The Racketeers

“Since prisons and madhouses exist, someone must sit in them.” Anton Chekhov

The way the American mainstream news media echoes the conventional wisdom and protects the status quo rarely fails to make me crazy. I’d like to kick NBC’s David Gregory in the balls.

Paul Ryan issues a budget on behalf of the GOP and the media and the pundits lose their minds and begin regurgitating Ryan’s talking points as if they originated from the mouth of Moses. It doesn’t matter that Ryan offers nothing new – his program is the same rank Republican Party manure, chock full of austerity measures for the poor, tax cuts for the wealthy, loopholes for corporations, and sweeping cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Let the poor and the elderly eat cake.

By contrast, when the Congressional Progressive Caucus issues its “Back to Work Budget,” the mainstream media can’t be bothered to cover it because the conventional wisdom says that this budget has zero chance of passing. Forget the fact that most Americans support the goals of the Progressive Caucus budget: job creation, infrastructure improvements, investment in education, aid to states, unemployment compensation, fair individual tax rates, accountability for the too-big-to-jail banks who precipitated the 2008 economic meltdown, and other sensible measures to assist working Americans who have suffered insecure employment, stagnant wages and crushing debt for the better part of the past 30 years.

But fuck all that stuff – it doesn’t fit the dominant American narrative as determined by our political and economic elites – and their media allies at ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and Fox. The political spectrum may be ten miles wide, in theory, but the mainstream media will shrink it down to a yard in short order, exclude or ignore any story that doesn’t fit neatly into the little lacquered box labeled, Acceptable for Discourse. 

Democracy? Hardly. Supposedly serious people swoon over Paul Ryan’s budget diarrhea, but the budget proffered by the Congressional Progressive Caucus is deemed too radical and far out to garner a mention in prime time.

Keep the masses stupid and distracted and they are easy to control.

Folks, we’ve been sodomized by a corrupt and criminal ideology that is slicker than any racketeering scheme ever conceived by the Mafia.

Wall Street owns and operates Washington D.C. for its own benefit. Consider that a simple financial transaction tax on Wall Street would raise billions of dollars that could be used for education, infrastructure improvements, alternative energy projects, expansion of Medicare, job training and a host of other initiatives that would help ordinary citizens lead more secure lives. But don’t hold your breath. The big Wall Street firms like Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase and Bank of America employ battalions of lobbyists who only have to dangle bundles of campaign cash before their lackeys in Congress in order to kill any discussion of a financial transaction tax.

When will this madness end? The broad and deep American middle class is on life support, growing weaker by the day. Outside of the Progressive Caucus, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, nobody in power stands up for working Americans and says, “This neoliberal shit has gone far enough. It’s time to run these criminals out of town.”