EU demanding power to control journalists

[LHS]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9817625/Leveson-EU-wants-power-to-sack-journalists.html

Kind of frightening, but not all that surprising, given the EU's typical bent towards state control of everything.

[TGS]

Frightening.

[John Ralston]

So that's the New World Order they all talked about! This sounds kinda like a Bourne Film or The International come to life.

[CMG]

Obviously the journalists should come to sort of compromise in which they are just registered. In the event that the journalist commits a crime their journalist license is revoked to prevent them from ever reporting again. I mean, nobody needs to have all these people around telling stories. Think of the children.

/sarcasm

[TCinVA]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/leveson-inquiry/9817625/Leveson-EU-wants-power-to-sack-journalists.html

Kind of frightening, but not all that surprising, given the EU's typical bent towards state control of everything.

Lyndon Johnson did basically the same thing.

One of the purposes of having a regulatory state is to give politicians leverage over the fates of business interests. When winners and losers are determined by government diktat rather than by something as pedestrian as consumer preference, it places the politician in a prime position to get himself rich because businesses that want to survive or thrive must come to him to do so. This is how a man who was pretty much dirt poor amassed one of the largest fortunes in Washington during his time in the senate.

Elected to the senate, of course, with the help of rich benefactors who helped him into the state house and benefited from his position with numerous considerations in tax law, land use, etc. Those same benefactors spared no expense in getting him elected...including rounding up random Mexicans at gunpoint and shipping them to the polls to vote. Hence the decision to put Johnson on the ticket in 1960...because Jack Kennedy was many things, but no fool in knowing it helps to have the LBJ machine counting your votes in states with lots of electoral slots up for grabs. Jack himself wasn't exactly a choir boy, as he knew as well as anyone else how the Daley and LBJ machines functioned. He didn't boycott them out of disgust...he recruited them to his team.

And so after a bullet felled JFK, we had president LBJ who had been receiving money directly from the hands of business interests via purchases of ad time on "Lady Bird's" radio stations and was looking down the barrel of an investigation into all his business affairs that was uncovering all manner of unseemly things. President LBJ, now with some actual power, called the owners of newspapers and insisted that they become his instruments or the FCC and the anti-trust division of the DOJ would suddenly find extreme hostility to all pending business they had before them. This meant publishing the administration line, supporting the administration with public endorsements, and firing any pesky reporters who wanted to dig into the details of exactly how LBJ managed to get rich peddling influence.

We wonder at a press corps that is seemingly unashamed about being in the corner of the current administration and marvel at why. Certainly there is significant ideological sympathy with the current occupant...but it's more than that. There's a reason why the big boys in business spend their time and money in Washington with the legislators and administrators...because that's where fortunes are won or lost. That is precisely what our founders sought to protect us from...and we've somehow let evil men convince us that the structure they set up was deficient and unsafe.

In the end we'll be China. A land with an omnipotent government whose functions are an almost complete mystery comprised of individuals using their positions for personal enrichment, business entities that pursue their fortunes in the halls of power, all cheer-leaded by a state-owned media that sings perpetual praise of the system. A system which has no qualms about running people over with a tank if they don't follow their assigned role in the script.

Such a system can never produce prosperity for all...but it does a damn fine job of letting the few allocate what prosperity there is as they see fit. And that's the point.

People will make noise about free speech with this, but remember that our own free-speech loving press doesn't really believe in the concept. They're like any other rent-seeking entity...looking to protect only their interests and diminish your ability to compete with them.

[Joe in PNG]

Here we go again, dammit. Some really bad ideals are like meth, or crack. Even though everyone that uses them gets royally buggered, people still seem to think its a good idea. Freaking Idealism junkies..