The Daily Show has an interview with Robert Reich ion two parts.

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 1

Exclusive – Robert Reich Extended Interview Pt. 2

In a previous post, Inequality for All: Robert Reich Warns Record Income Gap Is Undermining Our Democracy, you got to hear Robert Reich interviewed by a “serious” journalist. Comparing the two interviews you will see that both interviews were very good at eliciting different pieces of information. Each interview added to our store of knowledge.

I would have loved to have heard Robert Reich explain to Jon Stewart not only what was done to solve similar problems in the past, but explicitly how it was done then. What happened that allowed a political force to gain enough power to rein in the previous robber baron’s? Let us talk about that history.

Some of the alternative news sources are really getting pathetic with their begging and pleading for support.  I tried to send the following message to one such source, but they are not accepting responses to their pleas.

Seriously, people, you just do not know how to monetize your content in the digital age. You just can’t seem to figure out why your readers are unwilling to make even the smallest monthly payment for a subscription.

Some people choose from hundreds of sources over a month. If they had to pay $1, $3, or $10 for a monthly subscription to each one, that would be anywhere from $100 to $1,000 per month.

I have a blog post  Monetizing Internet Content that explains how to solve the problem while recognizing what the real roadblock is.

Basically, all you alternate media folk, The Daily Kos, The Real News Network, Reader Supported News, Consortium News, Truth-Out, etc. need to get together and create a clearing house that will take in a monthly subscription and provide the subscriber with access to thousands of news sites.

The clearing house distributes micro-payments to all news sources in their service for each article that a subscriber reads.

This distributes the subscriber’s payment in a way that represents the value that the subscriber actually gets from the articles that she or he reads.

Hundreds of times more readers would be willing to pay a substantial monthly fee to get access to an unlimited number of sources than would be willing to pay a very small fee to get access to only one source.

I offer this idea to you, gratis. I want nothing more out of this than a way for me to fairly pay for the value you provide.

It is so frustrating to have the solution to a problem, but no means to get the sufferers of the problem to hear about the solution.  If any of you readers know how to tell internet content providers how to solve their funding problem, I would be really grateful to you for passing this idea along.

The Daily Kos has the article Watch this ex-congressman leave everyone speechless on Meet The Press featuring the video below.

One of the panelists was described by The Daily Kos as CNBC mouthpiece and apologist Maria Bartiromo. That is probably nicer than the words I would have chosen.

Some of the rebuttal that The Daily Kos provided is quoted below.

Most of the segment was the standard blabber of nonsensical statements on the economy.
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Secondly, of all the jobs that are being created or that would be created, the wages are normalized because of policies that allow outsourcing and because of the decline of the power of unions. In other words, the American worker is working for less and with little recourse or representation. This increases profits for the titans of capital which adds to income and wealth disparity even further. The American worker has not benefitted from their increased productivity. It has almost entirely gone to the top 1 percent.

You have to wait to see the final zinger by the ex-congressman, who I have not named in order to leave you in suspense until you see it.

As it turns out, I just heard a report on NPR’s Marketplace that said the banks were not lending because they were keeping excess reserves at the Fed. Excess meaning reserves not required by law in contradiction to what David Gregory, the bankers he spoke to, and Maria Bartiromo said. So much for getting actual facts from the Sunday “news” shows.

Perhaps the bankers were saying the poppycock that they did to David Gregory because they figured that he knew so little about what is going on in the financial world that he would not be smart enough to object to what they said. Of course, if you are a reporter who only talks to the self-interested bankers, you aren’t going to learn a darn thing. Thus, you do not even have to feel guilty about unknowingly spreading your ignorance to your audience.