Spinning Gold from Grief? The Ledger Lies.

by: Couch Potato Politics

Wed Sep 21, 2011 at 12:44:23 AM EDT

A lot can be said of Chris Christie and his campaign of destruction at the expense of the middle class public sector but the one thing that can't be said is that it's beneficial. Well, unless you're a spinmeister who considers truth just an inconvenient nuisance better left unsaid. It looks like the Star Ledger is taking a direct feed from the State House in Trenton.

There seems to be a poison in the air. A foul contagion of disregard and dispassion for the suffering middle-class, and the putrescence can be traced back to a campaign of lies, misinformation and disinformation that places the pain of taxes on public workers instead of on the mismanagement of taxpayer dollars by politicians and Wall Street insiders (of which Chris Christie is both).

Instead of doing the honorable job of journalism, many news outlets, like the Star Ledger take political spin and mispresent it as common opinion or even fact. The Right-Wing misinformation machine usually follows these "articles" up with their own email campaigns quoting the Op-Eds as factual news stories. A new Christie support crew over at B4NJkids.org has even started a new ad campaign touting the ideas that Chris Christie and other teacher hate groups are using to recast attacking teachers as education reform. Instead of telling the truth about how they would lower the standard of living for teachers, they call it necessary reform to serve the children. How is driving the best and most experienced out going to better serve the children?

In cities and towns all across New Jersey, police forces are being decimated by layoffs and hiring freezes while Chris Christie spends millions on special "Studies" and "Committees" focused creating reports to justify privatization schemes that will further enrich his supporters and further reduce the quality of services to the state's population. Time and again it has been proven that placing public services jobs in the hands of profit motivated private corporations has always ended up costing the tax payers more and providing less. IN all of this, however, the people are being brainwashed into believing that it is all for the best and that the suffering is worth the rewards. As far as most scholars and economists see it, nothing could be further from the truth. Lower standards of education, less safe streets and more unemployed public sector workers and not a single real benefit to the taxpayer the Star Ledger claims "this painful adjustment was necessary because that path was simply not sustainable." But mass poverty, educational failure and higher crime rates are a better way?

The "Star Ledger Editorial Board" even went so far as to compare Christie's unfettered attacks on public servants and teachers to the negotiated deals brokered by Jon Corzine at the bargaining table. A table Christie is too phobic to sit at with teacher and public sector workers. Instead of negotiating in good faith and acting like an honest leader, Christie cut backroom deals with disingenuous democrats like Stephen Sweeney and Sheila Oliver to further denigrate the value and rights of public sector labor by stealing their rights to sit at a fair negotiation. Jon Corzine was the polar opposite in that he chose to work with labor to reopen their existing contract and find some fair relief for taxpayers. It says so much that the writer of the article had to reach out to the Corzine administration to cleanup Christie's attacks as being a continuation of the Corzine plan even if it was another total fabrication.

The Star Ledger continues to act as a fraudulent street rag for the Christie Administration to the point that they don't even bother actually researching articles anymore but choose instead to regurgitate Christie administration press releases and op-ed pieces as news. The quality of the news coming to us through the papers, television and internet has become so polluted by rightwing manufactured misinformation that the truth is almost invisible to the average citizen. The race to deception is staggering and the rate at which trustworthy news sources are disappearing is bewildering. It was telling how bad things have become when Christie sold  New Jersey's very own, moderately fair news and information network, NJN, to be sold to New York's WNET.

The Star Ledger is failing to point out the real damage being done to New Jersey as Christie drives up unemployment, drives down the quality of public education and looks to further enrich only the people who paid to get him into office. With every lost job or reduced public sector paycheck, fewer dollars are spent in local businesses, more people leave the state and the trickle-down effect becomes compounded. One of the key benefits of a strong and fairly paid public sector workforce has been that they are a strong contributor to the local economy, the tax base and the overall economic welfare of the state. When private sector shrinks, it isn't because public sector grew and cutting the public sector to "share the pain" doesn't share the pain or fix the problem, it compounds the damage.

Enough with the lies. It's time to demand better or deny patronage to the Star Ledger and any other news outlet that refuses to deal in facts and instead serve politicians.