Micheal Pollak
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It was interesting and a surprisingly enlightened essay. But I want to take this into another dimension...
I find it quite curious that US media seem overly concerned and adopt a huffy position toward China on topics like censorship, public corruption, human rights, and say this sort of intolerance of the gender spectrum. Meanwhile on the home front the same media completely ignore the US political and governmental activities performing the very same outrages.
I don't keep up with the LAT, SFChron, or NYT's positions on these domestic issues, but I can not think of or remember one essay as good as the above when discussing gay marriage, abortion, transgendered people, or any other so-call moral issue that the US rightwing hammer away at.
BTW, some rightwing group in SoCal gathered enough signitures to get a measure on the November ballot to ban gay marriage again. Meanwhile, I don't remember any local media rolling their eyes at this group, or hounding them about their intolerance or asking them gotcha questions to expose them a homophobic hate group.
US corporate media has long gone beyond mere hypocracy and bias, and turned itself into a highly selective censorship organ that always pushs its message to the right. I know this is standard left wisdom, but in recent years the media haven't been doing business as usual. They have definitely amplified their internal system to qualitatively new heights. It has gotten to the point that I don't recognize the universe they seems to be writing about.
The PBS newshour and its Friday weekly round tables all do the same thing, with occasionally a few exceptions, usually aired not on prime time and with spotty regularity, like Bill Moyer's Journal. And even Moyer's is very careful to steer away from much of the direct and overt political content of his stories. And most especially not the utterly surreal nature of most political news.
For example, last Friday Moyer's did a long overdue (and therefore too late to matter) expose on the money swindles of Tom Delay, Jack Abramoff, and Ralph Reed. The story concentrated on their dealings with the Native American gaming tribes of the Midwest and South. There was brief mention of the political purpose behind this swindle scheme, which was to fund rightwing lobbies and completely exclude any liberal or Democrat lobbist. This mention of K street lobbists was not elaborated on or traced to a whole host of policies and bills that have transformed entire sectors of the US economy.
There was also no mention of the same group's involvement in the giant energy utility swindles involving Eron, Duke Energy, and other corporations in milking billions out of California, Michigan, and other states.
It seems it's okay to go after the right, if you can prove they are crooks and swindlers after the fact, and after the crooks have been indicted or tried and convicted---well and out of public office where they have little power to fight back.
It is evidently not okay to go after the right for their political positions that basically enable these swindles in the first place, and which could have been examined and exposed as such, long before any legislation was written.
For example, in the months long media build up to frenzy over privatizing California public utility system which wasn't broken and didn't need fixing, I don't remember a single story that pointed out the obvious. The utility privatization scheme was a guarranteed invitation to swindle the consumer base out of billions under the banner of free markets and neoliberalism. It was also guarranteed to create a labyrinth of corporate fraud so complex that no state oversight system or attorney general would ever be able to untangle.
First, of all the proposed privatization scheme came out of nowhere and was suddenly all the media covered. Sure rates were going up. That's what energy rates do. But there was a state commission to review proposed changes and judge them fair and needed or not. And, of course the rate hikes were usually modest prior to this.
Well, we now know where the idea for privatizing California's utilities came from. The money to lobby the state legislators came from one of Delay's campaign organizations in Texas, where of course Eron and Duke live and who owned the pipelines and electrical grids that would be contracted to feed California suppliers. The then Secretary of the Dept of Energy, Spencer Abraham who was supposed to regulate all these deals, supported the idea. Well, he would, since he was just as crooked and corrupt at Delay et al, and had been on the US consultant team who performed the same miracle of corruption on privatizing electric utilities in some province in India that Eron was going to manage....
Back in California, within a year the new system blew utility rates through the roof, bankrupted PG&E and other California utilities. This was essentially the same sequence followed the same trajectory in the earlier experiment in privatizing utilities in India.
Then, the same Delay organization and its money helped Darrel Issa and other locals fund the state re-call initative to get governor Gray Davis out of office. They successfully campaigned to get Davis out, on the obvious and outright lie that Davis was responsible for the utility mess. True Davis did sign one of the bills. But he had previously spoke against and resisted the scheme for months before hand, when some part of it was passed as a ballot initative. When the bill finally got to his desk, he reluctantly signed it as most spineless Democrats do when they think something is popular and they will look bad if they don't go along.
Darrell Issa is the current Republican Representative for Cal's 49th district, which is one of the most gerrimandered and need I say it, one of the most Republcian districts in the whole state. He doesn't seem to be a thief, crook and political manipulator on quite the scale of a Tom Delay or Phil Gramm, but he is still young, so who knows. Oil isn't his thing. His thing comes directly out of his business fortune made in electronics, principally security systems. So if I was looking into sources of fraud, unethical conduct, and outright criminality, I would look into Issa's security business and its trails into places like Blackwater, no-bid contracts with the Pentagon, and of course any connection with Delay and or Gramm---well and the usual places this money goes, i.e financial markets and speculation in housing and land and their winnings scurried into off-shore banks like SBC.
Issa is very rich and the rich have only three things on their mind, how to keep the money they have, how to get more and how to rig the political economy to keep themselves in office and public money flowing their way.
The news during this whole elaborate and long system of swindles was apparent asleep, well because they reported it all, but left out the critical linkages that put all of it together. These were crimes committed in broad daylight that everybody could just watch if they wanted to see. Few did.
It's not just that the facts, even the heavily biased, heavily censored, and heavily manipulated facts, are insufficient to convince the public. This is not the problem that seems to block every reasonable proposal, every reasonable solution, and every well intended and enlighten spokesman or woman who isn't corrupt. It is the deliberate and willful blindness and deafness of the public mind that turns off reality and then whimsily focuses instead on some fabricated magical universe that never was and never will be----that's the problem, the way I see it.
The question is why? Why prefer whimsy over fact, make believe over the obvious and practical? I have no answer. But I do have provisional sketch.
It goes like this.
What I call realistic, practical, common sense, and factual almost always has to confront some mythological system of beliefs, moral ordering, and assumptions mostly now fabricated by the great opinion making machines of the media and political order of the power elite, or what Chompsky calls Manufacturing Consent.
In the very act of undertstanding a reasonable and practical solution to many of these so-called controversial issues, the public mind must pull away the flimsy curtain on the control booth, as in the Wizard of Oz and see the fat old gentleman pushing his buttons and turning his theatrical lights up or down, with smoke effects.
The grand myth that the US is the greastest, most wonderful country in all of history, and it not only can do nothing really evil, but it can do only the good, only the best, only the most wonderous of all things, and in fact has done so, since its very beginnings. Sure mistakes were made like maybe slavery, but we have the greatest capacity of all, we can change because we are free.... The great we, are made up of free, creatively endowed individuals of the kind Hayek writes about.
The vast majority believe this blather, because they have so identified with the state and the political economic order that to think otherwise is to put themselves on the witness stand and testify in public to their own not very nice doings and deep culpability in the everyday world they inhabit.
Sure I screwed that poor son of bitch who asked me which was the best DVD player. Well I had to. The boss wants some suck-brand made in the Gobi desert IMF/WTO development plan to sell better because we make more money on it and I want to keep my job. And who knows maybe it's true. Those things are all the same anyway. Where is the Gobi, anyways...?
Dirty little tricks like the above add up and up into a vast fabricated reality of excuses and apologies and make believe until there is no other reality. And in concrete terms, perhaps there is no other reality out there, no concrete alternative, but just another game in the imaginary infinities of lost causes.
I am reminded of the speech in the movie, Network where Arthur Jensen the CEO of the network pitches to insane Howard Beale one of the nightly anchors:
``Jensen: You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it!! Is that clear?! You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case. The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!
You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels.
It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU WILL ATONE!
Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today.
What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.
We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality -- one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.
And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.
Beale: But why me?
Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.''
That was back in the innocent days of 1979 when there was still the possibility of a future, and as we have seen, ``that perfect world in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality..'' has not only not come to pass, in fact it has been transformed into a world were only war, famine, oppression and brutality rule the day in the very name of preserving the economic good and order of the United States of America.
CG