Nina-Bytes: Ahead of the Curve

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

Personally, I have never quite mastered the important internet art of relentless self promotion. In fact, that might be why this blog generally tops out of a few hundred readers. If there is one thing I've learned in my time publishing analysis online however, it's that sometimes you have to toot your own horn a little; if only because nobody is going to do it for ya. So today we're going to try something a little different; I'm counting coup with some help from bigger voices in the progressive media sphere online. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article arguing that most mainstream media coverage of the reconciliation bill fight in the US Senate amounted to complicit codswallop and "corporate-sponsored fan fiction for lanyards." In that article I noted that anarcho-capitalist billionaires and corporate America had poured millions into stopping the Build Back Better Act at all costs. This including buying off Democrat Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema; whose support is necessary to pass the bill. Finally I observed that corporate media was engaging in active propaganda on behalf of their rich owners by pretending this was any sort of good faith political dispute. The whole mystery was a stalling tactic, and as of now it appears to be working.

Well, it turns out that I'm not the only person who noticed:

 

TV Reports on Manchin and Sinema Leave Out Their Financial Conflicts 

In this October 22nd report by Spencer Snyder over at Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, we find documented evidence that the willful blindness I observed in print media carries over to cable news coverage. In a review of twenty-one news programs covering the reconciliation bill fight (including programs from major players in corporate cable news), the author identified a total of forty-five seconds spent discussing conflict of interest issues; also know as corruption. Indeed, ABC's "Good Morning America" actually had former Senator Heidi Heitkamp on to admonish folks for questioning Manchin and Sinema's motives in stopping the bill. 

The article also goes on to detail Manchema's flagrant conflicts of interest; including donor money, Machin's one-step-removed coal empire, and Sinema's obviously corrupt relationship with a lobbying group in cahoots with Big Pharma. Finally, Snyder hammers away at cable media for spinning a narrative that ultimately sides with corporate power and the two corrupt Senators, while blaming the left for refusing to surrender. This is all great stuff, but given that I already wrote all of these same things, you probably could have guessed I'd feel that way.

 

Joe Biden Is Poised to Gut His Own Political Agenda; and the Democrats’ Electoral Prospects

In this October 21st article by Luke Savage in Jacobin, the author looks at the same corruption and coverage I did, and comes to the same conclusion; the fix is in and the media is in on it. In fairness to Savage, he then uses this discussion to point out that the Democratic Party (and Joe Biden; who was tepidly supporting the progressive position when I published) is also complicit in letting corporate lobbyists and two Senators hijack the negotiations. From the article:

"In exposing the deep dysfunction of America’s political institutions, the reconciliation battle has also, yet again, laid bare the structuring contradiction of the Democratic Party as a vehicle for real reform. Having begun the process by proposing trillions in big programs and new spending, the party’s subsequent negotiation with itself looks set to yield something both ideologically feeble and electorally counterproductive.

Among other things, that’s because the Democratic coalition is less a coherent ideological formation than it is a Frankenstein hodgepodge of progressives, public interest groups, liberally minded voters and corporate lobbies — with the latter, by virtue of its influence in DC, bottomless reserve of campaign cash, and de facto purchase of many elected representatives almost invariably carrying the day."

 

Now, I want to be clear; I'm absolutely not accusing either of this guys of plagiarism. What I'm suggesting you to do is look at the dates all three of these pieces were published, and then ask yourself one simple question. Why wouldn't someone who wanted to be informed on the cutting edge of left wing political analysis, subscribe to ninaillingworth.com, this blog, and all the social media services listed in my signature at the bottom of this post? 

Exactly, such a decision would be inexplicable; which is why you should sign up if you haven't already my friends.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

Nina-Bytes: Rigged Games, Supervillains, and Neofeudalism

 

Editor's note: Nina-Bytes is a weekday blogging series that features short analysis and commentary on articles from around the web.

 

U.S. Billionaires Got 70% More Wealth Under COVID. They Didn’t Deserve Any of It.

A little over a week ago, I published a blog that briefly touched on the historically unprecedented levels of financial inequity in our society. In that post I theorized that this phenomenon was both a contributor to, and side effect from, our society's ongoing transition to a state of capitalism I, and others, have been calling neofeudalism. In this Jacobin article by Luke Savage, we get a glimpse of what that actually looks like in the context of an ongoing class war during a pandemic; and it's predictably infuriating. 

Using data from an Institute for Policy Studies report, Savage reports that the combined wealth of America's billionaires has risen by seventy percent during the pandemic. This includes the minting of a hundred and thirty one new billionaires; creating a situation where just under seven hundred and fifty people "now own almost 70 percent more wealth than half the country combined." Although Savage doesn't mention it, the report also notes that this comes during a pandemic when eighty-nine million people in the U.S. have lost their jobs. "We're all in this together" my shiny pink ass.

 

Although the numbers are staggering, it's tempting to write them off as pandemic profiteering. As Savage notes however, the real driving force behind this intense concentration of wealth during the pandemic is keystroke hot money injected into financial markets by central bankers. In other words; this is plutocratic disaster capitalism on steroids. As nearly everyone on the left predicted, the pandemic relief strategy of just giving rich people a bunch of money to buoy the stock markets, worked out well for rich people and not so much for the rest of us.

 

This pandemic windfall is of course on the heels of, and in addition to, the unprecedented transfer of wealth granted to America's rich by Donald Trump's barely-remembered tax cuts. Furthermore, all of this wealth concentration must be understood in the context of a lobbying fight against even moderate tax increases, that these same rich people are waging against Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act as we speak. Clearly, it's always a good time to be rich in America; which brings me to my larger point.

 

Unfortunately, explaining precisely how I think neofeudalist capitalism works is beyond the scope of this blog. I can however easily tell you what it looks like. And what it looks like is a society rigged so that no matter what happens, good or bad, the billionaires always win. It looks like a society where the political solution to every crisis, or even the absence of a crisis, is to give billionaires more public money. Most importantly, it looks like a society prepared to herd eight billion people off the ecological cliff so knock off supervillains like Jeff Bezos and Charles Koch can pocket unheard-of wealth for just a little while longer. 

 

I have seen the enemy, and he is Musk.

nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”