A number of readers have written in to say that I'm being unfair to the enterprise because there's no real way AA could succeed as a business without in some way violating its liberal editorial principles. I think that's crazy. And this point is entirely separate from anything about Air America. But whether you define your market as liberals or Democrats, or some mix of the two or whatever, I don't buy -- based on principle and experience -- that you can't publish or broadcast stuff those folks like and make a profit at the same time. The thought that the two aims are in some necessary conflict has always struck me as one of the most effete, self-justifying and pathetic parts of the liberal psyche in this country. Hopefully, one on the decline.I offer this passage NOT as your cue to bitch about AA's on-air personalities. (Certain readers will do just that anyways. Certain readers are as predictable as the minute hand of my watch.) What irritates me -- has irritated me for as long as some of you have breathed -- is the self-destruct mechanism built into the progressive mind-set. If a thing makes money, it must be evil. Of course, if a thing does not make money in this society, it dies.
Honorable death attracts progressive purists. What can be more pure than death?
This purity principle exists outside the political realm. A novelist acquaintance tells me that certain of his literary friends instinctively snarl at any project which stands even a slight chance of finding an audience and putting a few bucks in the publisher's bank account. If you are a real writer (these people insist), you will bray incomprehensible poetry in a coffeehouse basement to a tiny gathering of sixteen sneering skeletal aesthetes draped in black and choking on clove cigarettes. Anything other than that constitutes a rape of the Muse.
As with writing, so too with painting, acting, music -- progressive radio. We have, in short, an Orwellian dilemma: Success is failure; failure, success.
What surgical operation can remove this idea from our skulls?
15 comments:
This is simple. The problem with Air America is that Al Franken is a total bore who is totally full of himself. No wonder hes screaming for more money because money is all he cares about.
NWO gatekeeper Randi Rhodes is the one I cannot stand. Everyone thinks that she is a great enemy of Bush but you notice she never talks about how the fall of the twin towers breaks every single one of the laws of physics. She's just another gatekeeper working for the NWO. Air America was the name of a CIA operation in Vietnam.
You want to talk about gatekeepers? The worst of the lot is Rachel Maddow. Remember, Zionist Larry Silverstein confessed that he was going to PULL World Trade Center 7 just before he blew it up. I tried to say this once on Maddow and she shut it down on orders from you know who. Remember how poppy Bush talked about the New World Order in 1990?
As for Josh Marshall, he is a Zionist who only cares about money and is a gatekeeper per excellance. The other big gatekeeper is Ed Shultz. The Democrats are just as corrupt as the Republicans, so don't vote, it only encourages them.
AIPAC snoremonger Al Franken is in bed with the Democrat party one hundred percent, which is the same as saying that he's in bed with Bush. Remember that Nancy Pelosi said impeachment was off the table. When Al and George get together, I wonder who plays catcher? If Air America were with saving they'd have people like Jim Marrs and Professor Steven Jones on.
It's no wonder Err America is going down the tubes. Dont blame mismanagement that's just an excuse. Blame sellout whores like the the Young Turks. Their ads suck.
Joe,
I see what you mean about certain readers. Anyway, let me take a shot at your question with a little story.
Riffing a bit on some of Paul Hawken's ideas, I like to start, er, discussions with my business friends by asking the question, "Why are you in business?"
Invariably the answer I get is, "I'm in business to make a profit." To which I reply, "Bullshit." This answer often pushes the dialog a wee past mere discussion, and I've got their full attention.
"You're in business for only two purposes," I tell them, "to make a (1) product or supply a (2) service,"
"Profit," I continue, "is permission from the market to keep providing that product or service and perhaps, if conditions are right, expand the enterprise.
Most persons, even top executives, still think like elementary school children. They think "profit" is some kind of reward for their good behavior, and a kid can't have too many gold stars. Not true, profit is permission to stay in business. All rewards should derive from the experience of satisfying customers with excellent products and outstanding services.
The other bug-a-boo plugging up the liberal mind-set, is this notion that corporate managers are justified as they seek to maximize profits in order to maximize value for the shareholders. This behavior persists even contrary to evidence that concentration on near term quarterly P&L can yield long term instability.
A better approach would be to concentrate on optimization of business parameters, as opposed to maximization of corporate and shareholder's objectives.
Just a couple of suggestions for dialog re-framing.
J i O
It's not so much that making money violates the purity of heart of a liberal, but that progressive politics are incompatible with the appeals to emotion, the race and gender baiting, the outrageous claims of a Coulter or a Robertson, etc., which apparently proves so compelling for advertisers, station-owners and some audiences.
And the truth is, Rush Limbaugh *is* far more entertaining than Al Franken, and a far more skilled propagandist. Limbaugh has an incalculable in this respect: he's not bound by either truth or decency. Franken on the other hand -- while not particularly well informed -- recognizes that he has a basic duty to the truth, as would any progressive (or decent person).
So, in that sense, yes: progressives can't easily compete for advertising dollars. On the other hand - to hark back to earlier argument we've been having -- maybe Noam Chomsky would bring in some more people. The right-wing audience gets a taste of the extreme, every hour or every day. The "left" isn't really represented on radio. In any other industrial democracy, Franken is a centrist.
Joe..One of the most "left" commentators on radio is Thom Hartmann. His analysis of the corporate hijacking of America is profound and educational ..but..even he has slipped a cog or two with a book he co wrote that suggests somehow that Castro put the hit on Kennedy because of some secret plan the Kennedys was about to trigger to eliminate Castro. Geez..who paid Thom to write such a tale and how much was he paid? Money is a problem once you have an audience of any size in this country. "They" (you know those guys dressed in black allah the time) either buy you or they will bury you.
My motto is wait patiently until they start wrangling among themselves over the baubles and trinkets stored in the cave, then quietly I will sneak up on them and roll a huge stone over the mouth of he cave and set off lots of rockets like the 4th of july..again.
Then what will we do? No more evil to play with ..no more battles to engage in. What a conundrum.
What surgical operation can remove this idea from our skulls? you asked..
I say remove this tumor and we will recover our health.
"The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum."
- Noam Chomsky
What is left of the Left?
A little history lesson is needed. After WWll the right was given a better workshop, with better and fancier (and more expensive), tools to play with. The right brought into the govrnment highly skilled assasins and mind control experts from Nazi Germany and Japan as well as super scientific exotic weapons scientists..right? No secret
Then Joseph McCarthy with the backing of that same right and the bought out media moguls, decimated the intelectual left in the “Party" trials in the senate and the press. Godby left
. But the left has a way of aborning anew and a new generation arose with Kennedys lamp burning oh so brightly..so..away he must go along with all those others that get in our way..right?
So the lingering question is “what is left of the left”?
If Chomsky is a serious candidate for progressive action we have truly lost our wits. He needs to be exposed for the posier he is so we can get on without the likes of him and find new ideas and debaters.
I beleive we can do it because we have good on our side
Below are some more reasons why we need to erase that gNoam from our pantheon of local heroes.
Chomsky and his good friend and soulmate on the JFK case, Alexander Cockburn went on an (orchestrated?) campaign at the time of Stone’s JFK to convince whatever passes for the left in this country that the murder of Kennedy was 1) not the result of a conspiracy, and 2) didn’t matter even if it was. They were given unlimited space in magazines like The Nation and Z Magazine. But, as Howard Zinn implied in a recent letter to Schotz defending Chomsky, these stances are not based on facts or evidence, but on a political choice. They choose not to fight this battle. They would rather spend their time and effort on other matters. When cornered themselves, Chomsky and Cockburn resort to rhetorical devices like exaggeration, sarcasm, and ridicule. In other words, they resort to propaganda and evasion.
CTKA believes that this is perhaps the most obvious and destructive example of Schotz’s “denial.” For if we take Chomsky and Cockburn as being genuine in their crusades--no matter how unattractive their tactics--their myopia about politics is breathtaking. For if the assassinations of the ‘60’s did not matter--and Morrisey notes that these are Chomsky’s sentiments—then why has the crowd the left plays to shrunk and why has the field of play tilted so far to the right? Anyone today who was around in the ‘60’s will tell you that the Kennedys, King, and Malcolm X electrified the political debate, not so much because of their (considerable) oratorical powers, but because they were winning. On the issues of economic justice, withdrawal from Southeast Asia, civil rights, a more reasonable approach to the Third World, and a tougher approach to the power elite within the U.S., they and the left were making considerable headway. The very grounds of the debate had shifted to the center and leftward on these and other issues. As one commentator has written, today the bright young Harvard lawyers go to work on Wall Street, in the sixties they went to work for Ralph Nader.
knowing, that our last progressive president was killed in a blatant conspiracy; that a presidentially appointed inquest then consciously covered it up; that the mainstream media like the Post and the Times acquiesced in that effort; that this assassination led to the death of 58,000 Americans and two million Vietnamese; to us that’s quite a consciousness raiser. Chomsky, Cockburn and most of their acolytes don’t seem to think so.
In the ‘80’s, Bill Moyers questioned Chomsky on this point, that the political activism of the ‘60’s had receded and that Martin Luther King had been an integral part of that scene. Chomsky refused to acknowledge this obvious fact. He said it really wasn’t so. His evidence: he gets more speaking invitations today ( A World of Ideas, p. 48). The man who disingenuously avoids a conspiracy in the JFK case now tells us to ignore Reagan, Bush, Gingrich, Limbaugh, Stern and the rest. It doesn’t matter. ...
... what Probe is trying to do here is not so much explain the reaction, or non-reaction, of the Left to the death of John Kennedy. What we are really saying is that, in the face of that non-reaction, the murder of Kennedy was the first step that led to the death of the Left. That’s the terrible truth that most of these men and organizations can’t bring themselves to state. If they did, they would have to admit their complicity in that result.
then the Gnome says..
"There's by now a small industry on the thesis that the administration had something to do with 9-11. I've looked at some of it, and have often been asked. There's a weak thesis that is possible though extremely unlikely in my opinion, and a strong thesis that is close to inconceivable. The weak thesis is that they knew about it and didn't try to stop it. The strong thesis is that they were actually involved. The evidence for either thesis is, in my opinion, based on a failure to understand properly what evidence is. Even in controlled scientific experiments one finds all sorts of unexplained phenomena, strange coincidences, loose ends, apparent contradictions, etc. Read the letters in technical science journals and you'll find plenty of samples. In real world situations, chaos is overwhelming, and these will mount to the sky. That aside, they'd have had to be quite mad to try anything like that. It would have had to involve a large number of people, something would be very likely to leak, pretty quickly, they'd all be lined up before firing squads and the Republican Party would be dead forever. That would have happened whether the plan succeeded or not, and success was at best a long shot; it would have been extremely hard to predict what would happen."
I leave you with this tune from our dusty library of Americana
"Oh give me a home where there is no more Noam
where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard any more of the word form the Chosky cause he is absurd".
See what I mean, folks?
Some people have emailed me with veiled, or not so veiled, accusations that, in a previous post, I allowed the CD pseudoscientists temporary "free speech" in order to boost my stats. In fact, I was simply trying to be gentlemanly. Hopsicker and I had attacked that position in that post, and I wanted to allow proponents a chance to respond. I did not even read most of what the critics had to say, since the stench of stupidity was pretty nauseating.
Now those same pseudoscience aficionados feel emboldened to publish their nonsense in places where it does not belong. The above commentary proves the point.
I wrote a simple post about what I consider a self-destructive attitude. Only one or two people attempted to address that topic. The rest veered off into weirdness. A dull and predictable sort of weirdness.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: The CD buffs are religious zealots. They are missionaries who do not leave your doorstep even when you yell "Go away!"
As objective traffic tools will tell anyone, my stats go DOWN when this conspiratorial crap appears. And it's not as though I make any money on this site.
If you people think I'm hungry for a wider audience, think again. For Christmas, I want fewer but better readers.
As a matter of established fact, the dominant ideology (money/power) in this country rewards right-wing purists while punishing the same on the left. (character assassination, actual assassination, marginilization)
We need purists on the left to provide a counterweight or else everything ends up being done in the service of acquiring more money/power.
Oh.
Oh well, the solution is not to further marginalize left purists (NOT the CHOMSKYITES!) but to create more!
In the small liberal arts college I attended as an art major we were drilled with the impressionist maxim "art for art's sake". So the art majors all dreamed of making a living as uncompromised fine artists. Such was the dream. The reality of course was that those who managed to stay in art either became art teachers or graphic/commercial artists. No one that I know of became an independent, work as they want, when they want, uncompromised "art for art's sake" artist. That type of artist is (to use a Midwest colloquialism) is as rare as hen's teeth.
sofla said...
I don't think the left is uniformly against profits. Are Ben and Jerry making no money? To the contrary, of course they are making money, at least, so far as I've heard.
Can an employer make MORE money sometimes by doing things progressives would disagree with? Perhaps, but that isn't the same as saying progressives or lefties don't want to make money in a business. It's more that there are some things, perhaps many things, they won't do for profit, while they nonetheless remain in pursuit of profit.
There's an entire investment service dedicated to investors in search of good profits who also want to keep their consciences clear, providing them with a list of corporations who maintain green policies, are respectful of women and minority rights in employment, avoid those suppliers who use slave labor in foreign countries, and etc.
So, not only do leftist/progressives invest with profit in mind in the stock market, so too are many publicly traded corporations following leftward/progressive principles in business (while remaining profitable and a worthy investment for others).
Fact is, however, profits are not the end-all/be-all to business. Start up companies are expected to lose money for 3-5 years, and then just break even for additional time, until they get their business model more fully implemented. Sometimes very mature companies (auto, airlines, e.g.) suffer lengthy periods of extensive losses, with no profits, yet continue in business.
Then, you have the entire range of 'non-profit' corporations as yet another counterexample. Besides those that are formally intended to be 'non-profit,' any number of businesses make only enough money to pay the 'owner' a salary, almost as if he owned the job rather than a company, per se. That is NOT a profit, exactly, but countless 'business owners' are in this exact boat, and find it worthwhile to continue, even when there isn't really any profit at all, once a reasonable salary is paid the owner for his time and effort.
GANDAR says:
You want to talk about profits? how about the profits made by certain gatekeepers who are paid big bucks to keep a lid on certain facts, such as no jet flew into the pentagon?
PROPAGANDA: THE ART OF HALF-TRUTH
Elite Zionists, whether neo con, liberal or leftist, control American perception as well as policy. This accounts for Michael Moore's wide distribution and publicity. You simply cannot be heard in the mainstream media unless you toe the Zionist line.
Despite his working class pose, Moore lives in a million-dollar Manhattan condo and sends his kids to private schools.
"Fahrenheit 911" wants you to believe the Saudis and the Bushes colluded to profit from war and oil. It shows that the Bushes and Bin Ladens had a long-term business relationship and the Saudis fund terrorism.
Moore fails to mention that Rothschild agent financier George Soros also bailed out George W. (Now Soros is out to defeat Bush.)
"Fahrenheit 911" pretends Osama bin Laden was responsible for the attack on the World Trade Center.
Moore doesn't mention evidence linking the attack to the Mossad, and elements of the CIA and FBI which all work for the Illuminst bankers.
He doesn't mention evidence "Saudi terrorists" are still alive, no passenger jet hit the pentagon, and the WTC collapse was a controlled demolition.
"Fahrenheit 911" indicates that George Jr. wasn't specifically told about the WTC attack in advance. The movie focuses for seven minutes on his reaction to the news. He is furious and seems to be thinking, "Those bastards screwed me."
To be effective, propaganda must contain an element of truth. War and oil profit was the payoff for Bush and his gang. In return, they will take the fall for the war's unpopularity.
911 and Iraq are about bigger stakes: the step-by-step enslavement of mankind.
The Illuminati (or Moriah Conquering Wind as they prefer to call themselves these days) is a very secretive group of occult practitioners who have been around for thousands and thousands of years. It is not a boys' club or a group of adults parents trying to get some excitement in life; this is something much bigger than that. This is a very well structured organization consisting of people in extremely High Places. Those people are the Super Wealthy, who stand above the law. Many of them don't even appear on the list of the wealthiest people in the world - it's that secret.
Official history is merely a veil to hide the truth of what really happened. When the veil is lifted, again and again we see that not only is the official version not true, it is often 100% wrong.
Take the Rothschild's, the bloodline formerly known, among other names, as the Bauers, one of the most notorious black occult bloodlines of Middle Ages Germany. It became known as Rothschild (red-shield or rotes-schild in German) in the 18th century when a financial dynasty was founded in Frankfurt by Mayer Amschel Rothschild working in league with the Illuminati House of Hesse and others. They took their name from the red shield or hexagram/Star of David on the front of their house in Frankfurt. The Star of David or Seal of Solomon is an ancient esoteric symbol and only became associated with Jewish people after the Rothschild's adopted it for themselves. It has absolutely no connection to "David" or "Solomon", as Jewish historical sources confirm. The Rothschild's are one of the top Illuminati bloodlines on the planet and they are shape-shifting reptilians (see The Biggest Secret).
Guy de Rothschild, of the French House, heads this bloodline dynasty today. He is one of the most grotesque exponents of trauma-based mind control, indeed the top man according to many of those who have suffered mercilessly under his torture. I am always loath to use the world evil, but if evil is the reverse of live, Guy de Rothschild is thoroughly evil. He stands for the opposite of life. He has been personally responsible for the torture and death of millions of children and adults, either directly or through those he controls. He conducts satanic rituals, as all these bloodlines have always done, and goodness knows how many human sacrifices he has been involved in.
If what I am saying is wrong, Guy de Rothschild, then take me to court and lets reveal the evidence. You are a multi-billionaire and you control the courts and the media. I have next to nothing. I should, therefore, be a pushover. So come on, Mr. Rothschild, lets have you. Lets take these claims into the public arena and have you and me in the witness box. Make my day.
Already I can hear the clamor gathering to condemn me as "anti-Semitic" because the Rothschild's claim to be "Jewish." Organizations like the Anti-Defamation League and B'nai B'rith have already made strenuous efforts to label me in this way for exposing the Rothschild's and to stop me speaking in public. (See elsewhere on this website) How funny then that both organizations were created by, and continue to be bankrolled by, the Rothschild's. Just a co-incidence, nothing to worry about. B'nai Brith means, appropriately, "Sons of the Alliance" and was established by the Rothschild's in 1843 as an intelligence arm and to defame and destroy legitimate researchers with the label "anti Semitic." Many of their speakers openly supported slavery during the American Civil War and today they seek to condemn some black leaders as "anti-Semitic" or "racist! Every year, the Anti Defamation League award their "Torch of Liberty" (the classic Illuminati symbol) to the person they believe has served their cause the most. One year they gave it to Morris Dalitz, an intimate of the notorious Meyer Lansky crime syndicate which terrorized America. Perfect choice.
Of course, the strength of feeling that fans the flames of condemnation against anyone dubbed "anti-Semitic" today is the sickening persecution of Jewish people by the Nazis of Adolf Hitler. To expose or question the actions of the Rothschild's or any other Jewish person or organization is to be called a "nazi" and "anti-Semitic", that all-encompassing label which has discredited so many researchers and stopped them having the opportunity to speak in public because of protest by unthinking robot radicals and the refusal of venues to host their meetings. I have had this from time to time, not least in eastern Canada thanks to a campaign by B'nai B'rith and the Anti-Defamation League (which spends it's entire time trying to defame people). Both organizations, I repeat, are Rothschild created and controlled.
How strange then, that as I have documented in And The Truth Shall Set You Free and The Biggest Secret, along with endless other researchers and scholars, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were created and funded by the Rothschild's. It was they who arranged for Hitler to come to power through the Illuminati secret societies in Germany like the Thule Society and the Vril Society which they created through their German networks; it was the Rothschild's who funded Hitler through the Bank of England and other British and American sources like the Rothschild's Kuhn, Loeb, bank which also funded the Russian Revolution.
The very heart of Hitler's war machine was the chemical giant, I.G. Farben, which had an American arm that was controlled by the Rothschild's through their lackeys, the Warburgs. Paul Warburg, who manipulated into existence the privately-owned "central bank" of America, the Federal Reserve, in 1913, was on the board of American I.G. Indeed Hitler's I.G. Farben, which ran the slave labor camp at Auschwitz, was, in reality, a division of Standard Oil, officially owned by the Rockefellers, but in truth the Rockefeller empire was funded into existence by the Rothschild's. See And The Truth Shall Set You Free and The Biggest Secret for the detailed background of this and other aspects of this story. The Rothschild's also owned the German news agencies during both World Wars and thus controlled the flow of "information" to Germans and the outside world. Incidentally, when Allied troops entered Germany they found that the I.G. Farben factories, the very core of Hitler's war operation, had not been hit by the mass bombing and neither had Ford factories - another Illuminati supporter of Hitler. Other factories nearby had been demolished by bombing raids.
So the force behind Adolf Hitler, on behalf of the Illuminati, was the House of Rothschild, this "Jewish" bloodline which claims to support and protect the Jewish faith and people. In fact they use and sickeningly abuse the Jewish people for their own horrific ends. The Rothschild's, like the Illuminati in general, treat the mass of the Jewish people with utter contempt. They are, like the rest of the global population, just cattle to be used to advance the agenda of global control and mastery by a network of interbreeding bloodlines, impregnated with a reptilian genetic code, and known to researchers as the Illuminati.
Indeed, the Illuminati are so utterly obsessed with bloodline, because of this reptilian genetic code, that there was no way that someone like Hitler would come to power in those vital circumstances for the Illuminati, unless he was of the reptilian bloodline. If you look elsewhere on this website you will see how the same bloodline has held the positions of royal, aristocratic, financial, political, military, and media power in the world for literally thousands of years. This is the bloodline that has produced ALL 42 of the Presidents of the United States since and including George Washington in 1789. It is the bloodline of the runaway favorite to win the 2000 election, George W. Bush. The World War Two leaders, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, were of the bloodline and also Freemasons and Satanists. They were manipulated into office, and their country's war effort funded, by the Rothschild's and the other Illuminati bloodlines.
http://www.rense.com/general70/handy.htm
"We shall unleash the Nihilists and atheists, and we shall provoke a formidable social cataclysm which in all its horror will show clearly to the nations the effect of absolute atheism, origin of savagery and of the most bloody turmoil. Then everywhere, the citizens, obliged to defend themselves against the world minority of revolutionaries, will exterminate those destroyers of civilization, and the multitude, disillusioned with Christianity, whose deistic spirit will from that moment be without a compass (direction), anxious for an ideal, but without knowing where to render its adoration, will receive the pure light through the universal manifestation of the pure doctrine of Lucifer, brought finally out in the public view, a manifestation which will result from the general reactionary movement which will follow the destruction of Christianity and atheism, both conquered and exterminated at the same time."
-Albert Pike, on a plan for world conquest, written in a letter to Mazzini dated August 15, 1871.
We have assumed that the entire quantity of jet fuel from the aircraft was injected into just one floor of the World Trade Center, that the jet fuel burnt with the perfect efficency, that no hot gases left this floor and that no heat escaped this floor by conduction.
We have found that it is impossible the jet fuel, by itself, raised the temperature of this floor beyond 280° C (536° F).
Now this temperature is nowhere near high enough to even begin explaining the World Trade Center Tower collapse.
It is not even close to the first critical temperature of 600° C (1,100° F) where steel loses about half its strength and it is nowhere near the quotes of 1500° C that we constantly read about in our lying media.
"In the mid-1990s British Steel and the Building Research Establishment performed a series of six experiments at Cardington to investigate the behavior of steel frame buildings. These experiments were conducted in a simulated, eight-story building. Secondary steel beams were not protected. Despite the temperature of the steel beams reaching 800-900° C (1,500-1,700° F) in three of the tests (well above the traditionally assumed critical temperature of 600° C (1,100° F), no collapse was observed in any of the six experiments."
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