Rick Perry, whose very status as a millionaire and two-term Governor is intrinsic proof that America is no longer a meritocracy, has come up with something even more, if you’ll pardon the expression, Ponzi-like.  It slashes, even eliminates, a whole raft of taxes the non-rich will never even know about, and creates deficits that, guess who will have to suffer for.  Not to be outdone, Romney (as of this writing, anyway) has leapt off the fence and endorsed a similar “flat tax, ” a code word for making busboys pay for the excesses of plutocrats’ trophy wives, with the now usual elimination of the estate tax, investment tax, etc.

Universally, the Republicans have concluded that the economy their policies (and pals) shattered requires, according to some pretzel logic only they can divine, that the rich, far from being punished for their quite public crimes, must be given more money, or else.  Democrats, as you’d expect, are willing to compromise.  Has there ever been a bigger reason than this for mass protests?

Granted, Barack Obama richly deserves to be defeated in 2012, but it appears that Republicans just won’t let him.  It’s a neat trick, of course, offering voters the choice between date rape and a prison gang bang, given that most will choose the former, but this is clearly a case in which “democracy” is no more than a distracting piece of not very good theatre.  Once safely reelected, there is little doubt that Obama will continue the rightward lurch that has become both his millstone and his key to finally joining the 1%, once and for all, not unlike the previous man from “Hope.”  An increasingly phony game is being played wherein everyone on the field wins, and only the fans are the losers.  No wonder so few bother to watch anymore.

By all appearances, the Republicans are planning to throw this match, but only because they’ve won it already.

(From Media Matters)

Schiff: “One Of The Most Anti-Poor People Rules Is The Minimum Wage.” On the September 21 edition of Fox News’ Fox & Friends, co-host Brian Kilmeade hosted author and businessman Peter Schiff, who claimed that minimum wage rules negatively affect employment for young and poor people. From Fox & Friends:

KILMEADE: All right, so let’s look at what you think we should do. How to encourage job growth, according to Peter Schiff: abolish the minimum wage. People think that’s anti-poor people.

SCHIFF: Well, one of the most anti-poor people rules is the minimum wage. It keeps people poor. What the minimum wage does is says that if a person that has very little skills, and generally they’re young or they’re poor, you can’t hire them unless they can produce –

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: — $7.25 worth of value, but it’s not just that. It also has to compensate you for all the mandatory benefits and taxes and risks associated with hiring people.

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: And people that have no skills, it’s not just worth it to hire them –

KILMEADE: Peter, I want to get through, too -

SCHIFF: -- maybe $3 or $4 an hour, if that’s what they’re worth – (emphasis mine!)

KILMEADE: — I understand what you’re saying. You also say – you say to repeal – hold on a second.

SCHIFF: — and you wouldn’t have all this red tape, maybe after a year or two, they would be earning $10 or $15 an hour -

KILMEADE: Right.

SCHIFF: The problem is they never get a chance. [Fox News, Fox & Friends, 9/21/11, via Media Matters]

 

Now, nothing’s going to be better at making the poors mend their wicked, greedy ways than to pay them $24 a day.  That’s 121 bucks a week!  How much is a hot bunk in a trailer housing fourteen and some ramen, anyway? Clearly, the Republicans are going where the money is this time.  Taxing these fat cats some more, the great majority of whom we are told bask in the alarming luxury of flush toilets and home refrigeration, is currently the plan to balance the budget, so the first thing we have to do is cut their pay so they’ll get used to it, I guess. They’ve been riding that $7.25 gravy train long enough, the righties would have it, and it’s time for them to go all Bangladeshi on us or the rich might have to fly commercial, and America as we know it is all over.

The most insidious implication of this more than usually repellent exchange is the blandly accepted notion that, sadly, a lot of our fellow humans are only “worth” a wage, say, 1/200oth of what some other, undoubtedly better dressed but dubiously more productive fellow human is.  Nothing to be done about it; they ought to eat less.  You know how fat the poors are and all, wasting their money on rent and gas instead of personal trainers; they’d surely be less unsightly if only couldn’t afford to eat.

Not wanting to sound like a broken record, but when I hear exchanges like that, I do see why Obama is so overconfident about being reelected.  He could even go ahead and “compromise” with the Republicans, deciding that, say, five bucks and some change might be alright, and Tom Friedman, David Brooks, and the entire WaPoo op-ed page would sing Hosannas to the heavens. Better yet, the Servant Problem would be solved, once and for all.

Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin.  For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra cash for something that would last longer than a cup of coffee and a trip to the bathroom.  My choices were the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Grey Lady, so I picked her.  It was, despite Maureen Dowd, Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, Judy Miller, Deborah Solomon, Elizabeth Bumiller, Frank Bruni, Jodi Wilgoren, and William Safire, not the worst choice I could have made.  After all, Paul Krugman’s lonely opposition to Bush’s onslaught on America will forever be remembered, if only for its singularity at the time, as a balm to many worried mornings of “smoke ‘em out” and whatnot.  Then, there was Frank Rich, whose fame (and astuteness) as a theater critic warranted him a reverent mention by the cynical playwright/murderer in Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap,” (a play I produced here in 1987), but he by then had blossomed into a searingly perceptive analyst of America’s Right (as well as the craven and compromised media that love it), which he continued to be until a couple of weeks ago, when he left to join New York Magazine.

It was a fitting move; New York Magazine, to which I subscribed for many years, was born out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune, whose Sunday magazine arose in the late 60′s, offering a haven for talent and journalism that the New York Times didn’t think was “fit to print.”  Seriously, a Sunday New York Times for SIX BUCKS without Frank Rich?  And a (hilariously inept) paywall, to boot?  Something, I thought, must be seriously wrong on 42nd street, and today, more evidence piles up.  Bob Herbert, it turns out, is bailing out as well.  Though Herbert was never my favorite columnist, his dogged focus on racial and economic injustice sometimes led him away from more stark and timely outrages and his earnest and plain-spoken style lacked the rapier wit of Krugman and Rich, in a paper laden with ads for furs, jewels and expensive watches, it was nice to read somebody who recognized, and compellingly wrote about, the very existence of poverty and injustice in America.  And now he’s gone, too.

This leaves an op/ed page feebly dotted with such glittering journalistic jewels as Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman the only “liberals,” aside from Krugman (who has a day job at Princeton, thankfully), on a page so degraded that it unashamedly prints the execrable, adolescent caterwauling of Ross Douthat (!), who replaced the also pre-disgraced, but nonetheless hired, Bill Kristol in the right wing slot.   Pre-disgraced William Safire preceded them, so I guess there’s a pattern here…  At the New York Times, IOKIYAR rules.

The question, then, is who will replace them?  Unlike, say, The WaPoo, which is now primarily a Graham family enrichment scheme solely dedicated to promoting the Village values of war-making abroad and austerity at home, the NYT does depend on millions of Americans ponying up the cash to read it, and virtually none of these people do so because they like Ross Douthat and nuclear power.  No conservative would be caught dead spending two bucks daily, six bucks Sunday, for the “far left” New York Times, so it might be a good idea not to cater to them quite so much, at the expense of those who actually read and support the paper.

Newspapers are, by their nature, conservative institutions, in the true sense of the word, and that is why columnists like David Broder and Mike Royko, to name just a couple, continued writing until the grim reaper got them: readers develop relationships with columnists no wise publisher would ever want to sever.  Once, this arrangement was born of competitive pressures; in today’s monopolistic environment it survived, until recently, as tradition.  Those days are clearly over in this age when even big, once-powerful papers like the NYT struggle for survival, and let go the voices that personified them.

I don’t know who will replace Rich and Herbert, but if history is any guide, they will be disappointing, indeed.

UPDATE:  Well, it looks like Joe Nocera, one of a precious few good reporters in the business section, will be moving to the op/ed page, which is good, I guess, but it weakens the business section while not bringing any new voices to the paper as a whole.  On the bright side, such a move will surely save money…  Will they pass the savings on to their readers?

Koppel targeted Fox News and MSNBC, comparing them to bling-addled boxers in the big media ring, glaring at each other from their respective neutral corners, and then raining rhetorical spitballs, as they move, night after night, to the center of the big canvas:  American cable television.

Typically, there’s been a lot of reaction.

Sssssnnnnnnorrrrrrrre !!!

Koppel furrowed mightily about the underlying threat to the Republic if trends (in place and quite profitable for a helluva long time, thanks) continued, led by O’Reilly/Olbermann, Beck/Maher, Limbaugh/Stewart food fights.

BUT !!!!

It may be The Big Media Story is way ahead of Ted and all these other clowns, at least in terms of the dire state of cable itself.

From the Financial Times, 11/18/10:

“The number of people subscribing to US cable television services has suffered its biggest decline in 30 years as younger, tech-savvy viewers lead an exodus to web-based operations, such as Hulu and Netflix.” *

• Total number of subscribers to cable and satellite in the third quarter:  down by 119,000
• Compared to gain of 346,000 in the third quarter of 2009
• Net falloff in subscribers in the third quarter of 2010:  741,000

“The figures suggest that ‘cord-cutting’ – one of the pay-TV industry’s biggest fears – is becoming a reality as viewers drift to web-based platforms.”

• Online subscription services now priced at $7.99 per month (Hulu and Netlfix)
• Hulu’s revenue up over $130 million this year compared to last (Hulu owned jointly by News Corp., Disney, and NBC Universal)

“Research from The Diffusion Group, a technology research company, found that more than a third of iPad users were likely to cancel their pay-TV subscriptions in the next six months.”

* Source:  SNL Kagan

–Col. Dave Lapan, Pentagon spokesman (with a straight face…)

The Pentagon, which devours about half of the US budget Defending our Freedom, has “asked” the news media if it would refrain from publishing the latest Wikileaks documents, ostensibly out of a sudden concern with the credibility of the media.  Yes, you read that right.  They’re pleading with the same media who relentlessly promoted the Iraq War, The “War on Terror,” and the “Axis of Evil,” among other stupid, misguided notions of the Bush Era, while unanimously dismissing opponents of torture, wiretapping, war, and indefinite detention as naive and unSerious, despite the fact that they were right.  The same shockingly discredited media that gave us Judith Miller, Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, Fred Hiatt, David Ignatius, Jonah Goldberg, David Gregory, and on and on is now supposed to be worried about how crossing the Pentagon, for once, might damage its credibility, and thus should keep mum.  What they’re asking is kind of like asking a fish to swim, but the Pentagon’s doing it anyway.  They have a lot of taxpayer-funded spokesmen to keep busy, after all.

But why bother?  The media has fallen hook, line. and sinker for every cockamamie idea that has bubbled up from the bowels of the Pentagon swamp for twenty years; from the Kuwaiti Incubators to the Aluminum Tubes, from Star Wars to Suitcase nukes, no phony pretext was too ridiculous for the mainstream media to toss credibility to the wind and type up whatever some shadowy Pentagon flack said, however often such errant hogwash was initially disputed and subsequently disproven.  Last time the Pentagon had this sort of Wikileaks-related Depends Moment, just this summer, all of its wild threats proved utterly false, but the media published them anyway, basically ignoring what the leaks contained.  There is no evidence that they won’t do so again, but I guess if you’re the Pentagon, and your whole world is a spinning kaleidoscope of imaginary fears, even this one might sound plausible.

Trouble is, the Pentagon has achieved “full spectrum dominance” when it comes to the US media, if not in the real world, where since World War II it loses all its wars, so such dire entreaties are as silly as they are unnecessary.  Nobody at the Pentagon seriously thinks that, say, the New York Times, which obligingly withheld Bush’s warrantless wiretapping until his 2004 reelection was safely past, will suddenly find something the the 400,ooo pages of documents with which to bedevil the war machine.  Nobody expects the Washington Post, no further introduction necessary, to print anything that might send Halliburton or Blackwater stock plummeting.  Everyone knows that on TV, war sells and peace leads to poor ratings, no matter the country/cause/pretext du jour.  What, pray, is the Pentagon pretending, this time, to be afraid of?

The answer lies, I think, in the latter half of the quote above, which is unintentionally (of course) revealing….   The Pentagon has, in effect, gone all Alaska on us.  Like Senate candidate Joe Miller, who had private thugs “arrest” and handcuff an impertinent reporter, and Sarah Palin, who blames the “lamestream media” for making her look like the dangerous idiot she is, the by far largest “branch” of our supposedly Democratic government is out to destroy the credibility of any media source, however tiny and inconsequential, who dares to question them.  When you’re a hillbilly grifter attempting to ride a wave of corporate-funded paranoia to Washington, that’s one thing.  When you’re annually gobbling up $700 billion of money we don’t have creating morally indefensible violence and resentment the world over and calling it “defense,” it’s quite another.  The media have been dutifully ignoring this rather simple fact for many years; indeed, whatever “credibility” they might hope to retain depends on their willingness to cover up their many past errors, incurred mostly by believing the Pentagon, so their interests, once adversarial, have become one.

At one time, the news media felt a responsibility, however often in the breach, to dig beneath shady official pronouncements, and found it both satisfying and economically advantageous to expose official lies; in short, they had credibility, and sometimes even used it, notably during the Pentagon Papers case, when several newspaper publishers risked jail publishing what the military always calls “classified” documents about its deceitfulness and egregious crimes against humanity.

That time has passed, and someone ought to tell the Pentagon to try something else.  Unlike the rest of America, they can afford to lavishly, and perhaps effectively, sell almost anything…   Anything but credibility, that is.

The Financial Times reports that the number of Americans giving up their citizenship to protect their families from America’s onerous worldwide tax system has jumped rapidly. Even relatively high-tax nations such as the United Kingdom are attractive compared to the class-warfare system that Obama is creating in the United States. I run into people like this quite often as part of my travels. They are intensely patriotic to America as a nation, but they have lots of scorn for the federal government. Statists are perfectly willing to forgive terrorists like William Ayres, but they heap scorn on these “Benedict Arnold” taxpayers. But the tax exiles get the last laugh since the bureaucrats and politicians now get zero percent of their foreign-source income. You would think that, sooner or later, the left would realize they can get more tax revenue with reasonable tax rates. But that assumes that collectivists are motivated by revenue maximization rather than spite and envy.

As usual, imaginary friends and tinny cold war epithets form the duct tape that purportedly hold this flimsy argument together, but could it possibly have been made slightly less offensive and a bit more plausible by leaving out calling tax evasion “patriotic” and misspelling its manufactured villain’s name?  (It’s Ayers, you righty halfwit…)  The best part is that he treats “revenue maximization” as something good and holy, while “spite and envy” are sordid and evil, as a supposed justification for such greed-driven voluntary statelessness.  Anyone who has watched how the Republicans talk about the unemployed and all manner of their other chosen “lesser people”  (thanks, Alan Simpson for putting it so refreshingly bluntly…), and it’s pretty obvious where the spite, if not the envy, lies in this debate.

The number of wealthy Americans living in the UK who are renouncing their US citizenship is rising rapidly as more expatriates seek to escape paying tax to the US on their worldwide income and gains and shed their “non-dom” status, accountants say. As many as 743 American expatriates made the irreversible decision to discard their passports last year, according to the US government – three times as many as in 2008. …There is a waiting list at the embassy in London for people looking to give up citizenship, with the earliest appointments in February, lawyers and accountants say. …“The big disadvantage with American citizens is they catch you on tax wherever you are in the world. If you are taxed only in the UK, you have the opportunity of keeping your money offshore tax free.”

Since, as we all know, but only Leona Helmsley came out and said, “Only the little people pay taxes.”  Tony Hayward calls them, perhaps in a nod to the Queen’s English, “small people,” but you get the idea.

To grasp the extent of this problem, here are blurbs from two other recent stories. Time magazine discusses the unfriendly rules that make life a hassle for overseas Americans.

See, even the “liberal media” is deeply worried about the rich…  you should be, too.  The point of the whole thing is that Time reported that wealthy people (500 or so of them), have such snazzy tax lawyers that, like Dick Cheney, they came up with a way to not pay taxes pretty much at all by buying a fake address someplace awful, then profiting off of American taxpayer money, bailouts, legal immunity, and (!) citizenship, while living wherever they damn well please.  The main complaint is that they have to report every little cash transaction over $10,000, which we all know can be so onerous.  I bet tipping will suffer from that.  Then they find the following hogwash in the New York Times, but leave out whether the author is Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, William Kristol, or Ross Douthat:

…. American expats have long complained that the United States is the only industrialized country to tax citizens on income earned abroad, even when they are taxed in their country of residence, though they are allowed to exclude their first $91,400 in foreign-earned income.

Oh, I see; they found a tax that wasn’t devised to tilt to the rich.  It’s like a bunch of Che Guevaras in mink.

One Swiss-based business executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of sensitive family issues, (That’s one way to put it…)  said she weighed the decision for 10 years. She had lived abroad for years but had pleasant memories of service in the U.S. Marine Corps. Yet the notion of double taxation — and of future tax obligations for her children, who will receive few U.S. services — finally pushed her to renounce, she said. …Stringent new banking regulations — aimed both at curbing tax evasion and, under the Patriot Act, preventing money from flowing to terrorist groups — have inadvertently made it harder for some expats to keep bank accounts in the United States and in some cases abroad. Some U.S.-based banks have closed expats’ accounts because of difficulty in certifying that the holders still maintain U.S. addresses, as required by a Patriot Act provision.

Ah, what suffering, to have one’s multiple six-figure income, floating through the ether in banks all over the world, bothered with by one’s freeloading fellow citizens trying to get their dirty paws on it.  (Under a law dreamed up by the socialist (?) Bush Administration,  but niggling details like that don’t faze Cato…)  At least these beleaguered expats have a better chance of seeing their tax dollars at work than those of us at home do; if they’re lucky a bomb or drone might kill somebody or flatten a town in their area.  More likely, a hefty dividend check from the latest no-bid contract, a court decision relieving you of all liability for your latest crime, or a no-strings government bailout will land in your Swiss or Cayman Islands mail box with nary a thud, courtesy of the American taxpayer.  That’s what I call patriotic.

-Mammy, to Scarlett in “Gone With the Wind.”

*”gentlemen” in Mammy-ese…  (as a slave, she knew what she was talking about.)

Where’s Mammy when you need her?  The formation of the Cat Food Commission is merely the latest example of the media and political class serially advancing the dunderheaded notion that the imaginary “Free Market” is not only the supposed prerequisite to less monetized forms of “freedom,” but if the “Free Market” so much as gets a cold, Democracy might have to just be put to sleep to make it feel better, and save on vet bills.  Thus, we are treated to spectacles like the IMF coldly informing us that our elderly simply have to die sooner to maintain our credit rating, and Arizona Senator John Kyl saying, without a trace of embarrassment, that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans were much more important than the relative pittance it would take to keep sending $1200 per month to people tossed out of the work force by deliberate Republican policies.  Never mind that for thirty years we’ve given the “free market” everything it supposedly wanted, and got another depression to show for it, along with the sort of vaulting inequality one associates with third-world dictatorships…  You see, the only reason the market failed was because it wasn’t free enough.  (!)

The boom and bust cycles of Randian Economics are well-known and depressingly familiar.  Corporations, usually those favored by government largesse (railroads, steel, real estate, autos, oil;  the list is long of industries that owe their very existence to the taxpayer dollar….), become so large and powerful that they have enough money left over to buy the government, even as they shower so much wealth to a chosen few executives that they can buy their wives opera houses for Christmas instead of another mink.   The purpose of free market fundamentalism is laughably obvious, and not exactly new…  selling despotism and mass poverty amid astonishingly concentrated wealth as something akin to God’s Will.  Remember that ol’ Divine Right thing?  What about “Let them eat cake?”  Down the memory hole for the Chicago School boys, who of course never expect to swallow the harsh medicine they endlessly prescribe for others.

Unfortunately for Louis XVI, there was no Fox News around in 1789, and thus no one was there to patiently explain to the uppity rabble that Marie Antoinette was not just expressing All-French Values, but was also an instrument of Our Lord.  If God had meant the peasants to have cake, He’d have given them all Easy-Bake ovens, as I’m sure Tom Friedman would be happy to tell you.  The measure of national greatness has become little more than the relative comfort of the superrich, a far cry from that dreary old “General Welfare ” crap those hippie Founders sneaked into Glenn Beck’s Constitution.  Freedom died a little, you see, when Dick Cheney moved his assets to Dubai.

It’s become increasingly clear over the last few decades that the Frankensteins created by the “Free Market:” a bloated and unproductive overclass dedicated only to Midas-like self-aggrandizement, a stodgy and backward industrial sector stuck in the 1950′s, a larcenous banking elite, and a policy-driving military sector aren’t just destroying the actual free market, but in the process are stomping all over the very concept of democratic government.

Protests, so revered by the corporate-sponsored Tea Party movement, fall like trees in an empty forest when they run counter to elite goals, and even two elections wherein the public overwhelmingly voted for change have been pushed under the rug in favor of the status quo…  The wars, the insider dealing, and the transparently false memes that sold it all still persist despite their failure and ruinous consequences.  Somehow, the Market didn’t fail us; we failed it, and must pay a heavy price:  public employees, those few who still have jobs anyway, must give up their hard-won pensions, Grandma must toil into her 70′s, and health care for the poor and elderly must be put before their own Death Panels.

Of course, the wealthy overclass isn’t being asked to give up anything; quite the opposite.  For them, even the recession ended a while back and they’ve already recovered so thoroughly that now their only worry is “the debt,” meaning the rather strong possibility that someday they might be asked to cough up something for the general good, which can never be tolerated.  Poll after poll shows that, propagandized and overworked though Americans are, few see “the debt” as a problem in the face of 10% unemployment.  Hedge fund managers are taxed at half the rate of waitresses, and Republicans say that it’s the waitress who ought to chip in by accepting sub-minimum wages….

Class warfare has reached its endgame; our idle and incompetent wealthy have decided of late that the biggest threat to America’s future is having a middle class at all, and are setting about doing away with it.  In a real democracy, such a thing would be impossible, because the wealthiest tenth of society is, in the end, arrayed against the other 90%.  Enter Citizens (!) United, FreedomWorks, electronic voting, and the Chamber of Commerce, with a healthy dose of craven propaganda about the hallowed “Free Market,” and its ironclad “laws,”  one of which seems to be that Democracy only exists these days for those who can afford to buy one.

Republicans had two enemies left to fight from those battles they lost back in the days of Martha Mitchell’s late night bathroom phone calls to Helen Thomas:  journalism and truth.  The first turned out to be remarkably easy, and once accomplished, the second followed with barely a push.  Instead of Nixon’s threats and lawsuits, sunny St. Reagan of General Electric strew flowers before a media that seemed, oddly, chastened by Watergate: offering deregulation, monopolistic expansion the government has wisely theretofore prohibited, and the elimination of the Fairness Doctrine, which, by mandating opposing viewpoints, historically made flat-out lying a lot more problematic.  With astonishing quickness, the many, often independent voices in the media lost their power as giant media conglomerates gobbled up everything in sight and the Wall Street profit demands hacked away at news budgets; soon, the administration could kill a potential Watergate like, say, Iran/Contra, with just a couple of telephone calls.  But all the media horses and all the President’s men couldn’t get a creepy incompetent (with poor delivery, to boot…) reelected in 1992, so much so that they later felt the need to compensate by falling all over his dunderheaded son.  This weird, self-flagellating dynamic turned out badly for everyone on the planet, except old-school right-wingers and the new, greatly empowered media elite, whom, perhaps bitter about what fools they’d made of themselves for embracing Reaganism, went after Clinton so mercilessly partly to “prove” to themselves that they hadn’t been so spectacularly wrong about everything for the past twelve years.

I do think that’s what’s at work today.  Surely Tom Friedman can no longer believe that the Iraq war was a good idea, but he’ll continue to play Pollyanna until he chokes on a Double Down, because if you never, ever, admit you were wrong, and you’re in the media, a lot of times people forget.  Surely George Will recognized that “Climategate” was a bunch of blatantly orchestrated FOX/BP horseshit, but he’ll be wearing his bowtie horizontally before he ever owns up to it.   Ruth Marcus must have some clue that rich Americans did pay taxes in excess of 70% for fifty prosperous years, and the drastic imbalance of wealth and power created when they stopped has caused most of our current problems, but to so utter would make her and almost all of her WaPoo colleagues look like lying nincompoops, so she’ll stay mum.  Bill Kristol, Ann Coulter, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh…  maybe I flatter these charlatans to say they couldn’t possible believe what they say, daily, but I’d bet one of my better furs that they don’t.

The media, as so successfully reconstituted these past few decades, is now as allergic to the truth as the Republicans they fawn over, and in any given situation, you can guess what they’ll say by checking in at Fox Nation.  After all, they’re privileged, often nepotistically promoted, wealthy know-nothings who neither know nor care about the lives of ordinary Americans….  They’ve got theirs thanks to embracing Republicans, no matter how crazy, and their policies, no matter how disastrous, and they intend to keep it; making an ass of yourself is a lot less stinging when you’ve got a cushy, no-work job and millions in the bank.

The latest absurdities, like “Americans are worried about the deficit,” “Americans support torture,” “Americans want to ‘win’ in (insert country here.), and on and on, when polls show the exact opposite, is now par for the course, and given this one-sided and screeching level of discourse, you could (almost) forgive the Obama Administration for caving to the Right on all these things.  Almost.  What the Obama Administration fails to realize is that both the media and Republicans are invested in his failure, if only to try and duct-tape back together their shared records of failure and incompetence, and the only route to political success is to repudiate them entirely and never let a lie go unpunished, either by the liar or the “journalist” who proffered it.  At this crucial point, they need to stop being Charlie Brown and start being Lucy.

Given the record, it’s the media and their Republican masters who ought to be lying on their backs, but they aren’t.  As Charlie Brown would say…   “Good grief!”

But why not?  The media rapture over Republicans never ebbed after Reagan, particularly since he got rid of that pesky Fairness Doctrine and annoying public service obligations that had heretofore made it awkward for media outlets to simply join the government in looting the treasury and bombing the planet.  Whether they were doing any good or not is neither here nor there; the point is that they were doing well, very well.  The ultimate effect of Reagan’s efforts to “deregulate” the media was in fact the opposite; the idea was to concentrate the media into fewer and fewer wealthy hands, who could certainly be relied upon not to rock the boat when the rising tide rolled in, as it did.  Like a tsunami.

Of course, the inconvenient part was that all the policies the righties had dreamed up were, putting it delicately, unlikely to succeed, and lo and behold.  Now, if I were Tom Friedman, Bill Kristol, or Liz Cheney, I’d be nervous as a whore in church on Meet the Press, but as luck would have it, everyone else on the set all embraced the same dumb ideas you did, so it’s easier to sell such inanities than it would be, say, on the subway.  Consequently, we have landed in something of a pickle: the minority party and the media have together become so deeply divorced from reality, in lockstep, that they can no longer tell any semblance of the truth without making asses of themselves.

Fortunately, they approach this problem by lying even more extravagantly, to a point where a five year old would question their credibility.  Victory in Iraq?  Nostalgia for Bush?  (maybe they meant neuralgia…)  Socialism?  Fascism?  Perhaps it was different when Bush’s absurd claims about the distribution of his tax cuts were wanly accepted and repeated ad nauseam; the real world consequences, and they’ve been dreadful indeed, of the much crazier stuff that happened afterward continue to unfold, and the media that equally bears responsibility is as invested in “looking forward” as John Yoo.   Thus, they make even bigger asses of themselves, and the “credibility” of the media is but a corn-dotted turd from that predictable and noisy orifice making its final circle.

One really does wonder when premature announcements of “victories” at home and abroad, always from the same source, will finally begin to ring hollow inside the Washington bubble, as they have outside it for several years.  In this important way, the right is reaping the downside of its own success…  you can only fool all of the people some of the time, and that time has passed.

Leonhardt’s drivel actually transcends the usual rote stenography of treating something flat-out bonkers a Republican said as though it weren’t entirely false and unfit to print, as it were, and ups the ante a bit.   Like Tom Friedman embracing the American Imperium before him, Leonhardt boldly steps above the partisan fray to personally declare that the least popular and most demonstrably misguided political party in American history is absolutely right, once again, although the opposite was of course true then as now.   As we’ve seen all too often of late, arithmetic isn’t the Grey Lady’s strong suit.  The recent 39% rate hike that WellPoint sneeringly slapped on its California customers was to boost its profits from 5% to 7%, a figure which is of course after the expense of corporate jets, executive salaries, advertising, lobbying, and lawyering et al, bringing this lovely organization to a overhead rate well in the thirties.  Medicare’s overhead is under 5%.  Isn’t anyone at the NYT aware of this?    ”Markets” are what currently produces the costliest and least effective medical care in the developed world; “government takeovers” are the only proven way to provide health care at an affordable cost to all citizens, but if you wasted two bucks on a New York Times you might not know that.

What is touted, and what we actually get, from the “free market” is the elephant in the room that simply cannot be mentioned in the mainstream media, of which the Times is unfortunately one of the least embarrassing members.  We get higher prices for poorer products, less innovation, colossal waste, corrupt politicians, environmental destruction, fewer jobs, and gross extremes of wealth and poverty.  Period.  This has been amply proven throughout human history, but especially in 20th century America.  After aggressive government intervention created a national transportation network and a robust financial system in the latter half of the 1800′s, the economy rapidly turned into the sort of monopolized and corrupt mess we see today, with the same results.  Aggressive moves in the other direction like progressive taxation, antitrust laws, and heavy investment in infrastructure and education briefly corrected the imbalance and produced a more broadly prosperous society, just the one that has relentlessly been swept away over the last thirty years as we’ve been blindly but eagerly led  back to the “market,” despite the fact that every time we went there before we got robbed.

Right down the line, we see every day the disgusting excesses and outright theft that Corporate America commits, whether they be our cable providers, agribusiness, retailers, utilities, banks, or military contractors…   None of them would survive five minutes in a “free market.”  But unlike the constantly reviled government, they get to keep their records secret, they seem increasingly unbounded by any laws, and they are worshipped not just on FOX Business Channel but even on the front page of the commie New York Times.  Worse, they run to the government at every turn for protection from real competition and absolution from even the flimsiest of penalties for misconduct, and they win almost every time, too, and that was before the Supreme Court gave them a new and improved version of humanity.

It’s time to stop saying that the “free market” is so successful, and come up with an example.  Just one.