Archive for it’s all about money

Banishing the Poor, Unemployed and Working Class from the Mainstream Media Implies That They are Worthless

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Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin;

How often do you come across an article or a television news story that presents a poor person in a positive light?  Or for that matter when do you read about or see a story on an unemployed individual or the challenges of a working class American whose salary is receding as the stock market soars? [...]

In short, if you are not a member of the economically made, political or corporate elite, you generally don’t appear in the news. You are voiceless, faceless. The reality is that you are not news; your existence is hardly worthy of note, with the obligatory exception of an occasional “gee it’s tough to live like this” profile of a “welfare mom” or person unemployed and looking for work for three or four years. [...]

Otherwise, in urban areas, the only regular stories you see about the poor is the knife and gun coverage of violence [...]

Some union members are well into the middle class, but even labor gets short shrift by the corporate mainstream media.  Why? Many reasons, but one of the big ones is that the owners of news “machines” in America are generally not keen on unions.  They cut into their media conglomerate profits.  So why promote the union viewpoint?

But there’s another key point to remember.  News that relies on advertising for revenue and profit – which is almost all the news media …– are shaped as conduits for advertisers to deliver to a defined market.  And guess what? Poor and low income people don’t have the money to make them a desirable advertising audience (with some exceptions) for big media. So why write articles about them in the corporate media? [...]

To many in the society, their mere presence on earth blights the landscape of the prosperous.

Please read the entire post here.

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Texas jury: Escort refuses to have sex with you? Can’t get your money back? Then shooting her is A-OK!

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justification justified

A Craigslist escort wouldn’t have sex with Ezekiel Gilbert, per MySanAntonio.com. That didn’t sit well with him at all. He wanted his $150 back badly, really really badly. So what’s a rejected, horny man to do? Clearly the answer was to shoot  23-year-old Lenora Ivie Frago in the neck, leaving her paralyzed. Hey, he was just trying to retrieve his own money, after all.

She died seven months later, on December 24th.

The Texas law that allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft was put in place for “law-abiding” citizens, prosecutors Matt Lovell and Jessica Schulze countered. It’s not intended for someone trying to force another person into an illegal act such as prostitution, they argued.

Of course, being the religious sex-buying guy’s guy that he is, Gilbert thanked God for saving him from having to spend the rest of his life in prison. I wonder if his sense of religious irony was developed enough to notice that Lenora passed away on Christmas Eve.

Said he, “I’ve been in a mental prison the past four years of my life. I have nightmares. If I see guns on TV where people are getting killed, I change the channel.”

Poor thing.

He must be thinking how lucky Lenora was, having been spared from any further nightmares, nor does she ever have to see another gun on TV, nor does she have the option to change the channel, let alone watch TV at all. I’m sure wherever she is, she is thanking Gilbert’s god for that.

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Looks Like Wall Street Is Starting to See the Dollar Signs in Legalizing Pot

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Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Jamen Shively, former Microsoft executive who wants to create America’s first national marijuana brand and wants to become “the Starbucks of pot,” spoke to MSNBC’s Chris Jansing:

Jansing:

The nation’s retail marijuana market is estimated at $30 billion. Maybe you have a different number. that’s what I’ve seen. Washington state’s marijuana consultant– I didn’t even know they had one– but says he fears that you, personally, are seeking to profit off others’ addiction. What do you say to him?

Shively:

Well, first of all, marijuana is not physically addictive. And since the only business that we intend to get into is cannabis, and we do not intend to get into the business of any addictive drugs, he’s simply flat-out wrong in that regard. As far as Mr. Kleinman’s assertion that I’m seeking to profit, guilty as charged.

And with that, a few snippets from Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Barron’s, the conservative financial news weekly published by Dow Jones, chose as its June 1st cover story an article that basically states the case for legalizing marijuana.

Coming from a publication that symbolizes the driving-force of Wall Street – financial data and investment prospects— the prominent placement of the story pondering marijuana legalization is a boost to those seeking to end its prohibition.

Although Barron’s journalist Thomas G. Donlan also offers a few of the arguments against legalization, the article virtually advocates for an end to the criminalization of pot. For Barron’s it is just good business: for the private market and for cash-strapped governments. [...]

Not only will law enforcement personnel be freed up, legalization would save imprisonment costs that run – on the low end of the range — $25,000 per incarcerated individual per year.  It will also offer more opportunity to persons of color, the primary group put in jail for marijuana violations. [...]

Perhaps of more significance in terms of assessing which way the wind is blowing in public sentiment is this Barrons revelation:

Whether Congress realizes it or not, a good number of citizens want the problem fixed. The same Pew study that found a majority of people favoring legalization also found that 60% of Americans think the federal government should not enforce its prohibition in states that permit marijuana use. And 72% agreed with the proposition that federal enforcement of marijuana laws is not worth the cost.

[...] Barron’s is one of the bibles, along with The Wall Street Journal, of the heavy Wall Street hitters. [...]

Seeing things in dollars and cents starts to get the attention of a publication such as Barron’s – and ultimately the business class that pulls the strings in DC.

Please read the entire post here.

marijuana can't we all just get a bong

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Cartoonaroony– A toast: “To fracking!”

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Clay Bennett is one of my all-time favorite editorial cartoonists. He says so much with so few, if any, words, and his drawing style is fantastic. I say this as a cartoonist myself, a discerning one who greatly appreciates Paddy’s daily posts of so many excellent artists.

He nailed it in this image that appeared in my L.A. Times on fracking, a topic I write about regularly (scroll). If corporations are people, my friend, let them guzzle tap water in the form of chemically induced flames that spew from faucets where fracking is prevalent, as is depicted in the excellent film Gasland.

Cheers:

fracking cartoon Clay Bennett

As one commenter at the Times Free Press noted:

patriot1 said…

We haul bottled water from our municipal water supplies around the country in trucks getting 6 mpg of diesel at cost of about $4 per gallon. More fracking needed for more fuel.

A reminder:

Fracking — “hydraulic fracturing,” technically speaking — involves drilling a pipe horizontally into an underground oil- or natural gas-bearing formation and pumping a slurry into the formation at high pressure to liberate the hydrocarbons trapped within.

Let’s get the truth about fracking.

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Palin Version 2.0: Bachmann will “cash in before she becomes politically irrelevant.”

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Today’s Los Angeles Times letter to the editor, because our voices matter:

Re “Bachmann bows out of House race,” May 30

Now that Minnesota Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann’s star is waning in Washington, she will do what 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin did and cash in before she becomes politically irrelevant. Watch for the 2012 GOP presidential primary candidate to make millions delivering speeches, becoming a conservative media star with her own television or radio show, writing a book or doing something else lucrative.

It is all very predictable these days — national politics as a stepping stone to great wealth in the partisan celebrity-media circus.

Joel Anderson

Studio City

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Facebook to crack down on hate speech, will remove posts and images that promote violence against women

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unlike

I do not like Facebook. I hate using it, but many readers depend on our TPC page for our posts. My son used Facebook to make sure we knew he was okay after the Boston bombings (he was only two doors away from the second explosion). My former students use it to stay in touch with me. But if I felt I could eliminate Facebook from my life, I would.

It constantly glitches, it’s annoying to use, the format keeps changing, I keep getting pop-ups explaining what seems like daily adjustments to their features, and don’t get me started on the privacy issues and Mark Zuckerberg’s political group’s support of the filthy Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.

I do not like Facebook. But I use it, very reluctantly. I look forward to the day I no longer rely on it, and I resent the reliance that I admit to, along with my own unwillingness to delete my account.

My personal page was once suspended for including this image as part of a post on women’s health care:

pregnant woman

They thought it was pornographic, apparently. My account was restored after I protested.

So a beautiful photo of a pregnant woman was considered porn, and my innocuous page was dispensed with immediately, but it took Facebook this long to crack down on actual, you know, misogyny and violence against women posts. Via the L.A. Times:

Activists say an online campaign to curb misogynist content on Facebook could be a watershed moment for a growing movement to remove posts and images that promote violence against women on the Web.

Women, Action and the Media launched the campaign last week, urging major companies to pull their advertisements from Facebook that could run alongside graphic language and images of rape, abuse and other violence against women.

Heeding the call, more than a dozen advertisers, including Nissan Motor Co. and Nationwide Building Society, removed their ads from Facebook, while others, such as American Express and Unilever’s Dove brand, pressured Facebook Inc. to remove the offending pages. [...]

Facebook, which makes the bulk of its revenue from advertising, said Tuesday that it is reviewing its guidelines to evaluate content that violates its standards and will train moderators to identify and remove hate speech.

Yes, money talks.

“Review” away, FB, because that’s worked so well for you in the past.

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NYC PBS Pres. Freaks Out Over Documentary Critical of Koch Bros., Offers David Koch Unprecedented Rebuttal

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Your Daily Dose of BuzzFlash at Truthout, via my pal Mark Karlin:

Thom Hartmann recently wrote an extremely widely read article on how the Public Broadcasting Service has evolved into a sometimes self-censored television network, in large part because major donors represent the 1% who would be the subject of discussion when it comes to economic concentration in the hands of a few.

Hartmann entitled his commentary, “The Corporate Dictatorship of PBS and NPR.” The primary example Hartmann offers of how critical analysis necessary for formulating public policy is de facto censored concerns how PBS dropped the funding of a documentary called “Citizen Koch.” [...]

Enter Alex Gibney, who won a 2008 Academy Award… Gibney filmed a documentary for WNET, “Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream” that focused on one of the wealthiest residential buildings in New York City: 740 Park Avenue.

According to Jane Mayer, who had written about the Kochs before in a celebrated New Yorker article in 2010, it would be difficult to do a film about 740 Park Avenue without examining the Koch empire that created their wealth, as well as their political activities. What did WNET President Neal Shapiro do when he realized that “Park Avenue” might offend David Koch? Why, he called him and offered him a rebuttal, a roundtable discussion, a written response: anything that would appease a 1% donor who was on the board of the station (Koch has since quit) and was about to give a bundle to WNET. [...]

Gibney was told that the most pressing problem was Charles Schumer, the Democratic senator from New York. Schumer’s staff had called WNET, arguing that “Park Avenue” falsely accused the Senator of supporting tax loopholes for hedge-fund managers. Gibney double-checked his research and stood by his interpretation. [...]

[T]he WNET battle over “Park Avenue” clearly intimidated, according to Meyer’s New Yorker Piece, other documentary makers in terms of what appeared to be a growing PBS bias to protect wealthy donors and board members from on-air criticism.

Please read the entire post here.

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