Worth Watching: Something Old & Something New from YouTube

Here's something relatively new from Jordan Chariton of TYT that you may have missed:

And here's something that wasn't sufficiently appreciated at the time of its release:

For Those Living Inside the Corporate Echo Chamber

Sometimes the financially expedient choice is also the ethical choice, as when people refuse to pay for their own brainwashing.

The main argument I hear for cutting the cord is that doing so will lower your bills without limiting your access to quality programming that is readily available via hulu, Amazon, or other streaming services.

But there’s a more important reason to cut the cord: Going cold turkey on cable television means no more FOX on a loop, no more CNN on a loop, no more MSNBC on a loop. 

If you’re living in that corporate echo chamber right now as a true blue Democrat, you’re hearing no less a luminary than Rachel Maddow insist that the Sanders campaign should be doing more to raise money for down-ticket Democrats.

Maddow may not be conscientious, but she is conscious. She knows that in addition to its own fundraising capabilities, the Clinton campaign can count on support from many Democratic incumbents and party officials who will be receiving (or have already received) cash infusions from the same people who are already bankrolling Clinton’s super PACs.

Maddow's line of questioning exposes that she, like Clinton, is completely tone-deaf to those of us who keep sending our money to Sanders because he isn’t bought off by the same interests that exert so much influence over Clinton. Telling us that Clinton is better for Democrats because she can distribute payola to her crony underlings better than Sanders can is tantamount to saying, “Hey Bernie, we’re really starting to see the limitations of your grassroots campaign in terms of your inability to deliver sufficient cash incentives to Democratic incumbents for their support. What gives, bud?”

Never mind that Sanders will achieve far more than Clinton could dream of achieving for down-ticket candidates simply by turning out enthusiastic droves of progressive and independent voters (who will be eager to install any candidates sympathetic to the Sanders agenda). Never mind that the Sanders campaign has more important things to think about than down-ticket races just now, such as winning delegates and developing a strategy for the convention (since the true mathematical situation, which the corporate media is forbidden to discuss, is that neither candidate is currently likely to clinch the nomination before the convention). Never mind that given the incredible obstacles the Sanders campaign has overcome so far, Maddow’s question suggests that if she had rowed out to interview Gertrude Ederle in 1926 while the swimmer was making her way across the English Channel, she would have begun by flinging Ederle a rope from her dinghy and asking for a tug back to shore. “You’ve shown tremendous strength and resilience to this point in your efforts, Ms. Ederle,” Maddow would begin, “but the real question is, ‘Why aren’t you showing even more strength and resilience?’”

If anything, the main story of the upcoming week should concern the laughable disconnect between establishment tools (ranging from the talking heads of corporate media to the political figures those heads talk incessantly about) and the electorate. Those of us who are talking to each other face-to-face and online know very well that we are not figments of anyone's imagination (as is so often the case with the implied audience addressed by the media). We also know that the major news outlets are all uninterested in the subjects that interest us. 

We’re stepping outside the strange bubble of corporate news—a bubble in which nonsense is simply repeated until it substitutes for truth despite never having been accepted as true. We hear the talking heads explain that Hillary will somehow make the world safer from terrorism by working diligently to promote the conditions in which terrorism thrives. We may not accept this lunacy ourselves, but we come away with the impression that somewhere out there, people do accept it.

No one accepts it—not after they cut the cord. 

And that’s a good thing. Those of us who can’t get mainstream coverage of the Sanders campaign end up watching great stuff like this on YouTube:

Instead of watching Sanders discuss important issues, those of you who are still stuck in the establishment media bubble will spend the early part of the week talking about such nothingburger material as how 1) Clinton struggled with a MetroCard while trying to board a New York subway (linked via FOX); 2) SNL did a slapsticky sketch about the incident (linked via CNN); and 3) Clinton jokingly blamed Mayor Bill de Blasio for this infrastructural failing of his city (linked via MSNBC).

It doesn’t matter whether this media narrative makes you think of Clinton negatively (“She’s clumsy!”) or positively (“I like a candidate who can chuckle at herself!”). Either way, the corporate tools will encourage you to spend time imagining that this subway nonsense is somehow relevant to the election in November. But it isn’t relevant, and its purpose is to be irrelevant. Stories like this are never about Clinton; they are always about ensuring that political discussion remains unrelated to matters of policy.

Cutting the cord means making this stuff painfully obvious to yourself and everyone you live with.

Try it. And please get the people you love in New York to try it before April 19th.

Tough Love for TYT: UFO Report Deserves Rotten Tomatoes

I’m going to be critical of The Young Turks in this post because I love the show. 

No one paying attention to mainstream media right now can doubt the importance of alternative news programs such as Democracy Now! (featuring Amy Goodman) and TYT (featuring Cenk Uygur). 

These programs are labors of love requiring dedication and support from all sorts of people whose efforts I very much appreciate. 

TYT isn’t just informative; it’s genuinely fun to watch. And since TYT fans can tell a lot about each other simply by revealing which panelists they consider their favorites, I’ll confess that my favorite contributor isn’t Uygur or Ana Kasparian or John Iadarola. Everyone on the show does a great job, but my favorite is Jimmy Dore.

Maybe I’m giving Dore too much credit here, but I honestly think that if he had been on the show recorded Friday, April 8th, he would have prevented his co-panelists from delving so deeply into the Area 51 nonsense that the mainstream media bamboozled everyone (including the ordinarily astute Uygur) into embracing as the distraction du jour.[1]

 

As the editorial board of the New York Post observed back on March 25th, the Clintons have long used UFO speculation to distract attention from more substantive issues. When Hillary tossed out this chestnut on Jimmy Kimmel Live! last month, the editors of the Post suggested that she merely sought to chew up time with idle chatter—time that might otherwise have been spent on questions concerning the FBI investigation into her use of a private server as Secretary of State. 

A separate article released by Mother Jones that same day began by noting how tiresome this diversionary tactic of the Clintons has become: “Once again, Hillary Clinton has pledged that she will discover as much as possible about government involvement in UFO research and share the information with the American people.” It's disappointing for Uygur to fall for such gambits when they have become obvious enough to warrant commentary even within mainstream media circles.

To Uygur’s credit, he recognized the Panama Papers as the most important story of the week when it broke. While the mainstream media stayed virtually mum, TYT did a commendable job of contrasting Bernie Sanders’ opposition to the U.S.-Panama Trade Promotion Agreement with Hillary Clinton’s support for it. Uygur’s takeaway point—that the agreement was about setting up tax havens, not improving economic relations—was courageously and compellingly articulated.

And yet when Clinton’s campaign manager John Podesta gave an interview about his own interest (shared, of course, by Clinton) in revisiting the Area 51 files, Uygur lapped the story up just as uncritically as the mainstream media that he rightly excoriates for failing to do its job. 

Golly gee, Mr. Uygur, I wonder what Podesta’s motives could have been for giving that interview on Thursday? Do you think the timing may have had anything to do with the fact that the Podesta Group (co-founded by John and currently managed by his brother, Tony) handles public relations for Sberbank (the largest bank in Russia), which happens to be implicated in the Panama Papers scandal?

When politicians and their henchmen resort to such smoke-and-mirror ploys, we expect CNN to slobber all over the mirrors and FOX to choke itself on the smoke.

But we expect better from TYT. I love you guys, but I’ll love you even more if you refuse to allow yourselves to be drawn into these dead end tunnels in the future. We can get tunnel vision anywhere else. We rely on you for something different.

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[1] Kasparian wasn’t on the show either, so her fans can argue that she would have kept Uygur and Iadarola from dropping the ball as clumsily as they did. I’m open to that argument.

Inevita-Hillary

It’s early April of 2016. Perhaps the mainstream media outlets are right; perhaps Americans have resigned themselves to a Hillary Clinton presidency as inevitable. 

We’re assured daily that it doesn’t really matter whether we like her. It doesn’t matter whether we trust her. It doesn’t matter whether we think she will prevent the planet from being raped, the taxpayers from being plundered, or innocent civilians from being gunned down by forces of their own government (domestically or abroad). 

We voters know that Clinton championed the war in Iraq as a senator and then lobbied for a series of regime changes as secretary of state. We wish we could elect someone who wouldn’t commit the U.S. military to perpetual worldwide warfare—but we seem willing to settle for that outcome as long as the person we elect isn’t Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “not because a corporatist candidate is such a great thing, but because it beats the heck out of an autocrat or a theocrat.”)

We voters know that Clinton was merciless when it came to destroying the credibility of a series of women who spoke out about having been sexually abused and exploited by Bill Clinton. We would prefer a candidate who touts herself as a feminist to be capable, at the very least, of empathizing with women less privileged than herself—but we’ll overlook Clinton’s viciousness as Bill’s attack dog because she isn’t Trump or Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “even though she spent her time as a board member at Wal-Mart diverting attention from the union-busting activities of the corporate giant by focusing on the hiring of female executives. If you want, you can fault her for routinely distorting feminism into whatever is most expedient for her at a particular moment, but does that really mean you’re going to vote for an autocrat or a theocrat? Get real.”)

We voters know that Clinton, by her own admission, exercised poor judgment in setting up a private server to handle her email correspondence for the State Department. We think it’s kind of embarrassing that just five years after the Cablegate scandal made that department—her department—look incompetent at managing its own intelligence, the hacker Guccifer is now being extradited in conjunction with his exposure of Clinton's e-correspondence. We are reluctant to elect a candidate who appears to be incapable of understanding that internet security is really a thing—but we’ll accept her carelessness as long as she isn’t Trump or Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “despite her childlike impulse to excuse her own misdeed on the grounds that Secretaries Powell and Rice made similar mistakes. Instead of acknowledging the immaturity of her response, distract yourselves by debating the degree to which her use of a private server compounds the error of relying on a private email account. And now that the topic has become sufficiently tedious, just overlook her cybernegligence and elect her instead of that autocrat or that theocrat.”)

We voters know that when the Clintons took furniture from the White House after Bill’s time in office, it was reportedly because of a clerical error. We know that when the Clinton Foundation failed to pay appropriate taxes, that was also reportedly because of a clerical error. We understand that electing Clinton means putting her in a position to report monumental clerical errors on a routine basis. We wish we didn’t have our suspicions about the Clintons—but we will try to look the other way when we see her hand in the cookie jar because at least it isn’t the hand of Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. (“Vote Clinton,” the press whispers to us, “because even though you have every reason to suspect that she is on the take, you can’t prove it to yourself without doing a lot of boring research. Why spend all that time reading when it doesn’t matter anyway, since you’ll still vote for her ahead of that autocrat or that theocrat?”)

We can’t trust her with money. We can’t trust her to handle sensitive information. We can’t trust her judgment.

And yet we will elect her.

Or maybe we won’t.

Maybe the inevitability argument advanced by the corporate media on behalf of Clinton is about to buckle under the strain of its own preposterousness. Maybe we can’t be made to swallow a candidate we don’t want simply because of repeated assurances that the election has been settled in advance.

Maybe we care enough about each other to come together in defense of our most vulnerable citizens, our most beleaguered communities, and our most cherished democratic ideals. 

Maybe Bernie Sanders will win.

The delegate math is daunting, but it’s heartening to see articles such as this piece by Darrell Delamaide that sheds important light on how flimsy Clinton’s lead is becoming.

Of course, the same day that Delamaide’s article came out, we got this piece from fivethirtyeight.com that explains how Sanders is even further behind than we think. 

The press is going to keep whispering to us. We simply have to remember that in 2016, the job of the Democratic National Committee isn’t to persuade us to elect Hillary Clinton, but to con us into believing that she has already been elected.

But can a dynasty-fatigued electorate really be gulled into adopting the principle of inevita-Hillary?

We shall see.