Thanks, @Lookout .

What I found especially intriguing were the views of the Millennium Woman, who was a guest on the program. To my ear, her words contained familiar packaged slogans, which she positioned herself to deliver again and again. These slogans were wrapped a narrative formula that is widely used in the media to smear Socialism. The object of this formula — which was incubated on AM radio — is to embed slogans in American minds that define Socialism as "a dictatorship that forces equal impoverishment upon everyone."

I was curious to see how the panel's hosts, Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball would handle this familiar gambit. To begin, Socialism is declares to be a universally-known evil. This is followed by the repetition of a packaged slogan. A familiar example is: "Wherever Socialism has been tried, it has failed." This is too complicated to challenge.

Next, an inequality or injustice is named, one that Americans suffer after they fall through the tattered US safety net. This injustice can be anything from death caused by medical neglect to the persistent hunger suffered by 25 percent of American children. In this panel, the selected suffering was the inescapable cycle of poverty that holds generations of Americans in its grip. Without upward mobility, which no longer exists in the US, few are able to lift themselves out of poverty. Bootstraps don't work in a gravity well, although they are mentioned, in the narrative formula. as a key aspiration of all Americans.

Finally, the strawman is torn apart by a contrived comparison of the US — not a comparison to other wealthy developed nations, god forbid — but a comparison to a nation that is listed among the world’s most destitute. By comparing poverty in the US to poverty in a country like Sierra Leone, where social and physical horrors are common, we are told that abject poverty in the US looks like a life of luxury to an impoverished person from Sierra Leone. This is never challenged and the discussion ends in victory for the propagandist.

In using this narrative formula, the Millennium Woman implied that either state of poverty would be more acceptable than living under the rule of Socialism. The Socialist solution is to spread the misery to everyone equally, she says, which forces everyone to live like paupers in small, standardized housing units. This, also, is too depressing to challenge.

In the US, Media Monopoly news is allowed to adopt a propaganda-based definition of socialism that matches their political bias. This propaganda can no longer be challenged by a regulatory mechanism like the Fairness Doctrine, which would have exposed the audience to a rebuttal of the propaganda and the opinions that were presented as facts. Or to paraphrase Issac Asimov:

"American political life is nurtured by the false notion that Democracy means that my ignorance about Socialism is just as good as your data-rich knowledge of Socialism in the twenty-first century."

Panel: This one chart tells the whole story of the 2020 election (8 min)
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NonAff3V5zM]

@on the cusp who are busy committing suicide so our owners can get out of paying their SS and Medicare or God forbid their unemployment since their jobs were lost long ago. Oops, I forgot, one only "gets" that for a short time so most of them really aren't collecting that little bennie anymore. Perhaps that will make some of the generational warriors happy, eh? Most of the suicides seem to be middle aged white males as well so there's even a nice bit of ID politics for the social justice warriors. Yippee! Let's blame each other while the bankers celebrate our demise at their latest international gala. If we're really good they'll let us all watch them on the boob tube so we can admire their private jets, their haute couture, and all that wonderful jewelry they'll parade before us for our viewing pleasure.

Boomers I know are in HUD housing and in the queues at the food banks for free food.
I was unaware I was in a class due to date of birth.

@janis b
...is the lord ready for me ?

I am surrounded by people, who are ready... and are waiting. While sitting on the bus station to wait for the bus to bring them there, do they really want it darker?

Wouldn't it be nice we could still hope they want it warmer and lighter?

As long as the bus doesn't come and bring them there, can we still give them a smile?

Cohen was such a great poet and you are a great human being to have chosen this song for exactly this thread and moment. It is so fitting that it dropped my jaws.

Thank you, janis b.

To distract all of you from the darkness, I wanted to tell you about 'sardines', ie

"Sardine" and "pilchard" are common names used to refer to various small, oily forage fish in the herring family Clupeidae. ... One criterion suggests fish shorter in length than 15 cm (6 in) are sardines, and larger fish are pilchards

Did you know that a couple of thousand Italians feel like they are 'packed like sardines in a box'?

'Sardines' against Salvini: Italy's fight against the far right -Grassroots protests have brought tens of thousands of people on to the streets of Rome

What is remarable imo that the demonstrators carried no flags with them, just cute sardine posters and that alone made me smile.

Viva la Sardinas!

but I am convinced that it is and has been responsible for most of humanity’s suffering.

[video:https://youtu.be/v0nmHymgM7Y]

@laurel

Wow! Another comment that could be an essay on its own!

Thanks, laurel.

I've previously spun a yarn here about how, growing up in the 50s and 60s, I played in the yard of the doctor, who lived next door to the bulldozer operator, who lived next to the shoe salesman. My neighbor's grandfather, who built (and paid off) a brand new home, was a milkman who used to sell us kids popsicles from his milk truck.

When I tell that to millennials or even Xers, they think I've lost my mind and am making it all up. But, I'm not making it up. That was what America was like growing up.

Even more mind boggling is that our nearly all-white Baptist church used to swap choirs periodically with the nearly all-black AME church. Ours probably lulled the poor AME congregation to sleep, but still... And this was in Kansas!

to fight amongst ourselves. As with all such internecine battles, we lose, they win. It just so happens that the Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember what everyday life was like before the 1980s. We knew life before trickle-down economics, the destruction of unions and the deregulative onrush of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. We were semi-aware of the elimination of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the consequences of which most of us couldn't imagine. We remember Clinton's WTO/GATT/NAFTA obsession, his shocking prison/ welfare reforms, the 1996 Telecomm Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Through it all, we watched the world change before our very eyes and uncomfortably adjusted our little lives to that colder more impersonal reality not of our own making. We watched local main street businesses wither and disappear while suburban chain stores and shopping centers sprouted up selling us goods created half-way around the world and sold via transnational corporations headquartered far away. As unions folded, some of us, and most of our children, got to know minimum wage part-time work sans benefits. Some of us saw our pensions disappear amid the merger mania. We who had enjoyed affordable college saw our younger relatives struggling with massive student debt and increasingly scarce (outsourced) jobs. Many of us, along with our children and our children's children, came to terms with very uncertain futures. Those of us who managed to learn highly skilled or professional jobs and buy houses in the 1980s found a degree of financial security while watching society fray and collapse around us.

That bleak world is the only one that Millennials and Gen Z have ever known. Gen X grew up during this painful transition and reacted with very appropriate alienation and rebellion. Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember life before the momentous Reagan-Bush-Clinton coup. If the oligarchy can silence or belittle the Boomers, our children and grandchildren might think the present world is how it always was. "OK Boomer" could be a clever way to render us, and our memories, invisible so that young people will never know that it does not have to be this way.

@laurel and conveys my opinion so well.

Thanks.

to fight amongst ourselves. As with all such internecine battles, we lose, they win. It just so happens that the Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember what everyday life was like before the 1980s. We knew life before trickle-down economics, the destruction of unions and the deregulative onrush of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. We were semi-aware of the elimination of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the consequences of which most of us couldn't imagine. We remember Clinton's WTO/GATT/NAFTA obsession, his shocking prison/ welfare reforms, the 1996 Telecomm Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Through it all, we watched the world change before our very eyes and uncomfortably adjusted our little lives to that colder more impersonal reality not of our own making. We watched local main street businesses wither and disappear while suburban chain stores and shopping centers sprouted up selling us goods created half-way around the world and sold via transnational corporations headquartered far away. As unions folded, some of us, and most of our children, got to know minimum wage part-time work sans benefits. Some of us saw our pensions disappear amid the merger mania. We who had enjoyed affordable college saw our younger relatives struggling with massive student debt and increasingly scarce (outsourced) jobs. Many of us, along with our children and our children's children, came to terms with very uncertain futures. Those of us who managed to learn highly skilled or professional jobs and buy houses in the 1980s found a degree of financial security while watching society fray and collapse around us.

That bleak world is the only one that Millennials and Gen Z have ever known. Gen X grew up during this painful transition and reacted with very appropriate alienation and rebellion. Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember life before the momentous Reagan-Bush-Clinton coup. If the oligarchy can silence or belittle the Boomers, our children and grandchildren might think the present world is how it always was. "OK Boomer" could be a clever way to render us, and our memories, invisible so that young people will never know that it does not have to be this way.

@laurel  
so nothing is passed down between flesh-and-blood people face to face.

“OK Boomer” = don’t listen to any of the older folks you actually know in real life, believe voices and images that come over the media.

to fight amongst ourselves. As with all such internecine battles, we lose, they win. It just so happens that the Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember what everyday life was like before the 1980s. We knew life before trickle-down economics, the destruction of unions and the deregulative onrush of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. We were semi-aware of the elimination of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the consequences of which most of us couldn't imagine. We remember Clinton's WTO/GATT/NAFTA obsession, his shocking prison/ welfare reforms, the 1996 Telecomm Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Through it all, we watched the world change before our very eyes and uncomfortably adjusted our little lives to that colder more impersonal reality not of our own making. We watched local main street businesses wither and disappear while suburban chain stores and shopping centers sprouted up selling us goods created half-way around the world and sold via transnational corporations headquartered far away. As unions folded, some of us, and most of our children, got to know minimum wage part-time work sans benefits. Some of us saw our pensions disappear amid the merger mania. We who had enjoyed affordable college saw our younger relatives struggling with massive student debt and increasingly scarce (outsourced) jobs. Many of us, along with our children and our children's children, came to terms with very uncertain futures. Those of us who managed to learn highly skilled or professional jobs and buy houses in the 1980s found a degree of financial security while watching society fray and collapse around us.

That bleak world is the only one that Millennials and Gen Z have ever known. Gen X grew up during this painful transition and reacted with very appropriate alienation and rebellion. Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember life before the momentous Reagan-Bush-Clinton coup. If the oligarchy can silence or belittle the Boomers, our children and grandchildren might think the present world is how it always was. "OK Boomer" could be a clever way to render us, and our memories, invisible so that young people will never know that it does not have to be this way.

@laurel

Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember life before the momentous Reagan-Bush-Clinton coup.

Whenever the PTB wants to make changes to our lives they have been very patient going about it. They don't make changes that go in effect right away and risk the wrath of the current generation. Oh no. They make changes that go into effect years down the road. Look at the things Clinton did. Glass steagal for one didn't hurt anyone right away, but it ended up crashing the global economy a decade later. Same with a lot of the other things he passed. It wasn't until Obama became president that I saw the damage his presidency caused.

We are seeing things much quicker from Obama's tenure because things didn't really recover from the damage Clinton's legislation wrought. The ByeDone bankruptcy bill is affecting young people now because they can't discharge their student loans that were reconstructed during Obama's tenure. Blackrock bought lots of the empty houses after the crash after Obama asked them to get them off the market and they did. Then they raised rents through the roof. Now with high student loan debt, high cost of housing and rents and low paying jobs...well the younger generation has every reason to be pissed off!

When Ryan wanted to make changes to SS he wasn't aiming for this generation. He said that his grandparents would kill him if he did. But they would have affected the generations coming up. Oh yes they have been very patient undoing the new deal passed by FDR.

to fight amongst ourselves. As with all such internecine battles, we lose, they win. It just so happens that the Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember what everyday life was like before the 1980s. We knew life before trickle-down economics, the destruction of unions and the deregulative onrush of mergers, acquisitions and takeovers. We were semi-aware of the elimination of the Sherman Antitrust Act, the consequences of which most of us couldn't imagine. We remember Clinton's WTO/GATT/NAFTA obsession, his shocking prison/ welfare reforms, the 1996 Telecomm Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagall. Through it all, we watched the world change before our very eyes and uncomfortably adjusted our little lives to that colder more impersonal reality not of our own making. We watched local main street businesses wither and disappear while suburban chain stores and shopping centers sprouted up selling us goods created half-way around the world and sold via transnational corporations headquartered far away. As unions folded, some of us, and most of our children, got to know minimum wage part-time work sans benefits. Some of us saw our pensions disappear amid the merger mania. We who had enjoyed affordable college saw our younger relatives struggling with massive student debt and increasingly scarce (outsourced) jobs. Many of us, along with our children and our children's children, came to terms with very uncertain futures. Those of us who managed to learn highly skilled or professional jobs and buy houses in the 1980s found a degree of financial security while watching society fray and collapse around us.

That bleak world is the only one that Millennials and Gen Z have ever known. Gen X grew up during this painful transition and reacted with very appropriate alienation and rebellion. Boomers are the last generation to clearly remember life before the momentous Reagan-Bush-Clinton coup. If the oligarchy can silence or belittle the Boomers, our children and grandchildren might think the present world is how it always was. "OK Boomer" could be a clever way to render us, and our memories, invisible so that young people will never know that it does not have to be this way.