NPR and PBS stations targeted by group involved in Carr's news-distortion probes.
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Conservative attacks on NPR and PBS continue with call to take FCC licenses
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Buddy I get baked with like during covid we would zoom and each smoke a blunt.
Yesterday he told me it was mapped out already. America is in the axis of evil. Russia gets oil and Europe, China gets the Asian Pacific and technology and America gets North and South America and agriculture.. But he's been wrong before.
Yesterday he told me it was mapped out already. America is in the axis of evil. Russia gets oil and Europe, China gets the Asian Pacific and technology and America gets North and South America and agriculture.. But he's been wrong before.
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It is not, in fact, time for that yet.
As mentioned in other threads, I know foreigners want to see chaos in the streets until Republicans are pulled from power, but there's two reasons why that hasn't happened yet:
1) The Democrats aren't organized enough to capitalize on it. Slowly but surely (albeit they also started almost a year later than they should) their left flank is forcing the centrists and moderates to come to the table on under the belt politics, but both the center-left and center-right can see the writing on the wall, that the younger up and coming politicians will not let them retain power or remain moderates themselves if they keep this up, and they don't know any other way to run the country or campaign.
People 50 and younger don't trust government institutions anymore even if run by Democrats, simply because Trump and the Bernie Maddoffs of the 2008 housing market recession didn't end up in prison. If you want to restore that trust, it will be necessary to actually amend the U.S. Constitution to a Democratic Socialist bent, whether you use the legal constitutional convention or other gray area means, forcing red states to forego federal funding by protesting the amendment.
2) If the Republicans are engaging in a circular firing squad due entirely to their own incompetence, jumping the gun too early will unite them in resistance and rapidly undo all of that 'regress'. The stock market has to actually crash from the AI bubble before you can start kicking hard under the belt and blowing off courts to seize billionaire GOP donors' assets at the state level.
A New, 'New Deal' or a New Deal 2.0 is going to look a lot uglier and more brutal than FDR's first go-round. Consider how bad things will have to get from the GOP's antics to reliably force a democratic socialist revival on an exhausted electorate:
When President Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office in March 1933, one in four Americans was unemployed and millions were destitute. At his inauguration he declared: “Our greatest primary task is to put people to work. This is no unsolvable problem if we face it wisely and courageously.”Whoever does this, whether it's Newsom or someone else, will have to be smarter, wiser, and more vicious than FDR. It would have to be done at the same time as permanently shutting down the GOP as a political party plus the social media disinformation spheres (because if this happens by definition Musk will be in prison and likely Peter Thiel, JD Vance and others), and yet still wisely refraining to overreact to legitimate criticism (because one or more political parties must be allowed to organically form to fill the GOP's void and split their voting coalition).
Winning elections is essential, but not enough. Public support is essential, but not enough. 'forgiving' the GOP is decidedly not enough, they're a worldwide threat, so vengeance against them, shunting them out of the economy and political representation is a defense mechanism for nations who want to otherwise be allied to the ideals of the US Constitution. That means breaking the will and spirit of white nationalism for good, finally. You cannot do that by rushing things.
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Dim bulb creationist Reagan killed off the fairness doctrine. Can't have reality intrude into their lies. Of course, now they want to drastically reduce the number of media outlets that do not promote their insanity. For them. "Free Speech" is for the unhindered lies they can tell, and it doesn't apply to others who do not share their counterfactual worldviews.
https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/topic-guide/fairness-doctrine
"The Fairness Doctrine was a policy requiring broadcasters to present contrasting views on controversial issues, which was enforced until it was abolished by the FCC in 1987 during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan's administration argued that the doctrine infringed on free speech rights and was no longer necessary due to the increasing number of media outlets."
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They're shocked that cutting federal funding alone didn't kill public media, so now they're having another go at killing it. Can't have any opposing views in a fascist dictatorship after all. The billionaires already own the private OTA stations for propaganda purposes
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So where are all the Freeze Peach libertarians? The ones who threw a fit because social media companies were moderating content?
The precedent being set for authoritarian oversight of media is staggering, and the Freeze Peach MAGAts are silent.
As they sow, so shall they reap.
The precedent being set for authoritarian oversight of media is staggering, and the Freeze Peach MAGAts are silent.
As they sow, so shall they reap.
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Those wheels have been greased for 40 fucking years - ever since the Reagan administration gifted the wealthy with the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the wealthy in human history.
After that, we've been at the mercy of psychopaths with an agenda and no sense of morality at all.
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Reminds me of what Noam Chomsky said about the Republicans - they're as far from being conservative as one could get, their politics are radical (he then went on to talk about Reagan and Thatcher's policies being antithetical to conservatism). It makes me wonder whether the Republicans were ever conservative or whether the years of rhetoric was just that, rhetoric but then again when you have a voting base who vote based on vibes and what feels good rather than a concrete understanding of policy or at the very least a coherent political philosophy then it shouldn't be surprising that Trump is the culmination.
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Yeah good luck. At this point I can't see the majority of Democrat politicians as anything other than a red herring to allow the Republicans to keep reverting the country without repercussions.
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I'm inclined to agree, but I might lack imagination: what could (should) be worse for the fascists in power than plainly stating what they're doing?
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Wrong.
The New Deal happened because the country’s economic climate was so poor that even the very wealthy feared for their well-being and allowed for policies to be set that would ensure their survival. In many cases the wealthy were no longer that due to the Great Depression.
The Great Depression and New Deal are so much more complex than the black and white view you offered. While some of the New Deal legislation did help with short term economic recovery historic analysis yields a mixed view as to how much of a factor it was in restoring the US economy. There truly wasn’t a full recovery until the late 1930’s when US manufacturing became the supplier to large parts of the world in the early stages of World War II.
FDR may have touted the New Deal but he wasn’t the socialist you made him out to be. His job was to extinguish a very large dumpster fire by any means legally possible.
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The Heritage Foundation published this plan. I'm not sure why the "article" wasn't researched and reported; instead it was just a bunch of quotes from the fascists that read like their press release. The Plan is to yank all public stations and give their spectrum to "Christian" stations to broadcast more of what they already broadcast: misogyny, race baiting, jingoism, and anything that will distract from the fact that 10 Americans have more gold than the Hobbit's Smaug who had a literal mountain filled with gold, and the billionaires made their billions by reducing by half what every household would otherwise have earned over the past 45 years.
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I think it's the ASD in me, but for the life of me, I cant understand how these people can be so stunningly hypocritical, in talking about bias in programming being reason for removing broadcasting licenses, all while far-right broadcasters spew forth lies and hate 24/7.
What's worse is, when the pendulum inevitably swings back, the Republicans will go back to pretending that none of what they did was in any way wrong or improper, and go back to decrying the destruction of the fabric of America in a President wearing a tan suit.
I've heard full thickness burns are some of the most painful things a person could go through, but I'm truly all for a lot of these people dying in fires... they're killing all of US, I'd just like to return the favor.
What's worse is, when the pendulum inevitably swings back, the Republicans will go back to pretending that none of what they did was in any way wrong or improper, and go back to decrying the destruction of the fabric of America in a President wearing a tan suit.
I've heard full thickness burns are some of the most painful things a person could go through, but I'm truly all for a lot of these people dying in fires... they're killing all of US, I'd just like to return the favor.
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Their goal is to make the pendulum not swing back. My Iranian expat colleague described how this is all exactly the same way Iran went over the decades post revolution and has now turned into, well, modern Iran, with a lot of decent people living without stable power, water, etc under a theocratic autocrat.
"We therefore request that President Trump unilaterally dictate that they be taken off the air."
The hypocrisy is not subtle. None of them cares.
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I read some time ago - can't remember when or where - that the Christian right want to muscle in on the frequencies currently used by public broadcasters. This is particularly of value in rural areas where AM radio in particular is important. By getting rid of public broadcasting the evangelicals can rid the airways of what they perceive as the evil of secular messages.
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Because having the perverse inclination to not see the world through the eyes of their own religious doctrine, is the very definition of 'evil'.
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The Fairness Doctrine never had teeth, was sporadically enforced, had been rendered moot years earlier by the Supreme Court (in a decision echoing the reason why it had not really been enforced). That's not to suggest Reagan was a decent president, mind you, just giving a little more context. The Fairness Doctrine always existed in spite of the first amendment, and there is no feasible path to achieving its like within that context other than adjusting laws on consequences for false public statements. The Alex Jones verdict should have been easy, and not the rare exception, and that he still hasn't paid up is a travesty.
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Absolutely fucking not. Name me one fucking thing that Democrats have done that have been remotely close to the attacks Republicans have made on the media, and the defunding of public media.
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The problem is that in general regulating news media, especially when it comes to viewpoint, violates the First Amendment. The only reason why it is permitted for over-the-air broadcast media is that the spectrum is a fundamentally limited communally shared resource, so as a special exception the government is allowed an unusual amount of leeway to regulate speech that uses it.
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Oh, I don't presume that there is any actual factual belief or statements made in good faith behind their assertions. Their motivation isn't that PBS is biased, but that it is the enemy. That it is an unbaised source of factual reporting may be why they consider it an enemy, but there's no actual belief that Fox News is unbiased in a way that PBS is not.
We don't need to engage with their arguments with a presumption of good faith. We need to call them out as bullshit liars and proceed accordingly.
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They're going harder after public media not because they see it as a bigger threat, but because they have more power to do so. In light of Paramount's hostile takeover play for Warner Bros, it's pretty clear they want to muzzle CNN just as much. They just have to go after it using different methods.
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"FDR conceded; saving capitalism"
That's not me saying FDR was a socialist; quite the opposite - he says so himself.
Workers had for at least 2 centuries had no leverage in the whole west since the industrial revolution and endured brutal exploitation; indeed the Great Depression followed your so-called Gilded Age of unbridled capitalist ventures for which we appear to try to hark back to currently.
Then after the USSR created, the workers in the West started a getting a bunch of concessions they never did before - enacting of universal education, child labour laws, pensions, maternity leave and pay, sick pay, universal health care etc I understand some of which the US still does not have.
It was a carrot and stick approach - the threat of domestic revolution and to stave of socialist revolution and also the rapidly advancing progress of the USSR which enacted the first welfare state. The West then conceded these concessions to its workers (and even then there was segregation by race - made even more infamous in Hitler's Mein Kampf; he sources US segregation and Manifest Destiny as the source of inspiration for the separation and murder of Jews, and for Lebensraum "Living Space").
A portion of capital accepted these concessions as it allowed to develop a large amount of signficantly skilled workforce and investment in infrastrcuture. This then allowed rapid development of technology - space race, STEM education, chip development, internet/intranet communication, mass vaccination (polio, especially to ward off communism spreading), biomedical research funding, nuclear programme etc etc
When the soviet union fell in the 1980s that leverage was once again lost and you have the roll back of worker's right ongoing with the deterioration of quality of life you see today with neoliberalism. In the US alone you have high levels of poverty, defacto slavery/indentured servitude with massive incarceration of the black population, high levels of debt including medical bankrupties, rampant homelessness, widespread food insecurity etc etc
The concessions were allowed also because of ongoing brutal explotation of global south workers extracting their labour and resources to carry on feeding western wealth. This was backed by gun boat diplomacy - IMF/World Bank structural adjusments (books such as Economic Hitman and the Shock Doctrine if you are interested), sanctions (at least half a million deaths per year as per Lancet), assassinations and coups to enable Western friendly governments, hundreds of military bases around the world to police all this, and of course war.
Since the 1980s the above also financialised your economy and hollowed out your manufacturing sector.
What leverage do you envisage the above western workers have now? Why did since the industrial revolution the workers did not gain leverage to build a welfare state till the 20th century?
The New Deal was a US project to stave off socialism, I was responding to someone who was saying they wanted new new deal through "democratic socialism" for which I was saying no and that FDR was a capitalist.
Not only did the US engage in several domestic projects to stave off socialism (New Deal, McCarthyism, domestic terrorism and assasinations such as MOVE bombing, mass surveillance and assassinations such as Freddie Hampton), it also engaged in brutal campaign of extermination abroad - the Jakharta Method, Vietnam War, and Laos bombings to name a few.
I am saying the New Deal is very much a capitalist project.
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It's not an either/or. It can be (and was) both. Yes, it was a capitalist project, steered and controlled by capitalists. But it was also a socialist project to broadly build up the US socially and economically as a concession from capitalists to shore up support for an ideology that had become very unpopular among US workers. At a time when that was a clear and present danger to capitalist interests. Capitalism was facing its first real competition for economic dominance in generations, and with Europe in shambles, its position on the world stage was tenuous. Without broad public support, the capitalist 'empire' was vulnerable enough to be brought down by its rivals. So they 'bought' that support by loosening the capitalist noose around the necks of the American people. At least for a time. Once their support no longer mattered, well...noose reapplied.
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Technically, the government is not supposed to use airwaves choosing to control speech. Until these companies go bankrupt, then all FCC can do is say in general what can not be done such as criminal actions such as encouraging murder up to civil actions such as porno. The issue here is the idea that gov gets to check if an ongoing user is profitable.
That goes well beyond the pale on this.
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chaos215bar2
Ars Praefectus
Can I have some of what you're smoking? (Or, on second thought, maybe better not. I'd prefer to keep my faculties intact.)
Progressive Dems want healthcare, social services, voting rights, bodily autonomy, acceptance of all folks, LGBTQ included, and a tax structure that's able to actually fund services for those who need them rather than just allowing the ultra-rich to accumulate ever more unfathomably large piles of cash.
The one who would just assume turn the US into North Korea is Trump.
And by the way, none of the countries you mention are really "communist". I mean, North Korea in particular doesn't even claim to be; they're "democratic". Except actually they aren't, unless you're silly enough to take their dictator's word for it.
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That was a well thought through dialectical response. On this forum that can be a breath of fresh air, so sincerely thank you.
I would, however, extend on what you said.
If capitalism is not commerce ie markets, trading and currency having existed before capitalism and will after; and if people across the pond (pick your pond) could define communism as classless, stateless and moneyless; then socialism could be considered the transition stage between the two.
If all forms of governance are both democratic and authoritarian (if, crudely as an example, 70% people vote one way and 30% people vote another way then the democracy of the 70% is ultimately backed by supposed state monopoly on violence). So then we have to consider who/what the democracy of any given nation is for and who it is a dictatorship against. In capitalist nations it is democracy for capital and a dictatorship against workers. In a worker's state it is meant to be the opposite. However, this is not so cut and dry as I will try to elaborate later below.
Concessions for workers could be consider pro-social but we have to consider at what cost and what leverage?
The leverage I won't re-hash in detail, as I have already gone through it, but the cost should be thought through. Western workers also in return made a concession to capital: there will be no dictatorship of workers against capital and capitalists (as a class) can continue enjoy profits from the superexploitation of the workers of the Global South.
So we now return to the question of leverage. Western workers don't have leverage of threat of domestic revolution if they don't get their concessions again like they did before and further more the tap of imperialism of superexploitation of the Global South is slowly being shut down.
The wealth from imperialism to be shared more equitably is not socialism.
What is the resolution of these contradictions? Fascism. Imperialism turned inwards. It has been long understood, at least by a portion of western workers, that if you squeeze the other they will get a bigger piece of that pie.
And large portion of the rest of the western workers who nominally don't see the above fascism appealing domestically have apparently been conditioned to not learn from the Global South and how some countries survived the on-going seige against them by the West, often judging their state of governance but ignoring the context of the material conditions of seige (threat of direct war and proxy wars, military encirclement, sanctions, "war exercises" etc etc by the only country that dropped 2 nuclear bombs on civilians).
Book recommendation : Blackshirts and Red - Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti
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The only difference is they haven't purposefully killed non-whites yet. Not that far removed. The whole point of ICE is to get rid of non-white people, so they're kicking them to every hellhole on earth. US citizens have been caught up as well. The only difference is the killing isn't happening en masse nor on US soil.
Also, many conservatives are against such policies - because when government switches, every power they exercised can be exercised against them. It's why many conservative influencers saw what happened to Kimmel as happening to them. If the FCC can just arbitrarily pull licenses, then owners of conservative stations (say, Fox News) should get extremely worried. Especially if it ends up on the shadow docket where they've failed to explain themselves.
Also, many conservatives are against such policies - because when government switches, every power they exercised can be exercised against them. It's why many conservative influencers saw what happened to Kimmel as happening to them. If the FCC can just arbitrarily pull licenses, then owners of conservative stations (say, Fox News) should get extremely worried. Especially if it ends up on the shadow docket where they've failed to explain themselves.
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Derp Derpus
Ars Centurion
When I worked in Public Radio we regularly got death threats from RWNJ's. I used to carry a Mossberg 500 Tactical 12 gauge shotgun in my car trunk and CCW'd a Ruger SP101 .357 Magnum for a reason. I was raised in a military family. Now we're in the phase of moving into a full fascism stage and the end of the United States of America. MAGA yearns for a totalitarian theocratic quasi-Xtian dictatorship with Trump as their Fuhrer. I have an idea of what it must have been like to be a citizen in Germany in the late 1930's and opposed to the Third Reich.
Our broadcast station was a windowless concrete block bunker with steel exterior door frames and reinforced steel doors. We had security cameras around the building. It was constructed that way on purpose after attacks on our first unsecured location. Two nights I was working the graveyard shift when a local Nazi group attempted kicking the doors in after the bars closed. I was the only person in the building. The local Sheriff's Department headquarters was a few blocks away. I called 911 and sat in the lobby , gun in hand and two full speedloaders on the table, waiting to see if they could kick the front door open before the Sheriff's got there. There were 5 of them the first time and 7 the second. They had no idea of what was waiting for them if they'd managed to get in. Fortunately the law quickly arrived and arrested all of them both times. This was in a Big 10 University city. They were drunk and screaming obscenities, I was surprised to later find out they were all students at the University and had rich parents who eventually managed to make the most serious of the charges disappear. I have a feeling things are going to get much worse unless Trump and MAGA are stopped. That was over a decade ago and the last incident happened shortly before I retired, it played a factor in my decision. I'm in my mid-70's and never thought I'd actually see the prospect of another extremely uncivil Civil War be such a close reality.
Our broadcast station was a windowless concrete block bunker with steel exterior door frames and reinforced steel doors. We had security cameras around the building. It was constructed that way on purpose after attacks on our first unsecured location. Two nights I was working the graveyard shift when a local Nazi group attempted kicking the doors in after the bars closed. I was the only person in the building. The local Sheriff's Department headquarters was a few blocks away. I called 911 and sat in the lobby , gun in hand and two full speedloaders on the table, waiting to see if they could kick the front door open before the Sheriff's got there. There were 5 of them the first time and 7 the second. They had no idea of what was waiting for them if they'd managed to get in. Fortunately the law quickly arrived and arrested all of them both times. This was in a Big 10 University city. They were drunk and screaming obscenities, I was surprised to later find out they were all students at the University and had rich parents who eventually managed to make the most serious of the charges disappear. I have a feeling things are going to get much worse unless Trump and MAGA are stopped. That was over a decade ago and the last incident happened shortly before I retired, it played a factor in my decision. I'm in my mid-70's and never thought I'd actually see the prospect of another extremely uncivil Civil War be such a close reality.
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Derp Derpus
Ars Centurion
This is the beginning of MAGA's version of the Final Solution but on a much larger scale unless they're stopped now.
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I mean, that's just fascism in general. Your opponents are both incredibly powerful as well as being weak. They live on doublespeak.
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