Pictures at an Exhibition of an Oligarchy

“Right, and again, it’s not necessarily intentional. It’s that those are the people that you’re surrounded with, so there becomes a group-think. And look, you are aware of what you’re going to be rewarded for and what you’re going to be punished for, or not rewarded for, like that definitely plays in the mind, whether you want it to or not, that’s a reality.”

Krystal Ball (courtesy of Caitlin Johnstone)


"Media companies run by the country’s richest people can’t help but project the mindset of their owners, and they are naturally incompetent when it comes to viewing their own role in society.

Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn’t create it. He sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side. The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for one-percenters. The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder for politicians. Sanders wasn’t the first, and won’t be the last."

Matt Taibbi


"And that's what I meant by playing ball. I was essentially told, play ball, soften your tone, and all of these good things can happen to you. But if you stay harsh that was going to cause me real harm, in those words.

It creates this false illusion that there are people out there looking out for the interest of taxpayers, the checks and balances that are built into the system are operational, when in fact they're not. And what you're going to see and what we are seeing is it'll be a breakdown of those governmental institutions. And you'll see governments that continue to have policies that feed the interests of -- and I don't want to get clichéd, but the one percent or the .1 percent -- to the detriment of everyone else."

Bill Moyers and Neil Barofsky, The Bullet or the Bribe


"Over the last thirty years, the United States has been taken over by an amoral financial oligarchy, and the American dream of opportunity, education, and upward mobility is now largely confined to the top few percent of the population.  Federal policy is increasingly dictated by the wealthy, by the financial sector, and by powerful (though sometimes badly mismanaged) industries such as telecommunications, health care, automobiles, and energy.

These policies are implemented and praised by these groups’ willing servants, namely the increasingly bought-and-paid-for leadership of America’s political parties, academia, and lobbying industry."

Charles Ferguson, Predator Nation


"Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity...few people have yet considered the kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of cold war with its neighbors."

George Orwell


"A true opium of the people is the belief in nothingness after death, the huge solace, the huge comfort of thinking that for our betrayals, our greed, our cowardice, our murders, that we are not going to be judged.”

Czeslaw Milosz, The Discreet Charm of Nihilism

The problem is not just with 'the media.'

The corruption in the developed world permeates the professions, from politics to healthcare to the media to telecommunications to the legal system to accounting and especially to the financial system.

It is a system based on deception, that abuses the power of money and other forms of career rewards and advancements and honors to promote the benefits of a relatively small group of people, to the detriment of everyone else.

What is sad is not the obviously and often justifiably angry unsophisticated who are taken in by some clumsy con man who was propped up by the powerful insiders as a strawman in the first place.

The real sadness is the well-intentioned, educated people, who historically have been the 'conscience'  of nation, that faithfully plug into their favorite, 'highly respected' media outlets, and allow their minds to be formed into the kind of unthinking, fearfully reactionary, and highly propagandized mindset that sits back and cheers on its own destruction, along with the overthrow of everything that it once believed to be good.

The corporate media bias against Sanders is just one example of many, especially if one thinks about the lead ups to war, and the blatant and persistent persecution of dissident voices, whistleblowers and reform and popular movements.

Power corrupts, and even worse, it attracts and rewards the highly corruptible.   This is why ordinary people combine to form laws, to protect themselves and their families from the abuses of power by the amoral, unscrupulous, and otherwise unrestrained.


It is a story as old as Babylon, and a betrayal evil as sin.

Thomas Frank on the Democratic Party, Their Credibility Trap, and the Beleaguered Middle Class

“In its quest for prosperity, the Party of the People declared itself wholeheartedly in favor of a social theory that forthrightly exalted the rich—the all-powerful creative class.

To the liberal class, every big economic problem is really an education problem, a failure by the losers to learn the right skills and get the credentials everyone knows you’ll need in the society of the future.

Professional-class liberals aren't really alarmed by oversized rewards for society's winners; on the contrary, this seems natural to them -- because they are society's winners. The liberalism of professionals just does not extend to matters of inequality; this is the area where soft hearts abruptly turn hard.

Of course Republicans do it too. The culture wars unfold in precisely the same way as the liberal virtue-quest: they are an exciting ersatz politics that seem to be really important but at the conclusion of which voters discover they've got little to show for it all besides more free-trade agreements, more bank deregulation, and a different prison spree.”

Thomas Frank


"What is most important for democracy is not that great fortunes should not exist, but that great fortunes should not remain in the same hands. In that way there are rich men, but they do not form a class."

Alexis de Tocqueville


"People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage.  Intellectual myopia, often called stupidity, is no doubt a reason.  But the privileged also feel that their privileges, however egregious they may seem to others, are a solemn, basic, God-given right.  The sensitivity of the poor to injustice is a trivial thing compared with that of the rich."

John Kenneth Galbraith

The examples of the credibility trap are apparent, especially in the Democratic Party because their own contradictions are so glaring.  It is harder to see in the Republicans because their hypocrisy in serving the wealthy faithfully in economic matters while duping the public with inflammatory cultural issues is almost a trademark.

But as Frank relates, the middle class is being badly abused and neglected by both professional political parties.  And this is unfortunate, because it is a strong and stable middle class that provides a large social organization its coherence and durability.

I do not see meaningful reform coming until the status quo in American party politics is repudiated and renewed again with a more democratic focus on people.

The powerful, those who built and have been fabulously rewarded by the current system, will oppose any threat to their exorbitant privilege, which they see as perfectly equitable and justified and fully well-deserved, with all the wiles and power moves that they can deploy, even against their own.

When one has all that a normal person could possibly need and even want, those who continue on playing for blood, who are generally 'afflicted'  in some manner— for those personalities it becomes all about the game, and winning for its own sake, and power.  And there will never be enough people and things to fill their emptiness.

This growing dichotomy, this gulf between appearance and reality, between policy and outcomes, will not only strain the social fabric, but historically is the kind of human dynamic that can light a fire in hearts and minds, despite increasingly desperate attempts to discredit, suppress, and then extinguish it.

And there are too often consequences that no rational person would wish happen.  And yet they do, and with some striking, almost cyclical, regularity.  Such is the weakness of human nature, and the wonderful power of self-delusion.

About Fake News

"It is part of the business of a newspaper to get news and to print it; it is part of the business of a politician to prevent certain news being printed.   For this reason the politician often takes a newspaper into his confidence for the mere purpose of preventing the publication of the news he deems objectionable to his interests."

Alfred C. Harmsworth, Journalism as a Profession

I have been meaning to say something on the subject of 'fake news' for a little while now. And as it sometimes seems to do, my procrastination has one again served me well.

A long time reader, Malcolm, sent this email below to me this morning, and I thought it was so to the point as to be worth sharing, with a few minor edits as it was a casual email.

The other week another reader sent me a list of purported 'fake news' sites, and congratulated me for being included on it.  I forget the source of this list, as I was preoccupied with other things at the time.  I was happy to note in the details that they had failed to categorize Le Cafe as being biased or slanted in any particular way.  It was simply labeled 'unknown.'   So I have a fake news site, but they do not yet know exactly what makes it fake, or why.

According to the document, apparently anyone can nominate a site to the list, without a stated reason, whether it be a personal dislike or some more factual analysis.  According to their document, someone later looks at the site and decides what kind of fake news it is.    Apparently they had not gotten around to Le Cafe yet, although they did see fit to include it on a fake news list.

As Winnie-the-Pooh's friend Eeyore would say, 'thanks for noticing me.'

I would like to think that when I have facts I put down the facts, and when I have an opinion or am not sure of the facts, or am putting my own interpretation on the facts, I make that clear also. That is the best that someone who is merely human can do.

Rarely in the real world, with all its variables and differing decision making weightings, are the facts so simple that 2+2=4.   And that is especially the case when it comes to public policy decisions, because of the underlying assumptions and objectives that lead to the selection of the variables and how they are to be combined and weighted.  But those who say 'it is simply math' rarely seem to state, or perhaps even understand, their own inherent biases and selectivity.

Fake news is a neat little label. So too is the label of Russia friendly that has been applied by some other group to various blog sites, such as our friends at Naked Capitalism for instance, for similarly arbitrary and undefined reasons.   I think they defeated their own credibility fairly quickly.  But it is a potentially dangerous trend, and it was especially discouraging to see it adopted by the once 'party of the people and diversity.'

This gets back to what a pundit, in a remarkable moment of irony and apparent lack of self-awareness, recently referred to as America's Epidemic of Infallibility.

To me, this culture of infallibility, or a superior appeal to authority and positional power, is a natural outcome of the notion that the professional class is a natural ruling elite as determined by the record of their schooling and connections and accumulatd accolades.

It is an old concept, sometimes called 'might makes right,' and the age old confusion of wealth and power with virtue.   If virtue were the basis, the natural path to all great power and wealth, then it would a much better world indeed.  But alas, we all know that it is not that way.

It seems that this whole notion of 'fake news' and 'Russia friendly' as it is being used recently is just the same old thing.  It is an attempt by those who are in power and their friends and enablers to control the dialogue in order to promote their own interpretations and policies.  And further, to stifle any dissent from their actions, in an attempt to maintain and enhance their positions and privileges from whence their power to do so arises.  This is as common a thing in corporations as well as societies.

As always, one must read everything with a skeptical eye, and take nothing on 'authority,'  especially now in our age with so many disgraced professions, having been corrupted by the spirit of their own exceptionalism, which is pride, and greed.

Question everything.  And never be afraid to call out those who stand, nakedly of the facts, on an appeal to authority, generally cloaked only with intimidation in jargon, and in very nice and civil terms question their pronouncements with all due respect and humility.

Respect and humility.  Really, Jesse?  Well, there is the resort to humor, which is certainly not pious by its nature.  Humor and caricature is the tool of the commons in dealing with the powerful, and wrong.  Making a joke of something, even if it is a bit pointed, is much less consequential than telling the pridefully mistaken to go shit in their hat.  

And one rarely can achieve a good outcome for their message of reform by writing it on a brick and shoving it into the other fellow's face, especially if the other guy is carrying the bully stick of the state.  There may be a time for that, but that is the difference between reform and revolution.

Those who resort to bullying and exclusion have already identified their character and the weakness of their propositions.  And the more incorrect they are, then it seems the louder and more mean-spirited that they get.

As badly as I made have made this point, here is what Michael has to say.

The mainstream media are up in arms over fake news. The establishment media, along with the political and economic elite of our country, have wound themselves up into a full hysterical fit of fear and loathing over fake news. What's not explained is where the line is located that divides 'fake' news from 'real' news.

Is it the selective publishing of half-truths, unverified rumors, and innuendo? The unquestioning regurgitation of anonymous assertions from shadowy insiders with blatant agendas and conflicts of interest? Perhaps the promotion of stories through hyperbolic overwrought headlines? A focus on the sensational and salacious? The selective exclusion of non-conforming views? The unilateral preemptive dismissal of alternative viewpoints? The manufacture of drama?

Is it the willingness to be infiltrated and influenced by intelligence operatives? The promotion of self-interested pundits? The refusal to call out and banish liars and cheats? Maybe it's the low budget for reporting and editing services, or the reliance of underpaid interns and independent hacks, or the lack of actual investigation? Or maybe the intermingling of news and editorial and advertising? How about the unabashed pursuit of profits?

No, it must not be any of that. Because the 'real' news is long and deeply guilty of those transgressions.

The problem is, we are told, that the purveyors of fake news just make stuff up from whole cloth. I'm shocked, shocked. Because the hypocrisy is monumental. The mainstream media has thoroughly compromised its credibility. This particular weed called fake news could only have grown in a garden long neglected and abused by its caretakers in the media.

To these fretting complainers, I believe that 'real' means responsive to and cozy with the elite. I think 'real' means owned and managed by people deeply connected with Wall Street and Washington. I think 'real' means willing to do the bidding of the war lobby, the US Chamber of Commerce, Goldman Sachs, the CIA, and fossil fuel lobbies.

The mainstream media has long since abandoned any semblance of pretending to do anything except regurgitate the spin, propaganda, lies, deceptions, and memes of the would be ruling class and of their enablers. They have proven themselves interested only in serving their patrons in government and finance, for the sake of power and profits. They barely cling to the weakly stated pretense of journalism, hollow and meaningless now, and contradicted by reality almost every day.

The mainstream media is in a crisis of its own making. Fake news is merely a symptom of a general disregard for the integrity of the facts.