Fox News and anti-democratic doctors

Today I had the dubious pleasure of waiting with my parents in the waiting room of a doctor they go to. The room was dominated by a large flat screen tv tuned to "Fox".

The content of the programming deserves mention, but prior to that:
I had a conversation with one of the women working there and learned that the doctor forbids them to change the channel or turn the TV off. "And what if someone would prefer to read in quiet?", I asked. No matter, the doctor forbids it. In other word, one is a captive audience to Rupert Murdoch's propaganda.

Indeed, the woman I spoke with explained that people working there would prefer to have a non-news channel, but the doctor (who, it would appear, doesn't even watch the TV) forbade it.
Three cheers for scientific medicine and tyranny!

As for the content: a diatribe against government. What evil crime was government committing? Lying about the unemployment situation. Indeed, governments lie.
But the solution to the problem is not less government, or a government that gives money to back up dubious financial transactions. What's needed is a form of government or social organization which actually is democratic and aims at producing the common good--something the USA does not have. (And specifically that part of the common good which involves the creation of decent jobs!)

Details escape me, but Fanny Mae and its partner were mis-represented as wholly government run. Somehow, the facts that they were for-profit and their top managers generously rewarded according to performance were left out of the story. (As I recall Fanny and Freddie have been partially privatized...)

In any case, the complaint was that failed mortgages were costing tax payers money. We were told that they've got to get the people out of the houses, and sell them.
Yes, that would be good for the banks who made bad loans, and behaved irresponsibly in the first place, but what about the people who ostensibly Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac were serving?

Sorry, but people can't pay their mortgages for a variety of reasons--largely because the homes were over-valued in the first place, but also because people were given housing loans without proper vetting. One way to keep people in their homes would be to change the terms of the mortgage--i.e., attempt to arrive at a more accurate valuation of the homes. It would appear that banks won't do that, and are relying upon taxpayer money to guarantee their over-valuations..... And banks won't do that because it would mean that their on-paper account of assets would shrink....(Notice it doesn't mean they would lose money and therefore bank employees or managers would starve; it means they would become less profitable--not unprofitable, but less profitable...)

But that's not the story on Fox. The story on Fox left out any reponsibillity on the part of the financial institutions and did not explain that the financial institutions made bad deals which now are being covered by the money of ordinary citizens. It was made to sound as though this were merely bad behavior by government.

I've forgotten the other anti-government nonsense I was subjected to, but I have one final thought. Rupert Murdoch's status as a war criminal is owed to the fact that he used all of the resources of the newspapers and media he controls to encourage a war of aggression against Iraq. And, it was plain at the time that the war was not a response to any real threat. (I recall very well that an Art Historian or someone with similar credentials published a one page analysis (in "Nature") of C. Powell's performance at the UN, and pointed out that it was unconvincing and inconclusive. And he didn't have to use fancy mathematics or sophisticated reasoning to reach that conclusion.) As a consequence of that war, about a quarter of the population of Iraq has been forced to leave their homes. It would seem that through Fox news Murdoch is aiming to have another gluttonous feast of evictions--right here in the land of the free and home of the world's greatest collection of weapons of mass destruction....It's not enough that a quarter of the Iraqi population is displaced (the country in ruin, a million dead), but now Murdoch is aiming to wreak havoc in the land of the free and home of the brave...