The Imperial Press

I've always thought we had a more or less free press, until I saw the MSM treatment of: Bradley Manning--and taxes!

Let's start with taxes. In the alarmist rhetoric of the "fiscal cliff" commentators, taxes on dividends are treated as if everyone earns them; if their tax rates go up to the same rates as earned income(!), then the bottom will fall out of the stock market; middle class people with 401K's will suffer along with billionaires. After all, they'll have to pay those higher taxes too.

But owners of 401Ks don't pay taxes on dividends their funds earn, although the funds do, so their investments might earn slightly less. But, the big losers, if taxes on dividends went up, would be the people paying the restored 39% rate. They'd pay it on their dividends, too, which is why, if capital gains were treated the same way, their tax rates would go up not from 35 to 39%, but from an effective tax rate of 15% or less, to one more comparable to what 'ordinary' people pay.

That's the idea. It not only would help pay off the deficits; it would lower income inequality. But the Media doesn't want ordinary Joe Blow to know that. Commentators want you to think these higher taxes will hit you 'ordinary' people especially hard.

The fiscal cliff was really an invention of the Tea Party Republicans to force government to shrink, favoring the wealthy. Obama, that 'poor' negotiator, locked them into a closet: to get out, they'll have to concede on higher taxes for the wealthy to avoid being tarred with raising taxes for everyone.

If Republicans want to protect their favorite charity--the military--they could be pressured to give up even more, like those favored tax-rates on dividends and capital gains, even Romney's carried interest.

Are there enough progressive Democrats to push that far, especially given the MSM's conservative corporatist bias on tax issues?

Another media bias is harder to see: it often is carried out by an absence of coverage, as in Bradley Manning, Wikileaks, et al. Here is a whistleblower with global impact, and he's treated like a terrorist and held incommunicado for almost two years, before he's allowed to speak. And then the media hardly covers him, or Assange, or Wikileaks, which revealed more embarrassing state secrets, and gave newspapers more issues to write/pontificate about for months than any other source. It showed how petty and conniving most governments are--especially the United States.

That's not terrorism. Was the boy who yelled: "The Emperor has no clothes!" a terrorist, or a truth teller?

A free press? We have a press dedicated to maintaining the American Empire and its prime supporters--and beneficiaries--the very wealthy. In Fifth Century Rome, the Emperor and Roman Senators had panegyrists, too.

Bastards and Real Bastards

Qaddafi bombs his own unarmed people and destroys towns in order to retake them; in China, human rights activists just disappear: poof. In Attila, as Told to His Scribes, (Chapter Two to appear soon), Attila makes the case that the Romans were worse than he was: and besides, he learned the brutality from them.

Lying kills more than Qaddafi's bombs, only not so suddenly. The misrepresentation of reality perpetrated on Americans by the MSM will result in a lot more deaths than bombs, from diseases not treated, from air pollution, from unmitigated climate change, from car accidents due to poor road maintenance, even from hunger--so draconian are the cuts justified by these lies. Note: Canada permits no Fox-Canada, because it has a law against lying on air.

The biggest lie is that the deficit is the problem. It isn't; it's a short-term solution and needs to be even larger in the near-term--to overcome lagging demand. The secondary lies are that unions are corrupt, wield monopoly power over governments, and are the cause of the budget deficits that--take a deep breath--caused the recession--which is all Obama's fault, of course. Oh, also: seniors are greedy and Social Security will sink us.

Reality Check: Obama's stimulus did prevent us, and perhaps the world, from falling headlong into another Great Depression, but it was compromised away to death and was much too small to pull us out of recession. What we need now, is more spending for job creation, not draconian cuts. Social Security hasn't contributed to the deficits; its "locked box" has been looted for years by politicians, who borrowed the bonds amassed, and replaced them with IOU's. Now they have to be paid back. Slashing the military, or taxing the few who have ripped off everyone else, could pay off the IOU's: both are responsible for them, after all.

In the ongoing budget battle, Obama does know that the stimulus worked, if not enough, and he knows we need more of it. Yet, right off the bat, he freezes Federal workers' wages, and offers to cut Food Stamps, the program that has expanded exponentially--because people need it to get by.

Obama is a politician. When he saw the election results, he listed rightward--offering concessions like the Food Stamps cuts, because people were angry about spending (due to Fox/Limbaugh lies). But nothing he offers will be drastic enough, unless he accepts the whole GOP agenda. If he does that--

We'll need a new party; we'll nationalize the Wisconsin Movement.

It's either that, or capitulation to our new masters: corporations and billionaires, the epitome of Fifth Century Roman Senators. Less humane than their predecessors, however, corporations and billionaires assume no responsibility for their slaves and serfs, nor for the world they trash.