"PBS has become more and more dependent on viewers nothing like you."
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The Colbert Report’s STEPHEN COLBERT, on reports that PBS killed a documentary critical of one of the gazillionaire Koch brothers — a major public broadcasting supporter.
Ugh.
(via inothernews)
Public funding is important for public broadcasting.
(via poynterinstitute)
What better way to guarantee the outlets most likely to present a truthful examination of your unscrupulous, manipulative, damaging behavior than to become one of its biggest supporters? Friends close, enemies closer, etc. People in the world with tremendous- I mean truly mind boggling, Koch-level- wealth are not spending it on yachts and private islands and nice watches. They’re translating it into political power. It’s very obvious, but the political system is so deeply entrenched in its ineffective, myopic cycle of winning elections for the sake of winning elections that it doesn’t seem like something that will be stopped or changed any time soon. One of the many reasons I greatly dislike the disdainful, dismissive tone so many people use when talking about the Occupy movement. For all its problems, it was a real moment born out of real outrage at the bald inequality and transparent machinations of huge corporations and the super-wealthy that benefit from them at the expense of everyone else,and I do mean everyone: the government suffers, the citizens of the US suffer, the countries they export all of the US’s once integral manufacturing jobs to and the people that work those jobs in unsafe conditions for next to no money suffer.
These corporations and these one-percenters, these Koch brothers, do not care about religion, or sexuality, or protecting the American worker, or protecting the American small business owner, or making sure the next generation of the American workforce is well educated, or the 2nd Amendment, or any amendment, or the Constitution. They do not care about this country, they do not care about other countries, they do not care about people who are not them. They sure as hell don’t care about the members of the Tea Party. They don’t care about anything- unless it makes them money and secures their position in the world. That’s the bottom line. But they are happy to fund ‘grass roots’ organizations like the Tea Party and campaigns for extreme right wing Republican candidates to keep the discourse on anti-socialism and gay rights and abortion because it distracts people from the fact that their government and their society is rotting, and it’s not unimpeded, rampant socialism that’s doing it.
Suggesting capitalism is bad for a society will get people pissy and up in arms immediately. Hackles raise, people start yelling about disincentives and punishing success and the importance of the small business owner. All those things are true, and are problems, but they are not the fault of some Marxist movement you think has taken hold and they are not true for people like the Kochs. They’re only true for the rest of us. It’s not capitalism, it’s an intense, endless greed that is facilitated by capitalism. The disincentives and unfair tax brackets and inhospitable environment for small business owners are not the fault of the Liberal Free-Money-For-Mooches Machine, they are the fault of people who enjoy a level of wealth and prosperity that you won’t. Ever. EVER. They will make SURE you don’t. They don’t want you to. They don’t want you in their club. So they buy power and people and legislation to make sure the burden stays on everyone else and breeds animosity between groups that are much more closely related than people who think of themselves as middle class or well off are to the 1%. Some people come along who cannot be denied by virtue of some unfathomable accomplishment that came about purely from their exceptional natures- see also, Mark Zuckerberg, like him or not. But that person is probably not you, and that person is definitely not the percentage of people in this country who are working their asses off for increasingly less pay and fewer benefits and are still being saddled with more taxes to take care of the poverty stricken who can’t get jobs because there aren’t any because these gigantic companies who pay no taxes sent those jobs somewhere else. So they could increase their profits without paying back into the system that provided them the opportunity to achieve success in the first place. Sounds mighty leech-y, doesn’t it?
And yeah, no, I’m serious. No market is free enough to get you to their level. Your family? Maybe, if they can keep whatever mind bogglingly successful thing you accomplish going for a few generations. Koch Industries has existed for seventy years and makes about a hundred billion dollars a year. A hundred billion dollars a year.
Koch Industries makes about a hundred billion dollars a year.
I mean that’s just a stupid amount of money. Some of it they funnel toward nice things, like the arts and cancer, which is great. But they also funnel it toward people and institutions that want to replace science in schools with religion and that don’t think the arts are worthy of a dime. Sends sort of a mixed message, doesn’t it?
Anyway, this sucks. Sad to hear PBS is going the way of established news outlets, which is to say spineless. Not that I blame them. When you have to choose between survival or integrity, it’s a lose/lose situation.
(via bookoisseur)