The Market for Hate

If we sit back and think about what caused the downfall of the United States economically, we see two enormous causes: greed and cleverness. Greed in that bankers, investors, CEOs, and corporate leaders stopped thinking long term and began to make decisions that created enormous short term wealth, draining the economic system of the money needed to invest in the future. Cleverness was creating income generating streams between the lines of statutory regulation.

Take any industry: automobiles, housing, newspapers, manufacturing, even health care and we see the same pattern. Not satisfied with reasonable, lower profit margins, decisions were made that made enormous immediate profits for a small group of elites. In the automobile industry, it was SUVs, which took advantage of the loophole in the passenger car safety requirements and fuel efficiency standards to create a market for giant, fuel-guzzling cars. In the housing industry, it was selling mortgages that would never get paid off to unqualified buyers. In the newspaper industry, it was taking such large profits without investing in new forms of news distribution so that the industry was taken by surprise by Craig's List and the Internet. Investment bankers withdrew funding from manufacturing, claiming that bigger profits could be made elsewhere. And broadcast television saw immediate profits in reality shows instead of series, news, and documentaries.

Ouch!

Let's take a closer look at the media industry which seems driven by hate. Rush Limbaugh responded to President Obama's speech in Cairo in part with this diatribe: Now, I firmly believe that Barack Obama has as part of his agenda to cut this nation down to size, and I believe one of the reasons for it, aside from whatever ideological beliefs he has, is that he's angry. This is a mad guy. He hung around people who were mad all of his life. His wife is angry all the time. Sonia Sotomayor is angry. She's angry at what she thinks was a life of disadvantage because she was Latina. Now, that line, that line scares me. Any world order that elevates one nation or group of people over another will inevitably fail. Freedom will elevate people above tyranny. Nobody assigns it. It just happens. American exceptionalism now fails to exist. And in Obama's mind, American exceptionalism was unjust and immoral anyway.

Joe Scarborough, the host of the MSNBC news show, provided pro bono legal assistance to another man to killed in cold blood an abortion provider. In 1993 Michael Griffin murdered David Gunn, a doctor, and Scarborough represented him pro bono, and tried to have a greater role in his defense, precedent to running for Congress. Read the post on talkingpointsmemo.com. This is the same Scarborough featured in today's New York Times magazine profile.

Read the Huffingtonpost.com post about how many times Bill O'Reilly called George Tiller, the most recent abortion provider to be mowed down by a maniac, a "baby killer." After the murder, he tried to tone down his rhetoric, but one can't lie with videotape all over.

Listen to the hate spewed against Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayor, if you can bear it, and wonder what kind of country we are becoming when media outlets are making money off of hate.