But the citizens have to find out about the things, and also receive analysis of their relative weight and significance. Most people in the world don’t have offshore accounts or shell companies, and don’t really know how they work or who’s telling the truth-the left insisting that this is a scandal, or Macri and the Twitter pundit he put by decree into heading the anti-corruption office (who didn’t meet the prerequisites for the position and also has been quoted saying that if Macri weren’t married, she would be so in love with him. No shit.). After living through a couple years of what happens to a society when almost all the news is like Fox News, I am convinced that it fucks with our ability to process information to the point of being psychological torture on a mass scale. How can you spend years hearing from every tv and newspaper that the left is corrupt, that the left steal, that the left launder, that Obama loves the right, because those good straight arrows in the rich USA hate corruption, that only the right can save us from this horrible bleeding away of all the country’s money by those highway robbers on the left, and then get it when a dozen small blogs and the one major leftist newspaper try to reorient you to the fact that the right is stealing and laundering?
Here about 75% of all news and commentary outlets are run by the same monopoly of uber-conservatives, who helped put Macri into power. In exchange he decreed-away some important anti-monopoly protections put into place by the last government. So, while everyone heard about the Panama Papers over the weekend, the news yesterday ran nonstop coverage of a police operation to surprise arrest a businessman linked to the old government, who was landing his plane in Buenos Aires to appear in court on Friday on charges of money laundering. That’s right-he traveled to the capital to appear in court, yet after never arresting him all this time while awaiting trial, suddenly they nab him on his way to the courtroom and make a huge spectacle of it, while not mentioning the Panama Papers except to say that Macri is relaxed because he is innocent. So, you get just as much social media of teary-eyed conservatives, astroturfers and bots resharing the picture of the businessman in his cell and “thank you president Macri for finally putting an end to corruption and impunity”.
You could go to the internet, but the monopoly news company is also the major internet provider for the country. At my place, for example, the only news source I can stream live on my computer is the far right, Macri loving channel TN-all the other channels just buffer endlessly, so I have to wait hrs or days for YouTube uploads, since I don’t have a tv.
The other, left wing half of the country are scrambling to agree on when and where to protest, but it’s a pain because every labor union and org is also holding individual protests every day over the waves of layoffs and political persecution of the left. Which don’t get hardly any tv coverage, or worse, they shoot video an hour before it starts, when only the first to arrive are setting up. We live resharing on Facebook and Twitter images comparing our amateur pics of the protests with the news coverage, but it gets old.
When Argentina was as close to its financial crisis as Iceland is, people didn’t hesitate to raise hell. But 12 years of the K government restored a great deal of comfort to the middle class, who have spent the last couple years taking their holidays in Miami and Europe, buying new cars and gadgets, and remembering that they are conservatives who can’t stand all this blah blah about governing for the people, while 2 years on nonstop news exposes of the Fox News indignation induction machine style convince them that no government ever stole more from them than the progressives, and that a government for and by the very rich would finally solve the problem, because the super rich already have all the money they need and therefore won’t steal like those dirty scoundrels who come from the middle class. People actually say this.
Also we’re so close to the elections only 4 months ago, so many who voted for Macri still want to defend him, while those alley burnt don’t want to hear ‘I told you so’.
Plus, the fact that the yuppie monetary fund class and old money aristocrats embezzle, evade taxes and launder money isn’t really news. Everyone actually knows this since always. The deal is whether or not you want to use the scandal to oust them or not, and whether you can be convinced that you have a chance of ousting them if you spend the next couple days missing work out in the cold rain with a stupid sign.
