I'm sorry, Thom but what is it that YOU are giving us?

You made google news today with this:

Thom is a lefty progressive who agrees with Bernie Sanders more than he agrees with Hillary Clinton, but has something to say that progressives should probably heed.

“It’s unimaginable the damage a Republican presidency could do…I’m very concerned that a lot of progressives are beating up on Hillary Clinton…but wounding a cadidate with the base is a very dangerous business.”

Media is the ultimate dumbing down of America. I am among 23 men over 65 who have morning get togetheres over coffee three times a week. The group is com[osed of close to equal proportions of liberal and conservatives. I think we all agree it's not about cookie cutter politicians with salesman personalities, nor about a lefty righty BS particanship. I think we all agree it's a Bernie Sanders thing. Bernie is the only candidate saying what we want to hear and the message is gaining mementum everywhere. During the last presidential election it was Ron Paul but now it's bernie even among conservatives because even conservatives are feeling the economic desparity and identifying the causes of it.

U.S. mass media is what it is -- a privatized version of Josef Goebbels' Nazi German Ministry of Propaganda -- because it is owned by the same people who own the two major political parties and the federal, state and local government.

Whether labeled Ruling Class or One Percent, this cabal of capitalist aristocrats has the same absolute power formerly possessed by Adolf Hitler. They are the tyrants who not only rule us but shape our consciousness by their ever-more-total control of information.

Nor is there any hope for improvement. The triumphant imperial trade coalition -- which defied the will of the U.S. electorate, further slashed wages, sent still more jobs abroad and gleefully flung millions more U.S. workers into inescapable poverty -- did everything in its power to serve the One Percent by blatantly destroying the last remnants of the American experiment in representative democracy and the so-called "American Dream."

The One Percent's long-term, global goal is replacing the policy-making functions of local, state and national governments with zero-tolerance edicts handed down by dictatorially empowered boards of corporate managers. Under this system, the only purpose of traditional "government" is to maintain the goon squads of police and soldiers essential to enforce the corporate decrees.

For a prophetic view of existence beneath the boots of the resultant global imperium, look at the wretched conditions that prevailed in the coal towns of Appalachia, where the mine owners also owned everything else -- houses, stores, schools, clinics -- and every person as well.

As part of its march toward the global corporate imperium, the One Percent's more immediate goal is the reduction of the United States to fascist oligarchy -- actually a uniquely USian form of Nazism in which the corporate cabal has replaced the individual despot, with the mandatory ideology a combination of (implicitly white) exceptionalism, Christian intolerance and Ayn Rand socioeconomic savagery. And -- yes -- exceptionalism with its implication of divine-right rule is indeed the 21st Century version of the Nazis' concept of ubermenschen or Master Race.

IDespite the implicit whiteness of exceptionalism, it is no accident the present U.S. figurehead is Barack the Betrayer, who makes no secret of being the tyrannical cabal's most cravenly obedient servant thus far. Indeed it is the Betrayer who personifies the One Percent's strategy and tactics. He is not just the most malicious liar ever to occupy the presidency, but in truth a hard-Right Republican who used his membership in the Democratic Party and his own skin color as false flags to scam the U.S. electorate into imagining he might provide desperately sought relief from the succession of One Percent vassals who have lorded it over us since the coup of 22 November 1963.

The One Percenters need the U.S. not for its (now-surplus) workforce or its (irremediably poisoned) agricultural lands, but rather for the goon-squad function of its war machine.

Mass media's function in this unprecedented deceprion was merely to provide its imprimatur, thereby giving whichever Big Lie whatever appearance of truth the One Percent demanded.

As Goebbels repeatedly affirmed to Hitler, taking control of policy is only half the victory essential to total dictatorship. Full victory is achieved only when policy and the public mind are each controled with identical absolutism -- precisely what happened in Germany after 1933, precisely what has happened here in the United States in the aftermath of 22 November 1963, the subsequent decade of political murders. and the Reichstag Firer of 9/11 -- a slow-motion coup that gathers speed and momentum as it approaches its terminal events.

Which, by the way, explains the death-blow to representative democracy dealt by today's anti-worker trade vote. The national mobilization against fast-track and the Trans-Pacific Partnership made it clear a vast majority of the voters -- I have seen figures ranging from 55 percent to 80 percent -- oppose so-called "free trade." But, exactly as I predicted would happen, Congress dropped any and all pretence of representing anyone but the One Percenters, and even here in Moron Nation, such a brutal sklap-in-the-face cannot be portrayed as anything other than what it was.

This means the era of charade democracy is over, and the era of unapologetic tyranny is upon us.

But I wonder how U.S. mass media -- the world's first fully privatized government propaganda machine -- will play the story. Will they try to explain it as yet another manifesttion of how 9/11 "changed everything"? Or will they merely try to flush it down the Orwell hole?

How did Obama betray anyone? He never promised rainbows and unicorns. and within the obvious limitations of dealing with the two right wings in Congress, Obama has maintained the agenda he discussed as a candidate.

This generation is stuck because we can't answer this: Who are The People, and what do they want? Pols and media recognize only the consumer and campaign donor class, but this is a segment of the population that has been shrinking for years. The poor and middle class, workers and the jobless, are deeply divided, pitted against each other. The "masses" have been divided and subdivided by class and race. The rich are now doing to the middle class what the middle class already did to the poor, and there's nothing we can do about it.

DHBranski's claim Obama "has maintained the agenda he discussed as a candidate" is patently dishonest nonsense, typical of what we will be hearing from Democratic Party operatives as the election campaign intensifies.

Obama the Orator ran in 2008 on three pivotal promises. These were: (1)-restoration of our constitutional rights; (2)-single-payer/public-option health care; (3)-enactment of the Employee Free Choice Act (which was the last and final hope of ever restoring Working Class power via the U.S. political system).

But as soon as Obama was elected -- not even inaugurated -- he shape-shifted into Barack the Betrayer, the hard-right Republican he has repeatedly proven himself to be.

Moreover -- and I am convinced this is the ultimate purpose assigned him by his Ruling Class masters -- he has thoroughly discredited not just the Democratic Party but the aspirations of all U.S. people of color.

The damage he has done -- done not accidentaly but with obvuious malice of forethought -- may take generations to undo.

And if it fosters -- as I fear it will -- the 2016 Republican landslide that will formally and forever redefine the United States as unapologertically fascist, the ruination wrought by Obama is literally forever because, whether by envronmental depredation, thermunuclear war or both, it will assure our species' extinction.

In this sense he has betrayed not just his obvious constituency. Inasmuch as he is the de facto emperor of the world, therefore responsible for establishing and perpetuating the four freedoms articulated by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Freedoms ), Obama has literally betrayed all humanity.

Yeah, I wonder why these sunday talk shows don't say anything.

It's because Archer Daniels Midland pays for the show and donates to the candidate.

It's the same companies paying the same candiates.

In order to be a Sunday Talk Show Host, you need those candidates on your show. So, you trade access for truth, and you get the usual pablam of horse racing, gossip and superficial nonsense.

Reply to Lorin, post #9: I can’t speak for everyone, but I don’t think Obama’s flip-flops discredit people of color. Not for me anyway. As for the Democrats? No argument there!

President Nixon, along with every goddam president we’ve had since Carter, has each furthered the damage in a significant way. It didn’t even start with Reagan; ole “Ray-gun” merely accelerated the process. They all sucked in my book, every friggin’ one of them.

Until this election period has run its course, I still refuse to let go of the hope Bernie Sanders has brought me. In the short time he’s been in the race, his numbers have been steadily swelling. Hope beats despair; might as well grab onto it whenever I can.

Good to see ya here, Loren…. always a treat.

I think it’s pretty clear from the comments in this blog that people who can still think logically are able to pin down how media corruption is playing out. The question that society is refusing to address, however, is WHAT IS THE FUNDAMENTAL CAUSE? After years of researching the breakdown of communication in modern society I found some profound, but disturbing answers.

One of the earlier discoveries, which has now been confirmed by others, was that human language is not primarily learned as a function of logic. Instead, our brains first remember speech patterns in relation to fundamental drives like smell, taste, pain, hunger etc. The response of a “brain pattern match” to something we hear is first a signal we sense as an emotion. Associating these matches with higher concepts like logic comes much later in the hearing process. This results in MAJOR LIMITATIONS to how humans hear and speak language. The major limitation is that MOST people are not able to broadly understand logical or complex issues, especially when the emotional content is high and the information comes quickly. They are not able to intuitively envision many interacting variables at one time. The best they can do is what I call SINGLE SENTENCE LOGIC.

As the media, and politicians, are driven to capture wider audiences, they DUMB DOWN their material. They get the largest audience by being clever with sound BITES – i.e. single sentence logic. The problem is, for these kind of thinkers, both listeners and talkers, the logic of each sentence does NOT have to be consistent with the logic of other sentences.

Another irony of this process is that it is NOT related to being SMART or wise. Many people who think only in sound bites have a very high ability to memorize those single logical sentences. They can string them together over a very wide range of material very quickly. Human evolution has put high value on that ability. In the world of the cave man, a large memory of single pieces of logic, mostly learned through hard won experience and SUPERSTITION, and very fast recall, came in very handy for staying alive. The irony is that, in a modern complex society, these skills are detrimental. They are detrimental because they do NOT include the ability to link the separate pieces of logic together. That is, they can NOT comprehend many complex variable interacting at the same time. Let me re-emphasize this: MOST PEOPLE CANNOT INTUITIVELY COMPREHEND COMPLEX ISSUES. This is why two political parties, and a media driven by the notion that there are “always two sides to an issue” can see the same facts in such different ways. They just draw on different collections of superstition and random experience.

The irony continues when, to counter challenges, both sides are driven to GET MORE DATA. The irony is, it doesn’t help! Because listeners don’t know how to simultaneously process lots of variables, providing more doesn’t help. It creates more confusion.

Of course, people don’t want to admit it. As modern culture grew in complexity, and people were barraged with more complexity, they created “street smart” workarounds to get by. While it worked for awhile, while society was still sparse and primarily agricultural, we have now reached a level of technology and social system complexity where the workarounds don’t work anymore.

With the radical extremes we hear from our government leaders and the media, it is not a stretch to say those discussions are not distinguishable from what we would hear in an insane asylum. THIS IS WHAT THE MEDIA WON’T TELL YOU. Tragically, it is because those who control it aren’t able to understand it themselves.

This problem with Language is discussed further at A3society.org/Language

Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump should have already been dropped by the media as possible Presidential candidates. The media is well aware that Bernie has never sought a large audience to tell us what we wish to hear, making his message and his Office ineffective. The Donald's outrageous opening Presidential campaign statements reveal his lapse of lucidity, which immediately disqualified him as a candidate. Infotainment media is a curse that must be removed in the interest of better society. Shame on us for having allowed this damaging industry to have survived for so long!