Tar & Feather

Greetings good citizen,

Either tonight at midnight or tomorrow night and it’s ‘game over’ for the world as we know it…

But Mayan jokes aside, we keep letting this bullshit slide and it won’t be long before we find ourselves cheering on a world ending catastrophe!

Like the, er, ‘unfortunately worded’ Second Amendment, it seems the givers of ‘corporate person hood’ (our thoroughly corrupt judiciary) have decided that ‘freedom of the press’ rests solely in the hands of he who OWNS the press.

How frightening is it good citizen to live in a society that seems to have developed an insatiable appetite for ‘secrecy’?

What is it that they are so intent on ‘hushing up’?

Or are we back to the now ancient argument that only the (proven incompetent) can be trusted to judge what is ‘good’ for society.

Well if Citizen’s United and our recent string of unfunded and unsupported foreign adventures are any indication of our ‘betters’ social superiority then we are well and truly good citizen.

Perhaps more telling is a goodly percent of the average citizenry is already hoping for some type of catastrophe (which they and theirs will escape unscathed, of course!) that will remove THEM from being a ‘bug under the glass’ (fuck the rest of you!)

(Did I mention selfishness is a primary driver behind the lack of action we’ve seen as our entire society is swept into it’s own cesspool and nobody lifts a finger to stop it?)

Who me?

I’m doing my part…and keeping my powder dry until the time is right…

Anyway, on with the story…

Tuesday in California, the Federal Appeals Court ruled against a group of journalists at the Santa Barbara News-Press who had been fired for demanding editorial integrity and a union. Rather than uphold their rights both to unionize and to speak out against bad editorial practices, the federal court instead said their dismissals were protected by the publisher's First Amendment Rights to print whatever she wanted.
The dispute began in 2006, when nearly all the top journalists and editors at the Santa Barbara News-Press quit because the paper's owner and publisher Wendy McCaw was interfering in the editorial content. As Melinda Burns, one former journalist at the paper wrote in the Santa Barbara Independent about that period:

"Spring had barely turned to summer that year when Editor Jerry Roberts and four other editors resigned, citing what they said was McCaw’s unethical interference in newsgathering and reporting. A dozen reporters quit, too, including one who had been covering a neighborhood dispute over the development plans of Rob Lowe, an actor friend of McCaw’s who wanted to build a mansion on a vacant lot in Montecito. Following standard newsroom practice, the reporter reported the address of the lot. Lowe’s assistant called the paper to complain, saying Lowe was going to cancel his subscription. McCaw fired off harsh letters of reprimand to the reporter and three editors, who all eventually resigned. Those of us who chose to stay in the newsroom knew we needed a written contract to protect our job security and integrity as journalists from McCaw’s arbitrary attacks."

Looks like a tempest in a teapot, doesn’t it? But the ‘precedent’ is set…owners rule and workers can go pound or better, quit if they don’t like it!

Which is to opine that ‘ownership’ is a terrible way to decide anything, yet our whole legal system is founded on that idea…

Which is to opine that for more than three hundred years, we’ve been DOING IT WRONG!

But not according to the ‘owners’ (and if you don’t ‘own’ then you don’t even belong at the table never mind deserve a seat!)

That’s how the game has been played for all of these centuries…but now there’s nothing left to own, all of the good stuff is gone…so a vast majority of us are on the outside looking in...

And the owners don’t give a fuck!

So here we sit, wondering just what ‘secrets’ they are keeping from us?

Could it be as petty as the example of ‘journalistic harassment’ given in this article or do you suppose the cloak of ‘national security’ could be covering up some major ‘errors in judgement’ that could make the One Percent look very bad indeed.

Didn’t Bush the First comment (like the founder Washington) that if the people knew what they had been up to they would ‘tar and feather’ us (and run us out of town on a rail!)

Oh and in case you didn’t know, tar and feathering (which sounds benign) was often fatal. (The tar would block the skin’s pores, killing them and causing gangrene to set in.)

So, when you’re sitting there, wrongly thinking ‘live and let live’ as far as the One Percent are concerned, don’t be foolish enough to think the feeling is mutual.

As far as they’re concerned you are the biggest threat to their continued mastery of the world’s resources. (Which they will continue to dole out as benefits THEM the most and the rest of us can go do the anatomically impossible!)

Thanks for letting me inside your head,

Gegner