Scottish Independence, and the Growing Divide Between the Privileged Classes and the People

What interested me the most in this article is not so much the information it provides on the campaign by the British establishment against the Scottish vote for independence, or the eager participants from the American members of the Anglo-American power clique as well.

Rather it is for the light that this article sheds on the behavior of the enablers of the Anglo-American establishment in the corporate media and the academy, and how rarified their experience of the daily lives of the people has become. It seems almost to be due to an imbalance of character and a fashionable failure of the national perspective. Understandable for the generation that proclaims, 'greed is good.'

As David Brin has remarked, 'It is said that power corrupts, but actually it's more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.'

I hope that whatever the result the vote turns out well for the people of Scotland. They will certainly have problems to encounter, and hardships as a people to overcome. As will we all.

There is a great divide growing between the elite classes in America and England and the great majority of the people. I am always surprised by how little those pampered princes and princesses within the Beltway or Westminster seem to understand about their own people.  What a caricature the communication between them has become, and how odd the occasional interactions between them seem.

It is becoming a cultural divide. And not just for the leadership itself, but for their vast assemblage of courtiers and sycophants who act as viceroys and interpreters.

It does not bode well for the future.

The Guardian

How the media shafted the people of Scotland

Journalists in their gilded circles are woefully out of touch with popular sentiment and shamefully slur any desire for change

By George Monbiot

Tuesday 16 September 2014 15.03 EDT

Perhaps the most arresting fact about the Scottish referendum is this: that there is no newspaper – local, regional or national, English or Scottish – that supports independence except the Sunday Herald. The Scots who will vote yes have been almost without representation in the media.

There is nothing unusual about this. Change in any direction, except further over the brink of market fundamentalism and planetary destruction, requires the defiance of almost the entire battery of salaried opinion. What distinguishes the independence campaign is that it has continued to prosper despite this assault.

In the coverage of the referendum we see most of the pathologies of the corporate media. Here, for instance, you will find the unfounded generalisations with which less enlightened souls are characterised. In the Spectator, Simon Heffer maintains that: “addicted to welfare ... Scots embraced the something for nothing society”, objecting to the poll tax “because many of them felt that paying taxes ought to be the responsibility of someone else”.

Here is the condescension with which the dominant classes have always treated those they regard as inferior: their serfs, the poor, the Irish, Africans, anyone with whom they disagree. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are ... They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” sneered Melanie Reid in the Times. Here is the chronic inability to distinguish between a cause and a person: the referendum is widely portrayed as a vote about Alex Salmond, who is then monstered beyond recognition (a Telegraph editorial compared him to Robert Mugabe).

The problem with the media is exemplified by Dominic Lawson’s column for the Daily Mail last week. He began with Scotland, comparing the “threat” of independence with that presented by Hitler (the article was helpfully illustrated with a picture of the Führer – unaccompanied, in this case, by the Mail’s former proprietor)...

Read the entire article in The Guardian here.