Recently, I’ve been interviewed fairly regularly on Sharon Firebrace’s “Razor Sharp” on radio Melbourne 3KND.
I make the point that economics is simply the interaction between people and the planet to produce wealth – because everything comes from the land. So we proceed to discuss the issues of the day in terms of this measure – whether a particular activity is acting to benefit people and/or the planet.
Does the banks’ putting people into hock for thirty years against bubble-inflated mortgages assist or hinder people?
Do large corporates getting our mineral wealth out of the ground owe more than trivial royalties to the Australian people because, let’s face it, the extraction is pretty permanent, and the resources are ours?
As I mentioned to Sharon Firebrace yesterday, analytical and challenging programs such as hers and others on 3KND and on 3CR are not to be found on mainstream commercial stations. The latter are too busy comparing the selfsame policies of Tweedledum and Tweedledee – and trying hard to distinguish a difference. There’s none.
The mainstream will interview a minister or a shadow minister and try to find something contentious in what they’ve said—if they do, they’ll get all worked up about it—but never challenge the social sickness of longstanding poverty or the wealth divide, nor how current policies are assisting to reinforce the obscenely growing gap between the mega rich and the 99(.9?)%.
Speakers for the status quo proliferate on the commercial stations, and any others are roundly derided or abused.
For all that, I’m confident that younger people have seen through the pointlessness of mainstream radio and are looking for alternatives sources of information, in programs such as “Razor Sharp”, and via the social media.
Much of the mainstream appeals to older people and those who are working themselves up into an angry tizz about the social change that every day becomes more essential.
Good one! Your probly right. As Ryan Heath put it in his book titled- Please just F*off it’s our turn now. ‘The sport obsessed Australian media is a collective yawn. I love sport, I just don’t love tedium’, ‘an adversarial model of journalism, plenty of idiotic talkback radio specimens. The alternative to the mainstream soft lobotomy of ping-pong comparisons of left & right is 3KND. 3 Cool-N- Deadly Land Value taxes would be as ‘Keynes’ said: Euthanasia of the rentiers’. Apathy in the mainstream? Perhaps young people would be better to sit on a beach, and let the show come to it’s logical conclusion, because they wont, don’t have the experience or historical memory, of living through, to the lead up, to the greatest global depression that has baby boomer footprints all over it.
Boomers are fond of saying-‘it all turn out to be a lot harder than we first thought’ but never though how hard they have been making it for decades for their children. Is their Adult children apathetic living at home till they’re forty because housing is so unaffordable? And some polite people from over sea’s will buy our overpriced assets without complaining, having no historical memory to the ponzi on our shore. But it’s the same wherever you go, and that’s why it’s not different here! Bubble deniers!’ Australians are an apathetic bunch’. Could it be when four hundred lobby organizations in Canberra speak, the thinking’s done? I think its that many now? And they have mostly had one generation on their mind. Baby Boomers. The great leveraging of our children’s future has come apart in spectacular fashion, it couldn’t last. Now come the greatest show on earth, the financial collapse, final episode.
The mainstream media is the domain of over 40’s and the baby boomers, who chair all the microphones as commentators since the sixty’s. Too many to count, But Australians can be pretty apathetic, I’m not Shaw whether this is because we have become so used to deferring our thinking and outrage on any topic to hugely powerful lobbyists, and thinking, they will keep beer in the fridge, cheers! No worries mate, leave it to the 400 lobby groups in Canberra to run every aspect of our lives and thinking, so we can knuckle drag ourselves to the fridge for another tinny and back to the big game on TV, forget that we have deferred being upset about much anymore. The mainstream talkback seems like ‘we agree to disagree’ because we both have a dog in the hunt, to get paid, or in other words, its all fake outrage, to get ratings, and besides we must keep the carefully crafted illusion that there is real debate, democracy and challenge to special interests. It’s the or the she will be right attitude, or the soft lobotomy of the fluoride in the water, that has the effect of glazing and searing the pineal gland, so that getting upset about anything other than peak hour traffic or being to late to pick up their Prozac from the chemist, to carm, the excessive alcohol withdrawals is about the only angst that Australians feel. But my blood did start to boil as I heard one acrimonious and self-aggrandisement Council member talk cycling and creative Melbourne like he invented it! Sorry Guv, but Cycling has been gaining momentum long before the Lord arrived in his Tardus, It was like listening to those sociopathic managers, who is acrimonious for everyone else’s better idea, and alternative, because they failed to fix Things, and people turned away, to another culture of ‘doing’. Young people are looking for their answers globally on the Internet, they are suspicious
About the deadly silence, on most things that matter to them. what is not being discussed on local radio, which means we don’t think your views, beliefs, or historical memory on anything much in community has any gravitas, to influence, power play or sway the establishment and its media, so you are to be dumb down to appeal too, lick boots for, and soft talk to powerful special interest groups, as if some how they/we are all connected at the hip, and would whither if separated, and that host needs the parasites by soft talking and feigning fake outrage, and dissent, all the while making up, no bad feelings, we agree to disagree, which is an exercise in doublethink, or an omission, that in the end we are all driving at the same neo-liberal consensus, its all so familiar, like grandmothers home sweets and cooking on Sundays. Is it that we are all so tolerant, or just apathetic that any good will come to change the massive inequality before us
The disinformation agents on radio & media are blinding. Once you listen to enough years of talkback, you start to realise how futile it all is. It’s what talkback does not discuss that is a great shame, and when we are not listening to talkback to find out what doesn’t matter. There I go again, I got off the issue like Moreen from Bendigo on the challenge. We were talking about Land Value Tax.