This is our media in a nutshell:
"…something very bad happened to the news media in the 1980s. Part of it was the 'public diplomacy' pressures from the outside. But part of it was the smug, snotty, sophomoric crowd that came to dominate the national media from the inside. These characters fell in love with their power to define reality, not their responsibility to uncover the facts. By the 1990s, the media had become the monster."
AP Reporter Bob Parry to Gary Webb, Dark Alliance
First Amendment Blues
It’s fairly simple: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Supreme Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson:
MY BIGGEST CONCERN IS THAT YOUR VIEW HAS THE FIRST AMENDMENT HAMSTRINGING THE GOVERNMENT IN SUBSTANTIAL WAYS, IN THE MOST IMPORTANT TIME PERIODS. WHAT WOULD YOU HAVE THE GOVERNMENT DO? I HAVE HEARD YOU-SAY A COUPLE TIMES - THAT THE GOVERNMENT CAN POST ITS OWN SPEECH - BUT IN MY EXPERIENCE, “KIDS, THIS IS NOT SAFE, DON'T DO IT,” IS NOT GOING TO GET IT DONE.
I GUESS SOME MIGHT SAY THAT THE GOVERNMENT ACTUALLY HAS A DUTY TO TAKE STEPS TO PROTECT THE CITIZENS OF THIS COUNTRY, AND YOU SEEM TO BE SUGGESTING THAT THAT DUTY CANNOT MANIFEST ITSELF IN THE GOVERNMENT ENCOURAGING OR EVEN PRESSURING PLATFORMS TO TAKE DOWN HARMFUL INFORMATION.
SO, CAN YOU HELP ME? BECAUSE I AM REALLY WORRIED ABOUT THAT, BECAUSE YOU'VE GOT THE FIRST AMENDMENT OPERATING IN AN ENVIRONMENT OF THREATENING CIRCUMSTANCES, FROM THE GOVERNMENT'S PERSPECTIVE, AND YOU ARE SAYING THE GOVERNMENT CAN'T INTERACT WITH THE SOURCE OF THOSE PROBLEMS.
"It is also axiomatic that a state may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish."
- Norwood v. Harrison, 413 U.S. 455 (1973)
I recommend just about anything RationalWalk writes. His excellent recent piece on the utility industry is one example:
“Warren Buffett’s message in his recent letter to shareholders was that we can no longer assume that the regulatory climate for utilities will be stable, something that he “did not anticipate or even consider” when making decisions in the past. He emphasized that Berkshire can sustain such a “financial surprise” but will not “knowingly throw good money after bad.” In a message that seemed to be directed to regulators as well as shareholders, Mr. Buffett noted that Americans may be “forced to adopt the public-power model” if the industry cannot attract investor capital.”
The Triumph of Price-Insensitive Investing
The Wealth Effect/Trickle-Down Scam
"Liberals" prefer "wealth effect," while "conservatives" say "trickle down."
“Janet Yellen, when she was president of the San Francisco Fed, wrote a paper discussing the wealth effect, the doctrine says that the central bank can make the wealthy - the asset holders - wealthier. They can create wealth through money printing and interest rate repression, and so the wealthy people that have these assets become wealthier, and then they spend some of this money, and as they spend this money, it props up the overall economy, because it's part of consumer spending. So maybe they're they're buying a new house, or they're building a castle, or buying a yacht, and a new vehicle, and they're splurging on other stuff, and hopefully the yacht is made in the United States somewhere, and so there'll be jobs, and people make money - so this is the whole theory of the wealth effect.
Ben Bernanke explained to the stunned American public that the Federal Reserve is purposefully making their wealthy even wealthier, so that they feel wealthy, and feel rich, and spend a little bit more of their money, and you know hopefully prop up the economy. So this is an official doctrine, and there's all kinds of economists that have written about it, so you can Google that, and it has a very spotty record in in terms of helping the actual economy. It has a very solid record in terms of making the wealthy wealthier, but the trickle down effect of that wealth effect is pretty small, and you end up with this huge division in wealth, and so that's the principle that the FED did this on…
I think the wealth effect has been discredited, I think it's bogus, it's a fake doctrine, but that governed the Fed's action at the time, and it was well established in economic literature, and Bernanke explained it to the American people, so it's not something that Fed did secretly. It discussed it. It said this is what we're doing, and this is why we're doing it, we're going to make the wealthy wealthy, and hopefully they spend a little bit of that, it's going to help the economy, and that was the theory.”
And then Bernanke went to Citadel and Pimco, and Yellen collected $7.2 million in “speech” income in just two years for doing Zoom calls to banks she was formerly the head regulator of. The End.
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