{"id":357737,"date":"2018-04-21T04:43:58","date_gmt":"2018-04-21T03:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-come-questions\/"},"modified":"2018-04-21T04:43:58","modified_gmt":"2018-04-21T03:43:58","slug":"how-come-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/how-come-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cHow Come?\u201d Questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_101481\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-101481\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2018\/04\/Screen-Shot-2018-04-19-at-3.20.32-PM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"365\"  \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photo by Elvert Barnes | <a href=\"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/2.0\/\">CC BY 2.0<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>There are many reasons why American politics often seems more baffling than the politics of other so-called democracies.<\/p>\n<p>These would include un- and anti-democratic provisions enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and statutory law, the duopoly party system that the Democratic and Republican Parties have concocted over the years, and spillovers from the economic into the political realm.<\/p>\n<p>With increasing economic inequality and Supreme Court rulings that have turned \u201ccampaign contributions,\u201d political corruption by another name, into Constitutionally protected free speech, the spillover problem has become especially egregious in recent years.<\/p>\n<p>Add to that a powerful propaganda system \u2014 run mainly by private corporations \u2013 that dumbs down and degrades public discourse.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t just mean Fox and Breitbart and others of their ilk.\u00a0 Because of their hold over a sizeable portion of the population, they are a menace.\u00a0On the merits, however, they are not worth being taken seriously; their \u201cjournalism\u201d is beneath contempt.<\/p>\n<p>The propaganda system I have in mind is the one led by ostensibly respectable purveyors of news and opinion \u2014 such as the two \u201cliberal\u201d cable networks, MSNBC and CNN, National Public Radio, <em>The New York Times <\/em>and\u00a0<em>The<\/em><em>Washington Post<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>Their ability to shape public opinion is so powerful and their influence is so pervasive that the ridiculousness of much of what passes for gospel truth in the political arena is&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2018\/04\/20\/how-come-questions\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photo by Elvert Barnes | CC BY 2.0 There are many reasons why American politics often seems more baffling than the politics of other so-called democracies. These would include un- and anti-democratic provisions enshrined in the U.S. Constitution and statutory law, the duopoly party system that the Democratic and Republican Parties have concocted over the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-357737","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357737","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357737"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357737\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357737"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357737"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357737"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}