It’s a great story and it’s great to see it making the rounds. Rachel Maddow is a commentator on her own show on MSNBC. She is engaging, energetic, beautiful, funny, brilliant and, apparently, when push comes to shove, she shoves back. Rachel must have said something that characterized the Koch brothers in an unflattering light. A Koch lawyer in a letter accused Rachel of a false allegation, demanded a retraction and provided a scripted reply for Rachel to read on air, repudiating her own story. Rachel provided full context of the exchange, and summed up, as reported by Huffington Post:
“I’m not going to read their script," the MSNBC host said during her show. "I’m not going to renounce my own reporting on this story, because the reporting on this story stands. It is true."
Maddow added that she thought the Koch brothers were not used to being talked about in ways they did not like, by people who do not listen to their instructions.
"We will not stop reporting on the political actions and the consequences of the political actions of rich and powerful men, even if they send angry letters every time we do it," Maddow said. "I will not read scripts provided to me by anyone else. I do not play requests."
Be sure and see the full broadcast (9:04 minutes) - right through to the parting shot in the last four seconds. It is high entertainment.
Fortunately for Rachel, she is operating well within her job description when she says she will not “play requests” for Charles and David Koch. Not so for the Koch brothers' employees. During the 2012 election the Kochs sent 45000 mailers to all of their employees at their subsidiary, Georgia Pacific. This was a repeat of a similar campaign during the 2010 midterm elections. With not-so-subtle innuendo the mailers are used to intimidate their employees with reference to “consequences” for voting the wrong way. Georgia Pacific corporate social media policies are equally threatening about how employees may express themselves at or away from work. These threats are taken seriously - there have been personal repercussions - and the threats have had the desired chilling effect on free speech. The effect on voting can only be surmised.
What is being described here is not just a managerial expectation that subordinates will not be insubordinate. It is something more and it comes with time and lots of money. This is not about labor and management, it is about lord and vassal. It is an expectation born of entitlement. It’s also about hypocrisy. In the Middle Ages, social castes were a concrete reality, lived and accepted by everybody. Fast forward to today, the prevailing lip-service from those protecting their privilege is about the value of the individual. Marginally less insincere are the urgent protestations about how Big Government is undermining democratic values. Gimme a break.
There’s nothing new here. It’s not shocking. It’s not scandalous. It’s grindingly commonplace. And like every other commoner down here, I don’t like having my nose rubbed in it.
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