When they pluck out an ordinary person and make them famous, not only does their story seldom add up, that story is meant to fool voters about the Republican agenda.
This amounts to precisely where the GOP have excellence: lies and propaganda. Whereas the Dems depend on the MSM to be their propaganda wing. Why is this so? The Dems continually depend on a motley crew of media folk who are caught between the capitalist structures of their organizations and keeping the electorate, I mean customers, happy. So we get news largely without teeth or zeal, except for a very few targeted messengers.
Until Dem billionaires start ponying up and buying media providers like the GOP did with radio and other media providers in the 90s and continuing on to this day, the country will be saddled with lies claiming to support workers, while in reality serving only the GOP and the rich. There have been nearly four decades of increasing right wing propaganda via these gobbled up media outlets. How many were bought up toward progressive message dissemination?
And also look toward the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other right wing groups that foster right wing positions and talent via billionaire funds. How many Dem counterparts are there, and why do we not hear about them? Where are their trainees placed in the courts and government? Where are their position papers espousing human and worker values implemented into law?
The GOP has organized to tell lies to promote wealth of their funders and themselves and to retain power. But organizations can also promote precisely what the Dem party itself aspires to. We need both and we are 40 years behind.
The "problem" is that we lack the right's ruthlessness and shamelessness. The challenge is to match that without losing our own humanity and integrity in the process.
No. It's numbers, shamelessness and ruthlessness have nothing to do with saturation. They are simply very efficient at messaging. The numbers below have most certainly gotten worse since 2007. The right is carving out media posts like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal by now:
"In the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive."
Lies and propaganda are all that the GOP's got. They know their policies are not popular so they use smoke and mirrors to confuse the millions of uninformed, ignorant illiterates that make up their base. America has an abundance of working class and middle class ignoramuses who actually believe that the GOP is looking out for their interests. This is all the evidence one needs of our failed educational system.
By definition just under 50% of people have IQs less than 100. In addition to a standard liberal-scientific base of schools, America needs trade schools, which would give a path – it works in Germany. Otherwise, people tend to vote the way their parents vote, so a segment is already locked in – with GOP propaganda right and peer pressure there to further support unknowing voter self-destruction and misery.
It doesn't have to be the way it is. But convincing the lower 50% of anything is a herculean task: which is why the left must use their own brand of well-meaning propaganda en masse – to have a focused counter-force to the ultimately usury lies of the far right. Otherwise, the schools are not doing as poorly as you suggest. They also funnel talent to science, professions, the arts, journalism, government, etc.
The problem is not so much in the schools as it is in the lies and greed for wealth and power of the GOP. Though I'd agree many, many colleges have priced themselves into a panic by building country clubs for students with more attention on special programs and activities to compete with other schools, rather than focusing on the prime task: education, while keeping a low bottom line for the school and tuition. Those special programs, administration, President's salaries, land grabs and the general salaries of full-time faculty are nowhere near the low academic salaries back in the 50s and 60s, while the administrations are far, far larger.
Sure, after the GOP's 1929 economic collapse that catastrophically effected the entire world (sound familiar? W. did it too, but by then the right had long enthralled the workers and low intelligence).
Then there was WWII, during which Americans have been loath to change leadership, though I think the hardship and bitterness of a decade of depression was more than enough to make the GOP more than toxic (and Roosevelt had made 8.5 million jobs by 1943, mostly for those with at best basic education – or less). Beyond that, Roosevelt could speak to the working class (the Dems were the party of the working class then).
Otherwise, there was no continually burgeoning GOP media propaganda machine like there has been increasingly across 40 years until today. The laws didn't permit it. Importantly, the laws were changed across the last 40 years and the Supreme Court justices placed to ensure a successful GOP assault on democracy. This is very much aided now further by GOP state legislatures with extreme gerrymandering.
no doubt. but you yourself above describe Roosevelt's ability to win elections by appealing to "low i.q." workers who were suffering from bad times. how is that different from what we are facing now? a party that loses elections by calling its opponents "low i.q." and failing to even run in states where "country values" matter to people. and ignoring the real needs of people...except by "feeling their pain" or kneeling in Kente cloth, has only itself to blame if all those "low iq" and country=values people get fed up and gamble on a strongman leader. Roosevelt brought us Social Security. Democrats have joined the destroyers of Social Security by voting for acts that speed the rush to insolvency and demanding SS become welfare "paid for by the rich." which, big news, the rich won't do. That was the whole point of FDR's design, which, by the way, is your iq high enough to understand this?
"how is that different from what we are facing now?"
As I said before: GOP momentum as the workers party, a vast GOP propaganda wing that supports the momentum.
Sorry you won't acknowledge that just under 50% of the population do have low IQs, but an IQ of 100 is the average. It's reality, not what I "called them."
There were 13 districts that had no Dem opposition running. There were 12 districts that had no GOP opposition running. The playing field is even there, which you would have known had you bothered to check.
As for declaring the rich won't pay more, historically they've already done that. There's no reason it can't be instituted again with voters demanding it.
Otherwise, look to Europe to see how nations nurture people instead of handing a country's wealth to the already fabulously wealthy. As for rushing to SS insolvency, who is taking the cash? The rich are. That's a no brainer that GOP propaganda argues against to low intelligence voters who have trouble parsing reality, as do you. The question becomes why do you argue for the rich and their usury strangle hold on the citizenry?
Some of the most important conversations I've had have been in a rideshare or at my front door, with gig workers. Their backgrounds and reasons for doing it are extraordinarily diverse, often pretty remarkable in both the inspiring and heartbreaking direcions, but the theme of relentless fighting just to actually not lose moneybl by doing it is common. Gas prices do not help. Neither do graceless, stingy customers. This 'story' saddens me. This is a real person with very, very fearsomely real worries and this regime can only see the ways they can exploit them, and her.
From one “pedantic scold“ to another: Great piece, Paul!
I’m amazed how Republicans are able to convince the working class that they are working for them, for at least a decade! And how Democrats can’t seem to counter this misconception!
Marcotte at Salon reports Simmons as being 58, FWIW -- changes nothing, as you covered the contingency of her in sub-65 status in the piece.
To put in an oar -- in my capacity as an antifa/antiracist/very old (74) white Southerner -- on the bootstrapping angle always exploited by this kind of rightist-plutocrat psy-op stunt, I remind everyone that the allure of the Weberian Protestant-work-ethic narrative is among People Like Her (yes, I know, I don't know her heart; but I can sure guess) entirely backgrounded by more-or-less seething hatred of Black people and the tropal apparatus buttressing it. Welfare queens, steak and lobster SNAP, blah blah, you know the old tired repertory, it never changes. Evidence need not be looked for afar: rational exculpations for a white individual's or family's failing to meet material and sociopolitical challenges -- those demotic analyses occasionally even including a relatively clear-eyed acknowledgement that some nontrivial component of the difficulty stems from living under a system of cowboy-crony capitalism -- will be readily adduced by other whites; but you will seek virtually if not totally in vain for application of the same explicatory mechanisms to Black folks by reflexively-rightist/MAGA whites in the old Confederacy.
And this is where we cue up the thing Moyers said LBJ said (and make a snorting noise anent the gullible jejunity informing "Cletus safaris"). It's all there is to it; and until every white Dixieoid now over the age of 40 is dead, the dynamic will roll on and the trick will work, or work well enough.
At the risk of sounding like a grinch... like all Republican policy proposals, no taxes on tips is moronic (in the best interpretation). If you want to cut taxes on low-income people (whose taxable income is already quite low and so who may not have any federal income tax liability at all), there's absolutely no reason a DoorDash driver should be rewarded while a 7-11 clerk is punished. It's all spectacle without any thought behind it beyond "what makes for a good photo op to rope in gullible people"?
Trump and Fox News have been highly successful in deceiving middle class, working class and poor voters about what Trump and Republican policies really are.
You generally seem like a decent person and well intentioned writer. But I don't understand the reflex to "both sides" your argument to the point of disrespect. Even though so many writers do it in this era. The prevalence of an action matters.
Using the Khans as your example is disrespectful. They were "plucked from obscurity" when their child was killed on active duty in the US military and awarded a medal for bravery. They are part of an extended community that they represent in public at times. Any public appearance for them is exhausting, it's painful. They do it as an extension of his service and sacrifice. They do it on behalf of other military families. They wanted to speak up as naturalized citizens against xenophobia and anti-Muslim policy.
You could pause longer to point out the difference of someone ACTUALLY experiencing a devastating consequence because of a government decision. Whether to go to war, whether to exclude people from the US based on nationality-- those are not random government choices.
A decade after their appearance at the DNC, the Khans' son is still dead. They have a valid argument to present for the rest of their lives and may at times feel a personal obligation to do it in public. It's not at all relevant to this doordash stunt. It's not "just like" Joe the Plumber. Who was invented from whole cloth.
Thank you for showing the approximate tax savings she probably received. That was one of the first things about this study I questioned but did not see anywhere else in the media coverage.
(Trying again …) Last night I happened to see a series of clips of Obama supposedly walking from the White House to a burger place to pick up food for his staff. Obviously it was staged - it probably took a week for the Secret Service to figure out the logistics. But you could just as clearly see that Obama was comfortable in his “I’m a regular dude” skin - he loved the attention for sure, but clearly you could tell he grew up in a world where working at Wendy’s was a realistic life option. Just as obviously, Trump and his goons have no idea what it means to try to live off DoorDash wages; the closest he’s ever been to that economic class was when he and his father were ripping off their low income tenants. Anyone who has worked those kinds of jobs understands that they never pay taxes on “tips” because the standard deduction is more than enough to effectively exclude that money from being taxed. Plus you can tell Trump disdains working people - he’s sure they are generally stupid enough to fall for the huckster ploy.
what can i say except wecome to the era of the death of truth. politicians have always lied. they have to, if they told the truth no one would vote for them. but the scale and depth of lying has reached a point where i don't think we can recover. they no longer lie to fool us. they enjoy the anguish they cause by telling us bold face lies knowing we know and we know we can't do anything about it.
I watched it. Grandma said she made $22000, of which $11000 was in tips. With payroll and state taxes and the $15750 standard deduction, Granny's tax cut is between $500 and $600.
This amounts to precisely where the GOP have excellence: lies and propaganda. Whereas the Dems depend on the MSM to be their propaganda wing. Why is this so? The Dems continually depend on a motley crew of media folk who are caught between the capitalist structures of their organizations and keeping the electorate, I mean customers, happy. So we get news largely without teeth or zeal, except for a very few targeted messengers.
Until Dem billionaires start ponying up and buying media providers like the GOP did with radio and other media providers in the 90s and continuing on to this day, the country will be saddled with lies claiming to support workers, while in reality serving only the GOP and the rich. There have been nearly four decades of increasing right wing propaganda via these gobbled up media outlets. How many were bought up toward progressive message dissemination?
And also look toward the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society, and other right wing groups that foster right wing positions and talent via billionaire funds. How many Dem counterparts are there, and why do we not hear about them? Where are their trainees placed in the courts and government? Where are their position papers espousing human and worker values implemented into law?
The GOP has organized to tell lies to promote wealth of their funders and themselves and to retain power. But organizations can also promote precisely what the Dem party itself aspires to. We need both and we are 40 years behind.
The "problem" is that we lack the right's ruthlessness and shamelessness. The challenge is to match that without losing our own humanity and integrity in the process.
No. It's numbers, shamelessness and ruthlessness have nothing to do with saturation. They are simply very efficient at messaging. The numbers below have most certainly gotten worse since 2007. The right is carving out media posts like the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal by now:
"In the spring of 2007 of the 257 news/talk stations owned by the top five commercial station owners reveals that 91 percent of the total weekday talk radio programming is conservative, and 9 percent is progressive."
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-structural-imbalance-of-political-talk-radio/
The report goes on to say that these far right broadcasters reach 50 million people per week.
Lies and propaganda are all that the GOP's got. They know their policies are not popular so they use smoke and mirrors to confuse the millions of uninformed, ignorant illiterates that make up their base. America has an abundance of working class and middle class ignoramuses who actually believe that the GOP is looking out for their interests. This is all the evidence one needs of our failed educational system.
By definition just under 50% of people have IQs less than 100. In addition to a standard liberal-scientific base of schools, America needs trade schools, which would give a path – it works in Germany. Otherwise, people tend to vote the way their parents vote, so a segment is already locked in – with GOP propaganda right and peer pressure there to further support unknowing voter self-destruction and misery.
It doesn't have to be the way it is. But convincing the lower 50% of anything is a herculean task: which is why the left must use their own brand of well-meaning propaganda en masse – to have a focused counter-force to the ultimately usury lies of the far right. Otherwise, the schools are not doing as poorly as you suggest. They also funnel talent to science, professions, the arts, journalism, government, etc.
The problem is not so much in the schools as it is in the lies and greed for wealth and power of the GOP. Though I'd agree many, many colleges have priced themselves into a panic by building country clubs for students with more attention on special programs and activities to compete with other schools, rather than focusing on the prime task: education, while keeping a low bottom line for the school and tuition. Those special programs, administration, President's salaries, land grabs and the general salaries of full-time faculty are nowhere near the low academic salaries back in the 50s and 60s, while the administrations are far, far larger.
and yet Roosevelt won election four times.
Sure, after the GOP's 1929 economic collapse that catastrophically effected the entire world (sound familiar? W. did it too, but by then the right had long enthralled the workers and low intelligence).
Then there was WWII, during which Americans have been loath to change leadership, though I think the hardship and bitterness of a decade of depression was more than enough to make the GOP more than toxic (and Roosevelt had made 8.5 million jobs by 1943, mostly for those with at best basic education – or less). Beyond that, Roosevelt could speak to the working class (the Dems were the party of the working class then).
Otherwise, there was no continually burgeoning GOP media propaganda machine like there has been increasingly across 40 years until today. The laws didn't permit it. Importantly, the laws were changed across the last 40 years and the Supreme Court justices placed to ensure a successful GOP assault on democracy. This is very much aided now further by GOP state legislatures with extreme gerrymandering.
mel
no doubt. but you yourself above describe Roosevelt's ability to win elections by appealing to "low i.q." workers who were suffering from bad times. how is that different from what we are facing now? a party that loses elections by calling its opponents "low i.q." and failing to even run in states where "country values" matter to people. and ignoring the real needs of people...except by "feeling their pain" or kneeling in Kente cloth, has only itself to blame if all those "low iq" and country=values people get fed up and gamble on a strongman leader. Roosevelt brought us Social Security. Democrats have joined the destroyers of Social Security by voting for acts that speed the rush to insolvency and demanding SS become welfare "paid for by the rich." which, big news, the rich won't do. That was the whole point of FDR's design, which, by the way, is your iq high enough to understand this?
"how is that different from what we are facing now?"
As I said before: GOP momentum as the workers party, a vast GOP propaganda wing that supports the momentum.
Sorry you won't acknowledge that just under 50% of the population do have low IQs, but an IQ of 100 is the average. It's reality, not what I "called them."
There were 13 districts that had no Dem opposition running. There were 12 districts that had no GOP opposition running. The playing field is even there, which you would have known had you bothered to check.
As for declaring the rich won't pay more, historically they've already done that. There's no reason it can't be instituted again with voters demanding it.
Otherwise, look to Europe to see how nations nurture people instead of handing a country's wealth to the already fabulously wealthy. As for rushing to SS insolvency, who is taking the cash? The rich are. That's a no brainer that GOP propaganda argues against to low intelligence voters who have trouble parsing reality, as do you. The question becomes why do you argue for the rich and their usury strangle hold on the citizenry?
Some of the most important conversations I've had have been in a rideshare or at my front door, with gig workers. Their backgrounds and reasons for doing it are extraordinarily diverse, often pretty remarkable in both the inspiring and heartbreaking direcions, but the theme of relentless fighting just to actually not lose moneybl by doing it is common. Gas prices do not help. Neither do graceless, stingy customers. This 'story' saddens me. This is a real person with very, very fearsomely real worries and this regime can only see the ways they can exploit them, and her.
From one “pedantic scold“ to another: Great piece, Paul!
I’m amazed how Republicans are able to convince the working class that they are working for them, for at least a decade! And how Democrats can’t seem to counter this misconception!
Laser like focus on the truth. Thank you.
Marcotte at Salon reports Simmons as being 58, FWIW -- changes nothing, as you covered the contingency of her in sub-65 status in the piece.
To put in an oar -- in my capacity as an antifa/antiracist/very old (74) white Southerner -- on the bootstrapping angle always exploited by this kind of rightist-plutocrat psy-op stunt, I remind everyone that the allure of the Weberian Protestant-work-ethic narrative is among People Like Her (yes, I know, I don't know her heart; but I can sure guess) entirely backgrounded by more-or-less seething hatred of Black people and the tropal apparatus buttressing it. Welfare queens, steak and lobster SNAP, blah blah, you know the old tired repertory, it never changes. Evidence need not be looked for afar: rational exculpations for a white individual's or family's failing to meet material and sociopolitical challenges -- those demotic analyses occasionally even including a relatively clear-eyed acknowledgement that some nontrivial component of the difficulty stems from living under a system of cowboy-crony capitalism -- will be readily adduced by other whites; but you will seek virtually if not totally in vain for application of the same explicatory mechanisms to Black folks by reflexively-rightist/MAGA whites in the old Confederacy.
And this is where we cue up the thing Moyers said LBJ said (and make a snorting noise anent the gullible jejunity informing "Cletus safaris"). It's all there is to it; and until every white Dixieoid now over the age of 40 is dead, the dynamic will roll on and the trick will work, or work well enough.
At the risk of sounding like a grinch... like all Republican policy proposals, no taxes on tips is moronic (in the best interpretation). If you want to cut taxes on low-income people (whose taxable income is already quite low and so who may not have any federal income tax liability at all), there's absolutely no reason a DoorDash driver should be rewarded while a 7-11 clerk is punished. It's all spectacle without any thought behind it beyond "what makes for a good photo op to rope in gullible people"?
I dont think he tipped her
Trump and Fox News have been highly successful in deceiving middle class, working class and poor voters about what Trump and Republican policies really are.
You generally seem like a decent person and well intentioned writer. But I don't understand the reflex to "both sides" your argument to the point of disrespect. Even though so many writers do it in this era. The prevalence of an action matters.
Using the Khans as your example is disrespectful. They were "plucked from obscurity" when their child was killed on active duty in the US military and awarded a medal for bravery. They are part of an extended community that they represent in public at times. Any public appearance for them is exhausting, it's painful. They do it as an extension of his service and sacrifice. They do it on behalf of other military families. They wanted to speak up as naturalized citizens against xenophobia and anti-Muslim policy.
You could pause longer to point out the difference of someone ACTUALLY experiencing a devastating consequence because of a government decision. Whether to go to war, whether to exclude people from the US based on nationality-- those are not random government choices.
A decade after their appearance at the DNC, the Khans' son is still dead. They have a valid argument to present for the rest of their lives and may at times feel a personal obligation to do it in public. It's not at all relevant to this doordash stunt. It's not "just like" Joe the Plumber. Who was invented from whole cloth.
Show some respect.
Thank you for showing the approximate tax savings she probably received. That was one of the first things about this study I questioned but did not see anywhere else in the media coverage.
(Trying again …) Last night I happened to see a series of clips of Obama supposedly walking from the White House to a burger place to pick up food for his staff. Obviously it was staged - it probably took a week for the Secret Service to figure out the logistics. But you could just as clearly see that Obama was comfortable in his “I’m a regular dude” skin - he loved the attention for sure, but clearly you could tell he grew up in a world where working at Wendy’s was a realistic life option. Just as obviously, Trump and his goons have no idea what it means to try to live off DoorDash wages; the closest he’s ever been to that economic class was when he and his father were ripping off their low income tenants. Anyone who has worked those kinds of jobs understands that they never pay taxes on “tips” because the standard deduction is more than enough to effectively exclude that money from being taxed. Plus you can tell Trump disdains working people - he’s sure they are generally stupid enough to fall for the huckster ploy.
what can i say except wecome to the era of the death of truth. politicians have always lied. they have to, if they told the truth no one would vote for them. but the scale and depth of lying has reached a point where i don't think we can recover. they no longer lie to fool us. they enjoy the anguish they cause by telling us bold face lies knowing we know and we know we can't do anything about it.
I watched it. Grandma said she made $22000, of which $11000 was in tips. With payroll and state taxes and the $15750 standard deduction, Granny's tax cut is between $500 and $600.