{"id":3661,"date":"2010-01-06T12:26:55","date_gmt":"2010-01-06T16:26:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/?p=3661"},"modified":"2010-01-06T12:26:55","modified_gmt":"2010-01-06T16:26:55","slug":"tabbai-on-err-public-private-partnerships-and-enabling-media","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blacknell.net\/dynamic\/2010\/01\/06\/tabbai-on-err-public-private-partnerships-and-enabling-media\/","title":{"rendered":"Tabbai On, Err, Public-Private Partnerships (and Enabling Media)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Matt Tabbai’s occasionally overwrought channeling of Hunter S. Thompson can sometimes obscure the quality of his reporting, but mostly, he’s just dead on<\/a>:<\/p>\n

For what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely monstrous Ponzi schemes that destroyed trillions in wealth while making a small handful of people rich. They were also a profound expression of the fundamentally criminal nature of our political system, in which state power\/largess and the private pursuit of (mostly short-term) profit were brilliantly fused in a kind of ongoing theft scheme that sought to instant-cannibalize all the wealth America had stored up during its postwar glory, in the process keeping politicians in office and bankers in beach homes while continually moving the increasingly inevitable disaster to the future.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Nicely said, no? Next paragraph gets better:<\/p>\n

That is a terrible story and it is also sort of a taboo story, since we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t really have a system of media now that is willing or even able to digest that dark and complicated truth. Instead, our media \u00e2\u20ac\u201d which has always been at best an inadvertent accomplice to these messes \u00e2\u20ac\u201d is basically set up to take every revelation about the underlying truth and split it down the middle, feeding half to one side of the political spectrum and one half to the other, where the actual point is then burned up in the useless smoke of a blame game.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d just step back and admire that last sentence if, you know, it weren’t so painfully true.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Matt Tabbai’s occasionally overwrought channeling of Hunter S. Thompson can sometimes obscure the quality of his reporting, but mostly, he’s just dead on: For what we\u00e2\u20ac\u2122ve learned in the last few years as one scandal after another spilled onto the front pages is that the bubble economies of the last two decades were not merely […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3661","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","category-society"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t