Cable News & State Propaganda

Ben Bartee at PJ Media reports:

Cable News Is Riddled With War Profiteers

The problem with cable news is that — outside of perhaps Tucker Carlson, who seems genuinely committed to exposing truths and has paid the price for it in the form of the Majority Leader calling for his censorship from the Senate floor [but see yesterday’s CTP blog here] — it’s not news.

It’s state propaganda, by and for the special interests that have purchased the state.

These special interests include big agriculture, big pharma, and, of course, the private weapons manufacturers that comprise the military-industrial complex.

Much more at the link here. So if you want the news, you have to turn off the TV and cancel your mainstream media subscriptions.  FTA: “The only way for viewers to discover said conflicts of interest is to do their own research.”  Or identify bloggers and websites that do the real digging.

JD Rucker at Discern Report has the plan:

To get the “real” journalists to speak the truth, we need “fake” journalists (like me) and non-journalists (the people) to beat the drums of reality. When those drumbeats get loud enough and are hammered often enough, the “real” journalists will have the cover they need to disseminate what is being said.

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Mo Brooks spills the beans

 

Bascott O’Connor reports on the corrupt culture in DC.  From the Blue State Conservative website a day or two ago:

Congressman Caught On Tape
Explaining How “Special Interest Groups
Run Washington”

In March, at a campaign fundraiser, Alabama Republican Congressman Mo Brooks was filmed and confirmed what many voters have suspected for years—money runs congress. Brooks is running for the Republican nomination for the senate seat being vacated by retiring Richard Shelby. The Alabama Senate primary is May 24 and polling has Brooks in third.

Here are the most substantial Mo Brooks quotes from the video.

• “Special interest groups run Washington.”
• “In the House of Representatives (I’ll use that as an example because that’s where I work), if you want to be a chairman of a major committee, you have to purchase it, and the purchase price for a major committee (say, like Ways and Means) minimum bid is a million dollars.”
• “We have committees broken down by A group, B group, and C group. C are the cheapest, B are middling, A is the most expensive. It’s the most expensive because those are the committees that special interest groups care the most about.”
• “So, where does a congressman come up with a million dollars to be chairman of one of these A committees? You can’t get it from Joe and Jane Citizen because Joe and Jane Citizen back home, they’re not going to be contributing that kind of money. They don’t have it—they need that money for their own families.”
• “And, so, you have to get it from the special interest groups, and with the special interest groups, there is a quid pro quo. If you don’t do what they tell you to do, they won’t give you the money that finances your chairmanship.”

Read the rest here.  Corruption.  Everywhere.

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Special interests, SuperPACS, and the presidential candidates

photo credit: natcom.org

The OpenSecrets website lists contributors to candidates, and also tracks the SuperPACS:

Super PACs are a relatively new type of committee that arose following the July 2010 federal court decision in a case known as SpeechNow.org v. Federal Election Commission.

Technically known as independent expenditure-only committees, super PACs may raise unlimited sums of money from corporations, unions, associations and individuals, then spend unlimited sums to overtly advocate for or against political candidates. Unlike traditional PACs, super PACs are prohibited from donating money directly to political candidates, and their spending must not be coordinated with that of the candidates they benefit. Super PACs are required to report their donors to the Federal Election Commission on a monthly or semiannual basis – the super PAC's choice – in off-years, and monthly in the year of an election.

As of February 03, 2016, 2,194 groups organized as super PACs have reported total receipts of $353,533,929 and total independent expenditures of $144,551,790 in the 2016 cycle.

The website further reports that

Super PACs allowed the [securities and investment] industry to gain an outsize share of the pie in 2015 as Wall Street gravitated to some candidates and utterly abandoned others. With billionaire investors giving right and left, total contributions from the industry to presidential super PACs rose to $81.2 million.

. . .

Investors made up the top donor industry to six of the current candidates when their campaign committees and super PACs are combined; the exceptions were retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, businesswoman Carly Fiorina, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).

All four of those candidates nevertheless benefit from SuperPACS, including those receiving Wall Street money. Recently, the securities and investment industry donors are shifting to new favorites:

Despite huge contributions to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush in the first six months of 2015, securities and investment firms appear to have picked their favorite candidate on the Republican side: Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

. . .

despite Rubio’s rise among securities and investment types, Iowa caucus winner Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) again showed evidence he has perhaps the strongest mix of funding sources in the race. Four of the top overall industries giving money were in the top five donors to Cruz super PACs and his campaign account: securities and investment, real estate (buoyed by huge contributions from the Texan Wilks brothers), oil and gas and retired individuals.

The leading five candidates in the GOP race, as of today via Real Clear Politics, are Bush, Carson, Cruz, Rubio, and Trump. (And as most patriots know, Rick Santorum,  Rand Paul, and Mike Huckabee  just suspended their campaigns.)

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