Down to the Lizards

Yep, them's the ones. *shudder*

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ex-nostradom25.livejournal.com

But I CAN admire your phrase "what in the king-hell fuck" and am already thinking of ways to use that in a sentence. lol

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HAW! I must admit that I got "king-hell" from Hunter S. Thompson. I expanded it into "what in the king-hell fuck" all by myself, though. :)

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You must have missed the big "Property Is Theft" series in the NY Times.

No... you're right, there's nothing even close to liberal bias in the major media. It's a tribute to public ignorance that so many people get away with saying that there is.

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Right, exactly. People babble this "liberal media" crap like a mantra without ever producing any evidence of what they're talking about. It's the world's biggest urban legend.

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I absolutely think there's a liberal slant to much of the news media, and I can assure you than I am not ultra right wing or ignorant. How many times do you hear that tax cuts for the rich are unfair, when the rich are the people who carry the bulk of the tax burden? What about the view that evil corporations shouldn't benefit from tax cuts, when it only takes a basic understanding of economics to know that corporations don't pay taxes? How about the idea that Bush's economic plan is going to result in a record deficit? How many times have I read that, and not heard one peep out of the media about the simple fact that the percentage of deficit is only relevant when compared with the amount of income (and therefore you'd have to go all the way back to 1983 to get anything close to a record deficit.) Does the media ever point out that tax cuts equal increased government revenue, not the other way around? No, of course not. Because there's a liberal slant to much of the media, and because they count on the public's ignorance of these things.

And that's just the topic - you know, money - that gets my panties in a wad the most. If you want evidence, I'll be more than happy to send you news articles every single day.

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Is there any way that I can say "I don't buy it" and still persuade you not to send me news articles every day? :) Seriously, I probably shouldn't have brought it up. My suspicion is that, with so many media outlets out there, people can perceive any kind of bias they want to. My biggest beef is with the idea that the media should be totally neutral and objective. I tend to believe Hunter S. Thompson's statement (yes, him again) that "there is no such thing as objective journalism." And yes, of course I'm aware that journalists DO claim to be objective, and if they claim that, then they should actually strive toward it.

I dunno. I'm not good at debating this kind of thing, especially with friends. So like I said, I probably shouldn't have brought it up.

On a totally different subject, I've been meaning to thank you for recommending Nicholson Baker to me. I love his stuff! I've sped through The Mezzanine and The Fermata recently, and I've just checked out Room Temperature and The Size of Thoughts from the library. (God, it's good to have access to a good library--a first for me.)

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Oh, I agree with you that you can find a bias on both sides, but I tend to think the liberal slant is more prominent in mainstream media than than the conservative slant. I wasn't serious about sending you articles, but I could honestly send you several examples every day ... but then I tend to hone in on that kind of thing because it pisses me off so much. Even Katie Couric pisses me off. Blah.

Anyhoo.

I'm glad you like Nicholson Baker! I haven't read The Fermata or Size of Thoughts yet. Just Vox, The Mezzanine, Room Temperature and The Everlasting Story of Nory. Super cool.

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You gotta gotta gotta read The Fermata!

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I will definitely check it out then!

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Hmm. Maybe I don't have "a basic understanding of economics" (I've generally been OK with that, since I don't think what gets taught as economics has much to do with how things really work), but what do you mean when you say that corporations don't pay taxes?
And how does it relate to the fact that corporations do pay taxes?

Also, I think "the system," in terms of where taxes get cut and where they get raised, rewards the rich for being rich and punishes the poor for being poor. I don't think, in any significant sense, the rich carry an unfair burden of taxation. Maybe you lose a million of your five million dollars to taxes. Well, so what. If I lost $10 of my $50, I'm in worse shape.
I admit I'm not arguing from facts here. But anyway, in general, corporations/the wealthy receive what are essentially tremendous welfare payments, and public subsidies, and you don't hear complaints about this from major media. However, you can always catch complaints about poor individuals being on the dole.

Also, Clinton, who was hardly a real liberal, got raked over the coals for crimes of a personal nature, and it was discussed every day on the news, but they don't spend a lot of time telling us about the much more serious crimes and shady deeds in the past of virtually every person in this Republican cabinet. Or of the Bush family's historical ties with the Nazis, or anything like that. Or, for that matter, the fact that a lot of the Republicans calling to impeach Clinton for his sex life had also had broken marriages.

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Only wealth can be taxed, and only individuals hold wealth. Corporations do not. A simple explanation of the tax trail: http://www.federalbudget.com/corpwelfare.html (http://www.federalbudget.com/corpwelfare.html)

The top 1% of income earners in this country pay 29% of all taxes. The top 5% pay 50% of all taxes. Saying "so what" to the fact that the rich can afford to lose more than the average person does not make it fair or right - though you did say they carry an unfair burden of taxation, so I'm not sure what your point is.

Clinton wasn't impeached for his sex life. To suggest that is completely absurd.

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So, corporations pay taxes, then the amount they paid then comes out of consumers' pockets? I don't think that makes it inaccurate to speak of corporate taxation. In fact, the underlying point here seems to be that individual taxpayers get screwed over so corporations can flourish.
Even if the wealthiest Americans bear an unfair burden from this screwing (which I have a hard time believing), I still think they're getting along better than the rest of us. I found (e.g., AP, "Income of the Richest Up 157%," Alan Fram, May 31, 2001) that, since 1979, the richest 1% in America has had their wages go up by 157%, whereas the bottom 20%, after adjustments for inflation, now earn $100 less per year than they did 20 years ago.
I see the irony in my quoting the AP, given our original argument about the media. But, although some accuracy does go out on the wires, I think the mass media, being tools of the wealthy, expend much energy downplaying the blows rained down on the poor and the advantages given the wealthy. And distorting the danger posed by Iraq, and on and on.
And Clinton may have been (partially) impeached for more than his sex life - such as lies he told about his sex life. Well, he was up to worse things than that. But still, I don't think he was up to anything worse than what went on in the Reagan and Bush I administrations, and those guys not only weren't kicked out of power, but many of them have now been let back into power, and the media rarely says boo about it.

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It's not just that consumers eventually pay the price of corporate taxes in the cost of goods. When a corporation has to pay a dollar on taxes, that dollar doesn't go into increased wages, investment, stock payouts, etc. One way or the other, it's the individual who pays, not the corporation.

We can argue figures all day long. No one here is arguing that it's better to be rich than poor and that the rich can afford to pay more in taxes. I would imagine that's why they do. However, if you're coming from the viewpoint that it's acceptable to take money from those who earn it by force and give it to those who do not, then there's pretty much nothing more I can say to you except that I find that a fairly sickening view.

On the media issue - a) I stated pretty clearly that I think there's a bias on both sides. I just think in mainstream media, there's more of a liberal bias. You aren't giving me anything besides digging up dirt. If you want to go that route, then yes, I will give you a number of examples to support my point. I rather thought we were talking about more relevant issues here though. To talk about the Bush family's ties with Nazism is irrelevant. That's about as relevant as telling my child, whose father is black, that my family owned slaves. It's pointless. It has no bearing on anything.

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I am "coming from the viewpoint that it's acceptable to take money from those who earn it by force and give it to those who do not" if you mean taking the money from people who used force to earn it and then giving it to those the force was applied to.
It's a dangling modifier, donchya see. Perhaps a subconscious acknowledgment of the moral character of those wealthy in question.

In terms of just "digging up dirt," I think dirt is one thing, and irrelevance is another. If, when George Herbert Walker Bush first ran for public office, a reporter would have asked, "Is it true that your father and grandfather built a significant part of the family fortune by trading with and financing fascist powers in Europe?", I might argue that would have been significant dirt to dig up. At least more significant than all the time and space the media dedicated to what a "wimp" he was and how much he disliked broccoli.
Even more significant dirt would involve questioning the illegal activities members of W's cabinet took part in in the '80s and early '90s. Because those people are still in power, see? It doesn't have a 200-year cushion (the time issue being the only reason I can possibly see for your saying slavery has "no bearing on anything" nowadays).

Mr. Grapple Muscles, I'm sorry to bring all this acrimony into your comments page.

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I don't follow you on the first part. I thought we were talking about taxation.

I also have to say that I don't entirely follow you on the second part there either. I don't really see how it's relevant that Bush's grandfather made money off Nazis. I can't exactly tell if you're saying it's relevant at this point or not. Anyway, I don't think it is. It did occur to me after I wrote that about slavery that I should have used a more recent event as context - one being that my grandfather had a drawer full of bullets that he saved to his dying day for the race war he believed was coming. My point was that what my ancestors did has no bearing on me as a person, nor should what Bush's ancenstors did have bearing on him as a person or a president. I was just trying to put it into context there.

I agree that it's relevant that members of a president's cabinet have been involved in illegal activities. Then again, I could raise the same questions about our former president.

It's been an interesting conversation.

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