Thoughts About The Week of Shutdown and Beginning of Affordable Healthcare

You've, no doubt, heard the assertion being made that the Republicans who have shut the government down have been acting out of principle.  Which is an odd thing to call the bald and sordid and gleeful harming of poor people, poor school children, those whose lives depend on federal programs, federal workers, for political gain.  

The Republicans who have shut down the government are also credited with some kind of adherence to philosophical principles.  Which is presented as some kind of virtue.  I have to say that I used to be somewhat suckered with that stupid idea in the past, that adherence to an abstract philosophical principle even as it harms people was shielded from its results by the claim that it was the result of philosophical rumination.   Criminal conspiracies, especially the successful ones, are also the product of intellectual activity.   Perhaps the fact that the ones with clean hands and good clothes are so freely let off for some of the biggest crimes committed is a related delusion.   Especially as in a number of cases it involves the same people and their circle of family and friends.  

Not much of anything that comes out of the Washington press corps is worth of listening to,  it is certainly not worthy of belief.   As I type this that's where my inspiration is coming from.  The problem isn't that our government services are centralized, made equally available around the country, it's that the politically effective media is centralized in Washington DC, New York City,  Los Angeles. What's more, it is centralized in the hands of the obviously interested rich.   Including "public radio" and TV.   The last time I saw figures, Steve Inskeep was making more than 300,000 dollars a year to lie on behalf of Republicans and I suspect he, looking at the salaries of others in his job feels he is a poor man.  Not to mention their benefits package which certainly contains full health coverage.   Since I'm hearing what Steve is saying reflected in his local equivalent here in Maine, I will not be giving them any of my money to promote the Republican party that has shut down the government and the wealthy people who they all work for. 

This would never have happened under the media rules in place during the 1960s. The tea party was the product of hate talk radio and cabloid TV, the impotence of the Democrats in office is as well.  That is a direct result of releasing TV and radio from their public service obligations, their obligation to not lie, their obligation to provide equal time under the Fairness Doctrine.  It is a direct result of allowing people like Murdoch and corporations like Clear Channel to feed endless lies to the American People.   That Ronald Reagan was the one who gave that desideratum to the "free speech" industry to them and that it has been the right-wing liars who have been the beneficiaries shows what a wrong-headed idea it was all along.  

Democracy cannot be made without some raw resources, without which it cannot exist.  One of those is accurate information had by a sufficient number of people to keep them from being duped by their enemies.  The People have a limited number of hours to obtain that information and they are entirely dependent on other peoples' reports of reality to get it.   That is a resource as limited as the bandwidth that is considered a public property assigned for use.   Any abuse of the limited hours available for people to devote to public affairs by broadcasting lies - including the lies told by the cabloids - is damaging to self-government, it destroys the ability of The People to govern us in order to produce an effectively beneficial result.   

The First Amendment to the Constitution is there to enable that self-government, it isn't there to cripple and destroy it, yet that is the clear experience of thirty years of electronic media being allowed to serve itself instead of the public.  Pretending that print is going to have the effect it did in the past, ignoring that electronic media has entirely and permanently changed the facts under which the First Amendment exists from now on, serves the enemies of democracy, it serves the enemies of The People and our common good.   You might want to consider that as the Republicans on the Supreme Court use it to destroy democracy this term.   You might want to consider that as you hear NPR, or as I think of it, the FOX farm team, distort the shut down and Affordable Health Care.   They're doing that out of philosophical principle too, the same one that is keeping poor kids from going to Head Start, damaging their ability to learn what they need to know to have a decent life.   Ain't the intellectual class a wonder to behold.