Sunday, March 11, 2012

Appallingly Bad Press Coverage

I'm going to try to do this without cursing. I have it on good authority cursing causes cancer. I likely won't be successful.

Let me start by saying I am ashamed to have ever been a part of the so-called Fourth Estate.

Many in our country don't even know what that means, the Fourth Estate. Is it an estate sale? What? What?

It's just unbelievable. Rabbits mashing buttons on hand held devices, who are so culturally and historically illiterate, even after grade ten, you couldn't successfully demand they tell you what the term means, or where it comes from. There'd be no connecting point to even begin the discussion. Speaking past them like a fart in the breeze.

"What? What's that? What?"

Sickening, really.

The failure of news is part of a feedback loop creating more ignorance robots of us all; electronic zombies, cud chewing consumption units who can't recall last year.

The Fourth Estate is not protecting us against this hacked voting thing, as many of you inside the game already know.

I hate to bring up Hillsborough again. I don't like writing that word. It's a long word, Hillsborough. I have to write it so often I have grown to resent the word but not the county. The county is a beautiful place.

Well, let's be honest, some of it is. Other parts are run down like Cleveland, through no fault of the public. It's the ruling class to blame on that score, I'm afraid.

You know what Hillsborough has? No jobs to speak of. Just like Cleveland A strong vibrant community; a ready made work force.  Hardworking people, tolerant people, church going people, a community.  Ready to go. Just ad jobs.

A solar factory, perhaps. Some company that makes wind  turbines. Why can't someone see this? Why can't an investor be found? This is a perfect fit.

If I won The Powerball.Yes, I would do the college tuition thing, the Europe thing, a cruise to Scandinavia and so on, maybe a little cottage for my wife and I to retire in on Sugarloaf Key. But with the other 99 percent of the money I'd build a factory in Temple Terrace, right next to USF.

And we'd build  solar panels, and wind turbines, those machines that harness the energy from changing tides. And we'd test all of this stuff right out there in Tampa Bay.

Does that happen? Does someone see the opportunity here, all that community all that energy, people looking for work, and can't find any? Does anyone use eighth grade algebra to put a labor force and a necessary industry together?

No. And why not?

No one gives a shit about the African American community. No one gives a shit about the Hispanic community, no one gives a shit about culturally unaffiliated, garden-variety unemployed community in Hillsborough County. No one gives a shit about taking energy from sunlight. Just like my county, right here in the Sunshine state. No one gives a shit about doing what's right for all of us.

Oh yeah, and the vote is hacked there, too, just like it surely is in my county, which also runs off Dominion voting. So the people of Hillsborough County get the same old treatment time again and again from the county commission. The same old plaques handed down with a pat on the head.

Wills Hill, Earl of Downshire. That's who Hillsborough County is named after; an entitled English Lord, who also enjoyed a massive absentee landholding in Ireland. All leading up to the American Revolution of course. What did the British Empire do to scribes who displeased them? It wasn't pretty. None of that going on today, however. Now we just have cowardice and laziness.

And what I am seeing in Hillsborough County government is the worst sort of recalcitrance. The elite recalcitrance. The sort of recalcitrance that's so thick, it almost makes a sound, almost has an odor, almost sucks the life out of a room. The recalcitrance of the elite.

An entitled nobility on that commission, ignoring the public; perhaps in receivership of their position through a botched or defrauded vote;  four of them, anyway, elected along with Rick Scott on Nov. 2, 2010.

The press? They won't look at it. They won't write about it. They won't broadcast one word despite evidence staring them in the face. So that county commission continues to play stupid with regard to this thing, and run the clock out, and the press continues to be diverted by carnival side show issues.

The county commission continues to trot out a little old lady and bash her on the head for uttering racially charged words nearly one month ago. They talk about decorum, they escort an enviro-protester from the podium who had gone too far in calling them "fools," during his speech, all the while they do nothing to clean up their own reputation.

Hillsborough is only one among 67 counties in Florida, among thousands of counties throughout the United States now each relying on these damned voting machines; each sending the same people off to congress from  elite little groups like this one on display at the East Kennedy government complex in downtown Tampa.

The same people, taking the same perks, being ushered to the same seats in the fifty state capitols everywhere; thereafter to the same seats in Washington, D.C. Making the same bad decisions over and over, getting us into the same wars; handing us down the same gas prices, the same financial collapses with the mini ones in between.

Making the same trades on Wall Street to take advantage of the same old volatility, which they themselves create through their votes on the Hill.

The same old oblivious TV pundit talking heads, also, just as willfully ignorant on both sides, willfully blind as this whole carnival, the whole gov-corp flywheel orgy goes careening toward calamity.

And our sad gelded "Fourth Estate," our ridiculously smug and self satisfied "Fourth Estate" does nothing. As they assure us they are watching out for our interests.

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