The “award” I’m about to give is a nod to HBO’s new series created by Aaron Sorkin, “Newsroom,” and the idealist notion in the 24/7 media orgasma era that ratings don’t have to drive content. What you’re about to read is the story of a nation rotting due to the inability to place priorities above political greed and ideological corruption, with our entire media and journalistic community complicit in our moral decay. Those who pay the highest price don’t have a voice, a champion or anyone willing to put our collective duty to humanity on trial in a country that’s losing its soul.
Early on a warm summer Saturday, Chris Hayes and his MSNBC show “UP” may have started off with teasing James Carville would be on later to talk about Romney’s Bain unraveling and the Obama Team’s withering attacks, but turned first to the most un-sexy, depressing and politically shameful subject possible as the price to pay for viewers getting their political red meat treat: hungry people and starving kids in America. Who besides #Uppers, those die hard Chris Hayes fans, could be gleeful about the prospects of the first hour being devoted to the plight of the poor, hungry children, and big agri-business?
From Reuters earlier this past week:
Food stamps would see the largest cut, $16 billion over 10 years, in the House farm bill – $2 billion more than for farm subsidies and nearly half of all the savings in the bill. The cuts, mostly in eligibility rules, are estimated to reduce enrollment by 5 percent. A near-record 46.2 million people, or one in seven Americans, received food stamps at latest count. Enrollment rises during economic distress, such as the current lingering high unemployment. If enacted, the food stamp cuts would be the largest since $27 billion in a deficit-reduction package in 1996, said the nonpartisan Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
It’s a subject few want to watch or listen to on Saturday morning at 8:00 a.m. eastern time, after waking from a Friday night’s pleasures with coffee or tea in hand, already fantasizing about the follow-up Saturday night debauchery to come; even if a bottle of wine and a really late Saturday night is as rowdy as it gets for some of us.
I am appalled, disgusted, ashamed and embarassed by Sen Harkin’s vote. I have lived in Iowa for over half my life and have regularly voted for Democratic candidates. After this vote by Sen. Hrkin, I truly do not know how I will vote when he is on the ballot. Corporate Farming seems to have won the day for him. Fraud and abuse? Show me the facts or should we just follow the money, as they say? – Sally (via email)
“Sally” was talking about what happened back in June when Senate Democrats voted against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s efforts to rescue food aid. The list of Democrats standing beside Sen. Tom Harkin is long and includes vaunted “progressives” like Al Franken, Tom Harkin, Dick Durbin, and including Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, who also happens to chairwoman of the Senate Agriculture Committee. Democrats now among the right-wing politicians who have decided to falsely promote the fraud and abuse aspect of SNAP, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, commonly called food stamps, that is relatively non-existent.
Poor people and the unemployed, including a large segment of children, are going to suffer even more because of Republicans, aided willingly by Democrats, are either drunk on austerity or are besotted to the pledge of corporate welfare over American suffering.
One of the men on Mitt Romney’s short list for vice president didn’t think what the Senate did went far enough.
Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, was one of 30 Republicans and five Democrats who voted against the Senate farm bill. He praised the “responsible reforms” to farm commodity programs but said the Senate bill didn’t do enough to “scale back the food stamp entitlement program,” which he noted accounted for about 80 percent of the cost of the legislation.
Chris Hayes offered a panel of expert analysts and guests that included people who had been helped by SNAP. Hayes ran a clip of Sen. Rand Paul pontificating about one millionaire taking food stamps as part of the “fraud and abuse” that warranted cutting SNAP, with Paul completely ignoring the innocent children who depend on the program, in favor of an outlier fraud case. The clip of Charles Krauthammer with Bill O’Reilly was equally offensive, a conversation that revolved around Americans wanting only a handout, instead of truly being in need.
It’s repulsive this is what masquerades as debate in our media and facts in the Congress.
What Chris Hayes did by leading with the farm bill story instead of the Mitt-Bain swarm is what Sorkin’s “Newsroom” is all about and he does it often. Important news stories taking priority over what might drive viewers to watch the train wreck that represents Congress and our big two political parties today. People who put corporate welfare above hungry American families and children, which is what both Democratic and Republican politicians have done recently, because Congress is now in the tank for the 1%.
If this country still had a soul the people would be collectively shamed into action. Instead, our media ignores what’s happening, letting Congress off the hook for their immoral priorities, while the American public remains ignorant, with much of it because they’re trying to make ends meet. We’re doomed if this continues and that’s not hyperbole.
Democrats bailing on the poor hit me deeply, as has their general rightward drift on everything, starting with the pending “grand bargain” that Pres. Obama already offered up, but especially the insulting dismissal of the importance of unions to the middle class and a living wage. This nonchalance is driven home by Pres. Obama and the Democratic Party’s choice of right-to-work North Carolina as their convention site. Further represented in full disgusting abdication when Democrats in Wisconsin actually picked a candidate to go up against Scott Walker who bragged “I’m not the union guy,” in Tom Barrett, who then refused to make the election about Walker’s efforts to dismantle unions, which was basically a template for completing the destruction of the middle class.
I was hit hard by the dot-com bomb when the dawn of the 21st century began, wiping me out and I didn’t have a lot to begin with. If it hadn’t been for my family I would have been forced to take federal assistance, because when I applied for a basic job like working in a flower shop to make money to have food to eat, they wouldn’t hire me. Not only was my writing resume and entertainment credentials going back to when I was a kid not what people wanted to see for a new hire, but every single person with whom I interviewed looked at me and didn’t believe I needed a basic job. After being gainfully employed since my teens, I quite literally couldn’t get hired anywhere, not even at minimum wage. I remember standing in the middle of the shopping aisle with my very last $20 bill trying to decide what food to buy with it, as I had my first encounter with a massive panic attack ripping through my body. My church loaned me $500 to help keep a roof over my head (eventually I paid it back). There’s much more, but I’ll leave it at that. So, I understand what the 2008 financial collapse has cost people and know personally what the story Chris Hayes covered today means.
The SNAP story isn’t sexy, but it’s important, because it tells a tale about this country, our politics and our priorities. It spells out our humanity, which is at present gasping for breath and life.
HBO’s “Newsroom” has been renewed for a second season. It thrills me that it has, especially if you saw the last episode. The monologue Jane Fonda, as “News Night” CEO Leona Lansing, unleashed on Sam Wasterston is one of the most important speeches I’ve heard in a television drama anywhere, delivered through perfect pitch emotion, sending a message of fierce urgency. Jane “I got where I am by knowing who to fear” Fonda was talking about people in Congress, in front of whom she has business, which is why she’s freaking out over “News Night’s” programming choices. Fonda isn’t just formidable as Lansing, she stole the entire episode and that’s saying something amid top flight performances across the cast. Fonda’s Lansing has award-winning written all over it, but the message her character is sending to the newsman in charge of “News Night” is bone chilling.
Fonda’s character reminds us what Hayes and everyone who programs content, no matter how small the company, is up against and why the media is failing us and the people no longer trust television news. From a recent Gallup poll:
Americans’ confidence in television news is at a new low by one percentage point, with 21% of adults expressing a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in it. This marks a decline from 27% last year and from 46% when Gallup started tracking confidence in television news in 1993.
At “Newsroom’s” core lies the truth of our media rot, where networks pick a political side to build up viewers, Fox going for Republicans, MSNBC going for Democrats, though they deserve credit for hiring and producing Chris Hayes, with facts often lying in rubble in between. Meanwhile, CNN struggles to stay alive and relevant through a cataclysmic loss in ratings battles brought on by terrible programming, but also because they’re not offering a spectacle. So desperate are they for ratings they actually blew what is arguably the most important Supreme Court case decision since Brown v. Board of Education trying to be first to get back in the game, instead of making certain they were correct. The result was their reputation was made worse, compounding a dire situation.
Enter Jon Stewart, the most powerful media mirror, who’s every utterance is considered gospel, which has been earned because he works at being factual. Unfortunately, Stewart has become so carelessly self-involved he evidently doesn’t understand we need what’s down there deep at the bottom of CNN’s founding heart a lot more than we need his laughs at their expense. Yeah, he vanquished “Crossfire,” which has been replaced by separate little cable shows all spouting their own partisan message. He’s not willing to consider what CNN once did is worth fighting to save. We need to be rooting for CNN to resuscitate itself, not piling on, as Stewart continually does, because there are reasons to do so (and here and here). Our democracy will continue to die a little more every day if someone doesn’t stand up for unfettered facts, objectivity, and getting it right instead of first, even if dull is the presentation. Putting news and stories that matter before head exploding partisan rhetoric that masquerades for important across cable, as well as every other news show trying to stay on the air. “The Daily Show” is brilliant political TV, but there’s a clear case to make for CNN and what it once did so well, especially since it’s the only 24/7 straight network around. “Newsroom” makes Stewart’s part in our media calamity clear: since he’s not pointing to the what’s missing in media, but only laughing at the train wreck, which has led to the rise in his importance, he’s not leading us anywhere but around in circles. Now, he’s obviously a comedy show, but why isn’t his critique leading at the very least to what’s missing, instead of round and round the network wheel? It’s not his job he’ll likely say, and he’s correct, but now that he’s on top we need it to be.
“Newsroom” is a reminder of what many dreamers like me still believe our work can mean to the American people. But it’s no mistake it takes place in a fictional world.
The “newsroom” I have provided as one of the pioneers writing on the web, starting in ’96, is an itsy bitsy window into why things are the way they are, told by someone who’s been in the entertainment business half of her professional life, writing the other half, while growing up in the most politically charged atmosphere of any generation. I began writing about the politics of sex, relationships and culture, telling the story of our world, our country and the people who inhabit it; political analysis, opinion, foreign policy, but also relationships and culture, including the good, the bad and the ugly of human experiences and behavior that foreshadows the future yet to unfold. It’s this “newsroom” attitude that pushed me to write The Hillary Effect, which is as damning a case on the media as has been made on what unfolded in the 2008 primary season that is historical in nature, with the facts proving my expertise and analysis, which is the reason I can stay afloat, if only barely. The odds remain against me in the long-term even as I plan my next creative venture, a jumping off point from my book. It’s 50-50 whether my tiny media company will survive, because the economics aren’t pretty at this point. It sure as hell won’t be for lack of purpose or passion, the proven track record I’ve earned, or the endless hours I spend upgrading my expertise. It’s about there being no room or appetite for independent voices to be heard anymore, with the financials pushing us out.
Chris Hayes and “Up” provided a glimpse of what’s needed this Saturday, as he does often, which is rare on cable. We all know what’s on Fox News Channel and it’s working for them as the most watched network on cable, though the people watching are far less equipped with the facts (see here, here); then there’s MSNBC, providing Democratic talking points, or faux “balance” like on “Morning Joe,” which is filled with elite conservatives, no matter the party represented on the teeter-totter.
Sorkin’s “Newsroom” is a reminder of the world in which the media, including independent people like me way down the stream, swim and why it’s so difficult to stay alive, let alone make a splash with important stories against the train wreck TV that drives ratings and money, but also how each person agreeing to play the ratings game, including what you choose to watch, pay for, and support delays the change needed to rectify what’s gone horribly wrong in this country.
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
Here here! The SNAP cuts are the scandal here. Its hilarious that Sen McKaskill of MO thinks that by cutting food to folks in her state, and MO is 1in 5 poverty, that she has a better shot to win election. Sen Franen came in praising Paul Wellstone- but he in the hell aint Paul Wellstone.
Lets not forget the body blow is yet to come on SNAP- recall Dems took money out of 2013 SNAP funds to pay for other things in 2010. They promised to restore the funding. According to FDL this Nov we will start have major SNAP cuts due to this on top of the farm bill.
Ive been on SNAP. Its 28 bucks a wk for food folks. 28. If I had no family Id be at the food pantry needing further help or god knows. 28 bucks. It hurts to watch our stone cold govt talk the way it does- Mitt Romeny’s free loders quips harm the nation. Obama’s failure to take a stand on cuts like this imperil the welfare state.
Nixon’s stragtegy is in full bloom now- its even harnessed dems into it.
Lest JFK remind the many int hsination who have lost their hearts and souls to greed:
“If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”-John F. Kennedy.
I thought of you on this one, Art.
I tweeted Claire that when I saw her named on the list of Senators who had voted against Gillibrand’s bill my heart sank.
She always says it won’t hurt her to lose and come home, well that’s a lie. If your elected Democrat will not protect the poor they are good for nothing.Not to mention the fact that she is way smart enough to know that the farm bill is an abomination
Another great read, Taylor. Thank you!
So appreciate it, ladywalker68.
**please share this story on Facebook, Twitter, & with your friends.*
Another non-entertaining news item that goes along with this post. This years corn crop. It might be a dismal year. Recently found out that the first 5 BILLION bushels of corn are more or else garanteed to go to ethanol production.
So taking 5 billion bushels of corn out of the food supply during a bad season means prices will increase for food items.
Looking at the list of Democrat Senators; linked in this post, it should be noted that beside the D: or for that matter, the R beinghind their names, the state where they are from should also be considered.
It’s self-preservation at it’s best.
Besides Harkin, Stabenow and McCaskill voting against rescuing food aid, they also voted on keeping ethanol subsidies and the ethanol import tarrif in place. So basically these people assist increasing the price of food while reducing food aid.
Self-preservation at it’s best
Go over to Chris Hayes’s videos. There’s one with an Iowa farmer that is stunning.
It was facinating. I could listen to that guy for hours.
Yep. Grim times….
I am glad that the Government is ready to make the tough decisions and cut spending. I know all too well that spending cuts are accompanied by violins and tissues. I watched a report about how people are lining their jobs and “everything” because of cuts in defense spending. We need to cut defense spending. We need to drastically reduce spending. I am willing to listen to every back story, heartbreak, and crying person who will have their life ruined in one way or another as a result of one budget cut or another. I am not interested in the old “Raise taxes AND cut spending.” it never works. Raising taxes on the condition that it will go along with spending cuts just raises both taxes and spending. I hope that the hard facts that go along with spending cuts can be met with a better response than “We are ruined because of (insert Government budget cut here).” Until a politician takes action to cut the budget and reduce spending, any talk of being responsible is just plain gibberish.
I appreciate, welcome and want to hear all opinions. Everyone here should encourage the debate. But “violins” aren’t the background music on this one. It’s the American landscape and an entire underclass exploding with more people, which produces a wail, coming from Real People.
You haven’t begun to make the case that making the poor, children and hungry families pay the price for Wall Street crooks getting away with the treasury without any cost is the answer. And that’s just for starters, naming only one culprit that should be front and center before the very poor.
You haven’t made a dent economically to prove to “drastically reduce spending” in a fragile economy won’t produce something akin to Ireland. If you like the look of austerity in Britain, you’ll love what happens here.
You’ve fallen well short of understanding what raising taxes in the ’90s did, while today when the Obama era began taxes in 2009 were the lowest in 30 years.
Too many people parrot talking points that have been said for decades, but never happen, because when push comes to shove The Math doesn’t add up.
Under other circumstances, this would be hilarious. Under the circumstances of an economy that is mainly failing due to lousy fiscal policy, and a redistribution of wealth that has put the gains of the last few decades exclusively into the hands of the richest people, it’s pompous nonsense.
A nation’s economy isn’t money. It’s all the things that nation possesses to create the things its people need. Money is just the way we keep score. If the rich among us have managed to take it from the rest of us, and then they managed to lose track of it, that’s neither the fault of the rest of us, nor is it our problem. What needs to happen is that the money needs to be put back where it belongs.
Our government hasn’t done any of that. It has utterly refused to fix what these assholes broke, because it’s taking their money and doing what they tell it to. That’s not “tough”, to use your word. That’s evil, stupid, and self-serving. And I don’t think you’re the least bit tough because you’re willing to listen to all the “violins” and still do nothing but continue the same stupid policies that got us into this mess.
Slight correction, that should be “failing due to lousy fiscal and monetary policy”, because we’re really talking about both here.
Strongly second to the nth degree!
Cutting spending is NOT the tough decision. All the millionaires in congress are on that band wagon.
Raising taxes on the wealthy and carving billions out of defense and putting it into infrastructure projects and into medicare and social security to keep them financially healthy and to make sure our citizens are not starving and living in shacks or on the street – These are the tough decisions!
BRILLIANT. …and bravo, lady!
DING! DING!! DING!!!
Which is precisely why our leaders aren’t making them. It would require some risk or sacrifice on their parts, and that’s not going to happen.
The real life stories of people — myself included — who struggle continue to grow. As your story makes clear, Taylor, this isn’t unique to this moment, but un/under/disemployment, foreclosure rip-offs, health insurance rip-offs, student loan rip-offs, and more are now defining the lives of millions. It’s why Occupy began and continues, along with similar efforts by other groups and organizations, new and ongoing. The realities of the entrenched systems of combined corporate / 1%-ers and those who represent and serve them, including many Electeds, will not change with this or any other election, not as long as we continue business as usual., and no matter how entertaining and distracting the process. Electeds and Wannabe’s pontificate about budget and spending cuts, throw in raise / lower taxes rhetoric, talk about the “middle class” and ignore the “poor,” and assure We the Electorate that this time, if we just put or keep them in office, they’ll work to make things better. A few will actually try. Most won’t, and they’ll be fairly safe in guessing they’ll be reelected anyway.
Meanwhile, millions can’t find a job of any kind. Food stamps, family and friends make the difference for many of them, in terms of whether they have something to eat, a place to live, etc. And while some are bored with hearing about it — MSM for one — the enormous and growing chasm between the very few at the top, and everyone else continues. This includes the increasing numbers who are facing the fact they will never again be employed, with age being one big factor.
As always, Joyce, well said. We need to all hit this story, share it, and do our part to make some noise.
Americans seem to be intent on showing the world what mean-spirited, hateful people we really are. The only thing our government is good for is making war. Now I know that this is not true of all Americans (I, for one, do not approve of our government priorities at all), but enough of the citizens of this country buy into this BS to make it so.
In the next election, people will vote for one or the other of the two “selected” candidates and it will “prove” that the people want austerity/war/deregulation/corporate welfare/tax cuts/a grand bargain etc., etc. We are constantly bombarded by ad-man propaganda that tells us that we’re the best/we have the best medical system in the world/everyone wants to come here and other lies. Because without such myths, everyone would be royally pissed off at the government and might actually change things.
The brutal truth is that without the wars we would have plenty of money! Without corporate welfare for multinational companies (that don’t need it) we would have plenty of money.
Even the people who post here don’t understand that things will not be better under Obama than under Romney–they will barely be any different at all. They are both status quo, support the system guys, and as Taylor says above, we won’t see any of this on the news.
Ah, yes, “making war,” getting involved in another country’s problems, while we rot systematically at home.
There are more than two choices: Vote Jill Stein, vote Green. Start to make a difference.
Yes, there are more than the two choices!
Jill Stein and the Greens are closest to my political philosophy these days. For those who think differently, though, there are still better choices than the sorry excuses for leadership our two major parties are offering us. If you want to see better choices from the major parties, voting otherwise is the loudest way I can think of to make that wish clear.
A lot of smart and important things have already been written here, by quite a few folks. There’s one thing that I don’t think we’ve discussed enough, though, and it’s important in the context of discussing what our national priorities should be, so I’ll do the impolite thing and repeat it here:
A nation’s economy isn’t money. It’s all the things that nation possesses to create the things its people need. It’s the roads, factories, and machines we’ve built. It’s the things that produce the power to run them. And yes, it’s the information sharers – the writers, journalists, and editors who make sure the information we need to know about our world is available and understandable to the rest of us. But most importantly, it’s having smart, educated, and healthy people who have both the resourcefulness and ambition to make those things happen.
Money is just the way we keep score. It’s not a thing, especially now that we’ve completely removed any explicit relationship between its value and anything that exists in the real world. It’s just a measure of how much we’ve created for the economy, and how much others are willing to risk on whatever crazy idea we’ve come up with that might contribute more to it. It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it’s better than any other solution we’ve tried so far. Thinking it’s anything more than that, at a national level, is profoundly ignorant.
I can’t believe the nature of our nation’s economic discourse these days, at least in most major news outlets. It’s the same sort of pompous nonsense I was responding to the last time I wrote “A nation’s economy isn’t money.” It’s as if no one understands the basic nature, or purpose, of an economy anymore.
Maybe my perspective is warped by being someone who has had to figure out how to produce things most of his life, but the idea that money is something that we’ve somehow lost, or put somewhere where we can’t get it back is something I find utterly laughable. Our wealth is in ourselves and the things we’ve built, and the things we have yet to build. It’s not in piles of imaginary cash lying on hard disks in someone’s bank somewhere.
And the idea that the wealthy are the “job creators” is another laughable idea. Yes, people who can combine ideas with the resources needed to implement them are an important part of the process, but they’re only a part. We’ve utterly forgotten that those resources are important, too, and those resources include people.
But then, these are often the same people who brag about being “self made” men, as if they had any idea what was required to make them.
The most depressing thing about this subject is how little we seem to understand about that, and how little respect that understanding has in early 21st Century America.
There are so many wonderful gold nuggets in your post, Taylor, it would take me pages to address them all. So, please allow me to address this one head on.
Who besides #Uppers, those die hard Chris Hayes fans, could be gleeful about the prospects of the first hour being devoted to the plight of the poor, hungry children, and big agri-business? Taylor
And tying this into the new Aaron Sorkin HBO series The Newsroom is a perfect fit.
I’ve expressed my disgust and dismay at what passes for broadcast news these days on this blog and have criticized specific news programs for their inanity and unintelligent diatribes. I have also praised Chris Hayes and was delighted when I learned MSNBC (which is one of the great moves they’ve made since they came into fruition) gave him his own show and I will now praise Rachel Maddow (who is part of the problem over there and whom I have been very critical of for a few years now) for promoting Hayes and who he credits with helping him get his gig on MSNBC.
I grew up with Cronkite and then Rather coming into my family’s living room each and every night bringing us the news of the day and we trusted them and even if we didn’t know about the history of the fourth estate at the time and how they were supposed to act as a barrier to protect us from the unbridled and abusive power of the official other three other branches of government, we welcomed them into our homes and believed what they had to say. I remember when Cronkite reited from CBS and even then felt bummed by his departure although Rather did a good job as his replacement. I remember Rather challenging Nixon about Viet Nam without flinching and I recall seeing footage of Rather being roughed up during the 1968 Dem Convention by Dailey’s henchmen when the “whole world was watching” and Cronkite complaining loudly on the air about that disgusting display.
And, to tie this into The Newsroom, Taylor and what you wrote about Jane Fonda’s character, as “News Night” CEO Leona Lansing, whom you quoted as saying:
“I got where I am by knowing who to fear” Fonda was talking about people in Congress, in front of whom she has business, which is why she’s freaking out over “News Night’s” programming choices. Taylor
Which reminds me of those who came before Cronkite and Rather, those other CBS giants of broadcast news, Murrow and Friendly who stood up to the demagogue McCarthy who ruined so many lives by taking away a person’s ability to find work after they were fired due to his baseless accusations.
And, McCarthy folded like a cheap suit under the bright light shown on him by Murrow and Friendly. And, I find it hard to believe that a present day McCarthy would be felled by someone in broadcast news nowadays part of which lies in that quote from the fictional Leona Lansing:
“I got where I am by knowing who to fear”
But, perhaps, this was also present in some way when Murrow and Friendly were front and center at CBS because their boss, their own Leona Lansing, William Paley folded to the powers that be in congress and the advertisers who were not friendly towards Murrow and Friendly both of whom were then “relegated” to anchoring programs interviewing movie stars and person’s of interest of the day.
Which then saw Murrow deliver a speech to the Radio and Television News Director’s Associaiton and Foundation in 1958. Here is that speech performed by the actor David Strathairn as Murrow from the film “Good Night, and Good Luck” about Murrow and Friendly and the take down of McCarthy. This is where Murrow is speaking to the Foundation (after he took down Mccarthy and then found himself interviewing movie stars) and speaks about the future of broadcast news. How precient and powerful were his words. One note here: the actor playing a part introducing the actor playing Murrow is Jeff Daniels. How fitting and also precient that Daniels played that role and is now the lead in Aaron Sorkin’s “The Newsroom”.
http://tinyurl.com/7shk8hx
IMO, Chris Hayes has the potential to being a modern day Edward R. Morrow. Unwilling to talk down to his audience. Willing to discuss policy more than any other news broadcaster who has more than twenty mintues to do so. Who doesn’t pander to his natural audience: liberals. And, as you said, Taylor, Chris Hayes has the gumption to ignore the CW of teh beltway and discuss topics that are not headline grabbing as you pointed out he did on Saturday’s program when discussing people who are struggling to make ends meet and actually had on people who had gone through/were going through hard times to feed their family nutritional meals and the disgraceful vote taken recently (as we discussed when it happened) with the farm bill which decreased food stamps for those in need of them with 24 Dems voting for that decrease. And, Hayes kept those guests on who had experience with the food stamp program for the full first hour IIRC. The one thing that I was disaponited in was that he didn’t call out any of the Dems who voted with the Republicans to decrease food stamps. Whether this was a deliberate oversight on his part is hard to tell. For now, given that he has not been as disagreeably pratisan as Melissa-Harris Perry (her program has become almost unwatchable especially when compared to what comes before it: Chris Hayes) or to a lessor extent Rachel Maddow, I will give hm the benefit of the doubt and say that oversight was not deliberate.
I just hope Hayes continues doing what he is doing and the powers that be over at MSNBC give him enough breathing room to grow even stronger. I have my doubts but for now, I’m DVR’ing his programs every weekend. I’ve have all of his programs saved for future re-watching.
And, I’m very happy that The Newsroom was renewed for a second season.
I read this article and stepped back a bit to think of what it encompasses. In short it is an expose on the neo-feudalism of modern America. The term “globalization” is used to explain everything that involves the increasing accumulation of wealth for wealth’s sake. I call it a plantation economy, but what most don’t acknowledge is that the shape of government shapes a society. They are NOT mutually exclusive.
Sunday political shows are, let’s face it, millionaires interviewing fellow millionaires. Rearranging deck chairs on an intellectual Titanic serves no purpose for the greater public.
What Ms. Marsh has done here is list symptoms of the cancerous rot of our government and society. The use of the term “middle class” is a useless appeal to a shrinking number of people. Since the poor don’t exist, or refuse to die as per the Darwinian principles of the elected class, that leaves only the rich for government/media to concern themselves with.
As a good example of this, I remember ABC’s George Stephanopolous flying over Louisiana just after Katrina. His companion was Sen. Mary Landrieu. She was crying as she was so upset. And over what? Her and her neighbors vacation homes! At that very moment there’s human being clinging to roofs like rats. But the coastal homes being wiped out were newsworthy.
For a time, this nation experienced common growth with common goals. Now it is every scumbag for themselves, and to hell with everyone else. For reference, check out Charles Dickens, any book.
What a great article and what a great conversation. Thank you everyone.
Another angle to this conversation is the farm bill and the entrenchment of the agri-business corporate farm model of food production. We are growing commodies that are poured into the the processesed food industry. The very same processed food industry that is causing the illinesses that are making healthcare costs skyrocket.
All the ‘holier than thou with hearts of stone’ types like like mpsmith probably look down their noses at all those poor fat people who are the consumers of choice for the advertisers and the fake food industry,
Blame the poor~ The lack of humanity for their own countrymen, women and children is breathtaking.
People depend on food stamps, it could mean starving if just abit is cut. Food prices are through the roof and food stamps barely provide enough in the first place, heck I would up the food stamps. What a sad day.