Reportorial neutrality no longer applies

Georgia Logothetis did a pundit roundup for Daily Kos. She quoted an article of Paul Krugman, who asks:

Why do a small number of rich people exert so much influence in what is supposed to be a democracy?

Yeah, it’s campaign contributions. It’s also the revolving door of lawmakers taking jobs in consulting firms and think tanks.

And it’s also the news media in which the “usual rules of reportorial neutrality” no longer apply when the subject is rich people and their opinions.



Mark Sumner of Daily Kos takes another look at the problems of concentrated wealth.

First, he tackles a misconception pushed by the wealthy:

When Michael Bloomberg runs a commercial saying he “created 400,000 jobs,” it needs to be remembered that he didn’t create anything. He employed 400,000 people, all of whom contributed labor toward increasing Bloomberg’s wealth.

Then Sumner shows a graph of the wealth of the 15 wealthiest people in America compared to the cost of some large public projects. One of those projects is the Superconducting Super-Collider, something really important to researchers into atomic physics. But it was canceled mid construction because tax cuts shifted too much money from public projects to private pockets.

But we’re in an age in which the least wealthy person on this list, Mackenzie Bezos [at $36 billion], could pay for the invention of the first practical fusion reactor, the operation the Large Hadron Collider, and the building the Freedom Tower—and still be a billionaire. And she would then own everything of value that any of those projects produced.

I had to look up Freedom Tower. It is what replaced the World Trade Center in New York.

A reply by RETIII says that in the first gilded age (we’re now in the second) private wealth was much richer than the federal government. The gov’t had to go to private sources to pay for a war or to recover from a Wall Street crash. That has shifted, where the government funds the war and the market recovery.

Properly understood then, the mania against taxes on the Right is not simply about retaining money but restoring power to the wealthy class away from democratic government. A second gilded age is precisely the goal, not a side effect.

As for that infrastructure week that hasn’t happened for three years RETIII says the holdup is Republican ideologues want to put public assets in private hands, so wealth can be generated from them. It’s a dispute about ownership.