A lot of legacy outlets are divorcing them selves even further form audiences with this kind of behavior, sticking to obviously manipulative narratives even as they see public opinion unaffected my them.
He’s successfully built a cult of personality, and is slowly consolidating that by alienating those who are willing to question him. We’re just lucky his mask off isn’t all that charismatic or convincing.
I mean, it’s an old idea and philosophy in the US, that of the old manor lords of Maryland, Virginia and Delaware. They held their liberties in great regard, but only their liberties.
See because they’re special and the smartest bestest people who should definitely be trusted to make decision with no oversight. How could they possibly be where they are now if they were not the most suited to make decisions? I mean I’m sure if they make bad decisions I’m sure the market will punish them and take away their power, and if it never does well then clearly they’ve never made a mistake! Oh and if they do something wrong and the market doesn’t punish them, well clearly it’s because regulations distorted the holy will of the market! There for we should get rid of more regulations, because that will definitely improve the situation.
So, a big part of the profitability of oil and other fossil fuels, is that they’ve found a use for just about every by product, so instead of dumping unused distillates or ash in to rivers and getting their asses sued to high heaven for killing everything down stream, they just sell it to you and tell everyone else what to do with their industrial waste. (before the introduction of the internal combustion engine gasoline type oil products were dumped in to rivers, hence all the stories about rivers catching on fire).
Plastics and polymers were a godsend for these companies in the 50s 60s and 70s as regulations on environmental impacts started to get taken seriously. Plastic helped these companies skirt around accounting for waste and pollution of their byproducts by getting consumers to buy them. Suddenly, it’s not the oil company dumping ton after ton of refinery waste in to rivers, now it’s you average every day consumer dumping a plastic bag here and styrofoam container there, and municipal governments footing the bill for burying it all .
This goes hand in hand with the “please recycle” stuff, suggesting to the average person that if they’re worried about all this oil byproduct everywhere, well that’s your fault for not putting it in the blue bin to make it go away.
It’s a systematic gaslighting of the average person to convince them that this mounting catastrophe of oil pollution is actually their fault. Out right banning of oil derived plastic packaging (excluding medical stuff) would probably make significant strides to breaking the backs of the oil companies that are feeding the climate catastrophe
I mean, I don’t think this is an accurate reading of how this is going to pan out. The kind of people who support them are not the kind of people who listen to the outlets that are going to go after them. Even supposedly “left wing” tv news hates their guts. And the places that AIPAC has influence in are not the place that “the squad” supporters particularly care about.
Like, they can throw a lot of money at this problem but it’s going to just show how much influence old news media and old political organizations have lost with certain demographics in the US country.
It’s pretty astonishing how bad at their notional job, of shaping public opinion, the corporate media is getting given how divorced from it’s narrative the general public is becoming.
As the population ages, the younger generations get smaller and the older generations get proportionally larger. More and more money will need to go to paying for retirees life styles, and they expect retirement life styles like those of their parents who had the benefit of a working age population multiple times the size of the retired population.
In the quest for this, often times not are that this is the effect they are seeking, they have to take control of ever more of the most message resources to force younger generations to do more work for less pay to support them.
It’s really quite absurd how bad it is in DC. There are so many smart professional young woman here and for so many they’re met by a wall of suit wearing conservative lobbyists who think that all they need to do to “get a wife” is be marginally successful in work, “strong”, and not respectful, kind, intelligent or responsible.
Finally good to have someone with real reach in the news space not just parrot the dumbest thought terminating clichés possible.
The media coverage of the situation in general has just been embarrassing. Like, ether they don’t know how to responsibly cover a topic anymore, or they are simply trying to push narratives anyway they can.
A year ago is still new. It’s been a creeping problem since well before covid even. Edging back in to the early days of tablet and phone based card readers.
The new part is every card payment system having a tip option, where as tips used to be a thing you gave a server in cash on the table, then a optional fee addended to a bill at a sit down restaurant to compensate the server (since they were getting payed below minimum wage), this is different though.
Even food providers where there are no servers have “tips” now. Often times establishments do not even choose to have them, they’re just the default on the payment system.
The tip system was always kind of scummy as it was putting the onus of preventing the server from getting kicked out of their home on the customer. Now though, rather than costumers being put on the hook for paying exploited workers, the companies are weaponizing that guilt based system to pad profits even further. Often times those “tips” don’t even end up going to the workers at the restaurant, they go straight in to the companies revenues, and pad the incomes of the payment service companies that get a 1-3% cut of every transaction.
What used to be conceptualized as a way to reward hard work is now just another avenue to scam people out of money. It’s another crack in the wall of a system that is mindlessly sabotaging it’s own justifications. Creating further contradictions.
This leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Like, it a continuation of this narrative that the problem is a lack of units, and that if we just encourage more development the problem will solve it’s self.
But what happens when the developers only build luxury units because that’s the only way to make their investment back in a reasonable time frame due to the absurd cost of land? What happens when those units are just bought up by speculators who refuse to fill them because then they’d have to maintain them and spend time dealing with residents? Sure they have some laws in place requiring the construction of affordable housing along side high end housing, but what are the chances that bit of regulation isn’t going to be the first one to get cut?
The way it’s worded it sounds like the intention is for there to be more units of all price range getting built, but the permitting and regulatory process is not the reason there is a shortage of affordable units. That’s far more to do with gentrification, and private equity artificially inflating demand.
A YouTube channel called nighthawk in light did a video on how to make paint that does this at home using commonly available ingredients