The Bee's Private Equity-Infused Bad Judgment

 (c) by Mark Dempsey

Proving once again that the private equity purchase of McClatchy papers didn't exactly improve their editorial judgment, in the Bee (Sacramento Bee 8/24/26 from p.B10):

First, there's an editorial denying what Israel is  conducting a genocide in Palestine. The editorialist, a Rabbi emeritus, says "no." Kevin Kiley says "no," and Richard Pan, his political opponent in an upcoming congressional election, doesn't give a clear answer. The clear answer would be "yes," but the Rabbi, who lives in the US, is unconvinced. 

Nevertheless: a UN study in 2025 concludes Israel has committed genocide in the Gaza Strip

It doesn't take too much effort to find articles like How the Media Sells Genocide from Chris Hedges. Excerpt:

"The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth.

"When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality.

"'If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,' George Orwell warned.

Finally, continuing the Bee's private-equity-informed bad editorial judgment... 

Next to the denial of Israel's bad behavior, "The Baltimore Sun Editorial" supplies a piece entitled "Politicians suffer from a deficit of answers about national debt." Excerpt: 

"Every new federal benefit, subsidy or program eventually has to be financed by taxes, borrowing, reductions elsewhere or some combination of the three."

The premise of this declaration is that dollars grow on billionaires and federal programs need some external input to mobilize resources. Most people know that the source of non-counterfeit dollars is the federal government. 

The accounting for national debt is like your bank account. That's your asset, but the bank's debt. Reducing the debt would just make your account smaller. Reducing national debt sucks the private sector's dollar financial assets out of the economy. 

The public has fallen for the "Fiscal Responsibility™" scam, leading to seven significant reductions of national debt since 1776. One hundred percent of the time the reductions are followed shortly by an economic downturn. The Coolidge and Hoover administrations diligently reduced national debt shortly before the Great Depression.

Perhaps the most significant debt reduction occurred thanks to Andrew Jackson. The Jackson administration paid off the debt entirely. That meant there was no public currency--yes, dollars are part of national debt.  People did their business with monetized gold ("specie") and over 7,000 varieties of private banknotes of varying reliability. It was a business nightmare, and shortly led to an economic downturn, a wave of asset forfeitures and foreclosures called the "Panic of 1837."

Of course the oligarchs with spare cash can pick up assets cheaply when they're distressed, so there's a constituency rooting for "disaster capitalism." It's called the "billionaires." The agenda of austerity is to enrich a few at the expense of most of the population, and concentrate owner in a small oligarchy. 

The short-term agenda is to defund Social Security and Medicare. Those two items and the military comprise 85% of federal outlays. When complaining "Eeek! We're out of money!" the deficit hawks never suggest cutting spending on the military, or for that matter raising taxes on the wealthy. 

Do we need to cut the social safety net programs because they're "unsustainable" and we're running out of money? Even Alan Greenspan won't go that far.

I'm not defending current federal spending policy. As Corbin Trent says "Now the deficit hawks are stirring, after hibernating through Republican rule, and they’ll tell us the only way out is austerity. We must cut spending. We have a spending problem. But what we have is a really bad purchasing problem. It isn’t so much that the American government spends too much money, as it is that we buy stupid things at extortionate prices." 

This is the kind of nonsense the private equity blinders at the Bee and "Baltimore Sun Editorial" support.

Stuff like this gives credibility to the phrase "fake news."