I was also extremely busy with work, travel for business, and family matters, so it was all too easy to not blog for a week, a month and . . . well, I haven't gone back to see just how long it's been between blogs. So I apologize for being absent.
However, in the time since I last blogged, I've been thinking a lot about politics, observing the developing campaigns--both for president and more locally the Wisconsin race for Herb Kohl's seat in the U.S. Senate.
I plan to resume this blog on as regular a basis as possible. which doesn't mean every day, but I hope will be at least once a week. Depending on other demands on my time, it will be more frequent than that. I predict that in a couple weeks I will have to interrupt the blog when I travel for business. And again in the second week of October. But otherwise, barring serious illness or emergencies, this should be a fairly frequent blog from now on.
For a long time I have wanted to do something in this blog that I could make a regular feature, and I think I've finally discovered something that I can feature that will be of benefit to anyone who wants to be able to tell the difference between non-partisan, reasonably accurate information sources and those that may seem non-partisan or claim to be non-partisan but which in fact are partisan in purpose and deliberately spreading false or distorted information because they are advocating for or sponsored by an organization or organizations that have an unannounced agenda which is partisan and not their publicly stated purpose.
If you watch television, get physical mail delivered to your house or Post Office box, or listen to radio you have been exposed to fraudulent or otherwise dishonest information that can only be characterized as propaganda.
People use the word "propaganda" and I'm not sure that most people understand what the word actually means. so let's start with a simple definition. From my Random House Unabridged Dictionary:
1. Information, rumors, etc., deliberately spread widely to help or harm a person, group, movement, institution, nation, etc.
2. The deliberate spreading of such information, rumors, etc.
3. The particular doctrines or principles propagated by an organization or movement.
There are other meanings, but these are the pertinent points defining the kind of propaganda that has become pervasive throughout the mass-media over the past several decades, and which has become so ubiquitous over the past ten years or so that it is now extremely difficult to determine whether something that is disseminated publicly by some information medium is truth or propaganda unless one is willing to take the time to do some real research into the source of the information.
There are some sources of news that I have come to trust, first and foremost Rachel Maddow and her nightly television show on the cable channel MSNBC. I trust her because repeatedly, for five years now, she has been investigating one news story after another, and when interviewing people who are directly involved in the developing story, she will offer a brief summary of the situation as she understands it. And without a single exception, whether the person she is interviewing has views similar to hers or of a different political persuasion, when she has finished summarizing what she claims to be the facts, she will say to her interviewee, "I've probably missed something or gotten something wrong. Have I gotten that right? Is that an accurate account of the situation?" or words to that effect.
And without exception, the interviewee responds, "No, actually that's an extremely accurate account," or words to that effect.
In other words, Rachel Maddow gets it right. She, and I assume the people on the staff of her show, are extremely diligent and accurate investigators, digging far beyond what many people who report the news dig, for information that not only is accurate but which is also clearly conveyed and precise, cogent information that helps her viewers make intelligent assessments of the truth of a given news story.
The contrast between Rachel Maddow's reports and those of the purported news organization I feel is the least rigorous and most obviously biased in things political, the oxymoronically named "Fox News," is stark.
The most obvious difference between Maddow and an enormous amount of what is labelled as "news" at Fox is simple: when Rachel Maddow makes an error of fact, she reports that error as quickly as possible. This occurs sometimes during the same hour-long show when she made the error; other times it will occur a day or two or three later, when, she says, someone brought her error to her attention.
In marked contrast, Fox News has made countless errors of fact in reporting news, but in one instance after another, when their facts are proven to be either inaccurate or simply entirely wrong, or based on what is subsequently proved to be a lie or distortion of verifiable fact, they do not admit their error or their mistake. They simply move on to a new story. Their commitment to honesty and integrity in their reporting is almost completely nonexistent.
I will not right now cite the particulars of Fox News's inaccurate, biased or fact-free reporting. At some later time, I will probably go into detail about something that Fox mis-reports or mis-represents.
However, to give a single example of such unprofessional behavior, consider the story of Shirley Sherrod, an Afro-American woman in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, who was accused of acting in a way that was racially prejudiced against Caucasian farmers. The accusation stemmed from a video of part of a speech she gave to the NAACP. The video, which was edited for content by a right-wing blogger, gave the impression that she had acted in a discriminatory fashion against a white farm family. Without investigating to see whether the video was accurate or complete, Fox News went full-bore to accuse Ms. Sherrod of abusing the power of her position for racist purposes. She was pressured to resign her position and did so, to avoid prolonging the criticism of the federal government that Fox and others were leveling against her and the Obama administration.
Within just a few days, the story was investigated by various news organizations, including Rachel Maddow, and Keith Olbermann, who at that time had his own one-hour show on MSNBC, and very quickly it was determined that the offensive video had been severely edited to create the impression of improper action. When the entire speech was viewed, it was quite clear that Ms. Sherrod had not said anything whatsoever that gave even a hint of misdeed.
But it was too late. Ms. Sherrod felt her name and reputation had been so thoroughly debased by the hasty, vicious and irresponsible attacks by Fox and other news media too lazy to check the facts, that she did not accept the administration's offer to restore her to her previous position.
Did Fox News ever admit they had been wrong? No. Did they ever acknowledge that the source of their story had fooled them? No. Did they ever apologize for taking a story that was unverified, biased, partisan and factually untrue? No.
That, and innumerable similar instances of journalistic irresponsibility, is why I do not consider Fox News to be a legitimate news source, especially in matters of politics.
But I digress. What made me realize that I could do something in this blog that would be a valuable service to the public was a cardboard announcement that I received today in the mail.
Introducing a new feature of this blog:
These People Are Not What They Seem
The invitation I received was for what is billed as a "Healthcare Town Hall Meeting" from an organization called "60 Plus Association, Inc."
At this "Town Hall Meeting" they promise to brief attendees on healthcare reform, to give out free food and refreshments, t-shirts and prizes, and to raffle off a copy of Pat Boone's book "America: 50 Years" and other prizes.
The 60 Plus Association terms itself "the conservative alternative to the liberal AARP."
A visit to their website reveals that they are in fact not so much an organization as the AARP as it is a group with the primary mission of advocating for the conservative view of the Affordable Care Act. Various of their press releases and position papers assert as facts such misstatements or deliberate distortions of the Act as claiming that it takes decisions about one's health care out of the hands of patients and gives the Federal government power over important healthcare decisions.
This is smply not true. If one reads the Affordable Care Act (a daunting prospect, admittedly; it's a lengthy document), there is nothing in it that gives the government the right to interfere in people's healthcare decisions or choices.
Yet 60 Plus, like a number of other organizations, which I will cover in subsequent posts, claims that the healthcare reform law hurts rather than helps seniors and others have access to affordable healthcare.
One of their biggest statements of untruth is their assertion that the healthcare reform will create a huge tax increase for the middle class. This is simply not true. The $716 billion dollars that Paul Ryan and Mitt Romney have claimed is going to be cut from Medicare has been consistently mis-characterized by them and others on the right. Yes, that money is cuts. But much of that money is coming in the form of reforms to make Medicare more administratively efficient, and in other measures designed to increase the quality of care for those who use Medicare.
In fact, Romney and Ryan also want to cut $716 billion from Medicare. But not by implementing reforms to the structure and making the system work better. Their idea, and the idea of 60 Plus Association, is to hand health insurance, and Medicare in particular, to private insurance companies, changing the current system to one in which medical care is not, as is currently the case, guaranteed. But rather to issue vouchers to Medicare users for $6000 with which they can buy private health insurance.
This is not the same as "saving Medicare" as 60 Plus asserts. This is basically saving the earnings of private for-profit health-insurance companies. Seniors would be put in the position of having to pay far more for health insurance through private companies under the 60 Plus plan.
To characterize themselves as "the conservative alternative to the liberal AARP is disingenuous at best; at worst, it is a cruel trick to attempt to convince those who believe in truly conservative principles that the AARP is somehow a "liberal plot" to take their healthcare choices away from them. This is simply not true.
Yes, the AARP has done lobbying for healthcare reform, and for good reason. The millions of members of AARP already are reaping tangible benefits from the Affordable Care Act, and in the next several years the benefits will increase. Already, the "donut hole" that was legislated into Medicare coverage under George W. Bush--and the cruel "Medicare Part D" which made it illegal for the government to negotiate for lower prices for prescription drugs for Medicare members--have been retired, saving seniors hundreds of millions of dollars a year, perhaps more--it's too early to say exactly how much, but it might well run to more than a billion dollars a year.
However, the main activities of AARP involve offering its members discounts on many kinds of products, including insurance; publishing a magazine for their members, and acting as a de-facto consumer protection agency for their members, alerting them to scams and other unethical or exploitive schemes that prey on older people. The AARP is not a partisan organization as is 60 Plus.
So today, I would like to warn readers of this blog that 60 Plus Association is not what they seem to be. If you go to their website you will see that another part of their agenda is to "save medicare and social security" for the next generation. This language is a code phrase for, as mentioned above, changing the current Medicate system to a voucher system that would cost seniors millions upon millions of dollars while feathering the nest of private, for-profit health insurance companies. And for "privatizing" social security by changing the system so that people would have to manage their own social security funds by investing them through investment advisors or stock brokerage houses.
Privatizing social security would be a disastrous policy for most private citizens. It would help certain people, specifically those who work on Wall Street or for investment firms across America. They would get enormous new business, leading to more money in commissions. But the vast majority of Americans would be immediately in danger of losing money that is under the current system guaranteed for their retirement. If the stock market and other investments increase in value, people would benefit, generally. But if, for example, your social security account money was invested unwisely under the Ryan/Romney/60 Plus Association idea, then you could lose some or even all of your retirement money.
This policy, which 60 Plus advocates, is not in the best interests of seniors. And no matter how much they distort the true facts, nothing they say to frighten or trick people into believing that their plan is a good idea for American seniors will make that true.
So I strongly suggest that you beware the clever distortions and tricky propaganda of the 60 Plus Association. They have Pat Boone; they have prizes, refreshments and free T-shirts. But they are not working for you, unless you are an executive or shareholder of a health insurance company. They are working for themselves, and for the private health-insurance industry, for which they have lobbied, and for whom they have spent millions of dollars in just the past year on campaigns against the Affordable Care Act and against candidates who support health reform that really does benefit the vast majority of Americans. The Affordable Care act is not perfect, but is a good first step in real healthcare insurance reform. And the people behind 60 Plus Association are trying to undo the good that this reform has begun, so that the private health insurance industry can make more money, at the expense of the people who 60 Plus claims to be trying to help. And that makes what they are saying in their invitation not a real invitation, but propaganda.
That's what I've got today.
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