If you read about the founding of this country, the federal assumption of the war debt will disabuse you of the idea of the nobility of the first Congress. While that was being bandied about as policy, the Federalists and their cronies were scouring the countryside, on the quiet, to buy up all the "worthless" war bonds issued by the states that would soon be made whole by the new federal govt. It was a neat piece of business and just as profitable as anything Pelosi or McConnell have pulled.
There are many reasons that such a large element of our society seem to actually take pride in their uninformed pretensions about basic awareness; surely some serious reading could solve this petulant notion, and possibly even awaken their power of reasoning.🤦♂️
Regarding your very commendable suggestion and historical observation, might I suggest the reading of Charles Rappleye's 2010 book "Robert Morris - Financier of the Revolution".
More importantly Chief Justice John Marshall promulgated the Discovery Doctrine claiming land sold by the Native Americans was not really owned by them. He was a major land owner and his real estate holdings would have been adversely affected if old land sales, prior to the Revolution, from Indians were allowed to stand.
Yes and….. It’s always been this way. In previous decades and centuries, it was not possible to follow the money. Now, we can via all sorts of pathways, and it’s enervating.
Outrage fatigue got to me somewhere in the second GWB admin. That was almost 20 years ago. Now I just try to stay chill, with oscillating degrees of success.
It's both - it's enraging that it's so prevalent it's enervating, because you feel like you're spending your life trying to punch your way through Jell-O.
The "questions" being "asked" by "journalists" are hilario. Why aren't we sending more [insert latest weapons system here] and doing more to help Ukraine! The on-the-ground hugs to Ukrainians wouldn't be so embarrassing had they not dehumanized Iraqis & Afghans for 20 years. They are PR agents for Ukraine & their clown/actor president. And the MIC.
The people who lived there disagree. They never saw a Russian solider, but they sure wish they had.
And the "shooting down a civilian airliner" story is fishy, especially keeping in mind the nature of the investigation and the fact that the Ukrainians have form in shooting down civilian airliners, such as Siberian Airlines Flight 1812.
The USSR is irrelevant to the discussion although N.S. Khruschev and L.I. Brezhnev were on some level Ukrainian. I.V. Stalin, of course, was Georgian, and for that matter, K.U. Chernenko had a Ukrainian name, although he did not grow up in Ukraine.
Talk show guests and producers routinely discuss beforehand what they prefer to talk about. This is the same type of self promotional plugging that real actors do nightly on Kimmel et al.
A little rich irony... the msm having a major coronary over Musk owning Twitter and fearful he will control the narrative.... LMAO you robotic water carriers!! What do you call what you’ve been doing 24/7 for the last six years?? Their outrage is just delicious.... I actually had to watch the first 15 minutes of The View to watch Joy Behar spin this as a crisis for free speech....” he will silence people”...do they not see what they have been doing?
The hosts of The View are walking talking or make that “freaking” shrieking hypocrites. One woman yesterday , Sunny Somebody, said that Musk taking over Twitter is a threat to women because he just another straight white male and women will be diminished….is Jack Dorsey not a straight white male ?and aren’t these Fauxminists themselves diminishing women with kissing Title 9 goodbye supporting transgenders in women’s athletics, “ birthing person” ,” chest feeding” etc ROT? Maybe it’s my age but I find the show and the hosts simply repugnant and hateful with their arrogant divisiveness. Disappointing that Executive Producer Barbara Walters does not pull the plug on this Shitshow.
Lack of full disclosure by Big Media's expert mercenary squad is one of the most serious problems in journalism and governance/politics. My theory is that it came from Big Media's decision to turn historically profit-draining news operations into profit-making divisions of the entertainment side. Making the hired mercenaries disclose their corporate funding masters would anger them, so full disclosure was jettisoned.
Both make a profit last I checked. Less than in the salad days, but they aren't paupers, and neither are their TV and cable equivalents.
Important People buy media outlets to throw their weight around and become Even More Important. If that also gets them bennies from The Empire, that's a bonus, but not the reason.
Even if what you said were true, a prestige paper is not a very efficient way to deploy capital, relative to the asking price.
Something else is driving those acquisition costs, and that something means a lot more to the average frustrated oligarch than it does to the shareholding public.
Oh, I agree---the bang for the investment buck for newspapers has been terrible since print's advertising monopoly disappeared. One owns Big Newspapers for prestige and dick-swinging, not return on investment. Little-town papers, which still have advertising monopolies, are doing better . . . but there's no prestige for Bezos to own one.
Actually, both of them and some others (Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, ...) have substantial revenue from online subscriptions. Many of their articles are paywalled. The cost for each subscriber is trivial compared to the cost of printing and delivering a newspaper. They may well be making money from the online component.
??? I've never seen anything from a "Q-anon" in the Epoch Times, to which we have been subscribers for 5 or 6 years.
In fact, while the news and political sections of the weekly printed edition tend somewhat right of center (though of course much less biased than the NY Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc., etc., etc.), the other two sections ("Life and Tradition"; "Mind and Body") are somewhat left of center.
I suppose you mean President Trump by "45". Well, The Epoch Times is certainly less biased than the NY Times or Washington Post. As of April 14, 2022, the NY Times has 19,335 entries for a search on their web site for "Trump Russia". A few may be admissions that the whole thing was nonsense, but most are genuinely fake news. About 90% of their articles on Trump were false.
The Epoch Times may support President Trump, but they haven't published fake articles about him.
They have an excellent group of reporters. To name just one, Catherine Cuthbertson is generally regarded as the best reporter on the southern border crisis.
Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you're self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Actually, the entire interview is well worth reading.
I watched the clip. Chomsky repeated his basic ideas but presented something new and informative: he said that when someone in the news media refers to values, you’re having your pocket picked. A great example of this is the introduction of the NYT Editorial Board just before it presents something: “The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.”
Times are changing profoundly, maybe even more so than when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. The future is open. We used to live embedded in Nature. Then in technology. Now we are starting to live embedded in algorithms. Nature - People - Algorithms. One thing we will learn from this is that our future will depend on our ability to change the system. We don't control the effect of algorithms anymore, unless we start thinking systemically. Once we understand this, everything is possible, from extinction to a future worth living for everybody.
Honestly, I would cringe when people blurted out, "Just get the jab!" like Pavlovian dogs, and wore masks to signal their compliance with the corporate cabal's direction.
Now, I cringe when I see people hanging Ukrainian flags in front of their houses and saying they, "stand with Ukraine".
They really mean they stand with the CIA vassal state that was created out of a successful coup.
One that will probably end up with us eating radioactive rats and squirrels as we navigate the hellscape of a nuclear holocaust.
As an actual 1st generation Ukrainian-American on my fathers side, I will admit this is annoying.
That said, Putin’s invasion is nothing new-Russia wants to control the Black Sea and Ukraine’s resources-it’s been that way for hundreds of years. Things took a chill pill after the Holodomor and the partisan rebellion during/post WWII, but Putin is reviving the old Stalinist/Ivan the Terrible/Peter the Great Russian nationalist butthurt pov to the fullest.
No apologies needed-if it wasn’t for Hitler and Stalin, I wouldn’t be alive, b/c my family would not have emigrated! As Mark Twain, I believe, said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”.
For all the legitimate paranoia and squawking about the “deep state” in American political life, the roots and tentacles of the USSR’s apparatus for state control, combined with traditional Russian paranoiac nationalism, make the US equivalent look like a mayor’s court in Hog Snout, Arkansas.
The late-'80s/early-'90s were an extraordinarily weird time for the Democractic Party. Clinton remade it in his neoliberal image, much as Trump remade the GOP in 2016. Perpetual loser Walter Mondale was the last of the old school.
The secret, perhaps -- Clinton, Trump, Liebniz -- is hair, genuine or factitious.
Maybe we should just routinely use their day job title as their middle name. Like Jim "Big Tech" Messina or Scott "Big Pharma" Gottlieb or Tom "Private Healthcare" Daschle or Tony "Defense Contractor" Blinken etc
"The disclosure issue sounds like a minor ethical issue in journalism" ... I would say it is the one biggest ethical issue in journalism ... and it is what drove me from mainstream media to writers like you Matt.
I used to do a lot more talking head work during the decades I was an elected DA.
The "chyron" that ran underneath my name was anything I wanted it to be, hence during criminal trials so many criminal defense attorneys choose to be identified as "Former federal prosecutor."
The ethical duty to disclose lies with the guest/commentator.
I retired as a DA three years ago and still do comments on TV, and am usually identified as "Retired District Attorney" which is accurate. I have a small outside gig now with a start-up anti-animal cruelty group, and anytime I speak on behalf of that group, I do NOT use my "former DA" title, but my operational title in my new job.
But the vast majority of the interviews I do deal with the issues I spoke out about during my 25 years in office, so "former DA" is appropriate in those cases.
Matt, check out 2000 Miles next week by Dinesh D’Souza. Needless to say MSM will be out to lunch. Interview Patrick Byrne for some awesome perspective. This is it buddy!!!!
Government officials a should be restricted from all lobbying forever once leaving government. You can be a lobbyist or you can be a politician, you can’t be both. The corruption in our society is sickening.
I've always been suspicious of campaign finance reformers who tell us to follow the money in every scenario except campaign finance reform. Better, they suggest, to focus on where the money comes from rather than where it winds up: in the deepest of deep technomedia pockets.
when watergate brought the phrase "follow the money" we should all have realized the end of our society had already gotten well underway...
If you read about the founding of this country, the federal assumption of the war debt will disabuse you of the idea of the nobility of the first Congress. While that was being bandied about as policy, the Federalists and their cronies were scouring the countryside, on the quiet, to buy up all the "worthless" war bonds issued by the states that would soon be made whole by the new federal govt. It was a neat piece of business and just as profitable as anything Pelosi or McConnell have pulled.
@ Rather Curmudgeonly 👍
There are many reasons that such a large element of our society seem to actually take pride in their uninformed pretensions about basic awareness; surely some serious reading could solve this petulant notion, and possibly even awaken their power of reasoning.🤦♂️
Regarding your very commendable suggestion and historical observation, might I suggest the reading of Charles Rappleye's 2010 book "Robert Morris - Financier of the Revolution".
Thank you for a thoughtful topical comment.
As Usual,
EA😎
That is a perfect little educational factlet of American history. Nothing new here, business as usual....
More importantly Chief Justice John Marshall promulgated the Discovery Doctrine claiming land sold by the Native Americans was not really owned by them. He was a major land owner and his real estate holdings would have been adversely affected if old land sales, prior to the Revolution, from Indians were allowed to stand.
Yes and….. It’s always been this way. In previous decades and centuries, it was not possible to follow the money. Now, we can via all sorts of pathways, and it’s enervating.
By enervating you mean enraging, right?
I could’ve been enraged a while back. Now, it’d take more than the shit I expect.
Outrage fatigue got to me somewhere in the second GWB admin. That was almost 20 years ago. Now I just try to stay chill, with oscillating degrees of success.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfX_oDzOxsc
It's both - it's enraging that it's so prevalent it's enervating, because you feel like you're spending your life trying to punch your way through Jell-O.
or a wet paper bag
No, because you can't punch your way through with Jell-O. No matter how hard you punch, you just shift the corruption around....
Agreed. I've given up on the whole mess and have accepted that it's all just going to go belly up. So what if the corrupt pukes all gorged like this?
It'll be up to the next gang to decide how much of this history gets recorded -and along what themes.
No more punching... play the long game and enjoy the ride.
It's just another Gilded Age falling apart.
The "questions" being "asked" by "journalists" are hilario. Why aren't we sending more [insert latest weapons system here] and doing more to help Ukraine! The on-the-ground hugs to Ukrainians wouldn't be so embarrassing had they not dehumanized Iraqis & Afghans for 20 years. They are PR agents for Ukraine & their clown/actor president. And the MIC.
Hell, if Ukrainians had not dehumanized their own erstwhile citizens for the past eight years.
How many times need we hear some SS wannabe from Galicia refer to the people of Donbass and Crimea as "insects" to be exterminated?
The post-coup Ukrainian state repeatedly attacked Donbass and got beaten soundly for its pains.
I know plenty of people from the area. (what is with my typos lately?)
The people who lived there disagree. They never saw a Russian solider, but they sure wish they had.
And the "shooting down a civilian airliner" story is fishy, especially keeping in mind the nature of the investigation and the fact that the Ukrainians have form in shooting down civilian airliners, such as Siberian Airlines Flight 1812.
The USSR is irrelevant to the discussion although N.S. Khruschev and L.I. Brezhnev were on some level Ukrainian. I.V. Stalin, of course, was Georgian, and for that matter, K.U. Chernenko had a Ukrainian name, although he did not grow up in Ukraine.
Talk show guests and producers routinely discuss beforehand what they prefer to talk about. This is the same type of self promotional plugging that real actors do nightly on Kimmel et al.
A little rich irony... the msm having a major coronary over Musk owning Twitter and fearful he will control the narrative.... LMAO you robotic water carriers!! What do you call what you’ve been doing 24/7 for the last six years?? Their outrage is just delicious.... I actually had to watch the first 15 minutes of The View to watch Joy Behar spin this as a crisis for free speech....” he will silence people”...do they not see what they have been doing?
Yeah, silencing the wrong sort of people is all hunky dory, not to mention necessary for Our Democracy(tm), but what if Musk silences *us*?
The View is one of the worst programs on tv, as it is especially committed to imperial narrative management.
The hosts of The View are walking talking or make that “freaking” shrieking hypocrites. One woman yesterday , Sunny Somebody, said that Musk taking over Twitter is a threat to women because he just another straight white male and women will be diminished….is Jack Dorsey not a straight white male ?and aren’t these Fauxminists themselves diminishing women with kissing Title 9 goodbye supporting transgenders in women’s athletics, “ birthing person” ,” chest feeding” etc ROT? Maybe it’s my age but I find the show and the hosts simply repugnant and hateful with their arrogant divisiveness. Disappointing that Executive Producer Barbara Walters does not pull the plug on this Shitshow.
I’m just pointing out this twit for making a totally invalid point… Musk is apolitical and I love watching the heads explode…
On the topic of Musk, Matt Stoller has some interesting things https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/elon-musk-china-and-the-biden-collapse?s=r
I’ll just go with “ she has serious anger issues” 😉😉
Lack of full disclosure by Big Media's expert mercenary squad is one of the most serious problems in journalism and governance/politics. My theory is that it came from Big Media's decision to turn historically profit-draining news operations into profit-making divisions of the entertainment side. Making the hired mercenaries disclose their corporate funding masters would anger them, so full disclosure was jettisoned.
From what I can tell, the prestige media (e.g., NYT, WaPo) continues to lose money.
Oligarchs don't buy prestige media to make money, but in order to ingratiate themselves with the Empire.
Both make a profit last I checked. Less than in the salad days, but they aren't paupers, and neither are their TV and cable equivalents.
Important People buy media outlets to throw their weight around and become Even More Important. If that also gets them bennies from The Empire, that's a bonus, but not the reason.
Even if what you said were true, a prestige paper is not a very efficient way to deploy capital, relative to the asking price.
Something else is driving those acquisition costs, and that something means a lot more to the average frustrated oligarch than it does to the shareholding public.
Oh, I agree---the bang for the investment buck for newspapers has been terrible since print's advertising monopoly disappeared. One owns Big Newspapers for prestige and dick-swinging, not return on investment. Little-town papers, which still have advertising monopolies, are doing better . . . but there's no prestige for Bezos to own one.
You really think that there is no non-financial benefit for a government contractor to own the CIA's house organ?
Actually, both of them and some others (Wall Street Journal, Epoch Times, ...) have substantial revenue from online subscriptions. Many of their articles are paywalled. The cost for each subscriber is trivial compared to the cost of printing and delivering a newspaper. They may well be making money from the online component.
Epoch Times?
They are the leading international newspaper, publishing in 22 languages and in 36 countries.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/
Here is their edition in Ukrainian: https://www.epochtimes.com.ua/
That outlet pushed a hell of a lot of Q-anon stuff, and is as reliably pro-45 as OANN.
That is true, but apparently there is a market for that.
??? I've never seen anything from a "Q-anon" in the Epoch Times, to which we have been subscribers for 5 or 6 years.
In fact, while the news and political sections of the weekly printed edition tend somewhat right of center (though of course much less biased than the NY Times, Washington Post, CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, etc., etc., etc.), the other two sections ("Life and Tradition"; "Mind and Body") are somewhat left of center.
I suppose you mean President Trump by "45". Well, The Epoch Times is certainly less biased than the NY Times or Washington Post. As of April 14, 2022, the NY Times has 19,335 entries for a search on their web site for "Trump Russia". A few may be admissions that the whole thing was nonsense, but most are genuinely fake news. About 90% of their articles on Trump were false.
The Epoch Times may support President Trump, but they haven't published fake articles about him.
They have an excellent group of reporters. To name just one, Catherine Cuthbertson is generally regarded as the best reporter on the southern border crisis.
Did not Noam Chomsky take down Andrew Marr thusly?
http://scratchindog.blogspot.com/2015/07/transcript-of-interview-between-noam.html
Marr: “How can you know that I’m self-censoring? How can you know that journalists are..”
Chomsky: “I’m not saying you're self censoring. I’m sure you believe everything you’re saying. But what I’m saying is that if you believe something different, you wouldn’t be sitting where you’re sitting."
Actually, the entire interview is well worth reading.
I watched the clip. Chomsky repeated his basic ideas but presented something new and informative: he said that when someone in the news media refers to values, you’re having your pocket picked. A great example of this is the introduction of the NYT Editorial Board just before it presents something: “The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.”
100% agree with this. The thing that is pretty depressing is that I just don't see any way that obvious issues like this will ever change.
Times are changing profoundly, maybe even more so than when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to agriculture. The future is open. We used to live embedded in Nature. Then in technology. Now we are starting to live embedded in algorithms. Nature - People - Algorithms. One thing we will learn from this is that our future will depend on our ability to change the system. We don't control the effect of algorithms anymore, unless we start thinking systemically. Once we understand this, everything is possible, from extinction to a future worth living for everybody.
It's across the board as far as I can tell.
Honestly, I would cringe when people blurted out, "Just get the jab!" like Pavlovian dogs, and wore masks to signal their compliance with the corporate cabal's direction.
Now, I cringe when I see people hanging Ukrainian flags in front of their houses and saying they, "stand with Ukraine".
They really mean they stand with the CIA vassal state that was created out of a successful coup.
One that will probably end up with us eating radioactive rats and squirrels as we navigate the hellscape of a nuclear holocaust.
None of them could find Ukraine on a map or have read a lick of European history
As an actual 1st generation Ukrainian-American on my fathers side, I will admit this is annoying.
That said, Putin’s invasion is nothing new-Russia wants to control the Black Sea and Ukraine’s resources-it’s been that way for hundreds of years. Things took a chill pill after the Holodomor and the partisan rebellion during/post WWII, but Putin is reviving the old Stalinist/Ivan the Terrible/Peter the Great Russian nationalist butthurt pov to the fullest.
I’m sorry for you and your family.
No apologies needed-if it wasn’t for Hitler and Stalin, I wouldn’t be alive, b/c my family would not have emigrated! As Mark Twain, I believe, said “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes”.
For all the legitimate paranoia and squawking about the “deep state” in American political life, the roots and tentacles of the USSR’s apparatus for state control, combined with traditional Russian paranoiac nationalism, make the US equivalent look like a mayor’s court in Hog Snout, Arkansas.
Tom Daschle broke my heart. I think when TD went over to the lobbyist side I began to lose faith in being a Democrat.
The late-'80s/early-'90s were an extraordinarily weird time for the Democractic Party. Clinton remade it in his neoliberal image, much as Trump remade the GOP in 2016. Perpetual loser Walter Mondale was the last of the old school.
The secret, perhaps -- Clinton, Trump, Liebniz -- is hair, genuine or factitious.
O, cross-substack conversational allusions, clever.
Substack contains multitudes.
Maybe we should just routinely use their day job title as their middle name. Like Jim "Big Tech" Messina or Scott "Big Pharma" Gottlieb or Tom "Private Healthcare" Daschle or Tony "Defense Contractor" Blinken etc
"The disclosure issue sounds like a minor ethical issue in journalism" ... I would say it is the one biggest ethical issue in journalism ... and it is what drove me from mainstream media to writers like you Matt.
Every one of them would have the same appellations "Corporate Muppet!" or "Slut for Empire!" or just "Sociopath!"
Scott “pfizer exec” gottlieb is more specific...
Thanks ... shortening it to Scott "Pfizer" Gottlieb also has a certain ring to it.
Very true.
I used to do a lot more talking head work during the decades I was an elected DA.
The "chyron" that ran underneath my name was anything I wanted it to be, hence during criminal trials so many criminal defense attorneys choose to be identified as "Former federal prosecutor."
The ethical duty to disclose lies with the guest/commentator.
I retired as a DA three years ago and still do comments on TV, and am usually identified as "Retired District Attorney" which is accurate. I have a small outside gig now with a start-up anti-animal cruelty group, and anytime I speak on behalf of that group, I do NOT use my "former DA" title, but my operational title in my new job.
But the vast majority of the interviews I do deal with the issues I spoke out about during my 25 years in office, so "former DA" is appropriate in those cases.
Matt, check out 2000 Miles next week by Dinesh D’Souza. Needless to say MSM will be out to lunch. Interview Patrick Byrne for some awesome perspective. This is it buddy!!!!
Mules not miles
Yeh but if you give reporters everything….
I thought it was against the law to buy and sell human beings in this country. Didn't Lincoln sign something to that effect?
The humans line up to sell themselves.
BINGO!
Quite right you are. Prostitution, not slavery. My bad.
They’re rentals.
I like the idea that they be required to wear their sponsors names on their shirt like NASCAR drivers
Government officials a should be restricted from all lobbying forever once leaving government. You can be a lobbyist or you can be a politician, you can’t be both. The corruption in our society is sickening.
I've always been suspicious of campaign finance reformers who tell us to follow the money in every scenario except campaign finance reform. Better, they suggest, to focus on where the money comes from rather than where it winds up: in the deepest of deep technomedia pockets.
I guess it's slightly reassuring to understand WHY you are being lied to all the time.