First This Excellent Explanation Of A Complex Entity

Joe Kernen of CNBC’s SquawkBox is everything that is wrong with mainstream media. While most media critics focus on the hyperpartisan presentation of debate segments and opinion shows, the real malignant nature of news is hidden in the mundane. In this episode, Max sets the table with examples of Kernen’s uncritical approach to news from a right wing perspective to determine the host’s bias then illustrates how this bias shows up in even the most innocuous and seemingly harmless observations. 

This like most of Max's commentary is worth listening to until you understand the details because so much of it is quite detailed.   And Max highlights why what they are peddling on virtually ALL of the commercial media and much of the non-commercial media is either knowing lies or total PR bullshit for the oligarchy. 

I especially liked this sarcasm after playing a clip of the tool, Joe Kernan and the corporate whore Peter Boockvar because it contains so much information about why the common consensus of the media-corporate-academic class repeatedly leads us to disaster and hints at part of the basis of it.

As usual, this is my editing of the auto-generated transcript,  Max's delivery is so good that that is unusually clear in the text when it's from him. 

"We all know where the problem is. 'It's entitlements.'" [Sarcasm quotes added by me.]

It's you. You and all that retirement security income and your health issues because you want to live in the world after paying into a system your entire life because you expect some sort of return on investment after your 40 hour work week over 40 years. How dare you? 

Don't you know that we have wars to start? I mean, sure, Trump is asking for a half a trillion on top of the trillion already allocated for defense. And sure, every president since Ronald Reagan has either cut or maintained tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations and allowed them together to hide nearly $4 trillion in offshore tax havens. 

Okay, take a breath. Here's the thing.

It's not the panel debates that actually influence public opinion. It's not the opinion shows themselves that drive opinion. Like the late night CNN lineups of the he-said-she-saids or the Piers Morgan ruses where they put seven faces on a screen and let them all yell at one another hoping for something clippable.

Which, I will insert, is a rather succinct summary of what American journalism in the cabloid age has devolved into.  Like the 500+ channel age with nothing on TV phenomeon, the 24-7-365 "news" cycle is as news free, as information and fact free as most "history"  Youtubes.  

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.  Like every assumption out of this guest [Peter]  Boockvar, every assumption out of his mouth could be annihilated,  at a minimum scrutinized.

See, when people on the left criticize the mainstream media, this is what we're talking about. It's not the hyper-partisan fictions propagated by the likes of Fox

News or MS Now. 

It's the mundane, repeatable offenses that worm their way into the record and become the law of the land. That's why I go out of my way to give a tongue lashing to feckless stenographers of corporate shibiliths designed to maintain the status quo. 

I'll start by saying the reason that these guys peddle that line on "entitlements" doesn't have anything to do with the alleged economic damage done by We The People having the money to live, be housed, eat food that will keep us healthy, get healthcare when we aren't,  IT'S BECAUSE THE OLIGARCHS KNOW THERE IS A HUGE POOL OF MONEY THAT IS THERE FOR THE STEALING AND ALL THEY NEED IS TO GULL ENOUGH PEOPLE INTO VOTING THEIR CRIME GANG INTO OFFICE AND THAT'S WHERE THE "NEWS" MEDIA AND THE ENTERTAINMENT "MEDIA" COME INTO IT,  THEY ARE TO SELL THAT LIE SO THEY CAN STEAL THAT MOUNTAIN OF MONEY.  

I'm sure some of those who read me often will note a particular sentence that was like cat-nip to me, 

It's the stuff that goes unchecked and unchallenged day after day,  stuff that's passed off as common knowledge and settled science.

The truth that a large percentage of those who are called economists or play them on cabloid TV pass off their oligarchich mythological lore as "science" is aided and abetted by academia who, enjoying the patronage of the oligarchy pretend the study of the generally artificial, man made, intentional conditions (to the extent that is controllable) of economies can achieve the reliability of science, and so their desired narratives have the same status as the discoveries of Newton or Mendeleev.  And that is among the things that allows them to get away with it.   

The study of economies could be a legitimate academic study, as could some other things included in the "soft-science" if they would give up the pretense that their incredibly complex, largely unseeable and often entirely artificial areas of study can be treated as science or find hard facts that are as reliably true and basic to more complex phenomena as those findings of mathematics, physics and chemistry (especially inorganic chemistry).    They could honestly admit that, in the example of economics, that the focus of their study is nothing like a natural phenomenon that can generate similarly hard "laws of nature" but might be honestly done if it was an analysis of choices made, laws imposed by human choice and the consequences of those "laws" playing out in reality.   In which case NOTHING ABOUT IT IS INEVITABLE NOTHING ABOUT IT IS UNCHANGABLE, NOTHING ABOUT IT IS SET IN STONE OR MOLECULES OR ATOMS OR SUBATOMIC PARTICLES.   It was the ideological foundations of all of the "soft-sciences" that all of reality was subject to the same laws and conditions as generated the laws of Newtonian gravity or atomic theory.   And that was always a rather obvious lie from the start of the formal study of economics and the subsequent areas of such pseudo-science as sociology, linguistics, anthropology and psychology.     And, as I have repeated endlessly,  the infection of that ideology entered into the real life sciences through the theory of natural selection to the extent that in the past half-century the absurdities of "evolutionary psychology" what Stephen Jay Gould called "Darwinian fundamentalism" has become the currency of similar "common knowledge and settled science."  

I will note in passing that while the hack Peter Boockar has a degree in finance and attended law school (I don't see that he ever graduated from it),  the total tool and asshole joke, Joe Kernan actually got a masters in molecular biology from that ultimate military-industrial whore house MIT.    I would love to know how much of what he learned there informs his view of economics as a science. 

Marylin Robinson, in her excellent book Mother Country, in which she took apart the British class system and its disastrous consequences, noted that the early economist whose false plaster-image and name is an idol of American and Brit oligarachic culture was really nothing like that false front.  She did what hardly anyone who invokes his name these days has done, SHE READ WHAT HE SAID.    And so did the current Democratic candidate for the Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed, clearly also has read Adam Smith and knows what he actually said.   Here he is giving a really interesting answer to a CNN gotcha question about democratic socialism.   Note how he differentiates his motivations based in science-based medicine and his accurate analysis of what "capitalism" was supposed to mean, before the Chamber of Commerce "Adam Smith" was errected. 

I don't think I've ever heard a better candidate cutting through the cabloid BS narrative to get right to the real truth of things.    And the American news media is doing everything they can to take him down.   I've seen a lot of that this year, especially in Senate races.    The lies in Maine to support Susan Collins are as over the top as those under white supremacy in the old South ever were.