News Brief: On Reconciliation 'Fight', Media Focuses on Abstract Numbers and Horse Race Over Human Stakes
Added 2021-10-08 13:49:25 +0000 UTCIn this Patreon News Brief, we breakdown American media's habit of ignoring what's actually in anti-poverty bills and who they will impact––in favor of big, scary multi trilliondy dollars top line figures.
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Adam Johnson | October 5, 2021 | The Column
Media Praise ‘Mavericks’ for Blocking Aid to American People
Eoin Higgins | October 6, 2021 | FAIR
What's in the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill?
Melissa Quinn & Kathryn Watson | October 5, 2021 | CBS News
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Comments
I think this can simply conclude, a capitalist society is completely fine with dehumanizing people within systematic poverty. If you can “dehumanize” people like they so easily do, than cutting and destroying any forms of (debatably ineffective) welfare programs (because they don’t actually help people out of poverty but only make it easier to survive in it) becomes easy.. We need to go up to these people and tell them to say it.. say that “you advocate for dehumanizing people based off their “systematic” (because poverty isn’t a choice but something we are all born into except for the 1%) financial position. Say it out loud, mask off. Get these monsters to say it out loud that poor people don’t deserve to live.
2021-10-12 20:29:25 +0000 UTCDamn, I needed this episodes. Excellent job
2021-10-12 16:58:17 +0000 UTCAnother thing that I haven't heard about is the savings from letting medicare negotiate drug prices, which I believe is part of the reconciliation bill. That alone would save both USG and individuals a bunch of money. The closest I've seen to the press doing the math is Kaiser Family Foundation (https://www.kff.org/medicare/issue-brief/how-would-drug-price-negotiation-affect-medicare-part-d-premiums/), but IIRC Bernie has harped on the fact that permitting this would also save other individuals money by lowering prices for everyone and would offset some of the other cost of the bill. Not that the costs matter that much; while I'm not a strict adherent to MMT, we should probably be less worried about how much the government spends (to say nothing of the military budget lol).
Alex
2021-10-08 22:10:20 +0000 UTC
