FOCUS: Bernie Sanders | My Plan to Protect Independent Journalism; Death and Destruction: This Is David Koch's Sad Legacy
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27 August 19
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27 August 19
FOCUS: Bernie Sanders | My Plan to Protect Independent Journalism
Bernie Sanders, Columbia Journalism Review
Sanders writes: "Real journalism requires significant resources."
Bernie Sanders, Columbia Journalism Review
Sanders writes: "Real journalism requires significant resources."
EXCERPT:
At the same time, corporate conglomerates and hedge fund vultures have bought and consolidated beleaguered local newspapers and slashed their newsrooms—all while giving executives big payouts. Gannett’s proposed merger with Gatehouse Media, for instance, will consolidate hundreds of publications under one mega-corporation’s control and slash $300 million worth of “synergies”—which is often corporate-speak for layoffs. Matt Pearce, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, notes that “the new Gannett/Gatehouse CEO is getting $4.5 million in bonuses and stock just for walking in the door.”
At precisely the moment when we need more reporters covering the healthcare crisis, the climate emergency, and economic inequality, we have television pundits paid tens of millions of dollars to pontificate about frivolous political gossip, as local news outlets are eviscerated.
The negative effects are predictable: according to a working paper by researchers at Notre Dame and the University of Illinois, when newsrooms are hollowed out, overall costs to taxpayers rise, because there are fewer reporters scrutinizing government transactions. A study published by Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity, a non-partisan forum, found that, despite millions of Americans struggling to survive, budget-strapped “newsrooms have not turned their attention to poverty.”
'This is the tragic mindset of many a rightwing oligarch: the toils, the woes, the maladies of humankind are irrelevant - unless they happen to me, or perhaps my close family members.' (photo: Justin Lane/EPA/Shutterstock)
Death and Destruction: This Is David Koch's Sad Legacy
Alex Kotch, Guardian UK
Kotch writes: "Koch Industries, a private company, is the United States' 17th-largest producer of greenhouse gases and the 13th-biggest water polluter."
Alex Kotch, Guardian UK
Kotch writes: "Koch Industries, a private company, is the United States' 17th-largest producer of greenhouse gases and the 13th-biggest water polluter."
EXCERPT:
This is the tragic mindset of many a rightwing oligarch: The toils, the woes, the maladies of humankind are irrelevant — unless they happen to me, or perhaps my close family members. I’ve never struggled to live on $7.25 per hour, so why is it a problem? An ailment has never caused me to go bankrupt, so why would anyone possibly need government subsidies to pay for life-saving medical care? Climate change has never directly affected my life so I’ll keep on denying that humans have anything to do with it. Even though I inherited a business and a fortune, I earned every cent of my astronomical net worth. If you worked as hard as I have, you would have what I have, too.
Koch epitomized this grotesquely selfish mentality during his 1980 vice presidential campaign on the Libertarian ticket, when he ran on abolishing Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, welfare benefits, the minimum wage and the Environmental Protection Agency. He put $2m of his own money into the effort and campaigned to ax all campaign finance laws so he and his brother could maximize their bloated political influence without any pesky rules attempting to honor the constitutional premise of American elections: “one person, one vote.”
It is this cruel mindset that was the real cancer plaguing David Koch. It wouldn’t kill him, but it would spread itself into university curricula, the halls of Congress, regulatory agencies, and the White House. It possessed the unfathomably rich who came before him, and it will infect the opulent oligarchs who come after him. It is the cult of anarcho-capitalism, the faithful worship of the divine free market that has shined so brightly on Koch and his family. If only we could do away with government altogether, we’d become a true utopian society: a handful of corporate monarchs ruling over billions of wretched serfs who toil away until their deaths, faithfully adding zeros to the quarterly revenues of the select few at their own fatal expense.
Not only did Koch help unleash countless metric tons of greenhouse gases from the earth, he was a key funder of climate change denialism, stiff-arming scientists in order to further plunder the earth he was destroying. Revelations in Christopher Leonard’s new book, Kochland, show that Koch played an even greater role in funding climate change denialism than we previously knew. As we careen towards a climate catastrophe that seems more and more likely to happen within the next 11 years, we can rightly pin a portion of the blame on David and his brother.
In the current decade, while Koch-backed state legislators made sweetheart deals with oil and gas companies and crippled the progress of solar companies, Koch beneficiaries in the House and Senate were cutting taxes, undoing federal regulations, and doing all they could to kick millions of Americans off of their health care coverage.
Koch may have kept some arts institutions on life support, bolstered the Natural History Museum’s dinosaur exhibition, or employed cancer researchers, but we must not let these philanthropic acts cover for a billionaire whose corporate greed has gravely endangered the future of the planet and the human species. This is the point of these seemingly magnanimous contributions: to cast the Kochs in a positive light, deflecting criticism of Koch Industries’ shameful business practices and defending the legacy of a heartless robber baron.
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