"Media: The stupid and the liars choose to serve corporations, not people" (Ava and C.I., THE THIRD ESTATE SUNDAY REVIEW):
But for now, let's stay with NBC. Last Thursday, they set a new record for live productions of a play -- a musical in fact. ANNIE LIVE! wasn't just a bomb, it was a huge bomb. This was supposed to be holiday fare. This was supposed to be event-TV. It wasn't. Viewers tuned out. Of this genre -- the winter holiday musical, nine other previous 'events' beat it out. And not just Carrie Underwood's SOUND OF MUSIC. No, no, no. Also getting higher ratings? 2015's THE WIZ, 2019's LITTLE MERMAID, 2014's PETER PAN LIVE, 2017's HAIRSPRAY LIVE, 2018's JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR LIVE, 2016's THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW and, yes, even 2016's THE PASSION.
It was a bomb of epic proportions.
We don't blame Megan Hilty for that (Megan replaced Jane Krakowski at the last minute because Jane had COVID 19). We do blame NBC for casting Harry Connick Jr. and Taraji P. Henson. The broadcast might have survived one but not both. The point is to cast a wide net with these specials. You want to attract as many viewers as possible -- it's supposed to be 'event TV' -- meaning wide appeal.
Harry alone in the cast might have been okay -- with a normal cast. Yes, some would have avoided him because of his father -- and Harry Sr.'s actions regarding JFK are known a lot more widely than when Junior was playing Leo. But, hopefully, a well liked cast could have made up for any loss he caused. But they also cast Taraji. And fate just wasn't having it.
Taraji used to be a respected actress. Her many bad films changed that. And her lying, as she promoted PROUD MARY, that she was going to be a big movie star even if this film failed because she had so many more coming out. She did have many more coming out. But they weren't hits either: ACRIMONY, WHAT MEN WANT and THE BEST OF ENEMIES. They all bombed. And don't pretend WMW was a hit. It wasn't. US studios do not get 100% of ticket sales to begin with -- and that's in North America. When you look at overseas, you are looking at even more money not going to the studio. We are so sick of idiots who comment on box office and claim that something was a hit for the studio because it made $17 million overseas. Yes, the studio got some money. It didn't get as much as if were money raised in North American theaters -- and even then, the studios do not get 100% of ticket sales.
Taraji's back to supporting roles in TV films. She never became a film star. She had too many flops and then came the scandal with EMPIRE.
For those who don't remember, Taraji backed Jussie Smollett. Even after the truth was known. Even after the show was cancelled and off the air. And she said damaging things about people who did not believe Jussie. Of course, we all know now that Jussie lied.
Jussie is a con artist.
And NBC wanted to cast Taraji as a big name for a family event and thought people would tune in?
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Fate doesn't seem to like NBC much so Fate slapped the network across the face. Meaning? Nightmare Taraji appeared at the end of last week, the week that saw Jussie finally go back on trial.
Jussie Smollett? A good actor, but not good enough to pull of his con.
Jussie was going to Subway for a sandwich and let's just go to Dave Chappelle because everyone knows he put it in perspective better than anyone else.
So Jussie was, per Jussie, attacked by two White men who wore MAGA (Make America Great Again) hats, statements, racist statements, homophobic statements, poured bleach on him and put a rope around his neck.
He did not know his assailants, he insisted.
The people? He told them he was "the gay Tupac." And then he went on ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA as BBC NEWS notes:
He suggests the alleged attackers were white, saying: "If I had said [the attackers] was a Muslim, or a Mexican, or someone black, I feel like the doubters would have supported me a lot much more."
On his refusal to hand over his phone, he says: "I have private pictures and videos and numbers... my private emails, my private songs, my private voice memos."
And speaking through tears, he says gay people should "learn to fight" these kinds of attacks.
There was a lot of drama. He got a lot of support. Most of that support, we don't attack or even criticize. Yes, he was lying. But people didn't know that. And if they gave support, good for them. It doesn't make them worse people for wanting to support someone they believed had been harmed.
But then there were the others. Remember them?
The ones who wanted to go beyond support and instead use the alleged
incident to advance their own agendas. Remember them?
We remember a performer going on THE LATE SHOW WITH STEPHEN COLBERT to cry and moan and talk of fear over the attack on Jussie -- while also promoting their new NETFLIX show -- was something to see -- if you like daytime TV on late night. The performer wanted to toss out support to victim Jussie and to make it clear how it happened:
Connect
the dots. This is what happens. If you are in a position of power and
you hate people and and you want to cause suffering to them, you go
through the trouble, you spend your career trying to cause suffering,
what do you think is going to happen? Kids are going to be abused and
they're going to kill themselves and people are going to be beaten on
the street.
If we'd been that stupid, we
might have had to change our names too. Fortunately, Elliot Page had
other reasons to change his name.
A lot of people should have distanced themselves from Jussie.
Not Taraji. She just dug in deeper. And when it turned out that the 'assailants' were two brothers who worked on EMPIRE? She still stuck with Jussie. When it turned out that they were Nigerian with deep accents? She still stuck with Jussie.
She and others didn't get how damaging that was. It destroyed EMPIRE. EMPIRE ended 2018 with five million viewers. January 31, 2019 Jussie claims he was assaulted. The series returns from its December 2018 cliffhanger on March 13, 2019 with about half a million less viewers. It continues to bleed viewers and ends up with the lowest season finale ever . . . until the next season. As Taraji continues to support Jussie, viewers are disgusted. The show is limping along. It starts off the season with an all time low of 3 million. 17 new episodes follow and that low 3 million starts looking a lot better as the show starts dipping more and ends up getting less than 3 million viewers an episode. (The all time low for that season? 1.89 million viewers.)
He's a known liar and Taraji's sticking with him -- hiking with him -- lying for him.
What Taraji and other idiots trying to defend him didn't get -- Angela Y. Davis, we're looking at you when we say other idiots? Jussie's hoax was a con. And that was bad enough. That's Sister Aimee Semple McPherson territory. Jussie didn't just appear on EMPIRE. He played Jamal. That was the heart and soul of the family. He was the one who believed in right and wrong. If this had been 'crazy' Andre, fans might have blown the scandal off. But Jussie played the character we were all supposed to trust. And no one with the show seemed to get how much his con hurt the viewers, the fans. And Taraji's nonsense may have appealed to a few of the viewers who stuck with the show to the end. But all those viewers who had vanished? They were done with her.
And this is who NBC heavily promotes in the commercials for ANNIE LIVE!?
This would have been a hard sell during a good week but last week wasn't a good week. No, last week was when Jussie went back on trial. And the media was already covering it before his attorney pulled a stunt. From Jonathan Turley's commentary:
If you thought that Smollett case could not get more bizarre, think again. CBS 2 Legal Analyst Irv Miller is reporting that defense attorney Tamara Walker had a sidebar conversation with attorneys from both sides and Cook County Judge James Linn. She reportedly accused Judge Linn of some improper comment and then said that he lunged at her in the courtroom. She was crying during the sidebar. Another Smollett attorney accused Linn of snarling and making faces during the trial. In thirty years of practice as a criminal defense attorney, I have never heard of such allegations in a criminal trial.
The demand for a mistrial was rejected.
In a case where the defendant is accused of manufacturing a bizarre alleged attack, the allegation of a judge lunging at his counsel seems weirdly consistent. There is no indication if there is proof of such threatening act or the alleged faces being made from the bench.
[. . .]
If a judge lunged at counsel and has been making faces from the bench, I
would expect an emergency motion and possible appeal. Such a demand for
recusal of a judge who is allegedly lunging at counsel would not
ordinarily ended with a simple sidebar.
Jussie is a joke and NBC's an idiot for putting Taraji in ANNIE LIVE! Even FOX knows that they can't do the EMPIRE spin-off around Cookie. They'd hoped to be able to but the negatives around Taraji are now too strong to make her a series lead. She might be able to be put in a cast -- in a non-leading role -- of people who are well liked and not harm the ratings but, as the lead, she's ratings poison.
They wrote a mammoth piece. It covers so much Even highlighting the above and what I excerpted yesterday, that still doesn't convey the scope of the piece.
"Iraq snapshot" (THE COMMON ILLS):
Tuesday, December 7, 2021. Oh, JACOBIN. THat really covers it all.
Garbage. That's what Julia Rock and David Sirota have written at JACOBIN. Trina texted me about it yesterday. I thought she meant to highlight it in the snapshot here and was all for it. Then I read it and called her and we were both appalled by the article.
It's about inflation. David and Julia are correct to note that inflation media stories do not note the gross inflation of executives salaries during the pandemic. They would've been wise to have built an article around that.
In terms of real people? They write like they know none. Inflation's just an illusion, they insist, and its the normal reaction people have to increased prices while forgetting that their own wages have increased. Huh?
Were you stoned?
Did you write garbage like this when you were stoned:
But the bottom 60 percent of earners have more money in their pockets than they did pre-pandemic, even after accounting for inflation, when wage increases and government programs like COVID relief checks and the Child Tax Credit are included. That spending successfully cut poverty nearly in half.
David and Julie, come over here, it's the real world.
I have no idea why it took two people to write such stupdiity. Maybe you're writing for 'the creative class'? I have no idea but if you thought that was going to connect with workers, you obviously don't interact with any. Maybe that's the point? Maybe JACOBIN fancies itself as a publication for the upscale?
I have no idea. But you can't count COVID relief checks as increased wages. The last one was months ago and it was the one Donald Trump pushed through (but Nancy Pelosi wouldn't allow to go out until Joe Biden had been sworn in as president). Those weren't about increased wages, you idiuots. Those were about easing suffering and pacifying a confused nation. We needed a UBI but all we got were crappy stimulus checks. And, now, thanks to you two, those crappy stimula checks will be portrayed as a 'wage increase.'
I don't get how this article came about.
Is this your effort to try to protect Joe Biden and his big spending bills -- that really don't do anything, by the way?
I'd really like it if we could have honest reporting. I'd like it if the needs of the people could come ahead of the wants and spin of a political party. I'm not here to pimp Joe Biden or his policies. I'm not here to do that for any political party. I'm not a whore. I'm reading over David and Julia's piece and my mouth just gapes wide in wonder.
Let's just deal with that nonsense about a wage increase (based on stimulus checks! and a tax credit!). That's going to lead to so much garbage. The same sort of garbage we have of "People just don't want to work" and "the government paid them too much and that's why they don't want to work."
No, some people don't want to work because wages are low paying and respect on the job is non-existent. I'd love, for example, for David and Julia to do a report on how many workers feel they deal with an office bully each day -- usually some middle management jerk. Bill Clinton gutted the safety net -- and bragged about it. It was racism and it was stupidity. And we're never going to rebuild that until we move beyond media lies of lazy people who don't want to work.
Lousy jobs. That's what you've got. Lousy jobs where people are treated like dirt and the pandemic showed them that they didn't have to put up with it. They could live on a smaller budget, some learned. Others didn't have the choice to 'learn' because they just had to cope. This especialy includes caregivers -- predominately women, but not just women -- who had to take on additional resposnsibilites due to the pandemic.
Now these aren't 'sexy' storeis for the press and, of course, anytime a story involves women, the US press is even less interested.
I don't know why JACOBIN can't cover things like that. I don't know how they see promoting a baseless lie that the discontinued stimulus checks were an increase in wages as being helpful.
Most people, for example, don't get a raise in 2020 but lose it in 20021 while doing the exact same job.
I was all prepared to quote from the article and to praise it. The headline alone made it seem important. But I read it and it's garbage. David and Julia probably think they made their case very well but they didn't. They've created a springboard for right-wing talking points which will hurt workers for some time to come.
And David and Julia need to start interacting with people -- and that's not Emily's constituents at political events.
We're just doing Zooms now because of the pandemic. But we had more than enough encounters via that with real people to see what was going to go down in Virginia. The inflation issue is not minor and it's not something in people's heads. They see the increases, yes. They also feel them in their pockets. Milk has gone up, everything's going up. If you can't acknowledge that (a) this is happening and that (b) the poor and the working poor are especially hard hit, I don't know why you're writing for a Socialist -- or psuedo Socialist -- publication. Marx said, "Workers of the world unite!" JACOBIN appears to be saying, "Workers of the world build us a staging platform and let us know when you're done." They want a movement but there's clearly a first class in their desired movement and a coach or workers' class for everyone else.
To call the piece tone deaf is letting it off too easy. Again, this is a piece that will launch a million and one right-wing talking points. Many of those talking points? They'll begin with, "Even Democratic Socialist JACOBIN admits that workers wages have increased . . ." And these arguments will be used to weasel out of government obligations and to ensure that the US does not provide any other stimulus checks, let alone the needed UBI.
Everyone wants to act puzzled by what has taken place socially. There's no puzzle to it. What's going on is a reset and, like previous ones, it's caused by a demographic bulge. The much maligned millenials are rather earnest, yes. But that's how it always is. That's how the younger generation was seen in the sixties, for example. Societal change, when it comes, usually succeeds because of the young. They're raised on the belieft of doing the right thing and they haven't yet been worn down to desperate whores who'll say, "Who cares if he raped a woman" or whatever. They're not going to accept marching orders. They beilieve in values and equality. And they still believe the system can work. They take those beliefs and they go up against the system and we get change.
Demography is one of the least understood aspects of change when it comes to political theory. But it's one of the most easily predicted. Time and again, it impacts the market first, this bulge in the population. And then, as the young people age into adults, it impacts the system itself.
Maybe if people grasped that, they'd spend less time knocking young people and less time offering garbage like David and Julia have? Instead, they could direct their energy towards what was possible in the brief time before the bulge gets worn down like all the ones that came before?
And maybe they could address that what's actually increased, per labor figures and stastistics, is the amount of work that workers are doing each week. More work and no real increase in wages. Seems like that's a story JACOBIN could and should be covering.
I don't dislike David. I like Emily. I have been really glad to be able to praise David in the last years. It's a huge improvement over our past relationship -- e-mails threatening to sue me -- but I'm not going to be silent right now. This is a very bad article. I'm sure it was not intended to be. But it is what it is. And I'm not going to praise it and I'm certainly not going to be afraid to call it out. It needs to be called out loudly.
Let's note this from Hamilton Noah's piece at IN THESE TIMES:
People who view the world through the lens of electoral politics don’t tend to like the phrase “Which side are you on?” It is seen as unsophisticated, simplistic — a black-and-white view of a political reality in which compromise is the path to getting anything done. But the phrase has great utility. It acknowledges that there are sides, and that you have to be on one of them. Organized labor is about power. Power concedes nothing without a fight. Compromise is fine, as long as everyone can tell — without looking too hard — which side you are working for.
A year into full Democratic control of the federal government, and a year out from the likely end of that happy arrangement, is a useful time to consider what the labor movement has gotten out of this ostensibly ideal situation. Have we gotten the PRO Act, the number one thing that labor wants and needs? No. Nor will we, until the filibuster is gone. In fairness, only a minority of Congressional Democrats are holding this legislation back, a result of the fact that the Democratic Party is not one unified thing, but a very loose collection of many disparate things united only by our nation’s poor two-party design. It is fair, however, to look at what the Democrats are doing from the very top — where the agenda is set, and where symbolism matters.
The
reason the PRO Act is so important is that it is not an easy time for
unions in America. The law is tilted against them. Major victories are
rare. Inspiration is at a premium. Democrats claim to understand this.
During the pandemic-wracked year of 2020,
there was no more important or inspiring union story than the effort to
unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama. It represented an
attempt to crack the most influential and powerful (and anti-union)
company in the nation, where the battle to organize workers will have
ripple effects on what the future of work looks like across the country
in decades to come. Though the union lost that election, the company
cheated, and another election will be held. In the fight to unionize Amazon, everyone must be on a side.
Last week, we learned that former President Barack Obama’s foundation has accepted a $100 million donation from Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. It is a trifling sum for Bezos, who has made more than $100 billion while doing everything possible to ensure that his hundreds of thousands of workers are unable to organize to improve their own lives. The donation was reportedly arranged by Jay Carney, Obama’s former press secretary, who is now Amazon’s spokesman, and who spoke out against the union drive in Alabama. Bezos specifically asked that the donation be earmarked to build a plaza in honor of recently deceased Congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.
John Lewis was a strong and active supporter of unions. Imagine how meaningful it would have been if Barack Obama had publicly supported the Amazon union drive in Alabama. He didn’t, though. But he will have a “plaza” paid for by the guy who has become richer than Rockefeller by crushing Amazon workers. I hope that plaza will be spacious enough for John Lewis to roll over in his grave. Thank you for your leadership, Obama.
That's reality. It's in short supply at JACOBIN this week. They're also promoting Liza Featherstone's deeply misguided defense of the 'canon.' And, Liza, I don't know that I'd called young right-wingers "little s**ts" in the same article where I went on about how the books of Aristotle and Shakespeare must be read. No, we're not just talking personal taste here (I've never had the Eurocentric devotion to William Shakespeare), we're also talking about the fact that neither wrote boos. Shakespeare wrote plays, dear, and Aristotle delivered lectures. It's a quibble but so is dismissing some young people as "sh**ts."
Iraq? ISIS is back or 'back.' I guess it's shocking if you were stupid enough to believe ISIS was ever defeated in Iraq. It never was and we noted that over and over in the last years. ISIS lost territory. BIg deal. A terrorist organization is suppoed to promote and conduct terror. It's not supposed to govern. (Although we could have a lively discussion about governments who terrorize their own citizens -- not to mention the citizens of other countries.) ISIS losing control of Mosul was not a defeat.
And ISIS has continued to be active. As they reach for reasons to argue US troops need to stay in Iraq, the US press is rediscovering ISIS and treating the Basra motorcycle bombing as a major event. Even quoting from slumlord Moqtada al-Sadr. Hopefully outgoing President Barhim Saleh is making noises about how this is a threat to Iraq's society. Really? I think corruption is a bigger threat and I think there are about six other factors that are more threatening.
In fact, ISIS benefits from these factors. But Saleh won't address that right now. Though it was only weeks ago that he was making similar statements.
Let's wind down with this announcement by Iraq War veteran Patrick Murphy:
The Army/Navy Game is about more than just football. It's about coming together to recognize that, even though we come from different places, and even though we wear different uniforms or perform different tasks in service, we have all sworn to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. The Army/Navy Game is a reminder that we serve something larger than ourselves.
The following sites updated:
-
Breaking Down Bedroom Pop2 hours ago
-
-
Jizzy Pants Maxwell, still on trial7 hours ago
-
Weekend box office7 hours ago
-
Jimmy Dore, Jonathan Cook7 hours ago
-
NBC's La Brea7 hours ago
-
The Hunter Biden Follies7 hours ago
-
That 'hut' on the Moon8 hours ago
-
Reality about Alice Waters8 hours ago
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
