Bush Barbarians & Big Oil in Burma

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March 10, 2007

Isn’t It Over Yet?
By Warren Pease

Here it is six-plus years after the right wing coup that seized power in this country and installed a complete ham-fisted idiot as president, ably propped up by his snarling, malevolent, utterly corrupt ideological doppelganger, the bad-to-the-bone Defibrillator Dick.
Our identities have been stolen, not by hackers but by the triumph of PR and advertising over intellectual curiosity and critical thinking. We have laid down like dogs at the lash of the corporate whip, sniveling and whining that we will be productive little worker bees and consumer drones and think good patriotic thoughts forever more if only they'd stop beating us – but they never do.
We are in the twilight of the great American experiment, watching as it implodes from the combined influences of an undereducated, uninformed, overmedicated, borderline-imbecilic electorate drunk on celebrity worship; a corporate state of which we are all wholly owned subsidiaries; a dysfunctional mass media owned and controlled by corporate America expressly to feed us a continuous diet of irrelevant pap, swill and drivel; and the omniscient presence of the national security apparatus, an alphabet soup of federal agencies that listens and watches obsessively to prevent the peril of an unapproved idea from intruding on our conventional little lives of rapacious consumption.


TV Made Me Do It

Even in such exalted company, our co-opted, bought-and-paid-for mainstream media deserves special attention. American mainstream media lost the thread of the story decades ago and are now only qualified to dish out pop culture infotainment masquerading as news; report breathlessly on the latest D-class celebrity screw-up; or act as stenographers and cheerleaders for the latest batch of official administration lies. And because it now answers to a very few corporate giants who demand orthodoxy and abhor deviation, there is an absolute blackout (PBS occasionally excepted) on the fact that America the myth and America the reality don't often match.
TV is the most efficient and powerful indoctrination machine ever built, although you can’t diminish the role AM hate radio has played in the grand corporate scheme. But TV is where corporate America has focused most of its attention. As a result, TV is where corporate values – easily summed up as "all for us, nothing for you" – are touted most lovingly and creatively, both in nightly entertainment programming and in what’s hilariously known as newscasts. According to several recent surveys, about 93 percent of Americans say TV news is their primary source of information, so corporate America has made yet another wise investment.
Ben Bagdikian in "The Media Monopoly," his seminal work on the causes and effects of media consolidation published in 1983, bemoaned the fact that there were only about 50 companies that, at the time, controlled the content and "spin" of all mainstream information sources in America. We should be so lucky.
Now, there are four corporations in complete control of over-the-air network TV content, a few more that run cable news outlets, and a small number of corporations, led by Clear Channel, that own the lion's share of American radio stations. Even newspapers have been swept up in the consolidation craze. They're too numerous to cite here, but you can go to: http://www.cjr.org/tools/owners/ and see who owns what.
It's no accident that mainstream American political and social ideology has shifted far to the right over the past several decades. Most observers trace the resurgence of the American right to 1964, when Barry Goldwater was buried by a Democratic landslide and conservatives were forced to reevaluate their message and improve the delivery systems that spewed it out to the electorate.

They learned their lessons well. America’s rekindled love for conservative myopia is the direct result of a well-planned, long-term, stunningly successful corporate takeover. Corporate America is in sole control of mass media’s singular ability to define and delimit the boundaries of acceptable opinion, which in this case means bringing the American political agenda into close alignment with the corporate value system – a rather obvious oxymoron.
The most spectacular evidence of conservative success in orchestrating America’s ideological tilt to the right was the election and subsequent deification of its brightest star, Ronald Reagan. Soon, school boards across the country were taken over by religiously insane fundies and a procession of increasingly bizarre right wingers were winning state and national office, many of whom will be fondly recalled as members of the shameless, knuckle-dragging 109th Congress. http://www.bushandcheneysuck.com/Isn't-It-Over-Yet.htm
...Then we have Rupert Murdoch, Australian fascist who owns FOX and most of the media industry. He is clearly in bed with BIG OIL, and like the rest of American, Canadian, Australian and British media, manages to keep the truth about Unocal, the French company Total and now Chevron out of the news from Burma. Quite amazing considering the people of Burma sued Unocal in a court in California as recently as 2002.
Quite interesting as well that Unocal had not been able to negotiate a pipeline with the Taliban in Afghanistan...but they landed in Afghanistan within days of the American invasion and occupation on their behalf.
Interesting as well that the former head of the FBI, John ONeil, was murdered in the 9/11 hit on the Twin Towers, along with a pile of evidence against the oil industry.
Quite the evil doers...quite.

Why are national troops fighting for private oil companies all over the world? Why don't we nationalize the oil if we are going to die for it?