That's what I've been saying, but in very old fashioned and fancy language. But
note that all of the people who accept what the establishment media dish out,
would point to that quote from Marx as an example of "left wing conspiracy
theory". If they cringe at criticism of the mass media, adding a quote from
Marx puts icing on the cake.
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Roger Loran Bailey
(Redacted sender "rogerbailey81" for DMARC)
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2021 8:38 PM
To: blind-democracy <blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the
Washington Post Editorial Board
Re: [blind-democracy] Re: With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the
Washington Post Editorial Board
Rememberr what I said about Marx saying that the ideas of the ruling class are
the ruling ideas? Well, Here is the exact quotation taken from his book, The
German Ideology:
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e.
the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time
its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material
production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of
mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who
lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are
nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships,
the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the
relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of
its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other
things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as
a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident
that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as
thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution
of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.
For instance, in an age and in a country where royal power, aristocracy, and
bourgeoisie are contending for mastery and where, therefore, mastery is shared,
the doctrine of the separation of powers proves to be the dominant idea and is
expressed as an “eternal law.”
The division of labour, which we already saw above as one of the chief forces
of history up till now, manifests itself also in the ruling class as the
division of mental and material labour, so that inside this class one part
appears as the thinkers of the class (its active, conceptive ideologists, who
make the perfecting of the illusion of the class about itself their chief
source of livelihood), while the others’ attitude to these ideas and illusions
is more passive and receptive, because they are in reality the active members
of this class and have less time to make up illusions and ideas about
themselves.
___
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief
and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your
patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's
wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly
bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically
demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to
follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we
created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.” ― Irvin D.
Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept On 6/19/2021 5:05 PM, Carl Jarvis wrote:
block quote
Miriam wrote: "Power elites have always manipulated us. ".
I would probably have said, "The Establishment always attempts to confuse us."
Back when I was just learning to print, I remember carefully printing out a
letter to Santa Clause. My mother took the letter and said she would mail it
for me. I know she did because I received a reply from the North Pole. And
Bunny Rabbits laid Easter Eggs made out of chocolate. And Goblins and old
Witches with warts on their chins came out on Halloween in order to scare the
pants right off us.
And I went to Sunday School and learned all about Heaven and that other place,
and I was told by my Sunday School Teacher that when we died, if we'd accepted
Jesus Christ into our hearts, and lived a good and decent life, that we would
go to Heaven and sit at God's feet, and play our harps and sing praises to His
name. And so of course I believed that WW II was the Good War. I believed
that our good guys never killed enemy civilians, nor did we bomb their homes.
Still, in all of these stories my teachers also taught me about our great
victories. Among tales of heroes and kind GI's giving Hershey Bars to little
children, I began counting the numbers of Wars that our Great Nation had fought
in.
I had grown up believing that after the Revolutionary War we were pretty much
at peace until the Civil War, and then not until WWI, followed by WW II.
Somehow I overlooked the War of 1812, our never ending Indian Wars, our
attempts to seize part or all of Canada, our Spanish American War, our safari
into Russia's Siberia, and our never ending activities in Central and South
America. And all of that only took me up to 1945.
And in all of that our Establishment's Media told us how powerful we were, and
how we were using that power to spread democracy and Freedom around the planet.
Well, as far as I was concerned, the Establishment oversold it.
Carl Jarvis
On 6/19/21, Miriam Vieni
<miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
block quote
We have all been tricked by the mass media at one point or another. Didn't we
believe that World War 2 was, "the good war", and that it was the US that
destroyed Nazi Germany? But it wasn't fought for the reasons that we had been
given, and it was the Soviet Union that destroyed Nazi Germany, not our brave
American boys. Didn't we believe that the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was
a surprise to our government? It wasn't. The government knew the Japanese would
attack because it manipulated the Japanese government so it would attack, but
it didn't know just exactly where and the FDR administration had planned for
that to happen because Japan was becoming an economic problem and our
government needed an excuse to declare war. I had to read many books and
articles over God knows how many years to know that.
And did we know that the Bush family had financial investments in German
military companies, or that the Dulles brothers were communicating with the
Nazi government throughout the world because of their financial interests, or
that the National Student Association was a front for the CIA and US
propaganda? And I first learned about how the US protected Nazi scientists from
the Nurenberg trials and brought them to the US so they could help with the
development of the Atom bomb as a threat to Russia, in a novel I read.
Later, I read about it in a nonfiction book. Power elites have always
manipulated us.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From:
blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Saturday, June 19, 2021 10:44 AM
To:
blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the
Washington Post Editorial Board
I simply shake my head. How is it that an animal that is clever enough to
dominate the entire planet can be stupid enough to believe the smoke and
mirrors Mass Media "news", owned and controlled by the American Corporate
Media(ACE)?
Carl Jarvis
On 6/18/21, Miriam Vieni
<miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
block quote
CONFIDENTLY WRONG
With Bezos at the Helm, Democracy Dies at the Washington Post Editorial Board
In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware that the media was controlled by the
state. But in a corporate state like the U.S., a veneer of independence is
still maintained, although trust in the media has been plummeting for years.
by Alan Macleod
June 18th, 2021
Mint Press News
By Alan Macleod
WASHINGTON — The Washington Post’s glaring conflicts of interest have of late
once again been the subject of scrutiny online, thanks to a new article
denouncing a supposed attempt to “soak” billionaires in taxes. Written by star
columnist Megan McArdle — who previously argued that Walmart’s wages are too
high, that there is nothing wrong with Google’s monopoly, and that the Grenfell
Fire was a price worth paying for cheaper buildings — the article claimed that
Americans have such class envy that the government would “destroy
[billionaires’] fortunes so that the rest of us don’t have to look at them.”
Notably, the Post chose to illustrate it with a picture of its owner, Jeff
Bezos, making it seem as if it was directly defending his power and wealth,
something they have been accused of on more than one occasion.
There was considerable speculation online as to whether Bezos himself wrote the
piece, so blatantly in his interest it was. Unfortunately, this sort of
speculation has raged ever since the Amazon CEO bought the newspaper in
2013
for $250 million.
Undue influence
Being owned by the world’s richest individual does not mean that The Washington
Post and its employees are rolling in dough themselves. Far from
it: Bezos’ revolution at the newspaper, which has led to both increased
pageviews and company value, has been largely based on simply squeezing workers
harder than before. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review,
management acknowledged that Post reporters are pushed to produce almost four
times as many stories as their peers at The New York Times.
Furthermore, the Post writes and rewrites the same story but from slightly
different angles and with different headlines in order to generate more clicks,
and thus more revenue. Thanks to new technology, reporters’ every keystroke is
monitored and they are under constant pressure from management not to fall
behind. The technique of constant surveillance is not unlike what
hyper-exploited Amazon warehouse workers who wear GPS devices or Fitbit watches
have to endure.
Bezos is currently worth a shade under $200 billion, with his wealth nearly
doubling since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. With such a
fortune to protect, the obvious solution is to acquire media outlets to control
the narrative in the face of rising public disenchantment with rampaging
inequality. Omar Ocampo, a researcher for the Program on Inequality and the
Common Good at the Institute for Policy Studies, said that this is a common
tactic among the super wealthy. “Billionaire ownership of major news outlets is
but another tool the billionaire class deploys for the purpose of wealth
defense. It gives them the power to set the terms of the agenda and influence
public opinion in their favor,” Ocampo told MintPress.
But Bezos is far from the only senior figure with questionable connections.
The company’s CEO, Frederick Ryan, was a senior member of the Reagan White
House, rising to become the 40th president’s assistant and later the chairman
of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation. He later became CEO of Politico.
In the Post’s announcement of the hiring move, they themselves noted that among
Ryan’s biggest achievements at their rival outlet was “helping the news
organization win a lucrative advertising deal with Goldman Sachs and host
presidential debates before the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries.”
Another neoconservative in a key position is Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt.
Under Hiatt’s tenure, anti-establishment columnists like Dan Froomkin were let
go and warmongers like the late Charles Krauthammer, Paul Wolfowitz, and David
Ignatius moved in. “After being so wrong on such a huge story as the invasion
of Iraq, hawkish ideologue Fred Hiatt should have been terminated as editorial
page editor,” Jeff Cohen, former Professor of Journalism at Ithaca College and
founder of media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, told
MintPress, adding:
In a decent media system, someone who has been so inaccurate on so many issues
as Hiatt would not be in a powerful media position two decades later.
Powerful voices in U.S. media often argue that society should be a
‘meritocracy’ — with advancement based on ability or achievement.
Hiatt proves that the U.S. corporate media system is just the opposite — a
‘kakistocracy’ — where the unqualified and unprincipled rise to the top.”
Other highly questionable hires include Jerusalem correspondent Ruth Eglash,
who spent seven years putting out content that was often indistinguishable from
Israeli government propaganda. At the time of her hire, activists highlighted
the conflicts of interest she had, given her husband’s job as a PR rep for the
country. In November 2020, Eglash quit the Post to become chief of
communications for the Israeli ambassador to the United States and United
Nations. “My experiences as a journalist have afforded me a great instinct of
how to better tell Israel’s unique story,” she said, adding “a strong
U.S.-Israel relationship and showcasing Israel’s successes to the world has
[sic] always been a passion of mine.”
At the center of the news cosmos
The Washington Post is among the most powerful, influential, and widely-read
media outlets in the United States. Its position as the dominant newspaper in
the nation’s capital reinforces its place as a thought-leading, agenda-setting
publication. Whatever appears in the Post will likely be in the rest of the
nation’s media, so authoritative is its reputation.
There are no more important pages than its editorial section, where its board
comes together to lay out the collective wisdom of its most senior journalists
and editors. Through its editorial page, the senior staff lay out the
newspaper’s line to others and broadcast what they see as the correct position
on the most pressing issues of the day.
Hence, editorials are essentially instructions to their well-heeled and
influential readers in D.C. and around the country on what to think about any
given subject.
This is particularly troublesome as, despite the fact the newspaper presents
itself as a defender of liberty and a champion of the people (its tagline is
“Democracy Dies in Darkness”), the editorial board has represented the
interests of the powerful over ordinary Americans on issue after issue. The
following editorials are examples of this in action.
Could we be any more pro-war?
The Post’s editorial board has generally been extremely supportive of whatever
conflicts the U.S. has started, and has consistently warned against ending the
violence. In a 2015 editorial entitled “Drone strikes are bad; no drone strikes
would be worse,” it balked at the idea of stopping the highly controversial
bombing campaigns throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
By that time, President Barack Obama was bombing seven countries
simultaneously. Nevertheless, the Post argued that drones had successfully
defeated Al-Qaeda and that the use of drone strikes “shouldn’t be up for
review.”
In recent times, the rising newspaper of record has also been a driver of
increased hostilities with China, describing Beijing’s military’s moves in the
South China Sea as “provocations” against the U.S., spreading rumors about the
COVID-19 virus’s origin, and demanding American companies like Apple “resist
China’s tyranny” and begin to relocate their production facilities elsewhere to
punish the Chinese government.
On Latin America too, the editorial board has proven to be extremely hawkish.
It immediately endorsed a U.S.-backed far-right coup in Bolivia in 2019,
insisting that “there could be little doubt who was ultimately responsible for
the chaos: newly resigned President Evo Morales.” The Post condemned him for
refusing to “cooperate” with “Bolivia’s more responsible leaders,” who were
organizing his overthrow, and chastised him for using the word “coup” for what
was going on. Morales, they concluded, was a victim of his own “insatiable
appetite for power” and his inability to “accept that a majority of Bolivians
wanted him to leave office.”
In 2002, the paper also supported a coup against Hugo Chavez, falsely claiming
the Venezuelan president had ordered the shooting of thousands of demonstrators
and absurdly asserting that “there’s been no suggestion that the United States
had anything to do with [it].
The WaPo editorial board's less than subtle take The WaPo editorial board’s
less than subtle take on drone warfare
In more recent times, it has demanded more action to unseat Chavez’s successor,
Nicolas Maduro, including supporting U.S. sanctions that have now killed over
100,000 people, according to a United Nations rapporteur. The Post’s
justification in 2017 was that Maduro was on the verge of carrying out his own
“coup,” “abolish[ing] the opposition-controlled legislature, cancel[ing] future
elections and establish[ing] a regime resembling that of Cuba’s” — none of
which has happened. In its efforts to oust the democratically-elected leader,
the Post even aligned itself with Donald Trump and endorsed far-right coup
leader Juan Guaidó as “Venezuela’s legitimate president,” a position some polls
have suggested as little as 3% of Venezuelans hold.
The editorial board has expressed its desire to see regime change in
leftist-controlled Nicaragua, too. President Daniel Ortega, it claims, is
“taking a sledgehammer” to opposition against him, while it also demands that
the U.S., which has done nothing but offer “mild verbal opposition” to his
rule, do more. What happened to the U.S. of the 1980s, “which spent so much
money and political capital to promote democracy in Nicaragua?” they ask sadly.
In reality, of course, the U.S. is currently trying to strangle Nicaragua’s
economy through sanctions. And in the 1980s, Washington’s “democracy promotion”
agenda included the funding, training and arming of fascist death squads who
wrought havoc across Central America, killing hundreds of thousands in
genocides from which the area may never recover. The architects of the violence
were found guilty in U.S. courts, while the Reagan administration was tried and
convicted by the International Court of Justice on 15 counts that amount to
international terrorism. That the Post’s editorial board remembers that history
as “promoting democracy” is particularly worrisome.
Fake news, fake newspapers
The Washington Post was the key supporter of fake news detection system
“PropOrNot,” which was almost immediately exposed as a fake operation itself,
forcing the newspaper to publicly distance itself from its own reporting. Yet
it was the Post itself that perpetuated the most notorious and damaging fake
news story of the 21st century:
the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax and Saddam Hussein’s fictional links
to al-Qaeda.
In a highly influential editorial entitled “Irrefutable” the Post wrote that,
after watching Secretary of State Colin Powell’s speech at the United Nations,
“it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of
mass destruction… And [Powell] offered a powerful new case that Saddam
Hussein’s regime is cooperating with a branch of the al-Qaeda organization that
is trying to acquire chemical weapons and stage attacks in Europe.”
“No page was more crucial in propelling the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq
than the Post‘s editorial page — which beat the drums for war in a couple dozen
editorials in the six months leading up to the invasion,” Cohen told MintPress,
adding:
The Post’s op-ed page was almost as cartoonishly wrong on Iraq, offering little
dissent or corrective to the editorial page’s jingoism — especially in that
pivotal media moment following Colin Powell’s error-filled U.N.
speech. While the editorial page offered up its ‘Irrefutable’ verdict, the
op-ed page’s liberal voice offered an embarrassing column, headlined ‘I’m
Persuaded’.”
The Post played a major role in manufacturing consent for the deadliest war
since Vietnam, publishing 27 editorials in support of an invasion. As with
PropOrNot, it backtracked long after the dust had settled, apologizing for its
role in amping the public up to accept that war. Yet to this day it continues
to push for others.
Surveillance state champion
Despite telling its readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” The Washington
Post certainly has a negative opinion about those individuals who work to shine
a light on illegal government activities. In 2016, its editorial board demanded
“no pardon for Edward Snowden,” condemning his backers like filmmaker Oliver
Stone and expressing outrage that Snowden had revealed that the U.S. was spying
on Russia and carrying out cyberattacks against China. In its long
denunciation, it insisted that the NSA’s massive surveillance operation against
the American public resulted in “no specific harm, actual or attempted.” As
such, the editorial board made history by becoming the first newspaper ever to
call for the imprisonment of its own source, on whose back and information it
won a Pulitzer Prize.
If Snowden was not worthy of defending, then it is no surprise that the Post’s
editorial team expressed their delight when Julian Assange was dragged out of
the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, declaring it a “victory for the rule of law.”
“Julian Assange is not a free-press hero. And he is long overdue for personal
accountability,” they wrote, spreading baseless conspiracy theories that the
Australian publisher worked with Russia to hack American democracy.
WaPo Snowden
After relying on him as a source, the Post went after Snowden and any who dared
to back him
The Ecuadorian government of Rafael Correa, which offered asylum to the Western
dissidents, also came under fire. In 2013, the Post
(falsely) labeled Correa an “autocrat” and “the hemisphere’s preeminent
anti-U.S.
demagogue.” They also directly threatened him, writing that, “If Mr.
Correa welcomes Mr. Snowden, there will be an easy way to demonstrate that
Yanqui-baiting has its price.”
Of course, the Post is now intimately linked with the national security state
after Amazon signed a number of deals to provide intelligence and computing
services to several three-letter agencies.
In 2020, the Bezos-owned Amazon Web Services signed a new deal with the CIA
worth tens of billions of dollars.
The editorial board has also gone up to bat for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) multiple times, insisting that it is “the wrong target for
outrage,” presenting the agency as key in the battle against art theft and
nuclear proliferation. “Abolishing ICE is not a serious policy proposal,”
the board wrote in 2018, despite the fact that the U.S. survived without the
agency perfectly well until its creation in 2003.
Attacking any pro-people policy
The Washington Post has aggressively attempted to beat back any new political
movements challenging the establishment. Chief among them has been the one
around Bernie Sanders, for whom the newspaper has reserved a special ire. In
2016, it famously ran 16 negative stories on Sanders in the space of
16 hours and has used its fact-checking page to relentlessly undermine him,
sometimes to bizarre effect.
“Bernie Sanders keeps saying his average donation is $27, but his own numbers
contradict that,” read the headline of one article, which detailed how his
average donation was actually $27.89, not $27. It also gave his statement that
six men (one of whom is Bezos) hold as much wealth as the bottom half of the
world’s population “three Pinocchios” — the designation just below the most
egregious lie. This was because, they argued, billionaires’ wealth is tied up
in stocks, not money itself, and most people own essentially nothing. Why this
disproved his assertion they did not explain. Going undisclosed is that both
Bezos and the Post’s chief fact-checker Glen Kessler, who is the scion of a
fossil fuel baron, would stand to lose a fortune if Sanders were elected.
Likewise, the Post’s editorial board did all it could to ensure Sanders was not
elected in 2016, publishing editorials such as “Bernie Sanders’s fiction-filled
campaign,” which defended big banks from Sanders’s attacks; “Mr. Sanders’s
shocking ignorance on his core issue,” which presented Hillary Clinton as a
more credible Wall Street reformer; and “Mr. Sanders peddles fiction on free
trade,” which championed the long-discredited North American Free Trade
Agreement as a jobs creator. Unsurprisingly, the editorial board was also a
vociferous supporter of the Trans Pacific Partnership.
In 2020, the Post was no less hostile to Sanders, publishing an editorial
headlined “We should pay more attention to the Democrats who pay attention to
reality,” which stated that “Mr. Sanders promises unlimited free stuff to
everyone; other candidates propose smarter, more targeted approaches.”
The Post’s higher-ups have been careful to oppose virtually every piece of
progressive or pro-people policy proposals. Chief among them has been
healthcare. The United States is alone in the developed world in not offering
some kind of universal healthcare to its population.
Its privatized system is multiple times more expensive than that of comparable
countries and has the worst outcomes in the West. Yet the board has
consistently scare-mongered its readers, claiming “Single-payer health care
would have an astonishingly high price tag,”
and attacking Medicare-For-All proponents running for office. “Why go to the
trouble of running for president to promote ideas that can’t work?” it asked
rhetorically, before going on to insist that moving towards a healthcare system
like that of Canada, Japan or Western Europe does not meet a “baseline degree
of factual plausibility.”
On education, it has been just as regressive. “There are consequences to making
college free,” it warned readers. Chief among these would be that private
universities would make less money, which, apparently should be a major
concern. “Forgiving student loans the wrong way will only worsen inequality,”
ran the headline of another editorial, in which the board pretended to be
ultra-left elite-hating radicals, arguing that we should not make college free
because Ivy League graduates would benefit the most (around one-third of the
Post’s editorial team attended an Ivy League school). It also feigned a
far-left position on charter schools, pretending that essentially privatizing
schools and handing them over to businesses to run would solve racial
inequality in America, and that anyone who opposed them (like teachers’ unions)
was no progressive.
Perhaps the most blatant conflict of interest the Post has displayed is in
their committed opposition to a wealth tax. “Elizabeth Warren wants a ‘wealth
tax.’ It might backfire,” they wrote, making a series of bizarre and illogical
arguments against the plan, such as immigrants will stop wanting to come to the
U.S. if such a tax is imposed (the threshold for paying a wealth tax is $50
million). Five months later, the board reaffirmed their
position: “A wealth tax isn’t the best way to tax the rich,” they wrote,
claiming that rich people “can afford the best accountants and lawyers,”
and
so taxing them is presumably impossible.
Of course, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has every reason to go all out to
prevent a wealth tax gaining traction. A CNBC study calculated that Bezos would
be forced to pay $5.7 billion annually if Warren’s tax plans came to fruition.
The Post has also taken a firm stand against serious regulation of monopolies,
decrying a supposed “antitrust onslaught” against Google, spearheaded by
simplistic “break-them-up” rhetoric from dishonest actors.
In
2016, it also lambasted Sanders for his “oversimplified,”
“crowd-pleasing”
demagoguery on Wall Street regulation, insisting that there has actually been
widespread reform of the financial sector since 2008, making another crash
unlikely.
Unsurprisingly for an outlet owned by a poverty-wage employer, the Post has
also consistently opposed a national $15 minimum wage. In March, it
categorically stated that “[a] $15 minimum wage won’t happen” and Democrats
should stop trying to make it happen. Instead, they advised, they should
“practice the art of the possible.” This, the board explained, meant falling in
line behind Arkansas arch-Republican Senator Tom Cotton to support his
proposals for a creeping state-by-state rise to $10.
On the climate, too, the Post has pushed extremely regressive positions,
opposing a Green New Deal outright and suggesting the atmosphere be turned into
a giant free market where polluters can trade credits and speculate.
“The left’s opposition to a carbon tax shows there’s something deeply wrong
with the left,” they wrote. They also endorsed the highly controversial process
of fracking. Seeing as the Post’s editorial board is littered with former
employees of the notorious climate-change denying Wall Street Journal, its
stance is perhaps not surprising.
On COVID, the Post has consistently opposed teachers’ unions calls to keep
schools closed, as well as standing against $2,000 checks. A universal payout
is a “bad idea” they stated, but one “whose time has come because of politics,
not economics.” So committed was the editorial team’s opposition to the idea of
helping the poor that it presented Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
as a voice of sanity in Washington.
This does not mean that the Post was against direct payments to all people.
In fact, all Post employees received a $2,021 bonus from management in January
as a gesture of appreciation for their work during the pandemic.
Two
grand for me, not for thee.
Junk-food news
The point of a fourth estate is that it is supposed to shine a light on the
powerful and hold them to account. But when corporate media are largely owned
and sponsored by the super wealthy themselves, the claim that this is what they
do is increasingly hard to maintain. In the Soviet Union, everybody was aware
that the media was controlled by the state. But in a corporate state like the
U.S., a veneer of independence is still maintained, although trust in the media
has been plummeting for years.
While The Washington Post presents itself as an adversarial publication
standing up to power, the fact that its senior staff constantly comes to such a
hardline neoliberal elitist consensus on so many issues shows how little
ideological diversity there is among its staff. Democracy dies at The
Washington Post editorial board.
block quote end
block quote end
block quote end
--
Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through disbelief
and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were so! Your
patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply a child's
wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the eveastingly
bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory scientifically
demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had not the courage to
follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely, you must realize that we
created God, and that all of us together now have killed him.” ― Irvin D.
Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept