US has no censorship but is more messy than us.
U.S has a more sophisticated technique of controlling
information flow. The control is more indirect. Ours is more
direct.
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
Fox
News Won't Air Wall Street Protester Who Humiliates Fox
News
http://www.good.is/post/fox-news-won-t-air-wall-street-protester-who-humiliates-fox-news/?utm_source=outbrain
(Credit: Wikipedia/AP)
Call him Frankenstein Delano Roosevelt. America’s only four-term
president is the real, if inadvertent, founder of today’s
Republican Party, not Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican
president. Most of what seems puzzling about today’s GOP makes
sense, once you realize that it is dominated by former Democrats
like Rick Perry.
The regional base of the Republican Party is the South and the
West—the historic base of Thomas Jefferson’s Republican Party, the
Democratic-Republicans that succeeded it and the Democrats of the
1840s through the 1960s.
As a result of the civil rights and counterculture revolutions of
the 1960s, several of the historic constituencies of the
Jefferson-to-Johnson Democrats—chiefly white Southerners and
Westerners, and European-American “white ethnics” in the North and
Midwest—abandoned the Democratic Party, which is now dominated by
groups that in earlier generations were predominantly
Republican—Northern white Protestants and blacks, along with
Latinos, whose numbers have become significant in national politics
only recently.
Today’s Republican Party can be viewed as Franklin Roosevelt’s New
Deal coalition, minus blacks, white progressives and the remnants
of organized labor. The New Deal was supported by a heterogeneous
coalition that included Southern and Western business interests,
the Northern white urban working class and many Wall Street
financiers.
These groups did not necessarily like each other, but they formed a
common front against the protectionist, isolationist Republican
Party of Herbert Hoover, which represented the mostly white
Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) capitalist elite of the
Northeastern-Midwestern industrial core.
The Southern and Western business boosters wanted federal financing
for infrastructure and economic development projects in their
region. The largely Catholic Northern white working class wanted
higher wages.
The anti-Republican Wall Streeters objected to Hoover-era
protectionism and wanted to liberalize trade, so that foreign
countries and businesses could repay their debts to Wall Street by
exporting to the U.S. market. From the 18th century to the 21st,
New York City like other financial entrepots has always favored
free trade.
During their period of political domination from the 1930s to the
1980s, the New Deal Democrats gave these constituencies what they
wanted. The South and the West were developed by federal
infrastructure projects like dams and interstate highways.
During World War II, the federal government, dominated by Southern
Democrats, built military factories in the South, Texas and West
Coast, creating a rival to the older “Rust Belt” in the new “Gun
Belt.”
The New Deal Democrats were good to the white ethnics, too. In the
northern industrial states they supported unions, allowing
unionized workers to join the middle class and buy houses in the
postwar suburbs.
And following World War II, the New Dealers liberalized American
trade, a goal sought not only by Wall Street but also by
internationally competitive U.S. corporations that sought markets
in Europe and Asia. (For reasons of Cold War strategy, the U.S.
later sacrificed the interests of its manufacturers by turning a
blind eye to unfair trade practices in Japan and other American
allies—but that is another story). Once you understand this
history, otherwise puzzling aspects of the Republican right become
clear.
The determination of the Republican Party to maintain high levels
of defense spending whether threats justify those levels or not
makes sense, once you realize that military spending is the major
engine of economic growth in much of the South and the West, thanks
to FDR and his successors.
Federally funded defense plants and military bases coexist in the
South and West with low-wage extractive industries—farming,
ranching and mining. Southerners and Westerners in the commodity
sector have always been opposed to high minimum wages and unions.
The low-wage, labor-intensive sectors in the South and West explain
the GOP preference for low wages, while the Gun Belt explains
Republican enthusiasm for defense spending.
What about the white ethnics in the North? Their parents and
grandparents depended on government and unions to help them out of
poverty during and after the Depression. But thanks to the New
Deal, many of them are now middle class. Government and unions help
other people—mostly other brown and black people—while threatening
to raise their taxes or their costs. Thus the “screw ‘em”
attitude.
And Wall Street? Roosevelt may have denounced “the money changers”
and the Democrats in the 1930s may have regulated the financial
industry, but there were always Wall Street speculators who
supported the New Deal Democrats, many of them Jews like Bernard
Baruch or Irish-Americans like Joseph Kennedy. Wall Street opposed
protection for American manufacturing in 1932 and it will oppose it
in 2012. The Democrats have become more economically nationalist
since the 1970s. But Wall Street has been consistent.
Not only the constituencies but also the policies of today’s GOP
echo those of New Deal Democrats. Consider the cases of
neoconservatism and supply-side economics.
The intellectuals who became known in the 1970s as
“neoconservatives” began as Kennedy-Johnson Democrats and Cold War
liberals. As Republican “paleoconservatives” point out, their
vision of using the U.S. military to promote democracy throughout
the world owes nothing to older Republican leaders like Robert A.
Taft and Herbert Hoover and everything to the crusading rhetoric of
Woodrow Wilson and John F. Kennedy.
Supply-side economics, too, is a version of Keynesianism that has
Democratic roots. Right-wing supply-siders point to Kennedy-Johnson
cuts in income tax rates as the model for what became the Reagan
and Bush tax cuts. When combined with the perpetual defense
spending favored by politicians from the Southern and Western Gun
Belt, tax-cut Keynesianism becomes military Keynesianism. The
Southerners and Westerners prefer military Keynesianism to
infrastructure Keynesianism, particularly investment in mass
transit and inter-city rail, projects that, they fear, will line
the pockets of Democratic city councils and Democratic labor
unions.
Even the hysterical denunciation of the New Deal as socialism or
fascism is a legacy of mid-century conservative Democrats in the
South and West, who saw no contradiction between supporting New
Deal policies of infrastructure spending, farm price supports and
defense spending, while bitterly denouncing the minimum wage,
Social Security, and other reforms that would give the captive
white, black and brown working classes in their regions greater
bargaining power.
The fact that today’s Republican Party is mainly a coalition of
former right-wing Democrats explains its curious relationship to
the past. Based in the former Confederacy, its leaders
understandably do not play up Abraham Lincoln or the long line of
Yankee Republican presidents who succeeded him. At the same time,
the anti-New Deal rhetoric that today’s Republicans inherited from
their conservative Democratic precursors prevents them from
acknowledging the paternity of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Unable to claim either the Republican past or the Democratic past
as their heritage, today’s ex-Democratic Republican constituencies
have settled on pretending that their party sprang into existence
out of nowhere in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan. Who, it
should be noted, told Dan Rather that Franklin Roosevelt was his
favorite president, and who voted for FDR four times.
http://www.salon.com/writer/michael_lind/
