‘A central promise of my campaign for president,’ President Obama told us, ‘was to change the tax code that was too skewed towards the wealthy at the expense of working middle-class Americans. Tonight we've done that.’

By Wednesday, our paid off corporate media was ‘reporting’ a broad outbreak of indignation that Congress enacted no ‘real’ deficit reduction or deep cuts in social programs.

Oh really? Haven’t polls shown repeatedly that said cuts are opposed by a large majority?

The role of media in society is the subject of ongoing discussion, and conclusions are plentiful. This much can be said:

• Media determines what the nation discusses as news.
• Media implicitly suggest models for understanding events.
• Media has a powerful, agenda-setting function in public life.

Perhaps more significant is the systemic preclusion from civic discourse of political positions that deemed injurious to the banking/investment class, and therefore to media and both major parties. The result is this:

• The tax code is not ‘fixed’ [but arguably, we are].
• The tax burden will remain on the working class.
• The working class tax burden is set for increase.
• Neither party nor the media speak for US laborers.

President Obama and the Democratic Party with the GOP cooperate in an exercise of unbounded hypocrisy. The US media utterly refuses to report that hypocrisy, and is silent on the one real alternative to it.