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https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2023/08/04/mainstream-journalists-are-cloistered-ivy-league-educated-trust-fund-kids/

Mainstream Journalists Are Cloistered Ivy League-Educated Trust Fund Kids

Iraq war cheerleader David Brooks has an article in The New York Times titled “What if We’re the Bad Guys Here?“, another one of those tired old think pieces we’ve been seeing for the last eight years that asks “golly gosh could we coastal elites have played some role in the rise of Trumpism?” like it’s the first time anyone has ever considered that obvious point (the answer is yes, duh, you soft-handed silver spoon-fed ivory tower bubble boy).

One worthwhile paragraph about the media stands out though:

“Over the last decades we’ve taken over whole professions and locked everybody else out. When I began my journalism career in Chicago in the 1980s, there were still some old crusty working-class guys around the newsroom. Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession, we’re an elite-college-dominated profession. Only 0.8 percent of all college students graduate from the super elite 12 schools (the Ivy League colleges, plus Stanford, M.I.T., Duke and the University of Chicago). A 2018 study found that more than 50 percent of the staff writers at the beloved New York Times and The Wall Street Journal attended one of the 29 most elite universities in the nation.”

Brooks is not the first to make this observation about the drastic shift in the socioeconomic makeup of news reporters that has taken place from previous generations to now.

“The class factor in journalism gets overlooked,” journalist Glenn Greenwald said on the Jimmy Dore Show in 2021. “Thirty or forty years ago, fifty years ago, journalists really were outsiders. That’s why they all had unions; they made shit money, they came from like working class families. They hated the elite. They hated bankers and politicians. It was kind of like a boss-employee relationship — they hated them and wanted to throw rocks at them and take them down pegs.”

“If I were to list the twenty richest people I’ve ever met in my entire life, I think like seven or eight of them are people I met because they work at The Intercept — people from like the richest fucking families on the planet,” Greenwald added.

Journalist Matt Taibbi, whose father worked for NBC, made similar observations on the Dark Horse podcast back in 2020.

“Reporters when I was growing up, they came from a different class of people than they do today,” Taibbi said. “A lot of them were kind of more working class — their parents were more likely to be plumbers or electricians than they were to be doctors or lawyers. Like this thing where the journalist is an Ivy League grad, that’s a relatively new thing that I think came about in the seventies and eighties with my generation. But reporters just instinctively hated rich people, they hated powerful people. Like if you put up a poster of a politician in a newsroom it was defaced instantaneously, like there were darts on it. Reporters saw it as their job to stick it to the man.”

“Mostly the job is different now,” Taibbi said. “The fantasy among reporters in the nineties about politicians started to be, I want to be the person that hangs out with the candidate after the speech and has a beer and is sort of close to power. And that’s kind of the model, that’s where we’re at right now. That’s kind of the problem is that basically people in the business want to be behind the rope line with people of influence. And it’s going to be a problem to get us back to that other adversarial posture of the past.”

This is a major reason behind the freakish sycophancy and empire loyalism we see in the mainstream press. It’s not just the obscenely wealthy owners of the mass media who are protecting their class interests — it’s the reporters, editors and pundits as well.

These are typically fairly wealthy people from fairly wealthy families, who become more and more wealthy the more their careers are elevated. As insiders of the mainstream press have attested, it’s widely understood by employees of the mainstream media that the way to elevate your career is to toe the establishment line and refrain from spotlighting issues that are inconvenient to the powerful.

This identification with the ruling class feeds into the dynamic described by Taibbi in which modern journalists have come to value close proximity to those in power. These are the people they want to be sharing drinks with and going to parties with and invited to the weddings of; the “us vs them” dynamic which used to exist between the press and politicians switched, and now the press see themselves and the politicians they fraternize with as “us” and the general public as “them”.

There are other factors at play with regard to elite education. The number of journalists with college degrees skyrocketed from 58 percent in 1971 to 92 percent in 2013; if your wealthy parents aren’t paying that off for you then you’ve got crushing student debt that you need to pay off yourself, which you can only do in the field you studied in by making a decent amount of money, which you can only do by acting as a dependable propagandist for the imperial establishment.

Universities themselves tend to play a status quo-serving, conformity-manufacturing role when churning out journalists, as wealth won’t flow into an academic environment that is offensive to the wealthy. Moneyed interests are unlikely to make large donations to universities which teach their students that moneyed interests are a plague upon the nation, and they are certainly not going to send their kids there.

“The whole intellectual culture has a filtering system, starting as a child in school,” Noam Chomsky once explained in an interview. “You’re expected to accept certain beliefs, styles, behavioral patterns and so on. If you don’t accept them, you are called maybe a behavioral problem, or something, and you’re weeded out. Something like that goes on all the way through universities and graduate schools. There is an implicit system of filtering… which creates a strong tendency to impose conformism.”

The people who make it through this filtering system are the ones who are elevated to the most influential positions in our civilization. All the most widely amplified voices in our society are the celebrities, journalists, pundits and politicians who’ve proven themselves to be reliable stewards of the matrix of narrative control which keeps the public jacked in to the mainstream worldview.

Is it any wonder, then, that all the sources we’ve been taught to look to for information about our world continually feed us stories which give the impression that the status quo is working fine and this is the only way things can possibly be? Is it any wonder that the mass media support all US wars and cheerlead all imperial agendas?

This is how things were set up to be. Our media act like propagandists for a tyrannical regime because that’s exactly what they are.

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https://scheerpost.com/2023/06/10/glenn-greenwald-what-is-the-espionage-act-a-brief-repressive-history/

What Is the Espionage Act? A Brief & Repressive History

Glenn Greenwald breaks down the conception of the Espionage Act and how it's been used to repress dissidents of the establishment.  

( Two videos, one 15 minutes, and one 10 minute by Glen Greenwald at URL below or at article address )

https://youtu.be/PDh1QCi4IGM

https://youtu.be/5T0ORTlakBY

Comment to article:

" Mr. Greenwald brings up an important question, which he presents very well without venturing to answer it. The question begins at about the 5:10 mark of the second video segment, when Mr. Greenwald asks (paraphrasing): “Does the Biden Administration really want Assange standing trial in the US with the whole world watching as the US Empire fully exposes its own glaring hypocrisy?”

It’s the same question I have asked in the past, speculating over whether the US Ruling Elites, (those running the US Empire), might realize that they’d maybe be smarter just to release Assange than to allow him to become an ever more celebrated icon of freedom, and possibly even a martyr. (He’s reportedly in poor health).

The question reveals the impossible dilemma the US Empire faces, which itself reveals the absolute inevitability of the Empire’s impending (and fast approaching) fall. The Ruling Elites are between the proverbial rock and a hard place. They are faced with ‘backing down’ and appearing weak, (just as they would if they agreed to negotiations over Ukraine), or standing strong and fully revealing their own utter moral depravity.

What ‘the question’ itself reveals is that the Empire of Lies cannot endure. The truth always has a way of revealing itself. One way or another, the truth will eventually be known.

An empire that wants to rule the world, as this unspeakably EVIL US Empire has clearly declared it intends to, cannot allow itself to appear weak. It cannot allow a negotiated settlement in Ukraine, for example, because that would show the world that the Empire is weak and vulnerable, which itself (the revelation of its vulnerable weakness), with an open rebellion against it now in full progress, would destroy the Empire’s intentions to rule the world. Weakness is defeat. Many don’t seem to realize the stakes currently in play. Negotiations in Ukraine would mean defeat of the Empire.

But in the case of Assange, for the Empire to stand strong, it must reveal the Big Lie, AS a BIG LIE. As Mr. Greenwald so cogently points out, when the whole world can see the Empire’s blatant hypocrisy on full display, the Big Lie, that the Empire represents the forces of freedom and democracy, against those of authoritarianism, will be fully exposed.

The Empire can neither release Assange, nor try him, without losing. Both options are losing options. There is simply ‘no way out’ for the Empire. But push does come to shove. The Empire of Lies, the Empire with no remaining options, (save that of Samson), must do SOMETHING. Defeat in Ukraine is rapidly approaching, just at the moment when the Empire must decide what to do with (or about) Assange.

An awareness of the Empire’s inevitably fatal dilemma is what gives both Russia and China so much confidence as they continue to steadily build the anti-Empire Alliance of Nations that is ALREADY more powerful, both militarily and economically, than the Empire.

A crucial conference among the anti-Empire Alliance is convening in St. Petersburg next week, on Wednesday, June 14. Among the key topics expected to be discussed is the creation of a new gold-backed international currency, which will inevitably destroy the US Dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency, which will, in turn, bring not merely the Empire, but also the entire US economy crashing down into utter ruin.

Russia’s taking the field in Ukraine was, from its inception, an open rebellion against the Empire’s authority, as that authority was expressed by the Empire’s naked aggression against Russia. Ukraine’s military is now on its last desperate doddering legs. Ukraine is on the verge of complete implosion. Complete and utter defeat for the Empire is fast approaching. Russia is deeply dug-in in an impregnable defensive position, protecting Donbas, (now a part of Russia proper), and Russia is in no hurry to mount a military offensive. The ‘front’ for Russia in its rebellion against the Empire will be in St. Petersburg next week, and for the entire anti-Empire Alliance, including China, and the burgeoning BRICS Alliance, etc, the ant-Empire Rebellion’s ‘front’ will be in embassies all over the world going forward.

Too few of us here in the US, trapped as we are under the power of the Mass Media propaganda bubble, fully understand that the Empire is facing the fast approaching inevitability of defeat. The gash in the hull below the water line is already torn open. The Empire is already ‘settling by the bow’. On the bridge, the captain’s feet are already sloshing in icy waters. It is under these conditions that the US Ruling Elites must now decide what to do with, or about, Julian Assange.

Addressing Mr. Greenwald’s question, at least two important sub-questions present themselves:

1) If an anti-Empire ‘movement’ existed in the US, (sadly all we have is the crazed ‘zombie apocalypse’ forces of the Woke Cult, which support the Empire’s highest priorities), what would be that movement’s preference for which choice the Empire would make concerning Jules? Would our natural compassion for our spiritual compatriot cause us to hope for his release, or would our knowledge of the opportunities for our coup-de-grace caliber actions against the Empire here in the US, should the Ruling Elites be stupid enough to put Jules on trial, take precedence?

In other words, would it be better for an anti-Empire movement, (if one existed in the US, which it doesn’t), for Jules to stand trial, to give the movement opportunities to do the Empire fatal damage, than for him to be released?

Since no such ‘movement’ even as yet exists, that question is moot. But it leads to another.

2) What would Jules himself prefer? Would he rather be released, and let the Empire ‘off the hook’. Or would he rather stand trial, to allow for a native US anti-Empire movement to take shape around his iconic heroism?

Given that the Empire’s own Zombie Apocalypse Woke Cult is likely still too strong to allow any other ‘movement’ to yet take shape in the US, it maybe seems better to hope that the Australian machinations now underway might give the US Ruling Elites an opportunity to ‘save face’ while releasing Jules. We would all feel relieved to think of him back with his family.

It’s tragic, however, that due to the Empire’s crazed Woke Cult forces, we have no opportunity to yet build an anti-Empire, anti-Ruling Elites, movement here in the US. The Empire WILL fall. When it does the Ruling Elites will obviously be vulnerable here at home. But with the Woke Cult Mob forces still rampant, it looks as if we, our nation’s Common People, will be totally unprepared to take advantage of the Ruling Elites’ vulnerability.

In the chaos of the economy’s utter destruction, (after the Empire’s fall), Martial Law will likely be declared. It will not have to be imposed on us. The Ruling Elites will use its Mass Media to whip the Woke Cult into its characteristic mob hysteria, and thereby set the Zombie Apocalypse Woke Cult Mob loose to riot, and in the ensuing deadly conditions of social chaos, with the flames of riot in the night sky growing closer each night, the fearful Common People will not simply tolerate Martial Law, they will DEMAND it.

The Ruling Elites will ‘graciously’ accede to the Common People’s demand.

We’ll then be left with the need to build a movement, from scratch, under Martial Law. The Ruling Elites’ creation, funding, and continued promotion of the Woke Cult has been a truly brilliant move on their part. Hopefully we can awaken soon to this terrible reality.

Anyway… All that is just speculation. The question Mr. Greenwald presents is: “will the US Ruling Elites release Jules, or bring him to the US to try him?”

Either way, the Empire LOSES. "

....

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug23/stratification8-23.html

The Wealthy Are Not Like You and Me--Our Terminally Stratified Society

When we say "The Wealthy Are Not Like You and Me," most people will assume we're talking about ultra-high-net-worth individuals (UHNWIs) with $30 million or more in assets or even the hyper-rich worth hundreds of millions or billionaires.

I'm not discussing the tiny class of UHNWIs here, I'm discussing the 8 million households of the top 5% and the 13 million households of the top 10% who own 70% of all assets and almost 90% of income-producing assets such as stocks, bonds, rental properties, etc. Not the uber-wealthy or hyper-wealthy, just the wealthy who own a million or two in assets not counting their primary residence.

A recent survey reports that there are 13.6 million households that have a net worth of $1 million or more (about 10% of the 132 million US households), and about 8 million US households have a net worth of $2 million or more (about 6% of households), not including the value of their primary residence. .

This top 10% collect about 50% of all income and account for about 40% of all consumption.

The topic here is the increasingly impermeable barrier between the top 5% and the bottom 95%, a matter not just of financial inequality but of sociological separation discussed by Christopher Lasch in his 1996 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.

I want to stipulate that I am not slamming the class of people I'm describing here. Rather, I am observing them as an anthropologist observes tribes, classes and cultures.

I recently met up with some old friends from our college days. At the time, they were students living in a cookie-cutter high-rise apartment with the usual hand-me-down furniture and concrete-block / pine boards book-shelving.

Now they live in a multi-million dollar house in an exclusive neighborhood, surrounded by $5 million McMansions recently built on small lots after the original homes were demolished. They too demolished the house inherited from parents and built a new luxe home.

What struck me as a journalist / analyst was how wealthy there are, and how all their friends are wealthy. They don't interact with the bottom 95% of "normal" people except as their housecleaning maids, repair or delivery person, etc., as interchangeable, commoditized laborers who are effectively peasants / peons in our highly stratified neofeudal economy. They don't actually know any "normal" people as friends or even colleagues; their friends are all wealthy people like themselves.

We might say this impermeable class divide is natural, but this overlooks three key factors.

One is that the barrier between the wealthy and the not-wealthy was once more permeable. As Lasch observed, America's elites have separated themselves from the rest of society in exclusive enclaves and in a mobile lifestyle detached from place.

Other commentators have written about the same sociological trend of elites living in bubbles populated by other elites: in elite universities, in exclusive social groups, in exclusive neighborhoods no normal household can possibly afford, etc.

Lasch's point was this economic / lifestyle stratification is toxic to democracy, a reality that is playing out in all sorts of ways.

Another factor is all the wealthy people I know became wealthy as a direct result of financial help from their parents. Every wealthy person I know (with a very few exceptions)--and by that I mean people who live in homes worth $750,000 or more in value and who own other substantial financial assets that generate capital gains and income--attended university funded by their parents, and whose first home purchase was enabled by help from their parents or in-laws.

I've also observed that this class of privileged people often tout their "bootstrapping" while neglecting to list the full measure of financial support they received from their family. Everyone wants to claim "I did it all myself" but this rings hollow once the facts of the matter come out.

This class also inherited substantial wealth when their parents passed away, or from trusts established by the parents to transfer their wealth prior to their death.

Lastly, all the wealthy people I know bought or acquired assets long ago at prices that were affordable to households with normal middle-class incomes. At today's valuations, the homes and assets they bought decades ago are no longer affordable to any household below the top 10%.

Another shared characteristic of the wealthy who inherited their wealth and benefited tremendously from the past 30 years of asset inflation is that they uniformly attribute their wealth to their hard work. Yes, they worked hard, but so did most of the bottom 95% who aren't wealthy.

The deciding factor wasn't the wealth they created as entrepreneurs or workers; it was the assets they were able to buy long ago as the direct result of financial help from their parents--or put another way, the wealth generated by the monumental inflation of assets their parents bought decades ago.

Scrape away the 1) parents-paid university, 2) the parental help in buying their first property, 3) their ability to save money in IRAs and 401Ks as a result of having low-cost mortgages (or no mortgage at all) and invest these savings in other assets at low prices, and 4) the rampant asset inflation of the past 30 years, and how much wealth would they own that was solely the result of their earnings / frugality?

Yes, there are wealthy entrepreneurs who earned their wealth by creating value in an enterprise, but once again, scrape away the enterprises that are bubble-dependent real estate and stock-market based ventures, and how many entrepreneurs actually created wealth via creating value? Take away the 30 years of asset inflation and the answer is very few.

Much of what the wealthy claim as brilliance is nothing more than the good fortune of living in a multi-decade era of ever-rising asset valuations.

Some friends inherited portfolios of dividend-paying stocks that had been on auto-reinvestment of dividends for 50 or 60 years. Small stakes invested back then are now worth $1 million or more. Others inherited gold purchased at low prices decades ago. These are just two examples of many transfers of wealth that rarely get mentioned.

As a general rule, the wealthy don't reveal all the help they received, or attribute their wealth to asset inflation. They tout their long service in academia or Corporate America, their wise investing, their hard work, etc.

I know this because I've benefited from the same asset inflation, though I didn't benefit from an inheritance or much help from my parents ( I did receive a rusting old VW that needed an engine rebuild--a real plus at the time as I needed a car to get to work). But even the accomplishments I can claim credit for--working my way through university by working 24-32 hours a week, fully self-supported, and building my own house at the age of 27--are out of reach of the majority of "normal people" now.

University tuition and fees have skyrocketed, and so have rents. It's almost impossible for a young person to make enough income from 30 hours of work per week to pay all the university costs, the rent for a tiny studio ($135 per month in 1975) and maintain an old car, plus groceries, beer, etc.

There is one other factor that must be described in this stratification of wealth: the role of frugality. My wife and I lived in the cheapest, crummiest studio in the city for years, worked Saturdays on construction side-jobs, did our own auto maintenance, etc. to save up the money to buy a lot and building materials to build our own house. I know many other people, mostly immigrants but some native-born Americans, who followed the same route of extremely disciplined frugality to save up the down payment needed to buy a house.

But even the path of frugality is steeper now. The rent for even the crummiest studio is sky-high, used cars cost a small fortune and wages have stagnated for 45 years, a fact I've often noted in my blog posts. Even wages in construction have stagnated.

Adjusted for inflation / purchasing power, I made more money as a 23-year old carpenter/tradecraft worker in 1976 than I've ever made since. In other words, it took fewer hours of work in 1976 to pay for basic shelter, food, utilities and transport than it does now. (See chart below of wages share of the economy: it topped in 1975.)

When the economic stratification was less pronounced and less entrenched, you might have had a spectrum of neighbors. Now the wealthy only know other wealthy people, because no one who isn't wealthy can possibly buy a home in their exclusive enclaves or enter their social circles of people wealthy enough to donate to the arts or politics.

In the bubble of the wealthy, one hears about the travails of finding people to fix pool pumps, wealthy acquaintances who scored a beachfront rental for only $7,000 a month and endless stories of jetting around. One also hears strained efforts to show how frugal they are, as if scoring discounted airline flights is the sort of frugality that will eventually build up a down payment for an insanely over-valued house in their enclave.

Extreme stratification is now the norm globally. The barrier between those who inherited wealth or who had enough help to buy assets decades ago and those without parental wealth to help them now is impermeable. Even as younger generations lobby for more housing to be built, it's still unaffordable unless it's heavily subsidized.

Here are a few links describing aspects of this impermeable stratification:

New Grads Chasing 'TikTok Lifestyles' Struggle In NYC As Rents Surge

A Tale of Paradise, Parking Lots and My Mother's Berkeley Backyard (NYT.com) NIMBYs and YIMBYs--older wealthier residents don't want new multi-story housing to change their enclaves, younger people want more housing to (hopefully) lower rents.

Majority of flights taken by a small percentage of flyers

The Saving Glut of the Rich

A bit of realism and humility are in order. Yes, we worked hard, but we're not wealthy because we're so brilliant or even because we're so frugal. We're wealthy because the global economy is structured to inflate asset bubbles. Those who bought or were given assets decades ago have benefited, those entering university and the workforce now cannot afford the same things we bought with average incomes without inheriting wealth from their families.

Those inside the bubble of wealth who only associate with other wealthy people don't seem to notice the social / financial stratification or its profoundly negative consequences. Perhaps they think this is how everyone lives, fretting about finding cheap laborers and cheap flights, or they discount their own wealth as merely "comfortable." Perhaps they think "since I'm doing great, everyone's doing great."

They have lost touch with those who didn't get to buy assets on the cheap, who didn't get their university education paid for by their family, who don't have an inheritance or a down payment provided by the Bank of Mom and Dad.

History suggests such a stratified society cannot endure as a democracy.