Once one takes the step of asking questions others dare not ask let alone demand answers to, it can start an avalanche
MSM Stenographers, Access Whores and Poseurs will tell you that they have never been censored. That is because they did not need to be. They know the coin of the Realm–ACCESS–and what it takes to get and keep it. Read Faustus by Goethe[/caption]
I once had the honor of seeing this great soul speak on a street corner, no pretensions, in Harlem in 1963, just before I was to ship out overseas in the Army.
“None are so hoplessly enslaved as those who falsely believe they are free” Goethe
How daring are they really? No ACCESS, no SCOOP; no SCOOP,no EXPOSURE; no EXOSURE no CELEBRITY; no CELEBRITY, no ACCESS
Welcome to an experimental Blog idea. It is called “The People’s Press Conference” where the readers interact with their own “Taboo Questions” that no “MSMer” (“Mainstream Media Clone) would dare ask. Of if they did, they know they wind up frozen out and unemployed,and even worse as in the cases of so many journalists worthy of the title Journalist–and they are few and far between: I.F. Stone; George Seldes; and others whose works will be brought to this blog.
What is a Taboo Question and How Does Someone Know What is Taboo and What is Acceptable?
I have been a professor of economics and geography (and have taught other subjects like statistics, logic, critical thinking, genocide, international law–that are all part of a totality that we carve up and stuff into little boxes that little minds can handle and find comfort, pleasure, power, status, wealth rather than fear, risk, uncertainty or challenge in-that is mainstream economics.)
In my classes I give for extra credit the following assignment: With respect to any culture, any period of history, any person with life and death power over people and careers, construct a scenario of a journalist asking this person of power a question guaranteed to get him or her killed and/or their careeers totally wiped out.
OK. Try This.
A White House press conference. Your are a journalist over thirty years. It is 1999 and not only is the Lewinsky scandal yielding all sorts of juicy details about “presidue” on blue dresses, phone sex at 2 am (on an unsecure line–Lewinsky’s which made Bill’s unsecure also and was bugged by a “foreign power” according to the Porn Classic book made into many movies “The Star Report”).
But you just got word you have terminal illness, your life is a waste and your colleagues would cut your throat in a minute for your ACCESS (the “Coin of the Realm” in MSM land) in he White House, and you are going through this whole “Willy Loman Moment” (Death of a Salesman) and say “Screw it” Sort of a “Howard Beale Moment” as in Network by Paddy Chayevsky.
Bill: “Yes, Yes, no, not you Fox, Walter, Walter, MSBS Network, (Mainstream BS Network) did you have a question? By the way Walter, and we go way back (Bill’s schmooz-a-thon is getting warmed up) congratulations on that Pulitzer on your coverage of the role of faith and compassion in the life of Lyndon Johnson; what is your question Walter?”
Walter: “Mr. President, thank you for your kind words. This will be my last prsss conference as I just found out I will die soon, so this is a special momment for me.
Mr President, with the revelation that your dna was matched with the infamous “presidue” found on Ms Lewinsky’s dress, that suggests that you were not practicing safe sex, or safe whatever depending it was upon what the meaning of it is.
Or yes, perhaps the condom leaked, in any case, did you have an HIV test and suggest the same for Ms. Lewinsky, and did you advise Hillary to have a test for HIV assuming you have marital relations?
Do you not have a responsibility to set an example for the youth on the issue of safe sex? And if I could have a follow up Mr. President?”
Bill: With a cross between pure shock and horror (seeing that future Nobel Peace Prize turn into maybe a Nobel Piece Prize,) on the one hand and the look of a Mafia Don about to order a whole ton of paper down on someone, or maybe worse…
Walter: “Mr President, as a follow-up, is there really such a thing as “safe sex” (or safe conversations on phones of mistresses outside of the white house and near foreign embassies or near forces with evil intent and very good at blackmail) or consensual sex or “private business”, any time in the White House, given what is at stake?
What if you are “copping a Lewinsky” while the missiles are coming in or worse when Hillary is coming in? You know President Johnson once got caught by Ladybird on his couch in the Oval Office (you Mr. President have apparently dropped the “V” and replaced it with an “R” in the Oval Office) and he had a warning bell installed by Secret Service for when Ladybird was on her way down to the office.”
How is that? Are those not legitimate questions on critical issues of national security, fitness for office, potential blackmail, and compromise of political institutions with lower approval ratings than Congress or Ted Bundy?
OK, now one without the humor and frills attached?
The scene is the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. and George W. Bush has just made a very public and tearful visit, right before an election where the Jewish vote in Florida is critical, and he makes a speech and gives a press conference on what he saw and how we was moved. Our “Dean of Journalism”, a 30-year veteran reporter, going through one of these Willy Loman moments with nothing to lose asks:
Walter: Mr. President, as you saw the exhibits in the Holocaust Museum, what were your thoughts given that your family wealth was mostly built on your grandfather Prescott Bush and your great grandfather George Herbert Walker after whom you are named, being principal financiers of Hitler and the Nazis from 1924 onward, their trading with the enemy during wartime which resulted in the assets of their bank the Union Banking Corporation being seized in November 18, 1942 under Vesting order 248 for Trading with the Enemy during Wartime, and of course there is the Synfuel plant at Auschwitz that used slave labor in which your grandfather and great grandfather were co-investors with Fritz Thyssen and that yielded a trust of $1.5 million dollars when liquidated for your father George H.W. Bush after the war.
So how did the Holocaust Museum exhibit move you given your family history and wealth and how it was really built?
The Bush Dynasty of Death. Built on Trading with the Enemy during Wartime (Vesting Order 248 November 18, 1942 Confiscation of Assets of UBC Corporation)
Bushes at Auschwitz where Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker and Fritz Thyssen owned a plant using slave labor during the war liquidated for $1.5 million after the war that became the trust fund for the business of GHW Bush.
The documentation is clear and not part of the nutzo and conspiracy stuff on the internet although in the real world there are conspiracies which is why there are laws against them and why there are some people in jail for them.
This time Barack Obama:
OK, another one, this time Barack Obama and again our veteran and burned-out Reporter Walter is on the job and having one of his moments of courage and candor as he considers the sweep of his life, how many Faustian Bargains he made over the years for that ACCESS, that not only brought him the SCOOPS, that gave him EXPOSURE that brought him RATINGS that brought him CELEBRITY, AWARDS, SPEAKING GIGS, PROMOTIONS, but that brought him even more and EXPANDED ACCESS to the Big Boys.
In fact, Walter, like Dan Rather (who later found out how DENIAL OF ACCESS works when you do not play the game and get into TABOO SUBJECTS like George Bush AWOL during Wartime from the Champaign Squadron of the Texas Air Guard and the Alabama Air Guard that had no airplanes) and Tom Brokaw, Charlie Rose, George Stephanopoulos, and other big names, started out as Stenographers to the “Masters of the Universe” and now are part of the Masters themselves, and go to Bilderberg, Bohemian Grove, Trilateral Commission, Council on Foreign Relations, Davos and other venues where they take an oath not to reveal or report on what was said and never by whom was anything in specific said.
And they call themselves reporters.
Walter: Mr. President, in his biography of you, “The Bridge” The Life and Rise of Barack Obama” David Remnick recounts how you got your first real job as a community organizer before going into politics.
He notes that it was a full-time job registering African-American voters of whom some 340,000 were not registered thus a desperate need, but you tried to make it only part-time, carried your work on the book everywhere, as you were very concerned, even obsessed about getting your first book out “Dreams From My Father” in which you admitted to regular use of marijuana and “blow” as you put it, or cocaine, which was then and remains a major felony.
My questions are two-fold Mr. President: First, were you obsessed with getting your book out and revealing your drug use prior to running for political office so that you could get the issue of your drug use out and you could deal with it and get politically inoculated from the issue prior to running for office?
And also, Mr. President, since some 700,000 persons are in prison for simple possession and not even trafficking of marijuana and cocaine, and the only differences between them and you is they got caught and you did not, and they did not have the connections and privileges you have had (prep schools, elite universities, networking connections, patronage of rich Chicago liberals and the Daley Machine, etc) Why not pardon all of them turn them loose which would also help to reduce deficits and debt as well as prison overcrowding?
Malignant narcissists not only believe they are special and “predestined for greatness”, but that the normal rules and laws do not apply to them but to everyone else. This is like a former marijuana and “blow” user now demanding tighter laws on drugs and opposing legalization of medical marijuana.
Malignant Narcissists, and here is two of them side-by-side, and many of them are psychopaths and sociopaths as malignant narcissism and grandiosity, predation, sense of entitlement are all characteristics of them, they are also above the laws they purport to hold everyone else to.
ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE COMMODIFIED CAPITALIST MASS MAINSTREAM MEDIA
For the MSM journalists, each story, no matter how tragic, is simply a “piece”, a commodity that is produced for sale, profit, power, access and the other coins of the realm of MSM journalism.
For the individual reporter it is about which “piece” will get him or her noticed by management and the public, which piece will get him or her better ACCESS to bigger stories, and celebrities, which will get him or her ACCESS to the next and even bigger SCOOP, that will then translate into greater EXPOSURE, that leads to higher RATINGS, that leads to CELEBRITY in journalism and other venues, that translates into an expanded rolodex and greater ACCESS…
We have all seen reporters, with misery and pain all around them, people starving at their feet, and they can only thrust a microphone and camera into the faces and pain of those at the feet, while they look well-fed even obese in some cases and come up with “Well, how do you FEEL about the loss of four of your five children?”
Do you think it would be any better under those terrorists that America is trying to liberate you from?” And by the way, thanks for the “piece” and of course, “Have a Nice Day”… Yeah, right…
These are the CORE AND INTERRELATED IMPERATIVES in the SPIRAL OF SUCK-CESS in MSM Journalism. But the SPIRAL OF SUCK-CESS works in a downward trajectory as well as Dan Rather and others that ventured into TABOO territory found out. DENIAL OF ACCESS leads to LOSS OF EXPOSURE which leads to DOWNWARD RATINGS which leads to LOSS OF CELEBRITY which leads to LOSS OF ACCESS…This is understood by all in MSM and the lessons from the likes of Dan Rather, once an attendee with the big boys in the places of power, now is on the margins of MSM at best.
This is a visual metaphor for how business is really done and how ACCESS to the “movers-and-shakers” who yield the SCOOPS that yield the EXPOSURE that makes the Stenographers become CELEBRITY “movers-and-shakers” themselves.
This works the same in Entertainment and Academia. They both also require ACCESS to the BIG GRANTS, PREFERRED COURSES AND RESEARCH LOADS, PRESTIGIOUS UNIVERSITIES AND THINK TANKS and for those in Entertainment, it is ACCESS to the BIG STUDIOS, PICTURES, MUSIC HITS, SPEAKING VENUES, AGENTS, ETC.
In MSE (Mainstream Capitalist-based) Entertainment the SPIRAL OF SUCK-CESS goes like this:
The SPIRAL OF SUCK-CESS IN MSA (Mainstream Academia)
And in MSA (Mainstream Academia where I have been for many years) The Faustian Deals, The Whoring, the naked Patronage, networking and the like give rise to a Spiral of SUCK-CESS in Academia that looks like this:
Academia has the tools to make sycophancy, whoring, toadying and the like, so common in Academia, look more respectable and “refined”; that makes it even worse as there are often real crimes and real victims involved when “science” and apology is for sale and in the hands of those seeking power for profit and profit for power–the essence of Capitalism; “Nothing is so passionate as a vested interest disguised as an intellectual conviction” Sean O’Casey
CORE IMPERATIVES OF ALL ENTITES AND ORGANIZATIONS OPERATING UNDER CAPITALIST SYSTEMS, RULES AND STRUCTURES
Capitalism is fundamentally about Profit for Power and Power for Profit. And the slogan of the Medicis who ruled Florence for over 300 years put it: “Money to Acquire Power; Power to Protect Money.
COMPETITIVENESS) in terms of lower prices, better quality and service, insider contacts, ETC.) AND MAXIMIZE PRODUCED (YET UNREALIZED) MAXIMUM POSSIBLE SURPLUS VALUE, while those that fail to ACCUMULATE CAPITAL and INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY as a necessary but not sufficient condition of INCREASED COMPETITIVENESS, fail relative to competitors, in the PRODUCTION OF MAXIMUM POSSIBLE (BUT YET UNREALIZED) POTENTIAL SURPLUS VALUE- and EFFECTIVE COMPETITION against the others (Market Shares, Capital Shares, Access to Government and Lawmakers).
Why MUST each competitor continually focus on EFFECTIVE COMPETITION? Because if one’s competitor is more able in EFFECTIVE COMPETITION, it is able to widen and deepen market shares, shares of total assets of all corporations, forge contacts and ACCESS to the lawmakers and newsmakers, have ACCESS to the latest technologies and the biggest celebrities, while those who fail to widen and deepen and enhance their overall EFFECTIVE COMPETITION.
Absolutely and in relative terms to competitors, they are not able to REALIZE MAXIMUM POSSIBLE SURPLUS VALUE (relative to competitors and their own survival imperatives) and on and on the SPIRAL PROCESS AND “LOGIC” of Capitalism governing all entities (individuals, businesses and whole nations in global competition) goes on.
So each story is not only a potential commodity for sale, but also, a potential time bomb, for the individual journalist, entertainer, academic or organization, if it turns out to step on the toes of those whose asses need to be kissed and whose interests cannot be threatened for ACCESS to the next “piece” that can turn a nobody reporter into a Woodward or Bernstein or Brian Williams or whomever:
ACCESS that can turn the next club singer into an American Idol; ACCESS that can turn the next new PhD and Assistant Professor into a tenured professor, “expert” in some field interviewed on talk shows, or advisor to the president; ACCESS that can turn a small paper or radio or tv station into an XM or ClearChannel or a newspaper into a Boston Globe etc; in the Star System of celebrities covering and interviewing fellow celebrities.
And big fish swallow small and medium-sized fish, (individuals, organizations and whole systems globally) and economic concentration (fewer and fewer entities command larger and larger market shares) and economic centralization (fewer and fewer interlocked entities or power blocs command larger and larger interlinked shares of total assets) go on and feed each other so that when Ben Baghdakian, Dean of Journalism at UC Berkeley wrote his first edition of “The Media Monopoly”, he identified 50 large MSM corporatons that controlled over 80% of market revenues and assets in radio, tv, daily newspapers, and journals.
By his 3rd edition of this book the number was down to 26 big MSM corporations; by his 5th edition, the number of big MSM corporations was down to 10; by his sixth edition, the number of Big MSM corporations controlling over 80% of market revenues and assets was down to 6.
OK Back to the People’s Press Conference.
Prof. James M. Craven/Omahkohkiaaiipooyii