Kudos to John Nichols & The Nation, Independent Journalists fighting $$ in Politics!

[RiverLover]

Ok, I'm a little late to the party here. I'm sure many here at DU are familiar with John Nichols(The Nation) who co-wrote Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America.

I wasn't & maybe I'm not alone?

I just stumbled on this video with Mr Nichols & had to share it with you guys. Not finding it on youtube or vimeo, embedding it isn't possible. To me, this is the most concise & brilliant video in 3:55 short mins (although all are really good)~ http://www.c-span.org/video/?c4535160/money-politics

Here are some other fantastic talks by John Nichols which are available to embed & he's spreading the word & standing up to the massive takeover of our govt by Moneyed Interests~

Between John Nichols & Katrina vanden Heuvel, I'm thinking of all the independent news sources, The Nation should be our most treasured & supported.

Ie

5/14/2015, front page of The Nation
Why Progressives Want to Rewrite the Rules—and the Story—of the US Economy
Zoë Carpenter

...Let’s dig into some of the choices that have been made, particularly starting in the 1970s, which is when the report says the trend really began. Can you explain how they led to concentration of wealth at the top and stagnation at the bottom?

People use the term “deregulation,” but what we really mean is re-regulation. It’s not like there are fewer rules, necessarily. It’s that they are enforced by different people, or they work in favor of private interests or established interests.

Look at the growth of the financial sector, which contributed to the housing bubble. We know that’s destructive. Previously finance was kind of a boring job. It was well paid, but it wasn’t superstars. We look at corporate governance; CEO pay fundamentally shifts in the 1980s. Before it was something like 30 times the average salary. Now it’s something like 300 times the average salary. [In 1978 the CEO-to-worker pay ratio was about 30 to 1. In 2013 it was 296 to 1.] It’s a huge shift. And there’s a huge shift of power to shareholders, which means there’s a new kind of short-termism in a lot of the industry.

Taxes came down for the very wealthy, which gave them a huge incentive to rent-seek. If the top tax rate is 80 percent, which it was in the 1970s, a board might not pay out a superstar salary, because 80 percent is immediately going to go to the government. But now there’s a huge incentive to inflate CEO value and we don’t see any real economic boost.

There’s the active dismantling of the labor unions, and then there’s the benign neglect of not updating labor rules. The economy became much more service-oriented, and those jobs—which have traditionally been considered female—do not have strong labor protections. There’s a question of whether or not we’re going to enforce standard labor rules for those sectors. Women’s labor force participation has been falling, though it’s increasing in our peer countries. That’s entirely the result of institutions, like not having access to pre-K.

All of these changes very clearly impact inequality, but there’s no evidence our economy is stronger....

http://www.thenation.com/blog/207329/why-progressives-want-rewrite-rules-and-story-us-economy

Will close this tribute, blathering w/e you want to call it, with John Nichol's latest article from May 5th~

Can Bernie Sanders Break Through the Status Quo?
http://www.thenation.com/article/206521/bernies-race

("He already has&quot

[Jackpine Radical]

1. John remains a Wisconsin boy, born not far from where I'm sitting.

We see quite a bit of him around here, actually. He's something of a regular at the Eau Claire JJ Dinners.

[RiverLover]

2. Well how about that.

Thanks for sharing this! I would have guessed NYC or DC. If you see him, please tell him how grateful we are for his work!!

[Jackpine Radical]

4. If I recall the story correctly, he was born in Owen.

His parents were on the train & "things happened" a little sooner than they had anticipated. I think he also says he is something like a 4th generation Cheesehead.

[enough]

3. Glad to see Nichols stressing the fact that the media are prime beneficiaries of all the new money.

The media have a direct pipeline to the vast sums of political money being poured into elections. They have possibly more to gain financially from the new political money than any other sector. And yet they are expected to report the campaigns accurately.

http://www.thenation.com/article/156391/money-media-election-complex#

Snip>

But it's not just corporations and consultants who are setting the new agenda. The most important yet least-recognized piece of the money-and-media election complex is the commercial broadcasting industry, which just had its best money-making election season ever. Political advertising has become an enormous cash cow for it—roughly two-thirds of the campaign spending this year flowed into the coffers of TV stations; the final figure is likely to be well above $2 billion. Whereas in the 1990s the average commercial TV station received about 3 percent of its revenues from campaign ads, this year campaign money could account for as much as 20 percent. And station owners are not missing a beat; thirty-second spots that went for $2,000 in 2008 were jacked up to $5,000 this year, according to the Los Angeles Times. Much of this money will go to stations owned by a handful of Fortune 500 firms. No wonder station owners oppose campaign finance reform; their lobby role in Washington is similar to the NRA's in battling bans on assault weapons.

Yet commercial broadcasters receive monopoly licenses for their scarce channels at no charge from the government under the condition that they serve the public interest. By any account, the most important role of our media is to make the electoral system serve the voters, who, as surveys continue to demonstrate, rely on local TV as their main source for news. However, local TV covers far less than it did two or three decades ago; according to the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California, a thirty-minute newscast at election time has more political advertising than campaign news. Even when politics does get covered, the focus, increasingly, is on "analyzing" ads. And the cumulative effect of endless advertising overwhelms what little remains of independent on-air coverage. What incentive do commercial stations have to cover politics when they can force candidates and players to pay for it? Nice work if you can get it.

snip>

[RiverLover]

5. Thank you for pointing this out, enough. Great article!

It's very true. I actually have first-hand knowledge of the $$$ signs advertisers get in their eyes around election time. Only the Super Bowl & The Olympics come close.

I'm not in advertising, but a peripheral industry. That industry is terrified by cord-cutters(such as myself, ironically.) The more we can break away from traditional TV, the better off we will all be.

[KoKo]

6. Thanks for pulling this together...

Plus, don't hear much about Media Reform these days in posts on DU. It was a huge topic in the former days on DU. Many of us from those early days (who saw the rise in influence of Big Money and Consolidation of Ownership) either cut the Cable Cord or sought out online sources for our news. And, the devices now available to watch other sources on our laptops or TV have made more sources available but it's still not enough. We need to take back our media because the bias and sometimes outright propaganda still has more people watching it for news and information than all of our alternative sources. Money in our Government, Citizens United and Deregulation has allowed our Govt. and Media to be bought by those who don't have any interests except themselves at heart.

Glad to see John Nichols reporting on the Big Money. Will check out his latest from your post.

[swilton]

7. Lots of meat in this thread

bookmarking for later when I can digest it all.