Lord, but have we been hearing a whole lot about “freedom” lately, and how “government” is its enemy. This message which would have been considered by our lately revered but strategically unremembered founders to be something of a slap in the face, but in today’s climate of unabashed corporate ownership of both our “free” press [...]
It seems that Moody’s, one of the insightful bond rating services that notoriously rated Wall Street junk AAA in the years leading up to the crash, is finally getting tough. Not with the banksters, though, but with the US, UK, and other governments, who, according to this infallible oracle, face structural debt that must be [...]
You know, you really have to hand it to the Republicans. They started out with a plan that was seemingly so audacious and unlikely to succeed that Democrats never saw it coming, much less moved to counter it. Selling plutocracy to the rubes, via a systematically concentrated media, has turned out to be like taking [...]
Having found such a gold mine of authoritarian propaganda in the “news” pages of the poor Los Angeles Times over these last two days, I couldn’t help dropping in again for a look-see this afternoon. Would there be yet another journalistic equivalent of an overturned dump truck in the Cahuenga Pass? So enamored am I [...]
Is it just me, or is GOP giddiness about their chimerical but purportedly inevitable “sweep” in the next election leading them into near daily outbursts of unseemly candor? Those of us on the left know quite well that they hold their non-rich supporters in utter contempt, but they at least used to recognize that most [...]
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When I was a kid in the 70’s, everybody listened to KGON, the local FM rock station, and it was avowedly liberal: pro-pot, anti-Nixon, anti-war, with a great cast of hippie-ish DJ’s that became like family. As Archie and Edith wistfully sang, “Those Were the Days.” They had a feature in the morning, “Nukes [...]
Rich people say the darnedest things, and they have for time immemorial, but only recently they have been encouraged to do so free of ridicule on national television. During the Health Care Summit today, (h/t crooksandliars.com) CNN helpfully cut away to have the certifiably cuckoo creationist Ben Stein come on the air and proudly say [...]
If I hear, one more time, someone speak of the wonders of the “free market,” I’m going to do something desperate. Why aren’t these cretinous martinets ever asked to explain what, in heaven’s name, they mean? The reality has gotten so far removed from the homilies that some explanation is in order. In an offensively [...]
I have a strong feeling that our Media Stars are going to be left with even more egg on their faces than usual as the next elections roll around, so convinced they are that, somehow, the Republicans have recaptured the hearts of that imaginary “middle America” that none of them have evidently ever seen. Of [...]
Probably one of the most infuriating rhetorical tactics you see these days from the plutocrats and the media who love them is their emphatic insistence that the “free market,” as it is currently constituted, may have its flaws, but in the end it “rewards success.” It does, I suppose, to the extent that it rewards [...]