David F. Ruccio — Socialism or truth

On truth and truthiness.

"We have the ocean in our bucket. We built a special bucket to contain it. So get lost."

Meanwhile, socialism rises.

Occasional Links & Commentary
Socialism or truth
David F. Ruccio | Professor of Economics, University of Notre Dame

Jeremiah Jones — ‘Whites Only’ Stickers Falsely Attributed To #BLM Appear At St. Louis Restaurants

Don't believe everything you see.

St. Louis restaurant owners were upset when “Whites Only” stickers with the hashtag #BLM began appearing at their businesses. It turns out that BLM had nothing to do with it. A group of young white males was caught on security cameras doing the deed to try to cause problems for BLM.

BLM is apparently Black Lives Matter, not Bureau of Land Management, although that is a right bogeyman, too.

Counter Current News
‘Whites Only’ Stickers Falsely Attributed To #BLM Appear At St. Louis Restaurants
Jeremiah Jones

Heiner Flassbeck — Babylonian double talk, populism and leftist confusion

Nowadays, enormous amounts of information reach people. Most of it passes through very few channels. The mainstream media dominate the public debate, sow confusion and propagate disinformation. Unfortunately, the situation is hardly better on the other side. Many leftist intellectuals love talking about big goals, but they hate the discussions about the way to get there.

flassbeck economics international
Babylonian double talk, populism and leftist confusion
Heiner Flassbeck | Director of Flassbeck-Economics

John Helmer — Amazon.Com Announces All Products May Be Defective – Russian Fake News And Kremlin Propaganda To Blame For Future Billion-Dollar Collapse Of Sales, Share Price

Cutting to the chase and going directly after Jeff Bezos to make corporate media responsive.

Some interesting revelations about PropOrNot, too.

Dances with Bears

Amazon.Com Announces All Products May Be Defective – Russian Fake News And Kremlin Propaganda To Blame For Future Billion-Dollar Collapse Of Sales, Share Price

John Helmer

Bill Mitchell — The ‘post-truth’ era – nothing new in mainstream economics

The dictionary says Post Truth is the “fact or state of being post-truth; a time period or situation in which facts have become less important than emotional persuasion”. But I prefer to be direct – not to mince words – Post Truth is lying, plain and simple. It is making stuff up that is untrue, in denial of the facts, and, in cases where volition drives the lying, using strategic and well-thought out tools of psychological persuasion, fear, threats etc to make it look as though the statements are factual rather than lies. The interesting thing for me at the moment in this respect is that we are increasingly being told we are now in this Post Truth era. That social media has created this Post Truth era and that something should be done about it. Oxford English Dictionary announced recently that the Word of the Year 2016 is…, you got it, “post-truth” which they claim is a “concept … [which] … has been in existence for the past decade”. Its use has apparently “spiked in frequency this year” as a result of the Brexit referendum and the US election. Two things then are worth noting. First, there is nothing new about the idea of lying to influence public opinion. Indeed, as I will explain (briefly) the whole edifice of mainstream economics, including New Keynesian economics has been ‘post-truth’ since its inception. Second, the fact that it is getting attention now is because the establishment are starting to feel the pinch – their usual media power is losing traction with the democratising influences of the Internet – and their cosy worlds of influence are under threat from a rabble. And this applies to so-called progressive Left (the socialist politicians in Europe, the Labour politicians in Australia, Britain and elsewhere) who have so bought into the neo-liberal myth machine that they cannot understand why they are now losing support from their traditional sources (working class people). The ‘post-truth’ era is apparently upon us. But the reality is that there is nothing new about lying in mainstream economics. It is built upon a lie. It is just that the lying that is spreading on the Internet (‘fake news sites’) are damaging the establishment. That is why they are now complaining. They have never complained about the incessant lying from the economics profession....

Bill Mitchell – billy blog
The ‘post-truth’ era – nothing new in mainstream economics
Bill Mitchell | Professor in Economics and Director of the Centre of Full Employment and Equity (CofFEE), at University of Newcastle, NSW, Australia

David Edwards — Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

To reiterate, 'fake news' is said to refer to 'websites [that] publish hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation to drive web traffic'. A simple, table-top experiment can help us understand why this definition can be generalised to all corporate media, not just social media.

Place a square wooden framework on a flat surface and pour into it a stream of ball bearings, marbles, or other round objects. Some of the balls may bounce out, but many will form a layer within the wooden framework; others will then find a place atop this first layer. In this way, the flow of ball bearings steadily builds new layers that inevitably produce a pyramid-style shape.

This experiment is used to demonstrate how near-perfect crystalline structures such as snowflakes arise in nature without conscious design. We will use it here as a way of understanding Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky's 'propaganda model' of 'mainstream' performance.

Imagine now that the four sides of the wooden framework are labelled to indicate the framing conditions shaping the corporate media:

1. Corporate nature, elite/parent company ownership and profit-maximising orientation
2. Dependence on allied corporate advertisers for 50% or more of revenues
3. Dependence on cheap, subsidised news supplied by state-corporate allies
4. Political, economic, legal carrots and sticks rewarding corporate media conformity and punishing dissent

When facts, ideas, journalists and managers are poured into this framework, the result is a highly filtered, power-friendly 'pyramid' of media performance. Every aspect of corporate media output is shaped by these framing conditions.…

Put simply, it is not reasonable to expect corporate media to report honestly on a world dominated by corporations. With perfect irony, the latest focus on 'fake news' is itself fake news because the corporate media never have discussed and never will discuss the framing conditions that make it a leading purveyor of 'hoaxes, propaganda, and disinformation'.…

Media Lens — Editorial

Fake News About 'Fake News' - The Media Performance Pyramid

David Edwards | Editor
 ht Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism