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justinspoliticalcorner · 2 months ago

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Dan Rather at Steady:

The morning after the election, I was talking with a friend who said something that made me pause: “The American people aren’t buying what the Dems are selling.” At the time I acknowledged the notion but filed it away for closer inspection, once the shock wore off. Vice President Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party were selling hope and freedom, upholding the rule of law, saving democracy. What’s not to buy? With the benefit of lots of discussion, reading, watching, and thinking over the past 17 days, it became apparent that that analysis is incomplete. It isn’t that the American people didn’t buy what Harris was selling; they didn’t know what she was selling. The increasingly powerful right-wing media championed her opponent’s message while distorting hers. And millions of Americans bought it.

As The New Republic editor Michael Tomasky wrote, “It wasn’t the economy. It wasn’t inflation, or anything else. It was how people perceive those things, which points to one overpowering answer.” The right-wing media now controls the agenda. For those of us who grew up on a steady diet of truth-telling, it’s gut-wrenching to see this mega misinformation machine grow into a multi-headed monster. Perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock. Gallup says trust in the media is at an all-time low. The most trusted news source according to YouGov is … The Weather Channel. Couple that with exit polls showing people who consume a lot of news from traditional sources voted overwhelmingly for Harris.

If you only read The New York Times or watch CNN or so-called legacy networks such as CBS News, you might be surprised to learn there is a vast right-wing media ecosystem that goes well beyond Fox News. Founded in 1996, Fox is the granddaddy of the far-right media but has since been joined by Newsmax and One America News Network. This media universe also includes Sinclair Broadcasting, which owns hundreds of radio and TV stations — reaching 40% of the viewing public — and newspapers, including the recently purchased Baltimore Sun; iHeartMedia, which dominates right-wing talk radio and podcasting; Trinity and Bott Radio, two massive Christian broadcasting networks; social media platforms like Trump’s own Truth Social and X, owned by Trump bestie Elon Musk; and a multitude of hugely popular far-right podcasts. Collectively, these various and varied media outlets have been feeding growing audiences a constant diet of disinformation for years. They have been fighting and winning an information war Democrats didn’t seem to know existed. The 2024 election may have been the inflection point when the right-wing media’s influence finally eclipsed the mainstream media. That is a major reason a convicted felon won with just under 50% of the popular vote.

The landscape is changing at light speed. Today, traditional media is not where most people get their news. Not so long ago you had to pick up a morning newspaper or turn on a television at a specific time to get news. Now “news” is available 24-7, from hundreds of sources, in tiny bite-sized portions, often without the benefit of context or even fact-checking. Right-wing outlets peddling half truths have learned how to navigate and thus dominate this new landscape. It is important to note that this battle is being waged between right-leaning media and mainstream media. The combatants are not two ideologues. One group is pushing a hard-right agenda, and the other is striving to report and expose the truth. The social media landscape mirrors this reality. On the right, you have Truth Social and X. On the left, not much. In reaction to the misinformation rampant on its sites during the 2020 election, Meta-owned platforms like Facebook and Instagram removed most political content.

An excellent read from longtime CBS News journalist Dan Rather on how right-wing media propaganda being fed to millions of Americans without any real fact-checking of lies is what led to Donald Trump become a Presidential candidate in the first place, let alone win twice.

#Conservative Media Apparatus #Donald Trump #Kamala Harris #2024 Presidential Election #2024 Elections #Media Consumption #Fox News #Newsmax #One America News Network #Bott Radio Network #Truth Social #X #Salem Media Group #Sinclair Broadcasting Group #Dan Rather #Steady

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black-is-no-colour · 2 years ago

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Simon Gallup, Robert Smith, Boris Williams, Laurence Tolhurst & Porl Thompson of The Cure, 1987, Brazil. Photographed by Michael Putland (Source: Spin Magazine)

#The Cure #Robert Smith #Simon Gallup #Boris Williams #Porl Thompson #Laurence Tolhurst #music #band #gothic #music photography #1980s #1980s music #musicians #style

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 months ago

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A slurry of lies in the wake of Helene and the path of Milton are making matters worse. [Benjamin Slyngstad]

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 11, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Oct 12, 2024

A report from the Labor Department yesterday showed that inflation has dropped again, falling back to 2.4%, the same rate as it was just before the coronavirus pandemic. Today the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 400 points to a record high, while the S&P 500 closed above 5,800 for the first time.

Washington Post economics columnist Heather Long noted that “[b]y just about every measure, the U.S. economy is in good shape.” Inflation is back down, growth remains strong at 3%, unemployment is low at 4.1% with the U.S. having created almost 7 million more jobs than it had before the pandemic. The stock market is hitting all-time highs. Long adds that “many Americans are getting sizable pay raises, and middle-class wealth has surged to record levels.” The Federal Reserve has begun to cut interest rates, and foreign leaders are talking about the U.S. economy with envy.

Democratic presidential nominee and sitting vice president Kamala Harris has promised to continue the economic policies of the Biden-Harris administration and focus on cutting costs for families. She has called for a federal law against price gouging on groceries during times of crisis, cutting taxes for families, and enabling Medicare to pay for home health aides. She has proposed $25,000 in down payment assistance for first-time homebuyers and promised to work with the private sector to build 3 million new housing units by the end of her first term.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which focuses on the direct effect of policies on the federal debt, estimated that Harris’s plans would add $3.5 trillion to the debt.

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has promised to extend his 2017 tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations and to impose a 10% to 20% tariff across the board on imported goods and a 60% tariff on goods from China. Tariffs are taxes paid by American consumers, and economists predict such tariffs would cost an average family more than $2,600 a year. Overall, the effect of these policies would be to shift the weight of taxation even further toward middle-class and lower-class Americans and away from the wealthy.

The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimates that these plans would add $7.5 trillion to the debt.

But there is more: Trump has also made deporting undocumented immigrants central to his promises, and his running mate, J.D. Vance, has claimed the right to determine which government policies he considers legal, threatening to expand deportation to include legal migrants, as well.

Michael Hiltzik of the Los Angeles Times noted on October 8 that in March, the Peterson Institute for International Economics pointed out that the immigrants Trump is targeting are vital to a number of U.S. businesses. Their loss will cause dramatic cutbacks in those sectors. Taken together, the study concluded, Trump’s deportations, tariffs, and vow to take control of the Federal Reserve could make the country’s gross domestic product as much as 9.7% lower than it would be without those policies, employment could fall by as much as 9%, and inflation would climb by as much as 7.4%.

And yet, in a New York Times/Siena Poll of likely voters released on October 8, 75% of respondents said the economy was fair or poor. Further, although a study by The Guardian showed that Harris’s specific economic policies were more popular than Trump’s in a blind test, 54% of respondents to a Gallup poll released on October 9, thought that Trump would manage the economy better than Harris would.

Part of Americans’ sour mood about the economy stems from the poor coverage all the good economic news has received. Part of it is that rising prices are more immediately obvious than the wage gains that have outpaced them. But a large part of it is the historic habit of thinking that Republicans manage the economy better than Democrats do.

That myth began immediately after the Civil War when Democrats demanded the government renege on the generous terms under which it had floated bonds during the war. When the Treasury put those bonds on the market, they were a risky proposition, but with the United States secure after the war, calculations changed, and Democrats charged that investors had gotten too good a deal.

Republicans were horrified at the idea of changing the terms of a debt already incurred. They added to the Fourteenth Amendment the clause saying, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” When that amendment was added to the Constitution in 1868, the Democrats’ fiscal rebellion seemed to be quelled.

But as Republicans increasingly insisted that protecting big business with a high tariff wall was crucial to the American economy, Democrats called for lowering tariffs to give the consumers who paid them a break. In response, Republicans said that those suffering in industrial America were lazy or spendthrifts and warned that Democrats were socialists. When Democrats took control of both chambers of Congress and put Grover Cleveland in the White House in 1892 with a promise to lower tariffs, Republicans insisted that the economy would collapse. But, the Chicago Tribune wrote, “The working classes of the country need such a lesson…. The Republicans will be passive spectators… It will not be their funeral.”

Their warnings of an impending collapse prompted investors to take their money home. On February 17, 1893, fifteen days before Cleveland would be sworn into office, the Reading Railroad Company went under, after which, as one reporter wrote, “the bottom seemed to be falling out of everything.” By the time Cleveland took office, a financial panic was in full swing.

Republican lawmakers and newspapers blamed Democrats for the collapse because everyone knew they would destroy the economy. Republicans urged voters to put them back in charge of Congress, and in 1894, in a landslide, they did. “American manufacturers and merchants and business-men generally will draw a long breath of relief,” the Chicago Tribune commented just days after the Republican victory. Republicans had successfully associated their opponents with economic disaster.

That association continued in the twentieth century. In 1913, for the first time since Cleveland’s second term, the Democrats captured both Congress and the White House. Immediately, President Woodrow Wilson called for lowered tariff rates and, to make up for lost revenue, an income tax. Massachusetts senator Henry Cabot Lodge called the tariff measure “very radical” and warned that it would destroy all the industries in Massachusetts. As for the income tax, big-business Republicans claimed it was socialism and that it discriminated against the wealthy.

For the rest of the century, Republicans would center taxes, especially income taxes, as proof Democrats were bad for the economy. As soon as World War I ended, Republicans set out to get rid of the high progressive taxes that had paid for the war. Andrew Mellon, who served as treasury secretary under presidents Warren Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover, took office in 1921 and set out to increase productivity by increasing investment in industry. To free up capital, he said, the government must slash its budget and cut taxes. From 1921 to 1929, Mellon returned $3.5 billion to wealthy Americans through refunds, credits, and tax abatements.

The booming economy of the 1920s made it seem that the Republicans had finally figured out how to create a perpetually prosperous economy. When he accepted the 1928 Republican nomination for president, Herbert Hoover said: “We in America are nearer to the final triumph over poverty than ever before in the history of any land. The poorhouse is vanishing from among us…. [G]iven a chance to go forward with the policies of the last eight years, we shall soon, with the help of God, be in sight of the day when poverty will be banished from this nation.”

The Great Depression, sparked by the stock market crash of October 1929, revealed the central weakness of an economic vision based in concentrating wealth. While worker productivity had increased by about 43% in the 1920s, wages did not rise. By 1929, 5% of the population received one third of the nation’s income. When the stock market crash wiped out the purchasing power of this group, the rest of the population did not have enough capital to fuel the economy.

Mellon predicted that the crisis would “purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up the wrecks from less competent people.” The Hoover administration preached thrift, morality, and individualism and blamed the depression on a wasteful government that had overstaffed public offices. To restore business confidence, Republicans declared, the nation must slash government spending and lay off public workers.

But most Americans had had enough of Republican economics, especially as the crash revealed deep corruption in the nation’s financial system. In 1932, voters overcame their deep suspicion of Democratic economic policies to embrace what Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Delano Roosevelt called a “New Deal” for the American people, combating the depression by regulating business, providing a basic social safety net, and investing in infrastructure. Hoover denounced Roosevelt’s plans as dangerous radicalism that would “enslave” taxpayers and destroy the United States.

Voters elected FDR with about 58% of the vote. Over the next forty years, Americans of both parties embraced the government’s active approach to promoting economic growth and individual prosperity by protecting all Americans.

But when President Ronald Reagan took office in 1981, he promised that returning to a system like that of the 1920s would make the country boom. He called his system “supply-side” economics, for it invested in the supply side—investors—rather than the consumers who made up the demand side. “The whole thing is premised on faith,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman told a reporter. “On a belief about how the world works.”

Under Reagan, deficit spending that tripled the national debt from $995 billion to $2.9 trillion—more federal debt than in the entire previous history of the country—along with lower interest rates and deregulated savings and loan banks, made the economy boom. Americans watching the economic growth such deficit spending produced believed supply-side economics worked. Tax cuts and spending cuts became the Holy Grail of American politics, and the Democrats who opposed them seemed unable to run an economy.

But that belief was not based in reality. In April the nonpartisan Economic Policy Institute found that since 1949 the nation’s annual real growth has been 1.2 percentage points higher under Democratic administrations than under Republican administrations (3.79% versus 2.60%), total job growth averages 2.5% annually under Democrats compared to barely over 1% under Republicans, business investment is more than double the pace under Democrats than under Republicans, average rates of inflation are slightly lower under Democrats, and families in the bottom 20% of the economy experience income growth 188% faster under Democrats than under Republicans.

A recent analysis by former Goldman Sachs managing director H. John Gilbertson expands on those numbers, showing that Democratic administrations reduce the U.S. budget deficit and that stock market returns are 60% higher under Democrats than under Republicans.

Democratic President Joe Biden returned the country to the proven system that worked before 1981, and the economy has boomed. While Trump has vowed to return to the tax cuts and deregulation of supply-side economics, Vice President Harris has promised to retain and fine-tune Biden’s policies.

But Harris has to overcome more than a century of American mythmaking.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #economics #US Budget deficit #history #American History #the economy #Benjamin Slyngstad #the great Depression

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darkmaga-returns · 6 days ago

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By Michael Snyder

The Economic Collapse

January 3, 2025

What kind of year is 2025 going to be? If you ask 1,000 different people that question, you will probably get 1,000 different answers. There are some that are very optimistic about the year ahead, but there are others that are very pessimistic about the year ahead. In fact, Gallup just conducted a survey that discovered that most Americans believe that 2025 will be a year of “political conflict, economic difficulty, international discord, increasing power for China and Russia, and a rising federal budget deficit”…

Financial news subscriptions

Americans foresee a somewhat challenging year ahead for the country, based on their predictions for various aspects of U.S. affairs and daily life. Majorities of U.S. adults think 2025 will be a year of political conflict, economic difficulty, international discord, increasing power for China and Russia, and a rising federal budget deficit.

I agree with all of that.

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religion-is-a-mental-illness · 1 year ago

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By: Nicholas Kristof

Published: Aug 23, 2023

While much of the rest of the industrialized world has become more secular over the last half-century, the United States has appeared to be an exception.

Politicians still end their speeches with “God bless America.” At least until recently, more Americans believed in the virgin birth of Jesus (66 percent) than in evolution (54 percent).

Yet evidence is growing that Americans are becoming significantly less religious. They are drifting away from churches, they are praying less and they are less likely to say religion is very important in their lives. For the first time in Gallup polling, only a minority of adults in the United States belong to a church, synagogue or mosque. (Most of the research is on Christians because they account for roughly 90 percent of believers in the United States.)

“We are currently experiencing the largest and fastest religious shift in the history of our country,” Jim Davis and Michael Graham write in a book published this week, “The Great Dechurching.”

The big religious shifts of the past were the periodic Great Awakenings that beginning in the mid-1700s led to surges in religious attendance. This is the opposite: Some 40 million American adults once went to church but have stopped going, mostly in the last quarter-century.

“More people have left the church in the last 25 years than all the new people who became Christians from the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening and Billy Graham crusades combined,” Davis and Graham write.

This “dechurching,” as they call it, is apparent in most denominations, reducing the numbers of Presbyterians and Episcopalians and also of evangelicals like Southern Baptists. White and Black congregants have left churches in similar percentages, but Hispanic religious attendance has dipped less.

To be clear, the United States remains an unusually pious nation by the standards of the rich world. Pew reports that 63 percent of American adults identify as Christian — but that’s down from 78 percent in 2007. And in that same period the percentage of adults who say they have no religion has risen to 29 percent from 16 percent.

If this trend continues at the same pace, by the mid-2030s fewer than half of Americans may identify as Christian.

There are various theories for what is behind the struggles of Christianity, and multiple factors are probably at work. One noted by Davis and Graham is that to many people the church hasn’t seemed very Christian.

When the Rev. Jerry Falwell dismissed AIDS as God’s lethal judgment on promiscuity, he conveyed a sanctimoniousness that in the 1980s and 1990s allowed much of the religious right to turn a cold shoulder to the suffering of people with the virus.

Jesse Helms, a leader of the religious right in the Senate, even suggested in 1995 that funds for fighting AIDS should be reduced because gay men contract the virus through “deliberate, disgusting, revolting conduct.” In retrospect, the most immoral conduct in America in the late 20th century was not taking place in gay bathhouses but in conservative churches where blowhards preached homophobia, embraced bigots like Helms and resisted efforts to counter AIDS — allowing millions of people, gay and straight alike, to die around the world. That is not morally inspiring.

Then in 2001, Falwell and the Rev. Pat Robertson suggested that the Sept. 11 terror attacks were God’s punishment for the behavior of feminists, gay people and secularists. My view was that God should have sued them for defamation.

The embrace of Donald Trump by many Christian leaders, even as he boasted about assaulting women, separated children from parents at the border and backed an insurrection, was for some a final indication of moral decay.

(It’s important to note that conservative churches had another side that worked tirelessly and without much recognition to address disease and poverty, as I’ve often written. It was evangelicals like Michael Gerson who in 2003 helped persuade President George W. Bush to adopt a huge initiative to fight AIDS worldwide. That may be the single best American program of my lifetime, saving some 25 million lives around the world so far. We owe Bush and evangelicals our thanks for that.)

The loss of religious community has far-reaching implications. Congregations are a crucial part of America’s social capital, providing companionship, food pantries and a pillar of community life. There’s also some evidence that religious faith is associated with increased happiness and better physical and mental health.

One of the most thoughtful contemporary religious commentators, Russell Moore, an evangelical who is now editor of Christianity Today, bluntly acknowledges the challenges ahead.

“American Christianity is in crisis,” Moore writes in his new book, “Losing Our Religion.” “The church is a scandal in all the worst ways.”

Moore is deeply critical of the way many evangelical leaders embraced Trump, and he is pained by church sex abuse scandals. In his own ministry, Moore said that he increasingly has heard from committed young Christians who are upset that their parents have been politically radicalized: “I was less likely to hear about wayward children going out into ‘the real world’ and losing their faith as I was to hear about wayward parents retreating into an imaginary world and losing their minds.”

Moore cites data suggesting that the reason people leave churches is not that they lose their belief in God so much as that they lose confidence in religious leaders and in the church’s moral leadership. He thinks faith can still recover; I’m not so sure.

Religious charlatans like Falwell may have meant to usher in a new Great Awakening, but in fact they taught millions of Americans to be wary of preening ventriloquists who claim to speak for God.

[ Archive: https://archive.is/UTeJx ]

As I've said before, the statistics on church non-attendance don't correspond to non-belief - there will always be more people who believe than go to church. But non-attendance predicts a reliable pathway that does lead to non-belief.

"Church attendance is the first thing that goes, then belonging and finally belief — in that order. Belief goes last." -- Ryan Burge

#dechurching #decline of religion #rise of the nones #empty the pews #the good news #good news #religion #religion is a mental illness

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