I was listening to an episode recently where they talked about the Lincoln Project for a very long time. But they seemed to focus on the guy actually producing the ads and only once, while reading an excerpt from a bio, did they mention that the tea-party was koch funded. And then they go right back to talking about these ads as if they were a divine and inspired vision of some guy that just so happened to be a former tea-party dickhead.
The people who funded the tea party and rightwing protectionists. Globalism as a boogie man isnt just about thinly-veiled antisemitism, it's also about Koch, Malone and Kroenke not wanting to have to compete with foreign private equity in their scheme to take over every industry. These guys funded and promoted the tea party with their fossil fuel money and media empires. And now the Lincoln Project is the same exact rhetoric and being produced by the same exact people and it seems like people want the story to be the content of the ads instead of the rightwing dipshits behind it.
The way they talk about USPS is the same. They keep talking about whats happening to the USPS as though that has anything to do with how or why it's happening or how we can stop it. Fedex and UPS have been $10+ million a year for decades in an effort to privatize the industry and trump is just the only guy dirty enough to take the heat for it.
Fedex Owner - Frederick W. Smith
Lobbying Totals: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/summary?id=d000000089&fbclid=IwAR1i048MvcLwAzOsSw3q4hZlEqEIpd_RlbnleTG9xYSJ091Tae8Ss75zMXI
UPS Owner - David P. Abney
Lobbying Totals: https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/lobbying?id=D000000081&fbclid=IwAR0JKZf1fWDHewDxfZNTA5rbcoBhUWtPMAeFfSb9aFiQSijZ1LJJeNY6Ln4
if the media (which the chaps are a part of) was framing this as "Look at these two actual people using their money to take away a public good" it could actually change things. I think we need to go on the offense and make every single political issue about the financials beneficiaries.
What the donors want is politics. What politicians say they believe is just pop culture.
I just clicked play on their most recent episode. It's covering HG TV and gentrification. But I'm worried they're going to fall into the same trap as the Chapo guys. HG TV is owned by discovery inc which is owned by John Malone.
Abstractions can't be our enemy. Real people are the oligarchs working against us and EVERY bit of vitriol about this issue of gentrification and HGTV and media bias against certain groups needs to be directed at the very real person who is entirely in charge and the main beneficiary of these businesses AND the political policies that support them.
I'm now ten minutes into Citations Needed without hearing the name of a single villain. Just lots of "targetish" language. "Shady developers", "predatory lenders", etc... are phrases with zero value. We need to go one step further every single time we use phrases like that and say "Shady developers like Jared Kushner" or "predatory lenders like Tom Steyer".
Just now on the recent episode of Citations, the host said "look at donald trumps biggest donors, half are real estate developers"....We need names!
Seriously corporate personhood isn't real. People are the mechanism for political change and the people bankrolling the most violent policies are names that never show up on any coverage, including our favorite leftist pundits.
I think what happens is that these podcasts are serving as an introduction to the shady shit that oligarchs do and to left wing views in general.
The issue is that they never go further. What you're talking about is a combination of investigative journalism and propagandising on behalf of the left. I can see this working well in unions and other collective action organisations where you can get a mass of people to do something about it instead of just consuming like on a podcast.
The issue is what do we do about it. Because even if you find out who these people are and who they're donating to then it's not going to make a lick of difference. Even if we bombard legislators with emails telling them to return the donations, they're going to turn around and say no. No one is going to go out and protest a donation to a politician.
But this is the problem. The right isn't a series of "random things with a rightwing theme" they shit is always tied to larger movements and real direct action. The entirety of mainstream leftism says this same kind of "jumping off point" argument for why they aren't doing more.
And I actually think that isn't even really the issue. What I'm suggesting is harder. It takes more work. It's real easy to say "big pharma is benefiting from...." but you have to do an extra three googles to get to the point where you can say "Michael Pearson the CEO of Valeant is benefiting from...". Finance and corporate structures are designed to make it harder to actually find out who is behind what but that can't be a reason for our side to just give up and be vague, alex-jonesian morons.
I completely agree. And knowledge for its own sake is worth having, it gives you power. I'm legitimately asking what we do with the knowledge? How can we use it to effect change in our workplace or our communities?
EXACTLY! Low-information punditry sucks for its own sake and knowing shit is even dope in a vacuum. There is no good argument against name-checking donors in every single tweet/post/comment. The difference between liberalism and leftism is whether or not it can actually help people. I think communicating this way would actually help people.
Look at the anti-soros campaign. That shit worked. He is now way less effective at whatever the fuck he is actually doing (which probably ain't much) because of the amount of public vitriol directed at him. The shape of that isn't what makes it evil. Evil men should be on the receiving end of vitriol and negative, public attention. It really does matter.
The difference between one person saying "Spectrum Cable is a piece of shit" vs "John Malone is a piece of shit" isn't much. But multiply that difference by a thousand or a million and we have one less oligarch able to act without consequences. But we've literally seen that a thousand or a million people thinking "spectrum is a piece of shit" can NOT help anything at all. Let's just try the other way.
Liberalism is just performative leftism hooked up to right-wing business models. Part of the reason it works is because they can performatively vilify an industry without ever naming the bad actors that finance them. We need to make every single political statement about corruption to include the name of a person benefiting from that corruption. We have to follow the benefit up the chain, not down.
That's a good point about soros actually. Spreading it in memes actually works.
I know it is itself a meme on here but the meme war does have an effect on people's perceptions, especially terminally online boomers. If it's our ideas out on the table in meme form then that can only be good. And if those memes are pointing at overtly corrupt people then that will cause anger. Everyone hates corruption except oligarchs, even the right.