Free-Market Capitalism: Threat to Freedom

Which do you love more Republicans? Free speech or the free-market because you have created a world with your policies where the latter controls the former.

So which will you defend, free-speech to keep Rush on the air? Or will you defend the free-market capitalism that is silencing him and could possibly force him off the air? I thought corporations could do no wrong. They are people, my friend, as the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination reminded a person at one of his events.

And to be honest this isn’t about free-speech because Rush still has the right to say whatever he wants, and I agree with Rush having the right to call people names whenever he wants. But you don’t have a right to say whatever you want on the public-owned, corporate-leased airwaves. The corporations are concerned with keeping that license.

Many of you may lay-people not realize that even with the PICAN standard abolished by Reagan and annihilated by Clinton in the Telecommunications Act of 1996 it only takes one substantiated complaint at the right time for a corporation to lose its broadcast license. These corporations rely on the lease they have for the public airwaves to run their stations that run the commercials that give them the money. The shows are simply filler, the shows don’t make money, but the commercials do. That is why it is a big deal when a show starts losing advertisers.

So, if it seems there is cognitive dissonance coming out of the conservatives/Republicans/right-wing (really, nothing new there) it’s because they are trying to defend two ideas that are incompatible with each other. They are trying to defend Rush’s right to slander and libel while cursing free-market capitalist ideology that has kept him on the air this many years. You can’t have both for Rush in this case. He is going to be relegated to the status of the Westboro Baptist Church just yelling “slut” at passing cars on your local highway because that’s the way the corporations and free market want it.

Capitalism, the continuous work of concentrating wealth and power, is the true enemy of democracy and free speech. You can’t have free speech in a country where speech can be bought by the highest bidder because if you have to buy it or access to it then it is not free.