I get the creeps whenever I hear

a politician confabulate 9/11 and the Iraq War

I think that the Global War on Terror

is the 21st Century “commie scare”

I disdain deceptive Democrats as much as

I disdain neocon Republicans

Yet I'm a Wall Street Journal junkie

The WSJ, along with The New York Times

and The Washington Post, are the three

principle “opinion-makers” in the United States

They set the tone and the editorial policy

which then quickly percolates through

the rest of the US news media

the hree newspapers propagate the official

government stories and the “approved” propaganda

The Media World According to Murdoch

Rupert Murdoch is angling to buy the Dow Jones Company and The Wall Street Journal that it publishes.

Murdoch owns News Corp (as Murdoch’s transnational business is known in Street vernacular) and News Corp is one of those media conglomerates that everyone loves to hate.

Murdoch, through his company, owns so many newspapers, television stations, magazines, internet outlets, cable and satellite news and infotainment networks that he is the poster child for the Corporate Mass Media.

Now he wants to buy my secret addiction, The Wall Street Journal. With his money, he can certainly buy up any media he likes. He cannot, however, buy its readers.

I am a confessed left wing Wall Street Journal junkie, but Murdoch has the miraculous power to cure me of my addiction.

If the day comes and the deal is done, then so am I. That very day will I cancel my subscription to The Journal.

I would rather deny myself the secret journalistic pleasure than be complicit in the continuing agglomeration of all media into fewer and fewer hands.

Primary Propaganda News Outlets

The WSJ, along with The New York Times and The Washington Post, are the three principle “opinion-makers” in the United States.

They set the tone and the editorial policy which then quickly percolates through the rest of the US news media.

In an age when “local” media no longer have their own national or international reporters, they rely on the “biggies” to set up the stories for them.

The Times, The Post and The Journal propagate the official government stories and the “approved” propaganda.

If “your government” wants to channel public opinion in a particular direction, it begins with these three papers.

You can read it here today, and read it in your local newspaper tomorrow.

The Post writes primarily for Washington’s political wonks and The Times for bleeding heart Republicans who fancy themselves “liberals”.

The Journal, however, unabashedly caters to the ruling elite, the moneyed class that owns, and, therefore, does not need to hold elected office.

This class’s watchdogs monitor what we are saying; it is imperative that we also monitor what they are saying.

As scary as it seems, there are, indeed, many powerful people in the world who share the raw capitalist views of the WSJ editors.

This newspaper influences the world’s thin upper crust.

Their editorials set the “talking points” adopted by the elite as they defend the likes of the occupation of Iraq, beat drums of war against Iran, champion the privatization of health care, social security and education, or justify the madness of King George.

So, if you want to know what America's ruling class will think tomorrow, read the WSJ today.

Confessions of a Left Wing Wall Street Journal Junkie

I admit it. I am a left wing Wall Street Journal junkie. I think Hillary Clinton is a closet Republican and Dennis Kucinich is a political moderate. I do not own a TV and I bike to work.

I get the creeps whenever I hear a politician confabulate 9/11 and the Iraq War in the same breath. I think that the Global War on Terror is the 21st Century “commie scare.” I disdain deceptive Democrats as much as I disdain neocon Republicans.

But I am still a Journal junkie. Every morning I drink my mug of fair-trade coffee, dunk my trans-fat free doughnut and scour the Dow Jones Company’s conservative business newspaper from section to section.

I try to keep my embarrassing addiction a secret from my friends. My subscription is in someone else’s name.

I wrap my WSJ inside the local newspaper, just in case someone looks through the window and catches me reading the financial pages.

When I am finished reading, I hide my tracks by stealthily dumping my Journal… in someone else’s recycling bin.

I do not read The Wall Street Journal to keep an eye on my non-existent stock investments. I read The Wall Street Journal because I crave data, particularly data about what the economy, the financial sector and the business community are doing.

I want to know what they are doing, and what they are thinking, because, sooner or later, what they do or think will affect you and me. I also subscribe to and read the usual alternative media, print and electronic.

But there is a limit to how much political orthodoxy I can take (especially when I agree with most of it) before my political gut starts to demand more substance.

It is like those damn doughnuts I eat in the morning: one is good, two is okay; but a straight diet of nothing but screeds and doughnuts leaves you with a soft, flabby belly, a soft, flabby brain and a hankering for more nutrition with less fat.

The WSJ, along with The New York Times and The Washington Post, are the three principle “opinion-makers” in the United States.

They set the tone and the editorial policy which then quickly percolates through the rest of the US news media.

In an age when “local” media no longer have their own national or international reporters, they rely on the “biggies” to set up the stories for them.

The Times, The Post and The Journal propagate the official government stories and the “approved” propaganda.

If “your government” wants to channel public opinion in a particular direction, it begins with these three papers.

You can read it here today, and read it in your local newspaper tomorrow.

The Post writes primarily for Washington’s political wonks and The Times for bleeding heart Republicans who fancy themselves “liberals”.

The Journal, however, unabashedly caters to the ruling elite, the moneyed class that owns, and, therefore, does not need to hold elected office.

This class’s watchdogs monitor what we are saying; it is imperative that we also monitor what they are saying.

Clearly, it is not every story printed in The Wall Street Journal that merits our attention. This quintessentially mainstream newspaper is as skewed to the right as the rest of them, sometimes more so.

However, the staff reporters of The Wall Street Journal are a rather professional lot.

The reporters are also unionized and have staged at least one little publicized walk-out to protest the sale of the WSJ to Rupert Murdoch.

Buried within many of the reporters’ stories are nuggets of pure information.

Thus, while a headline might blandly state that “Investors Shrug Off Sub-Prime Mortgage Collapse” or “Bankers Postpone Sale of Debt for Chrysler LBO”, there lie within the articles heart-stopping descriptions of mountains and mountains of bad debt:

Collateralized debt obligations, collateralized mortgage obligations, securitized financial shenanigans and unhinged hedge funds that carry book values in the billions of dollars but which really may be worth practically nothing.

And then you read who ultimately owns all this bad debt - not the banks (who bundle it, slice it, “repackage” it and resell the debt as “bonds” as fast as they can), not the debt brokers, not the financial big wigs on Wall Street.

No, the hot potato often ends up in the lap of teacher and union pension funds, mutual funds, city and state investment vehicles, and foreign investment banks.

In the quest for the maximum return on their investments, these entities have indirectly snarfed up investment instruments comprised of the shaky mortgages and gossamer securities that have held the American economy together with spit and duct tape for the past business cycle.

And, as usual, it is the lesser people who will be crushed when the edifice finally collapses.

In the Journal stories you can read between the lines how the Stock Markets have been levitated by manic corporate mergers (also funded by cotton candy bonds and insignificantly collateralized securities).

How the Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, acknowledges that interest rates will not drop until the unemployment rate increases (thereby creating a larger reserve of wage-depressing excess labor).

How production at Mexico’s Cantarell oil fields, one of the largest in the world and one of the major suppliers of US petroleum, has peaked and its oil yield begun a rapid, irreversible decline.

The newspaper’s financial charts and graphs, once you learn how to read them, describe the raw economic data that clearly indicate whether another war is imminent to keep the profits churning.

Whether the de facto devaluation of the dollar will accelerate as more foreign holders of US currency diversify out of US treasury instruments and into Eurobonds or hard assets.

And whether food and energy costs will continue to skyrocket while the “experts” blandly assure us that “core inflation” (which excludes everything essential to life, like food and energy) is under control.

Should we give a rip about all this technical financial stuff? Karl Marx did.

He was not just a pamphleteer and agitator. Although Marx wrote the Manifesto whose specter haunted Europe in the mid to late 19th Century, he was an especially ardent student of capitalism.

Indeed, Marx’s major claim to fame is that his voluminous study, Das Kapital, is a thorough definition of capitalism, how it works, and how it fails.

Marx understood that in any competition of ideas, you must first completely understand your adversary.

Marx spent much of his later life burrowing into the books and financial reports archived in the British Library.

Then he dissected what he learned about capitalism from the capitalists themselves, setting forth in his most significant life work one of the most cogent analyses, not of communism, but of capitalism.

As entertaining as this is, you sober up quickly when you realize that the editorials of The Wall Street Journal are, indeed, aimed at a sympathetic and receptive audience… and it is not you or me.

As scary as it seems, there are, indeed, many powerful people in the world who share the not-so-funny views of the WSJ editors. This newspaper influences the world’s thin upper crust.

Their editorials, moreover, set the “talking points” adopted by the elite as they defend the likes of the occupation of Iraq, beat drums of war against Iran, champion the privatization of health care, social security and education, or justify the madness of King George.

So, if you want to know what America's ruling class will think tomorrow, read the WSJ today.

Zbignew Zingh @ Dissident Voice