What It Says is This

It says that marketing values, and not the professional journalist's mission of providing accurate information to the public, now dominate the American news media. This sacrifice of journalistic credibility to propaganda, false balance and amusement finally adds up to a form of societal suicide, like walking along a cliff's edge drunk, with your eyes closed.

Only the Jester...

Edward R. Murrow is alive and well in the 21st century. This is his disguise.

Trapped in the 21st century, eh? I Know the Feeling

The Name is the Game

                    By Dan Hagen

What do you call no income tax increases for the ever-richer rich, no cuts in the no-bid, no-performance trillions wasted at the Pentagon but massive cuts to public education and the social safety net? 

If you’re a Republican or the corporate news media, you call it “compromise” and “being serious.” But if you’re a Democrat and you agree to it, what it actually represents is “complete capitulation.” Who in hell won the last election, anyway?

U.S. Troops Just More Patsies for Wall Street

“Imagine that you’re serving at a forward operating base in Afghanistan,” David Dayen wrote.

“You’ve been in country nine months, coping with hazardous and punishing conditions, trying to survive and return to your family. Then you get a call from your spouse that they’re about to be evicted from the family home. The sense of anxiety is acute, and so is the feeling of helplessness – you’re thousands of miles away, focused on your mission, and you’re wracked with regret and guilt, unable to protect your family from the tragedy and shame of foreclosure.

“This has happened at least 700 times to servicemembers on missions overseas since the beginning of the foreclosure crisis in 2008. And it’s actually illegal; it violates the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, a statute that carries criminal penalties. The nation’s biggest banks have admitted to the conduct before Congress and in regulatory filings, and they only recently acknowledged that they illegally foreclosed on ten times as many servicemembers as they previously claimed. Any serious effort to hold banks accountable for routine abuse of homeowners should include prosecutions of this execrable behavior. But the government rolled out settlements years before the true depth of these violations ever began to come to light.”

So why haven’t these banksters been arrested? This would be what we in journalism used to call "a very good question."

Of course, we wouldn't to hurt the feelings of Wall Street bankers by actually asking it, however. That would be mean.

Hit and Myth

Illustration by Will Varner

By Dan Hagen

The ancient Chinese had a curse that they had cleverly disguised as a blessing. It was, ”May you live in interesting times.”

When 9-11 happened a dozen years ago, I wrote a newspaper column warning that this was precisely the kind of event that leaves societies vulnerable to fascism.

"Cassandra Spoke" by Kelly Naylor

Since then, the U.S. has invaded and occupied another nation in a war based entirely on government lies, instituted the use of torture, moved steadily toward a universal surveillance police state, and seen a president declare that he has the power to murder anyone in the world, including American citizens, without trial, due process or any rule of law. 

Meanwhile, the economically browbeaten citizens have remained largely supine, bovine and silent, waiting for the tide of history to wash them out to sea.

Yes, I confess, I always wanted to be a mythic figure. But playing the role of Cassandra is no fun at all.

An Ode to Spring

You sit silent as the students scratch their heads figuratively and their answers literally on the test booklet for the essay question. On their faces, you see critical thinking in real time. Across the way, the greenhouse man bends to tend to his boxes of yellow. Horticulture, and culture as well, grow, waiting for spring, ready to spring.