One of the funniest (and most pathetic) examples of ignorance and illiteracy I've seen so far. Or maybe it's just revisionist history? Fortunately, not many people watch MSNBC, but those who do are presumably susceptible to Kyrstal Ball's NEWSPEAK.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2014/04/30/msnbcs_krystal_ball_animal_farm_actually_a_parable_about_greedy_capitalists.html
http://dailycaller.com/2014/04/29/msnbc-host-claims-orwells-anti-communist-novel-animal-farm-is-a-tale-of-capitalist-greed-video/?print=1
More coverage:
See more at: http://rare.us/story/this-msnbc-host-thinks-that-animal-farm-is-actually-about-greedy-capitalists/#sthash.WyNOzOZK.dpuf
UPDATE: Krystal justified her interpretation in more detail. Here explanation is even worse NEWSPEAK as she conflates capitalism with the elite. In reality, the elite are found in both parties; it's the phony partisan war that leads to the abuses she refers to--and she's fully engaged in that very war!
Read this: KRYSTAL BALL: I know Orwell’s novel was an allegory of Soviet communism but to fixate on Snowball as Trotsky and Napoleon as Stalin is to miss the profundity of the story. At its heart, Animal Farm is about tyranny and the likelihood of those in power to abuse that power. It’s clear that tendency is not only found in the Soviet communist experience. In fact, if you read Animal Farm today, it seems to warn not of some now non-existent communist threat but of the power concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elites and corporations. The pigs cast themselves as Mitt Romney-style makers; they built it and deserve the rewards. The farm animals outside the elite pig circle are left to suffer and toil, working all day with little to show for it and with retirement always just out of reach. There is, at least at first, a theoretical political process, but the pigs rig it so that they always get their way. Napoleon and Snowball even have a brilliant propagandist named Squealer, a Frank Luntz of Karl Rove type who convinces the animals that things are so much better under their benevolent rule that giving the pigs more tax cuts — I mean more food — is in everyone’s best interest.
“We pigs are brain workers,” Orwell writes. “The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.” Sounds like Orwell’s pigs believed in trickle-down. As new research shows that we already live a sort of oligarchy that the preferences of the masses literally do not matter and that the only thing that counts is the needs and desires of the elites, Animal Farm is a useful cautionary tale warning of the corruption of concentrated power, no matter in whose hands that power rests. At the end of the book, the other farm animals look on with horror as they realize that their pig rulers have become exactly like the farmer who used to abuse and oppress them.
Orwell writes: “The creatures outside look from pig to man and man to pig and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Conservatives would do well to realize that tyranny can come from dictators, from an overreaching government, or from corporations and wealthy individuals who run our country for their own benefit. My Animal Farm comment confused them because, like Orwell’s farm animals, conservatives have been blinded by the self-serving nonsense served up by today’s pigs.
Here's what she actually said:
KRYSTAL BALL, MSNBC HOST: Our economic policy used to reflect concerns over inequality. Thomas Piketty in his blockbuster book Capital in the Twenty-First Century points out that the U.S. was the pioneer in highly progressive taxation. In 1919, before any other nation, we ratcheted our top income tax rate up to 70%. Then progressively climbed up to a top rate of 94% in 1944.
It was only in the Reagan area that these rates were brought crashing down under the bizarre and ultimately incorrect belief that doing so would increase growth. For his trouble, Piketty has predictably gotten the full Cold War treatment. The National Review calls his book soft Marxism. Lord only knows what they are saying at less responsible outlets, or the comments section.
Even the aghast and ostensibly economically literate The Wall Street Journal tells him to read Animal Farm. Animal Farm, hmm. Isn't that Orwell's political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they're the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar. Hey conservatives, it's time to stop the childish Cole War name-calling and deal with facts. Either that or be relegated to the kids and the crazy uncle table at holiday dinners.
It was only in the Reagan area that these rates were brought crashing down under the bizarre and ultimately incorrect belief that doing so would increase growth. For his trouble, Piketty has predictably gotten the full Cold War treatment. The National Review calls his book soft Marxism. Lord only knows what they are saying at less responsible outlets, or the comments section.
Even the aghast and ostensibly economically literate The Wall Street Journal tells him to read Animal Farm. Animal Farm, hmm. Isn't that Orwell's political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the animals they need the food because they're the makers and then scare up a prospect of a phony boogie man every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar. Hey conservatives, it's time to stop the childish Cole War name-calling and deal with facts. Either that or be relegated to the kids and the crazy uncle table at holiday dinners.
More coverage:
MSNBC host Krystal Ball suggested Tuesday that George Orwell’s famously anti-communist novel “Animal Farm” is an allegory for capitalism run amok, immediately setting the hair of literature professors across the country on fire.
Ball spoke on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” about the recent release of French economist Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,” which argues capitalism is intrinsically unfair and advocates a global wealth tax to level the playing field.
Ball noted that Piketty’s claims have been met with some criticism, which she felt was undeserved. “Piketty has predictably gotten the full Cold War treatment,” she claimed. “The National Review calls his book ‘soft Marxism,’ and Lord only knows what they’re saying at less responsible outlets or the comments section.”
“Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells him to read ‘Animal Farm,’” she noted. “Animal Farm? Hmm. Isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the other animals they need all the food because they’re the makers, and then scare up the prospect of a phony bogeyman every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar.”
In the “Animal Farm” written by renowned British political writer George Orwell in 1945, a group of farm animals overthrow their human owner and declare “All animals are equal.” Food is evenly distributed and political decisions are made by the community.
But a group of pigs immediately sets about using the politics of equality to accumulate power, exhorting the most powerful and successful workers to toil for the common good while they bask in the fruits of that labor. At the end the pigs become indistinguishable from their former masters, and their farm’s charter is amended to “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”
Leaving aside the obvious historical parallels between Animal Farm and the Soviet Union, the inescapable message is that government-enforced equality inevitably leads to oppression and further inequality, as fallible humans (or pigs) use powerful enforcement tools for their own personal gain.
But even if that isn’t obvious from the novel itself, Orwell makes it very clear who he’s targeting in the novel — telling a friend Animal Farm was his novel “against Stalin.”
That would be former Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, the well-known proponent of ruthless free market capitalism who slashed taxes for the rich, allowing business owners to propel themselves to disgusting new heights of hedonism on the backs of their non-unionized workers.
More coverage:
MSNBC co-host of “The Cycle” Krystal Ball said that George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is about greedy capitalists, rather than a critique of communism, as it is explicitly about.
Ball was commenting Tuesday on the recently released report by French economist Thomas Piketty, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” The report “argues capitalism is intrinsically unfair and advocates a global wealth tax to level the playing field,” The Daily Caller explains.
Ball defends Piketty’s study, despite many notable critics.
“The National Review calls his book ‘soft Marxism,’ and Lord only knows what they’re saying at less responsible outlets or the comments section,” Ball said.
“Even the august and ostensibly economically literate Wall Street Journal tells him to read ‘Animal Farm.’ Animal Farm? Hmm. Isn’t that Orwell’s political parable of farm animals where a bunch of pigs hog up all the economic resources, tell the other animals they need all the food because they’re the makers, and then scare up the prospect of a phony bogeyman every time their greed is challenged? Sounds familiar.”
See more at: http://rare.us/story/this-msnbc-host-thinks-that-animal-farm-is-actually-about-greedy-capitalists/#sthash.WyNOzOZK.dpuf
UPDATE: Krystal justified her interpretation in more detail. Here explanation is even worse NEWSPEAK as she conflates capitalism with the elite. In reality, the elite are found in both parties; it's the phony partisan war that leads to the abuses she refers to--and she's fully engaged in that very war!
Read this: KRYSTAL BALL: I know Orwell’s novel was an allegory of Soviet communism but to fixate on Snowball as Trotsky and Napoleon as Stalin is to miss the profundity of the story. At its heart, Animal Farm is about tyranny and the likelihood of those in power to abuse that power. It’s clear that tendency is not only found in the Soviet communist experience. In fact, if you read Animal Farm today, it seems to warn not of some now non-existent communist threat but of the power concentrated in the hands of the wealthy elites and corporations. The pigs cast themselves as Mitt Romney-style makers; they built it and deserve the rewards. The farm animals outside the elite pig circle are left to suffer and toil, working all day with little to show for it and with retirement always just out of reach. There is, at least at first, a theoretical political process, but the pigs rig it so that they always get their way. Napoleon and Snowball even have a brilliant propagandist named Squealer, a Frank Luntz of Karl Rove type who convinces the animals that things are so much better under their benevolent rule that giving the pigs more tax cuts — I mean more food — is in everyone’s best interest.
“We pigs are brain workers,” Orwell writes. “The whole management and organization of this farm depend on us. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.” Sounds like Orwell’s pigs believed in trickle-down. As new research shows that we already live a sort of oligarchy that the preferences of the masses literally do not matter and that the only thing that counts is the needs and desires of the elites, Animal Farm is a useful cautionary tale warning of the corruption of concentrated power, no matter in whose hands that power rests. At the end of the book, the other farm animals look on with horror as they realize that their pig rulers have become exactly like the farmer who used to abuse and oppress them.
Orwell writes: “The creatures outside look from pig to man and man to pig and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.” Conservatives would do well to realize that tyranny can come from dictators, from an overreaching government, or from corporations and wealthy individuals who run our country for their own benefit. My Animal Farm comment confused them because, like Orwell’s farm animals, conservatives have been blinded by the self-serving nonsense served up by today’s pigs.
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