This Country Brought to You by G.E.

– Posted in: Corporatism, Cranky Tammy, Mean People, Politics, World Gone Crazy, Worst Mom Rants

So I sort of feel like I’m gonna throw up.

You’ve probably heard, the two mega-media giants, Comcast and NBC, have morphed into one super, mega-media giant. This will no doubt raise prices for all of us little guys and cause the “news” industry to sink even further into the abyss (I’m actually grateful that my favorite journalism professor died a few years ago so that he didn’t have to endure anymore of this).

But here’s what you may not have heard. Meredith Attwell Baker, a commissioner for the Federal Communications Commission and one of five members who made the decision to essentially create this monopoly (something completely counter to everything the FCC is supposed to be guarding against) is now quitting her job. And it’s not because she wants to spend more time with her family or take up paddle boarding. . .

No, Ms. Baker is — drumroll — the new vice president of government affairs at NBCUniversal! That’s their cute new name — it’s suppose to make you feel like you’re having fun, like at a theme park (are you having fun yet?). Sounds like she barely let the ink dry on the merger papers before she started typing her resignation. You can watch Jon, the guy I would’ve married if I hadn’t married Tenzin, riff on how quickly it all happened:

 

So I’m wondering, when did we become Russia? I mean, I’ve always known people did lowdown, underhanded, amoral, self-serving crap when it came to government service and bribes, but this is just plain blatant. She’s practically opened her purse and showed us the check NBC and Comcast wrote her so she’d vote their way. And now what? We’re just going to say, “Oh well. . .”?

Yes, I think we are. I think we’re all just going to say, “Oh well.” Because that’s what we’ve become. We’re a country of angry people who get ticked off when we hear stuff that seems so outlandish that it can’t possibly be true — like a state government stripping authority from the elected officials of an entire city, or a governor cutting education to the bone while spending $1.3 million of the state’s money so he can put his buddy in a Senate seat (talking about my Governor Sandoval of Nevada — I’m so proud), or multi-billion dollar corporations paying zero tax while we’re told that everyone needs to “make sacrifices.” But then we just rant and rave and then. . . we keep on taking it.

I’m not sure what our tipping point is going to be. I don’t know when we’re going to start taking to the streets and calling, “Off with their heads” or at the very least egging a bunch of Bentleys. I’m sure most people are like me — they don’t know where to start. The balance of power has shifted so significantly away from the little people, and we little people have no idea how to even it out again.

And if you’re like me, you don’t even care if it’s much of a shift. Just enough to make things feel a little more “fair” again. Just enough to make us feel like we have some control over our lives and our country again. Just enough to give us some hope that our kids might be able to make a living doing something other that being a hedge fund manager.

Because it’s bad enough that stadiums and bowl games have to have those ridiculous names. I don’t want to end up as “The United States of G.E.”

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