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Driven Mad By The Media

It’s a long time now since Gore Vidal wrote, “The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western world. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity—much less dissent.” Harsh words, but it’s only become worse since then. Much worse.

America is a country that is being driven mad by its own media. Reason is drowning in the tidal wave of toxic sludge pouring relentlessly 24/7 from newspapers and television. And it’s not accidental. It’s taken years to achieve.

The reality, rather than the reassuring fantasy, is that the media does not exist to inform or educate us about what is going on in the world. They exist to make profit and to shape public opinion for the benefit of the interests they serve. It’s about money and political advantage.

There is too much power in too few hands. Only six giant companies control almost everything the average American sees and hears. There is a strong bias towards the status quo and only self-serving change is supported. Journalistic ethics have been jettisoned because they don’t generate profit. Polls show public ignorance about the wider world and misunderstanding about domestic events. Some show viewers of one of America’s major ‘news’ channels (Fox) actually more misinformed about matters in the news than people who watch no news at all.

The US media have no moral compass. They compete to appeal to the worst in people. They offer a steady diet of sleaze, lies, conflict, violence, and ‘celebrity’ tittle-tattle. They peddle politics with the honesty and integrity of snake-oil salesmen. Everything comes with a corporate-friendly, establishment-supporting spin. Honesty, objectivity, and truth are almost non-existent. Rare honorable exceptions (and there are a few) only highlight the general malaise. 

Why don’t people unite to kick all of the lobbyists and crooks out of Washington and reclaim their democracy ? Why is the country embroiled in an endless Orwellian ‘war on terror’ on the basis of lies ? Why is a tiny rich elite getting vastly richer while whole swathes of decent Americans struggle to get by ?  It’s no mystery. The public is brainwashed and bamboozled. Its a con-trick on an epic scale and people are being played from birth to grave as suckers.

The inescapable truth is that the present political system simply does not benefit the majority of America’s population. It has become rotten from top to bottom, deeply corrupt, and completely unfit for purpose. It is probably already past the point where it can be fixed from within. Naturally the rich and powerful for whom the system operates, and the politicians who serve them, don’t want public discussion of these truths and the American media is overwhelmingly happy to oblige. The media didn’t cause the parlous state US politics is in but they certainly help to enable and perpetuate it.

It’s through the media that people are bullshitted into believing black is white, up is down, and bad is good. It’s through the media they’re being distracted from what’s really going on by collusive reporting of cynically staged political theater. It’s through the media they’re taught to fear and reject the very things that would really improve their lives. The US media delivers the message and it’s toxic.

America is being driven mad by it’s media

Internet Writer

Just so people Understand: The Connection between Capitalism and Religion Was Engineered! It was Engineered by Capitalists through Political Lobbying!

“Under God” and “In God We Trust” resulted from Marketing!

Good morning, Tumblr!  What’s the buzz?

Eat bread. Make $12.5 million.

After Oprah Winfrey tweeted Tuesday that she had lost 26 pounds — while indulging daily in carb-loaded bread — on a Weight Watchers diet, the company’s stock (WTW) soared. Winfrey, who holds about 10% of the stock, made $12.5 million. If you include her stock option, Winfrey earned $19.2 million Tuesday or a cool $5 million per hour.

But, really, Oprah, you can do better. 

When Winfrey announced she had purchased stock in Weight Watchers last year, the company’s shares jumped 100% in value in a single day, earning Winfrey $70 million.

(Photo: Mohammed Badra, epa)

 What to do about Syria?

Closing Guantanamo

There are some words that become so tainted and associated with evil and inhumanity that just saying them out loud leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Guantanamo is one of them.

What is so special about Guantanamo ? After all, there’s been no shortage of other American ‘facilities’ where people have been held in limbo without judicial process and where torture and prisoner abuse occurred. Places like Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, and hell-holes in middle-east ‘ally’ countries to which America ‘rendered’ prisoners for brutal, out-sourced, third-party torture. That’s probably still happening, although a lot less brazenly now. So why make such a fuss over Guantanamo ?

The fact is Guantanamo became an international symbol of everything that was lawless and loathsome about the Bush torture regime. A focus of infamy. It united decent people around the world in utter contempt for any administration that would sink so low. It became the lightning rod for their disgust. It helped to create a dark stain on Americas reputation that it may never be able to eradicate.

People thought that Obama got this and fully understood how symbolically crucial it was to close Guantanamo before America could even begin to rehabilitate itself and struggle back up out of the moral cesspit it had been plunged into by the Bush torture regime. Yet here we are, with all this time gone by, and the vile place where so many have been abused and treated inhumanely still stands.

Were the Guantanamo prisoners all the ‘worst of the worst’ as the Bush regime emphatically told the American public ? Nothing could be further from the truth. Just another deliberate, knowing lie like so many other lies they told. Over 90% of the people originally held there were never even Al Quaeda fighters (according to the US government). Among them were 21 children, a 13 year-old boy, and a 98 year-old man, innocents swept up by greedy Afghan bounty hunters and sold to the US military like cattle. Over 200 times FBI agents reported torture and abusive treatment at Guantanamo yet still it was allowed to go on for years.

Guantanamo is an utter abomination and disgrace to America on every possible level but sadly it has become the partisan football of unprincipled men and women who put political advantage above human suffering. Whether it stays open or closes has absolutely nothing to do with law or justice or any risk to the USA. It is entirely about party politics. These people are, and I’m referring to many American politicians here, the absolute scum of the earth in my opinion. That anyone ever listens to them or lets them get their own way is incomprehensible.

The position of both political parties on Guantanamo is shameful. The Republicans cynically block all attempts to close it simply to score points against Obama. The Democrats want to close it but even if they do there are no plans to give the illegally detained prisoners access to the due process of law and every intention to let some of them rot until they die in super-max prisons in clear violation of the 5th amendment. One bar to justice, of course, is that some prisoners suffered criminal abuse (torture) at the hands of the USA making fair trials impossible.

So the closure of Guantanamo, if it happens, will be symbolic at best. It will not put right the wrongs done. It will allow injustice to continue. But it will be a tiny step towards reclaiming lost integrity. Obama has shown a worrying failure of will in this as in some other things. Yes of course unprincipled political opponents made support for the evil of Guantanamo a rallying cry but wasn’t that exactly the kind of thing he was elected to defeat ? What did he or anyone else expect ? Of course it was going to be a fight but it was one that had to be won.

Obama promised to end the war in Afghanistan by 2014 but that didn’t happen, with plans now to keep troops there beyond the end of his Presidency. He also pledged to close Guantanamo and it seems he’s about to have one last try with new plans expected to be released soon. The Republicans will oppose him, of course, and Obama will then have to decide whether to use the executive powers that have always been available to him to carry out the closure or to hand Guantanamo, like Afghanistan, over to his successor as a toxic legacy.

Let’s hope that, one way or another, Obama manages to find the courage of his convictions and keeps his promise. The closure of Guantanamo would be symbolic at best but it would send a positive and necessary signal to the world. A statement of intent and an acknowledgement of the need for change.

If it is allowed to remain open, though, it will send a signal of a very different kind that says America is content to remain an internationally lawless, rogue state and nothing has fundamentally changed from the Bush era.

Internet Writer

Endless War and Afghanistan

The longest ‘war’ in America’s history just got set to last even longer. President Obama pledged to end the ‘war’ in Afghanistan by 2014 but he gave up on that and now it seems the continuing chaos and blowback from the ‘Bush wars’ he inherited will be passed on to his successor like a toxic legacy. So it goes on. After all of this time there are still no firm or credible exit plans, no clue how fourteen years of murderous and misguided bloodshed will be ended.

Is America’s failure to ‘win’ a surprise ? It shouldn’t be. There’s an old saying that goes something like “Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to keep on repeating it.“ You would have thought the USA might have learned a painful and humiliating lesson in Vietnam. Or call it a simple truth. People who are fighting for their own country against an occupying force, whatever the differing specifics of the conflicts, always have the greater will to win.

The USA has the richest, best-equipped, most powerful army in the history of the world. The Afghan fighters have no tanks, no planes, no predator drones. They have old taped-up kalashnikovs and improvised explosives but a fierce will to win. It is their country. They have nowhere else to go if they lose. Giving up is not an option. They’re fighting to kick a foreign invader out, as they have done before. Resistance is not terrorism. It is inevitable.

Unfortunately America’s politicians seem ignorant of history and blind to the realities of the present when they talk of ‘winning’ this ‘war’.  Or if they’re not ignorant then they’re dishonest. Either way, it drags on endlessly, pointlessly, bone-headed, muddled, without direction or clue. Billions of dollars that should be used to revitatize America’s weakened economy and help the unemployed, sick, and homeless are being squandered on killing innocent people and devastating a poor country already ravaged by decades of fighting off invading armies. Money that could build is being used to destroy. How criminally stupid is that ?

Of course what’s going on is not about ‘winning’ a ‘war’ that is going to protect America from some implacable enemy state. The people of Afghanistan have no plans to invade America. They never had, nor do they possess the means to do so even if they wanted to. They just want the invading American troops to stop killing them and get out of their country. They want an end to the murderous drone assasinations, escalated under Obama, where the vast majority of victims aren’t even targets, just innocent civilians dismissed as ‘collateral damage’ (here). They know that America’s huge military presence across the middle-east has nothing to do with spreading ‘freedom and democracy’ and everything to do with greed, controlling the region’s resources, and projecting American power.

It would be wonderful if one-day America had a President who had the courage and honesty to tell it like it is. To say ‘The Bush invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were disastrous mistakes and we cannot afford to continue along this bloody and foolish path a moment longer’. Or to be even more honest and admit that they were not only mistakes but also deliberate acts of criminal aggression, pre-planned and opportunistically implemented after 9/11, sold on lies and propaganda designed to mask America’s greed and desire to dominate by any means necessary.

We could all admire a President willing to apologize for the hundreds of thousands of innocent people the USA has killed and the millions it has made refugees. One prepared to promise that in the future the USA will embrace co-operation, diplomacy, and an ethical foreign policy rather than simply using military might to impose its will. Of course that’s not going to happen. There are too many people making too much money from America’s endless state of war.

So nothing will change radically, whoever is in the Whitehouse. There will be more of the same. More billions of dollars wasted. More precious lives lost. More endless corporate greed masquerading as ‘foreign policy’. More scare-mongering and political dishonesty. More lies to justify endless war.  

Afghanistan is a symptom. It is not the disease.

Internet Writer

Clinton Apologizes For Email Scandal 

How the Right Make Wrong Seem Right

How do they do it ? How do the privileged elite, the big corporations, and the right-wing politicians who work for them get so many people to believe things that are plainly wrong and often damaging to their own interests ? Not just harmless little fibs either but great big, brazen lies with consequences.

Like the lie pushed by those who profit from pollution and their political servants that global warming is some kind of masochistic liberal myth .

Like the lie that the universal healthcare enjoyed by all other developed nations is ‘unaffordable’ or somehow ‘wouldn’t work’ in America.

Like the lie that workers rights and protections and pension rights need to be attacked because preventing people being exploited and harmed in the workplace and offering them a secure retirement is dangerous ‘socialist’ meddling.

Like the lie that everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps when the playing field has never been level and the odds are rigged against them.

Like the lie that labor unions are in some way ‘unamerican’ instead of essential organizations that have historically improved the lives of ordinary workers and been a civilizing influence on society generally.

Like the lie that America’s middle-east wars of choice are somehow to do with ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ or even to combat ‘terrorism’ instead of being about political and economic power, greed and self-interest.

Like the lie that ‘trickle-down economics’ works and giving more wealth to the already rich will somehow magically help the poor

Like .. Oh I could go on indefinitely but you get the idea.

Relentless brainwashing, scare-tactics, phoney narratives, and outright lies as well as control over much of the media have enabled clever right-wing manipulators to convince vast swathes of the electorate that up is down, black is white, and bullshit smells of roses. That the things which will harm them most should be supported and the things which would actually help them must be feared and resisted.

“By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise” .. Adolf Hitler allegedly said that a long time ago and some things really don’t change.

Even understanding how it all works I still struggle to believe that people take any of it seriously, but they do. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry.

Internet Writer

Huckabee Campaign Suspended After Candidate Trapped In Briar Patch 

“Aw shucks, we hate having to put everything on hold like this, but darned if Mike ain’t done got hisself stuck in a dang briar patch like a possum in a drainpipe,” said senior advisor Chip Saltsman, adding that the GOP hopeful had been “kickin’ up a ruckus” and “hootin’ and a-hollerin’ something fierce” since becoming entangled in the thicket earlier in the day.

America’s Invisible Working Class

In the coming months, as the USA gears up for its quadrennial election extravaganza, you’re going to hear an awful lot from politicians about the ‘middle class’ but you’ll listen in vain for mention of America’s working class. Why ?

Of course the whole idea of a ‘class structure’ seems absurd when talking about human beings but at least in the UK it once had some clarity. There was the ‘upper class’ (aristocracy), the ‘middle class’ (successful businessmen and professionals like doctors) and the ‘lower class’ (most of the population .. manual workers and low-end white-collar workers). The rigid barriers between the classes blurred somewhat during the 20th century as aristocracy lost its influence, money propelled others upwards, and workers lost a lot of their traditional subservience. To a large extent, money came to differentiate where birth previously had.

America, of course, is supposed to be a classless society but it’s not and clearly never has been. Although social divisions weren’t as rigidly defined as in Europe the US developed its own class system based on those who had acquired wealth and power. In doing so, America seems to differentiate between ‘old money’ and ‘new money’ in terms of the respect and privilege accorded to the upper stratum. If you’re born into the right ‘old money’ family in America you’ll be granted an enchanted life. Your privilege will not be made as formally explicit as if you’d been born into the British aristocracy but it will be there just the same.

Anyway, what I really was interested in is how the ‘working class’ (and for that matter the poor and unemployed) seem to be invisible in America at the moment. I read the news and listen to the politicians of both parties banging on about the ‘middle classes’. I post a lot of political cartoons on my other site that generally reflect what’s in the news and there’s never a mention of the ‘working class’. All of the references are to either the super rich, the 1%’ers, or to the ‘middle-class’ who are feeling under pressure. Its as if a whole class of people, the majority I would guess, has been erased.

I wonder why this is ? Its not a provocative question because I just genuinely don’t know. If anyone is going to talk in terms of ‘class’ (and I’d far rather that nobody did) but if they are then to me the vast majority of Americans are working class. The builders and police and post-office employees  .. the clerks and plumbers and call-center workers and shop assistants .. they’re all what traditionally would have been considered ‘working class’ rather than ‘middle-class’.

So why do politicians and the media focus on the ‘middle-class’ and totally ignore the ‘working class’ ? Is it because ‘working class’ has some kind of crazy negative connotation in America, like ‘socialist’ or ‘trades-union’ or ‘liberal’ ? Something politicians are wary of associating themselves with ? Or is it an aspirational thing, where everyone wants to be seen as ‘middle class’ even if they’re not ? It honestly baffles me. What on earth is wrong with being working class ?

As I said, I personally wouldn’t talk in terms of ‘class’ and the only reason I’m commenting is that America’s president and its politicians seem to be doing it on a daily basis and all they’re referring to is the ‘middle class’. To me, if there’s a ‘middle’ it implies something on either side of it, above and below or alongside or around it. That’s kind of what middles are. If there’s a ‘middle class’ there’s a ‘working (or lower) class’ too. So why is nobody talking about them ?

Caitlyn Jenner Receives Praise From Obama Twitter Account

A Toxic Relationship

Co-dependent relationships are rarely healthy, but it’s usually the two parties involved that suffer most. In the case of America and Israel it’s everyone else.

Admittedly, there is a kind of self-serving logic to it. Having a heavily-armed, warlike state such as Israel as its proxy in the middle-east supports the USA’s influence over oil-rich countries there and helps it to threaten Iran. Having the biggest gorilla in the jungle standing menacingly behind you, right or wrong, guarantees Israel complete freedom to impose its will through military force and grants it immunity from the consequences of its actions.

It comes at a huge cost, though, and not just in money. Vast amounts of American taxpayers dollars are squandered in maintaining this relationship. Successive American governments have armed Israel with $21 billion worth of cutting-edge killing machines in recent years. The F16s, the Apache gunships, the hellfire missiles, the flesh-searing white phosphorous shells and cancer-causing d.i.m.e. munitions that slaughtered and maimed thousands of Palestinians when Israel attacked Gaza in late 2008 and again in 2012 were largely supplied by the US.

If the USA stopped arming Israel and blocking the attempts of the world community to bring it into line through the UN, then Israel might be forced to seek peaceful solutions with its neighbors on a basis of equality and through diplomacy rather than just crushing them with its military superiority. One of the biggest roadblocks to any meaningful progress towards peace in the middle-east is America’s unconditional support of Israel. Anyone who condemns what Israel does must logically condemn America just as strongly.

With America and Israel its hard to know if its the tail wagging the dog or the other way around. It could be either at times. National interests have become hopelessly confused and a new clarity is desperately needed. What is good for Israel is not always good for America (and vice versa). Until America stops using Israel as its proxy for middle-east meddling, and until the disproportionate influence of Israel over American politics and foreign policy is broken, nothing will change.

Its difficult to see how that change can occur, though. Israel is determined that it won’t and any American politician foolhardy enough to challenge the status quo is committing electoral suicide. The wealthy Israel lobby in the USA, fronted aggressively by groups like AIPAC, has politicians from the President down running scared. To even question the wisdom or morality of the present relationship, however mildly, is treated as unspeakable heresy and invites hysterical attacks on the grounds of ‘anti-semitism’, which of course it’s clearly not.

So it goes on and the suffering it causes continues. America and Israel are increasingly isolated in world opinion but seemingly indivisible. Where is the discussion in American politics and its media fundamentally questioning this relationship ? It simply doesn’t exist. This toxic relationship is the elephant in the living room that nobody wants, or dares, to talk about.  Its time we did.

Internet Writer