Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott marched over to the White House and told the President that it was time to pack his BVDs and get out. From his own party! Unimaginable today.

My aforementioned friend wasn't yet born at that time. So the impact of Watergate and its aftermath isn't the same to her generation as it is to those of us who lived through it. It's just something that happened "back then." Ancient history.

Then in 1987, the FCC, under the aegis of the Reagan administration, abolished the Fairness Doctrine; a policy that had been on the books since the Truman administration. The regulators at the FCC deemed the doctrine an "unfair burden" on broadcasters who used the public airwaves. So the FCC commissioners, in their wisdom, announced that the media was responsible enough to regulate itself. And just like that, it was done.

What could go wrong?

One of the first to disprove that was a man named Rush Limbaugh. A talented, albeit hateful, highly partisan conservative propagandist. Mr. Limbaugh launched his campaign of division a year after the demise of the Fairness Doctrine. One followed the other.

My above friend was in the 7th grade at the time.

Ironically, it was Watergate that led to the next chapter in the cleaving of our nation. A man named Roger Ailes, Richard Nixon's media consultant, was so personally humiliated by Nixon's resignation, that he, along with the financial backing of a tabloid publisher from Australia named Rupert Murdoch, launched Fox News in the fall of 1996.

The year my friend turned 20 years old.

But the dynamic duo of Ailes & Murdoch weren't alone in dividing us. A Congressman named Newt Gingrich from the great state of Georgia, felt that the comity and all the "my good friend from" happy talk between the parties had gone too far. So he threw a wrench into the works, injecting a new level of toxicity into our system of governance, which has been there ever since.

Again, my friend was a young adult at that time. The era of trusted, unified, factual news media… Walter Cronkite, John Chancellor, et al, began to whither and die around that time. The new, glitzy, glamorous Fox News, with its colorful graphics and "tell it like it is" highly opinionated personalities, pulled no punches. They were, and still are, a coordinated army of Rush Limbaughs, pumping lies and misinformation into America's homes and businesses.

My point being, if you were born after 1970 or so, you've only known the current at-each-other's-throats kind of politics we're drowning in today. The cooperation and camaraderie of the LBJ, Eisenhower, Kennedy eras are likely foreign to you; too abstract to even consider functional today. Not that everything was rosy even then, but it wasn't toxic.

And things got DONE. We didn't need two different televised entertainment events; one for Republicans, one for Democrats. When a Cabinet Secretary was called before Congress for oversight, they didn't show up spewing vitriol and lies, armed with a binder full of opposition research to hurl at each Democratic questioner on the panel.

So to my friend who proffered; "We may want to ask who is behind all the division and why," I say this:

We aging boomers know who, and we know why. I only wish you could have been around to see it pre-Limbaugh, pre-Gingrich, pre-Ailes, pre-Murdoch, pre-Newsmax, pre-OAN, and pre-Trump. It was a time when TRUTH mattered. And liars were shunned.

I'll wrap this up with the same final thought that I left my friend with last night: "Think about the absurdity of that. How do we ever get back to being *United* States? Or do we?"

ANS -- why Capitalism needs to be regulated.

Thom Hartmann again.  Read it.  He explains why Capitalism needs to be regulated.  

--Kim

Thom Hartmann 

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Last night's NFL Super Bowl game was great. The guys wearing blue beat the guys wearing red, and Bad Bunny and Lady Gaga made MAGA snowflakes cry.

But the NFL can also teach Americans a huge lesson about economics, "socialism," and the differences between Republican "free market" nuts and FDR's re-regulation of the American economy that created the largest middle class in history and the first in the world to include more than half of a nation's citizens.

Most Americans would be highly offended, for example, if the NFL took big bucks from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or somebody like these monopolists to change the rules so whichever team gave the League the most money could have an extra three players on the field at all times.

But that's pretty much exactly what Reagaonics and deregulation have brought us in our marketplaces; it's the staggering difficulty that every small business in America faces today in the form of massive corporations like Walmart, Facebook, X, Google, and Amazon.

For capitalism to work in a way that doesn't produce oligarchs and monopolies, it must be regulated. Capitalism, after all, is just a game that people play using money and mutually agreed-upon rules. Just like football.

The NFL heavily regulates football in the United States, at least the football played by its teams. Those regulations include how many players are on the field at any time, exactly what constitutes a down or a touchdown, and rules about how players may physically contact each other, and under what circumstances.

The NFL's super-socialist regulations also decide which team gets first pick of new players: they decided that the worst-performing teams should have first choice of newly available players, giving every team an opportunity to rise up through the ranks in the following season.

It's much like progressive income taxation and the estate tax, giving the little guy a chance while slightly restraining those already at the top. These regulations guarantee the safety and stability of the game itself, and also guarantee that fans of football have a consistent experience, because everybody understands and follows the rules.

That's not meritocracy; it's planned redistribution of future resources to maintain league balance. If American public policy worked this way, the millionaire opinion bots at billionaire-owned Fox "News" would spontaneously combust.

The league also pools its television and licensing revenue and divides it equally among all teams: No owner gets richer just because they're in a bigger market. In a pure "free market," the Cowboys and Giants would drown everyone else in cash. The NFL says, "Nope, everybody eats." That's redistribution by design.

And they impose a hard salary cap so rich owners can't simply buy championships, and they require owners to spend what is effectively a minimum wage on players rather than hoarding profits. Teams that overspend are punished: that's collective control of capital to prevent oligarchy, the exact thing conservatives scream about.

NFL teams are also required to spend a minimum percentage of shared revenue on their players. Owners can't just hoard money; they must reinvest in labor. That's closer to social democracy than laissez-faire capitalism.

The NFL figured out something America forgot after Reagan: markets only work when rules prevent the powerful from rigging the game.

In other words, the NFL is a regulated market with enforced rules that prevent monopolies, protect labor, and preserve competition. And because of that, small-market teams can win, dynasties don't last forever, and fans get a fair game.

If the American economy were run more like the NFL, we'd have fewer oligarchs, more competition, and a much healthier middle class.

But imagine if Milton Friedman, Robert Bork, or the other idiots like them who first advised the Reagan administration and now have guided Republicans ever since were to have taken over the NFL.

The teams with the wealthiest owners would always get the best players, and thus would win every game. They might even decide that the team that gave the NFL the most money could have an extra player or three on the field at various times.

They'd assure us that the teams that didn't perform as well just have to "pull themselves up by their bootstraps." Perhaps their problem is just that their players are "lazy," these people would tell us, and the solution is to cut their salaries and reduce the amount of protective equipment they can wear so that they will have a "incentive" to play harder and increase their performance.

Then the richest teams would begin buying the poorer teams, until all the teams are owned by three or four billionaires. Sounds like every industry in today's America. But conservatives would try to convince you it would create a football paradise, right?

Of course it wouldn't be a paradise: Fans would stop watching, kids would stop dreaming of playing, and the game itself would collapse under the weight of rigging and unfairness. Not to mention that if the socialist NFL ever actually tried some crazy "free market" stupidity like that, Congress would be holding hearings within a week and the public outrage would be deafening.

But when the same thing happens in our economy, we're told by Republicans that it's just "the free market." We're told that "monopolies are natural," that "billionaires are geniuses," and that working people who can't get ahead in a rigged system somehow "deserve their fate."

We're told by these fools that any attempt to re-write the rules so the American economy is fair again and our middle class can recover from the massive $50+ trillion hit it's taken from 45 years of Reaganomics is "socialism," even though FDR's system is exactly how every successful capitalist system in history has worked.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this. He knew markets don't self-police any more than football does. Without referees, rules, and consequences, the biggest and most ruthless players take over, the game stops being a game, and democracy itself is put at risk. And when the morbidly rich write the rules, they inevitably only benefit themselves; everybody else gets screwed.

The NFL doesn't regulate football because it hates competition: it regulates football and "redistributes" wealth and opportunity so competition can exist at all. America once did the same thing with capitalism, and the result was the greatest middle class the world had ever seen.

Two-thirds of us were in the middle class when Reagan came into office, and could get there with a single paycheck thanks to FDR's and LBJ's "socialist" New Deal and Great Society policies. Today it's only roughly 45% of us, and requires two paychecks. All because of 45 years of Reaganomics.

The choice in front of us is simple. We can keep pretending that letting billionaires write the political and economic rules and own the media is "freedom," or we can remember that a fair game is what freedom actually looks like.

Because when the rules only work for the owners, the rest of us aren't players anymore. We're just there to watch, pay, and lose what little we have so the billionaires can buy another super-yacht.

hartmannreport.com

The NFL Is "Socialist" on Purpose, and It Exposes Republican Economic Stupidity