The hard right: fighting our well-being since the ’50s

[via TPM]

Maha on pigs, among other things:

Today’s Republican Party is entirely about polemics. It has nothing to offer in the way of responsible government, either in domestic programs or foreign policy, but fantasy narratives, tired slogans and ideas that have already failed. No amount of real-world examples showing why their ideology is inapplicable to governing can sway them.

Hofstadter continued, quoting Theodore W. Adorno:

“The pseudo conservative is a man who, in the name of upholding traditional American values and institutions and defending them against more or less fictitious dangers, consciously or unconsciously aims at their abolition.”

And finally,

Writing in 1954, at the peak of the McCarthyist period, I suggested that the American right wing could best be understood not as a neo-fascist movement girding itself for the conquest of power but as a persistent and effective minority whose main threat was in its power to create “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible.”

Back in 1954, Hofstadter didn’t believe pseudo-conservatives would ever win elections. Here his vision failed him. Because once they had created “a political climate in which the rational pursuit of our well-being and safety would become impossible,” they were able to win elections.

What Hofstadter didn’t foresee was that in the 1970s pseudo-conservatism would join forces with old money — right-wing family foundations and wealthy individuals — to build a media message machine that would utterly confound rational political discourse in America.

Thus, in November, Americans will march to the polls without having once had the candidates’ stands on issues clearly and factually and un-hysterically explained to them.

What really sucks is that when I was in Journalism 101 back in ‘72, we read Ben Bagdikian who for years had been talking about the consolidation of the media, and the bad things that would come about because of that. Bagdikian was freaking out because there were only a couple dozen corporations controlling all our media. Now there are only a handful. Here’s some of a Bagdikian speech given in Hanover in 2000.

[T]he majority of mass media in the developed world is dominated by a small number of very large firms. Some insist this is not a problem because the giants compete against each other, and new media have created hundreds of new products usable on the internet.

The great firms do compete, noisily but marginally. They compete to acquire new firms that have clever new systems, or they buy large systems recently released from government monopoly. But like the nuclear superpowers during the Cold War, theirs is not total competition because, like the superpowers, each has too much to lose. In fact, they are interlocked in joint ventures and shared stock.

Ever since Gutenberg, every dynasty, every political leader, every major religion, has recognized that to control the media is to have a powerful instrument for controlling the values and behavior of a population. It is not an accident in countries undergoing rebellion or revolution, that the first target of the rebels is to seize the radio and television stations. Perhaps this dilemma can be summarized in this way: Media power is economic power. Media power is also political power. And, finally, media power is the power to socialize the values of whole populations.

Today, we are not concerned that our large firms are going to storm the government headquarters or send armed militia to seize television stations. Their goal is not military power, it is economic power—the classic battle over market share.

International mergers usually are explained as the inevitable result of globalized trade. That corporations will enlarge to engage in that trade is inevitable. But we know enough about the past to guard against mistakes of the past.

Maximum market share has always been the natural goal of all business enterprises. The dilemma, of course, is that maximum market share is 100 percent, or monopoly. Those arrangements have seldom been in the best interests of their customers. Such firms have always been less likely to lower prices or improve quality unnecessarily.

No one expects corporations to operate as philanthropic organizations. But the greater a corporation’s power in society, the greater its obligation to take social responsibility.

Media power is also political power. It is always an advantage for any large private enterprise to win the sympathy of government agencies. But media firms have two unique advantages. They control the news and other information learned by the public, and they are often found emphasizing the news and information that encourages the corporations’ political goals and influence both the public and governments.

The second unique political power of large media firms is that they stand between the politician and the voters that politician desires. Every political figure I have known during my career has given a high priority to treatment in the mass media. And the more powerful the media company, the more politicians hesitate to offend it. I do not base this concern in the belief that the men and women who head our globally merged media firms are evil, though I confess that I am not yet ready to nominate Rupert Murdoch for sainthood. The problem is not wickedness. The leaders of our powerful media firms are simply doing what comes naturally to any business venture—to increase their market share, to maximize their revenues, and ultimately to minimize their costs. In achieving this, they urge legislation and regulations to their own advantage, even if too often this influence may not be in the best interests of maintaining the diversity of choice in a fair marketplace or the full and diverse information needed in a continuing democracy.

It is also true that the larger the merged corporation, the greater its ability to use its many subsidiaries to aid each other, sometimes against public needs. For example, shortly after General Electric bought the major network, NBC, a drop in the stock market brought a call from the head of General Electric, Jack Welch, to his president of NBC news, saying he did not expect his national network news to report anything that might depress General Electric stock.

NBC just finally demoted Chris Matthews, taking him off their election coverage. Not because he’d just spent a couple of years savaging Hillary Clinton in the most puerile and adolescent ways imaginable, but because he and Keith Olbermann got a little too catty during the RNC.

The FCC has the power to punish this companies, and under Obama I sincerely hope that we enter into a period of media regulation reminiscent of the French Revolution’s solution to the aristocracy problem.

Really, how else should we respond to two days of lying from the Wall Street Journal and Fox News? Here’s the link if you’re curious about the lie, but the lie’s not the point. The lying is the point, and the Wall Street Journal, New York Post and Fox News are black belt Zen masters in that dark art.

Mr. Sponge examines John McCain’s role in all of this deliberate dis- and misinformation, and Glenn Greenwald provides even more detailed analysis.

Meanwhile, Fred Thompson is whining that Palin’s never been on the cover of Time magazine.

More on McCain’s relationship to the phrase, lipstick on a pig.

 

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NPR just said that Interior Dept. employees responsible for oil contracts were sexing it up with oil industry hotties.

Now that sex has been mentioned do you think the national media companies might spend more than half a minute on this scandal? Or is everything still OK if you’re a Republican?

Talk of the Nation has moved on to the subject of their solicitation of reader questions for Charlie Gibson to ask Sarah Palin. They got (for NPR) a staggering number of suggested questions, 800 all total. NPR is flummoxed and can’t quite seem to bring themselves around to pointing out that Americans are VERY curious about Palin, and they’re not getting answers.

Fuck Charlie Gibson (someone should). I want to know if NPR will ask any of these question to McCain-Palin directly. ???

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Aramark has been fucking with student workers for a couple of years now, docking them pay they are entitled to and only grudgingly making good when a student worker can document their claim (funny, I always thought the original paycheck was the document, but not with Aramark which apparently has made a science out of fucking their bottom-most workers out of pay).

Aramark is #216 on the Fortune 500. In 2007 Aramark bought up its own stock to become a privately held company again, and the CEO’s slice of the pie was one fucking billion dollars.

How many student workers do you have to fuck over to generate that kind of money?

But that’s not the outrage here. Here, from the first article, is the real outrage:

 

In 1997, the University had a self-operated dining service facing financial hardship, with profit losses plummeting more than $1 million annually. It was in dire need of a savior to curb its losses.

In 1998, the University signed a 10-year contract with the Philadelphia-based food industry conglomerate Aramark. 

 

WTF? How can a university that includes the Carlson School of Management, not know how to profitably run a monopolistic on-campus dining room service? Are the Carlson School of Management students too hoity toity to run a dining room? The faculty incapable of offering real world advice?

The legislature should forbid state universities and colleges from using private contractors to manage work done by students. Campuses incapable of doing so should face a shakeup starting at the top. 

If you can’t make money running the only on-campus food service with student labor, you have absolutely no business conferring BBA and MBA degrees. 

Seriously, I want a legislative investigation, and I want some top people at the University of Minnesota fired for rank incompetence. And then I want this dumped in the lap of their business college, and if the business college can’t figure it out, they should lose their accreditation.

[h/t Jeff Shaw]

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Romenesko takes note of local coverage of how KSTP patted itself on the back for being a bunch of good house n*ggers, none of whom got arrested by cops at the RNC last week.

Stanley Hubbard is the Rupert Murdoch of Twin Cities media. KSTP is run by his idiot sons. I will never forget the look on his younger [40ish] kid’s face as he tried to wrestle a massive Hummer down a back street in my neighborhood a few years ago. He looked like a student-learner suddenly being told to use a semi-tractor to take their drivers test with.

More money than brains, so yes, they own about 20% of the Twin Cities’ airwaves.

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Former Strib editor Tim McGuire says more newspapers should dump AP.

No argument from me. Dreadful news coverage strained through a sieve of partisanship and the class hatred the haves have for American have nots.

Anna Pratt has a list of all the reporters who got busted during the RNC, and Chris Steller writes about how the police seemingly targeted street medics for arrest.

And Taylor catches someone else who noticed that for local coverage, the alt-media kicked big media’s ass during the RNC. 

 

 

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