I just discovered that at the same time the corporate media was covering the protests in Egypt that led to Hosni Mubarack’s well deserved departure 350,000 Israelis, Jewish, Christian, and Palestinian alike, were protesting the corruption and worse by the corporate elite in the country.
Most of us never heard of it. The middle classes protesting the obscenely wealthy are as non newsworthy as the massive anti-war demonstrations in the US and world wide before little Bush attacked Iraq They do not get covered. The corporate media is almost as devoted a servant to its owners as the sate run media of the old Soviet Union was to the party. A few brave columnists excepted, there is almost no practical difference.
Then there is the recent news about the criminal and shady activities of Koch Industries, one of the major financial supporters of the right wing. Nothing about it in a popular news magazine because, you know, Americans do not need to know about the activities of their “betters.” Happily it did make it into a business publication, and very happily we are not nearly as dependent as we once were on the NYT or Washington Post to inform the country as a whole. And there is more.
Thank the Gods for the Internet.
Warren Buffet understands, as he made clear in a recent interview:
QUESTIONER: Are you happy seeing your suggestion, this new Buffett Rule, becoming more of a basis of a political battle that really has turned into class warfare?
BUFFETT: Actually, there’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years, and my class has won. We’re the ones that have gotten our tax rates reduced dramatically.
If you look at the 400 highest taxpayers in the United States in 1992, the first year for figures, they averaged about $40 million of [income] per person. In the most recent year, they were $227 million per person — five for one. During that period, their taxes went down from 29 percent to 21 percent of income. So, if there’s class warfare, the rich class has won.
I have to the Wall Street demonstrators and hope you will as well. (This site even enables you to donate food through local restaurants.) Those they oppose are forces of nihilism. Their values are the antithesis of any decent ethical system.