Watching cable news, one notices that any mention of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez requires a statement that she is “too far to the left.” Several of the Democratic Party candidates for president are also identified as “too far to the left.”
What they are really saying is that any attempt to address the public interest is too far to the left. They never say a candidate is too far to the right, even those, like President Trump, who embraced Nazis and Ku Klux Klanners in his Charlottesville rhetoric.
The right is sacrosanct in that the billionaire class supported avidly by corporate media are mostly ignorant right wingers. One notices that billionaires are ignorant only when they open their mouths (Trump, Shultz, Gates, Charles and David Koch, Bloomberg, Soros, Buffett etc.), particularly on the subject of how to address poverty. They seem to ignorantly think that being a billionaire makes one an expert on everything.
This doesn’t mean they’re not experts on greed, tax laws, or how to screw the public interest, they are all very good at these things.
But an interesting thing about all of this is the way the mainstream press, on its knees kissing billionaire butt in promoting continued plutocracy, attack Ocasio-Cortez, as though she is the greatest threat since the asteroid which knocked off the dinosaurs.
It’s not surprising that she is attacked by Democrats. Her modest stands, in promoting health care for all, an end to the Empire and wars, and taxing the rich would be centrist, after all, in other major industrialized nations, and these stands show how bankrupt is the Democratic leadership on public interest ideas that appeal to the masses.
But the Republicans have also been attacking Ocasio-Cortez, and this is where the phony “two-party system” exposes its corrupt underbelly.
If the Republicans really cared about winning rather than maintaining the corporate, “two-party system,” they would embrace Ocasio-Cortez, and encourage leftists like her to run for president, since they claim they are “too far to the left,” and have no chance to win. But they constantly attack Ocasio-Cortez, and even liberals who don’t go quite as far as she on these issues, like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
Republicans say Warren and Sanders are “too far to the left.” Why wouldn’t they welcome Democrats who are unable to win? This exposes the two-party scam. What they obviously fear is that people “too far to the left” would win, if allowed funding and media exposure, particularly if contrasted by typical Republican candidates.
The main goal for Republicans, as well as Democrats allowed by the system to head the presidential ticket, is campaign funding, and that comes from the polluters, defense cheats, and banksters (look at how Hillary Clinton was funded). You don’t get this money if you are even slightly left of Joe Biden.
Their secondary goal is the free media exposure denied to any candidate slightly left of Joe Biden.
When corporate media say a candidate is “too far to the left,” they mean the candidate opposes plutocracy too much and is a danger to the ruling billionaires, so would never get the massive campaign financing to run the deceptive TV ads, or the free media exposure which drowns out all other candidates, as did Hillary and The Donald in our last presidential election farce.
The Donald boasted that he bought Hillary when she ran for the US Senate, by donating to her campaign. We had a “choice” of voting straight plutocrat for Trump or voting for a billionaire sycophant like Hillary in the last presidential race.
As I write this, Cory Booker is announcing he will run for Prez on TV. He doesn’t point out that Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner hosted a fundraiser for his Senate campaign, or that Jared’s corrupt billionaire father funded the Democrats until 2015, when he gave $100,000 to Trump’s political PAC.
It’s all a kind of hopeless, nebulous slush. The Democrats are there to provide the illusion of an opposing political party. Trump himself was a pro-choice Democrat when it was convenient for him.
No mention of the public interest, in any meaningful way, is now allowed in the mainstream press. One must ridicule health care for all as though it is a preposterous idea, despite the fact that other industrialized nations have it and provide better health care at far less cost. Corporate viewpoint media do this without admitting that we allow thousands of people to die annually for a lack of health care. This includes corporate media physicians like Sanjay Gupta, who recently ridiculed single payer health care on CNN (31 Jan. 2019).
No mention of retreating from Empire is allowed in the mainstream press, opposing a thousand overseas military bases and the ongoing bombing of dozens of nations endlessly, with only retired generals allowed on cable news to tell us how to think– peace advocates not allowed for a second opinion.
No mention of a living wage is meaningfully allowed in the mainstream press, as if it were a bizarre idea. The same media ridicules workers for not saving money. We saw this during the recent government shutdown, when corporate media “journalists” stuck their microphones before those who acted as though it were the fault of government workers for not being able to pay their rent and being forced to go to food banks for help. Many of these cable news “journalists” make 7 figure incomes and obviously have no idea how the peasants live.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not yet publicly embraced a single thing that is “too far to the left,” in other industrialized nations. She’s only spoken out in favor of the public interest. When 26 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.75 billion, it is time to oppose such capitalism and replace it with sensible alternatives.
The mainstream press do all they can to keep the masses ignorant on behalf of their owners, board members and advertisers, and it’s worked up to now. But as the wealth continues to roll up into the hands of fewer and fewer people, and homelessness increases (now two years running, despite mainstream press reports of a “booming economy), it may be impossible to sweep it all under the rug and avoid violent revolution.
They could begin to let the public know that it is not “too far to the left” to feed America’s children as one in five goes hungry at some time during the year. It’s not too far left to have basic health care in the wealthiest nation on earth, as thousands die for a lack each year.
I’ve watched corporate media for decades as they keep repeating the line that anyone who gives a damn about social justice, peace, a clean environment, or anything decent, is too far to the left, when it is they who are too far to the right.
Jack Balkwill has been published from the little read Rectangle, magazine of the English Honor Society, to the (then) millions of readers USA Today and many progressive publications/web sites such as Z Magazine, In These Times, Counterpunch, This Can’t Be Happening, Intrepid Report, and Dissident Voice. He is author of “An Attack on the National Security State,” about peace activists in prison.
