You have to shovel a lot of fertilizer to start up a "grass roots" movement, and that takes money.
So it is not a huge surprise that the Tea Party "movement" is little more than the public relations puppet show of the billionaire brothers Koch, and the darker doppelganger of P.T. Barnum, Fox Corp's Rupert Murdoch.
You have to shovel a lot of fertilizer to start up a "grass roots" movement, and that takes money.
So it is not a huge surprise that the Tea Party "movement" is little more than the public relations puppet show of the billionaire brothers Koch, and the darker doppelganger of P.T. Barnum, Fox Corp's Rupert Murdoch.
The Koch Brothers, owners of everything from oil to Brawny paper towels, who are up there with Bill Gates and Warren Buffet in the billionaire boys club, have put a rumored $100 million into the Tea Party movement, and they have dropped countless millions on candidates and political races whose outcomes they want affected.
Rupert Murdoch's cynical, dark hand can be felt on Fox News and in the score of publications that he drives to high profit by catering to the most base instincts of human behavior, leaving a lot of truth in the ashes of his spin machines.
No one seems to step back and "get it" even when they see pieces like the Jon Stewart rip, "The Parent Company Trap," on Fox's use of Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal's contributions to the Lower Manhattan mosque and madrases around the world as an evil conspiracy without disclosing his name or mentioning that he also owns 9% of Fox Corp, their parent company.
Sadly, even Stewart doesn't connect the dots of the bigger picture: We are being played by the oil billionaires, media moguls the defense establishment and even the reactionary guys selling the Lycra in most bras and some underwear. It just never seems to click.
It should be added that movers and shakers like the Koch brothers are really NOT Republicans. Like "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," the GOP has been taken over by Libertarians who followed the wave of born-again Falwell-zealots into the party as the logical blend of wealth and the extremist "government off my back" ideology found a home. David Koch was actually the Libertarian candidate who ran against Ronald Reagan, and drew a 1% vote.
As I pointed out in my Huffington Post column this week "Manufacturing a Phony Job Crisis" the big three of evil are just the more visible faces of the corporate puppet masters manipulating the fears and desires of Americans to get them to dance through elections that favor their continued wealth and power.
Fox and the cadre of Republican Radio outlets nationwide that were established under the Limbaugh flag in the heyday of the Reagan Era still set not only the tone, but the news cycle agenda for the American news media.
The Frank Rich Op-Ed Piece" in the New York Times about the Koch brothers was one of the few mainstream media pieces that debunk the myth that the minions of Murdoch, whipped into the same fear-driven religious zealot fervor of a Tehran self-flagellation parade, are the unwitting spokespeople for the darker agenda of a corporatocracy that feeds off of their consumerism and spends billions to buy a political and social system that keep Americans in their cages, consuming away their fears, uncertainties, and doubts.
Why isn't CNN, drowning in its own banal mediocrity, turn on the machine? It's owned by Time Warner, which is part of the problem, not the solution.
America has been blessed, over the many years, to have some balance in wealthy patrons who believe in some level of social justice, and care for all of our children, and some, like the Koch Brothers, who would like to see the entirety of the state security and safety nets dismantled, and both the American citizen and our environment left to the beneficent oligarchy of the corporatocracy, without the sham trappings of democracy and government.
One problem is that there really aren't any William Paley figures left to be the standard-bearers of a free press. The Times and The Washington Post are the last two really independent media corporations, whose empires are still not vested in enough soap, oil, and entertainment product to see their publications as little more than another advertising outlet of their products.
The commoditization of news, as a promotional tool to shape our nation into the proper receptacle for the goods and services delivered at high prices to a waiting public, has been a troubling trend, but equally bad has been the degradation of our pool of journalists.
There are a few, usually older, dinosaurs who remember that accuracy and truth are the acme of our business. Charles Kuralt could never find a job at a modern CBS or CNN, where telegenics trump reportage.
There is the rarity of an Anderson Cooper,hunk/Dan Rather wannabe, who occasionally rises above his station on the GQ evening news to really challenge some of his guests and their assumptions.
Tim Russert's death brought an end to the era of quality broadcast television journalism.
American journalism is drowning in a sugary sea of John Kings and Rick Sanchezes and Katie Courics. You can't take telegenic and manufacture Murrows.
Sure you can flip to MSNBC, the anti-Fox, and catch the wonky Rachel Maddow or the anti-Rush Keith Olbermann, or the latest Lib Ed Schultz, but the lean is hard to the Left, and, while it's mostly top-drawer journalism and opinion grounded in fact, it is biased, not the unwavering middle that was CBS news from post WWII until the day that Dan Rather stepped on an IFD (Improvised Forged Document).
Nearly a decade of Fox and its imitators feeding Americans a steady diet of car chases, lost teenagers, and propaganda, and the subtle campaign to make sure that it is switched on in every corporate lounge, diner and bar, has transformed an American public that used to be suspicious of everything that big business did or wanted, to having them slavishly follow the men behind the curtain, and believe that their hatred of Obama the Muslim or their nostaglia for a white bread America that only existed on "Leave It To Beaver" is actually their own thinking.
I'm not sure that the damage can be undone. Ignorance is harder to cure than stupidity. There are lots of well educated, ignorant people. You can put a fact in front of them, like Jon Stewart does on a nightly basis, but how many just write it off as "Liberal propaganda" without a thought?
We need to think more, and worry about who is pulling the strings of that scary, fire-breathing face telling us what to do. I just can't see how it's going to happen when the corporatocracy is beginning to find democracy inconvenient.
My shiny two.