Lure of TV over public service

~ "America-  you're Fired! And don't forget to watch my TV show this fall.. and gamble at my many casinos.. and buy my clothing line and cologne for your husbands.. they make great gifts..."

Within the last 48 hours, two potential Republican candidates for President have stated they would not run-  Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas and Donald Trump.  Whether you like or dislike either/both people, it is interesting to understand Why both will not be running.

In the case of Mike Huckabee, whether his faith led him to his decision or not (and that is not a 'knock'), it is also fair to say giving up his TV show, "Huckabee" on Fox News and the lucrative salary it generates, played at least some role, if not a major one.  And if you think it would have no bearing, then why the following prior to his announcement...

""Governor Huckabee will announce tomorrow night on his program whether or not he intends to explore a presidential bid. He has not told anyone at FOX News Channel his decision," said Woody Fraser, executive producer of "Huckabee."  (Y! News)

When the potential candidacy of a person is used as a 'teaser' to draw in ratings for their show, you have to surmise that the lure of TV $$ trumped service.

And speaking of Trump-  most didn't think he would run; that he was using the ruse of possibly running for President as a way to promote "Celebrity: Apprentice" and his overall inflated ego.  He sure did play a good game though-- went on various talk radio shows to discuss the economy, foreign policy, etc.. just like a real potential candidate would.  Of course the 'birther' thing didn't help ultimately but it certainly got people curious and stirred up discussion.

Who knows- maybe Trump seriously was thinking of running,  But when Apprentice, your TV 'child' is threatened to be taken away from you with someone else basically 'recast' in the role you identified your ego with for many years, it certainly played a role in Trump deciding not to run.   Oh, he'll never admit it.. just like he never would admit that he was personally responsible for destroying the USFL, a football league in competition with the NFL back in the 80s' to which he was involved..  but you have to believe it played a role.

So two non-candidates in 48 hours- because the lure of making money was too great.   The one potential candidate and money-junkie left is Sarah Palin. Will she run or will her love of money make her choose not to?   Some love her, others despise her... one thing for certain is she Loves being a celebrity and the income in generates.

This is the real reason she resigned as governor of Alaska a few years back-  her income streams would have been severely capped due to being a public servant.  Now she's ghostwritten two very successful books, gets paid quite well on the speaking circuit, did a "reality" TV series on Alaska, and gets a nice check each month from Fox News to appear on various shows as an analyst.  Meanwhile her daughter Bristol got the opportunity to dance as if she was a "Star" on television and there's rumors of her doing a reality series of her own.

Palin never bothered me as a politician or person so I've no axes to grind on either count.  In fact, to those who know me, they probably got a chuckle at what I wrote a paragraph ago.  I just personally hate celebrity and the endless opportunities for cash streams denied to the other 99.9999% because there's some quirk that captured a nation's imagination, like that vile pretend 'mom' Kate Gosselin (having children does not in itself make you a mother beyond the biological) or the lowlifes on "Jersey Shore" who are nothing special; no talents or gifts yet are household names for doing nothing other than being on the dum-dum box.   Ah, the Power of Television...

But I digress...

It is one thing to choose not to run for public office because you do not think you will win, or do not really offer anything to the 'table' to make lives better for others.   But when you choose not to service because the financial benefit is far greater not to, then irregardless of the person's political positions and ideologies, I have no respect or use for them.

The political-media-corporate-celeb Dynamic

~ CNBC's Maria Bartiromo looking like a prostitute at the 2010 White House Correspondents Association Dinner...

The world is run, operated and controlled by a System.

Think of it as a web- everything and everyone that composes this System is intertwined and the supposed individual 'strands' are braided together.

Found this op-ed in the Washington Post about the annual absurdity called the White House Correspondents Association Dinner- the one event where politicians of both parties, the corporate media that covers them, and the corporations that own all media & politicians concerned, can openly acknowledge they're one big Happy family.

What is most interesting is to see the whole dynamic at play, written by David Milbank who has attended them in the past and in his editorial expresses why he passed this year.  The Washington Post editorial is in blue font..

"On Thursday, the Washington Post editorializes that Donald Trump has been campaigning on “bogus” issues and that he should “cease and desist.” An article in the news pages the same day reports that the great orange charlatan’s “simply wild speculation” has “almost no basis in fact.”

Then, on Saturday night, Post reporters and editors, in black-tie finest, go to the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner to host their invited guests, including. . . Donald Trump.

Awkward though the Trump invitation is, it is just one of the many problems with the annual dinner and its satellite events.

The fun begins, appropriately enough, at the offices of the American Gas Association, where White House reporters are feted by the lobbyists of the Quinn Gillespie firm. More lobbyist-sponsored entertainment comes from the Motion Picture Association. Along the way, journalists wind up serving as pimps: We recruit Hollywood stars to entertain the politicians, and we recruit powerful political figures to entertain the stars. Corporate bosses bring in advertisers to gawk at the display, and journalists lucky enough to score invitations fancy ourselves celebrities.

Cee Lo Green sings for us. Seth Meyers tells us jokes. Lindsay Lohan’s ex, Samantha Ronson, is our DJ. All the cool kids -- Sean Penn, Kate Hudson, Steven Tyler, Paula Abdul, Courteney Cox, David Byrne and Bristol Palin -- want to party with us. A Johnnie Walker “cigar tent” furnishes us with scotch and hand-rolled stogies. We are handed Fiji water, or Grey Goose vodka, to slake our thirsts, and Sea Terra Organics Vanilla Body Butters to soothe our pores.

The correspondents’ association dinner was a minor annoyance for years, when it was a “nerd prom” for journalists and a few minor celebrities. But, as with so much else in this town, the event has spun out of control. Now, awash in lobbyist and corporate money, it is another display of Washington’s excesses.

There are now no fewer than 20 parties, plus a similar number of receptions at the Washington Hilton before the dinner. A pre-dinner brunch, once an intimate affair in a TV producer’s backyard, was moved this year to the Georgetown mansion of multimillionaire Mark Ein. Democratic and Republican consultants shell out five figures apiece to join the Café Milano owner as hosts. (Cafe Atlantico’s owner, by contrast, is cooking for the Atlantic’s party.)

Time Warner booked the St. Regis for the People and Time fete; Conde Nast has the W Hotel for the New Yorker and the French ambassador’s residence in Kalorama for its Vanity Fair party done with Bloomberg. The MSNBC party is in the Italian embassy, while others choose the Hay-Adams, the Ritz Carlton or the Ronald Reagan building. A few sponsors, generally Hollywood-oriented nonprofits, hold cocktail parties masquerading as charity benefits.

Hungover hobnobbers reconvene Sunday morning at Politico publisher Robert Allbritton’s Georgetown manse to “nosh on hand-rolled sushi and dim sum prepared by Wolfgang Puck’s The Source.” The press release continues :“The Allbrittons’ lush garden, filled with 200-year-old poplar trees, will feature a white century-style tent adorned with blue-and-white ceramics” – not to mention Ashley Judd and Janet Napolitano.

Is it Politico’s job to get Judd and Napolitano together? Is it ABC News’s role to unite Glee’s Jane Lynch with White House chief of staff Bill Daley or 30 Rock’s Elizabeth Banks with National Security Advisor Tom Donilon? ... The cumulative effect is icky. With the proliferation of A-list parties and the infusion of corporate and lobbyist cash, Washington journalists give Americans the impression we have shed our professional detachment and are aspiring to be like the celebrities and power players we cover.

My late colleague David Broder once recalled how, when he began newspapering in mid-century, journalists embraced the credo that “the only way a reporter should ever look at a politician is down.” He said they “prided themselves on their independence, their skepticism, and they relished their role in exposing the follies and the larceny of public officials.”

As I began to do the RSVPs for a few of this year’s parties, I thought about what our hardbitten journalistic forebears would make of Cee Lo and SamRo and the Donald. Then I made other plans for the weekend. "

~ Is there any wonder the corporate owned visual and print media Trumpet 'recovery' and do the White House's bidding?

IMF: Age of America Nears End

~ "Four F**k-Ups and a Good, Decent man"

I'm reposting a news article from MarketWatch.com because of its importance in understand America's place in the global economy, and what has happened not simply since the start of the recession, but really over a 30 year period beginning with the original "F**k Up", Ronald Reagan's "Trickle Down" economic policies...

(MarketWatch article in blue font)

"International Monetary Fund has just dropped a bombshell, and nobody noticed.


For the first time, the international organization has set a date for the moment when the “Age of America” will end and the U.S. economy will be overtaken by that of China. 


And it’s a lot closer than you may think.


According to the latest IMF official forecasts, China’s economy will surpass that of America in real terms in 2016 — just five years from now... It provides a painful context for the budget wrangling taking place in Washington, D.C., right now. 


It raises enormous questions about what the international security system is going to look like in just a handful of years. And it casts a deepening cloud over both the U.S. dollar and the giant Treasury market, which have been propped up for decades by their privileged status as the liabilities of the world’s hegemonic power.


According to the IMF forecast, whomever is elected U.S. president next year — Obama? Mitt Romney? Donald Trump? — will be the last to preside over the world’s largest economy.


Most people aren’t prepared for this. They aren’t even aware it’s that close. Listen to experts of various stripes, and they will tell you this moment is decades away. The most bearish will put the figure in the mid-2020s. 


But they’re miscounting. They’re only comparing the gross domestic products of the two countries using current exchange rates.


That’s a largely meaningless comparison in real terms. Exchange rates change quickly. And China’s exchange rates are phony. China artificially undervalues its currency, the renminbi, through massive intervention in the markets.


The comparison that really matters:  The IMF in its analysis looks beyond exchange rates to the true, real terms picture of the economies using “purchasing power parities.” (PPP) That compares what people earn and spend in real terms in their domestic economies.


Under PPP, the Chinese economy will expand from $11.2 trillion this year to $19 trillion in 2016. Meanwhile the size of the U.S. economy will rise from $15.2 trillion to $18.8 trillion. That would take America’s share of the world output down to 17.7%, the lowest in modern times. China’s would reach 18%, and rising.


Just 10 years ago, the U.S. economy was three times the size of China’s. "

Ineptitude of both political parties over 30 years, as well as selfish greed which is as natural to businesses and corporations as breathing, have caused this to happen.  More specifically, the only real differences between Republican and Democrat in political circles has been on social and hot-button issues like abortion, gay-rights, 2nd Amendment rights, etc..

Economically, there are little to no difference.

Sure the Republicans talk of balancing budgets now but their goal really is to completely gut social services and roll back the entitlements of the last 75 years.  They had no problems freely spending money when in control of Congress during the early-mid 2000's.  And Democrats claim they're for the working people and poor, yet abandon them at every turn so not to upset the markets, corporations and power brokers that own both parties.

And meanwhile, while every President from Reagan to Clinton to Obama was/is at heart, a pro-Wall Street, pro-corporation "Trickle down"-ite, deeply greedy US businesses decided it was far better for them to close whole factories and distribution centers and ship them to the ends of the globe to save $$ in wages, benefits and Federal taxes.

The American only had value as a 'consumer' with endless credit cards to tap out which was used by most people to make up the difference in loss of standard of living, based on increased prices and stagnant wages.

The American people have not had a leader who has genuinely fought for them in over 30 years; someone who looked at corporations and banks with healthy hatred and took them on directly, grabbing the proverbial 'bull' by the horns.  Someone who fought hard for fair trade policies that help make the nation stronger rather than speed up its decline.

Instead, for 30 years our Presidents have made us feel good about ourselves with "Morning in America", sold us on a 'New World Order', 'felt our pain' while increasing it via NAFTA & WTO, sold a bill of lies to get us into a 8years + counting war in Iraq, and promised us 'Hope' & 'Change' while delivering neither.

Five presidents worked collectively to appease the ultra-rich,  destroy the economic foundations, expand our National Debt to uncontrollable proportions and make us heavy indebtors to China, who will now eventually surpass the US in five years.

I end with this sobering statistic-- in 1980, the National Debt of the US was under $1 Trillion.  In 31 years and five really awful presidents of both parties, it is at $14.3 Trillion and rising by $133 million A DAY.