THE ELECTRONIC HALLUCINATION & MEDIA HOLOGRAM

We've Let Corporations and Media Rob Our Souls

The most chilling accomplishment of American capitalist culture is that we have commodified our own consciousness.

At the Houston airport, where I spent two hours listening to a Christian religious fanatic tell about Obama running a worldwide child porn ring out of the White House. Entering the country shoeless through airport homeland security, holding up my pants because they don't let old men wear suspenders through security, well, I knew I was back home in the land of the free.

I am forced to talk about three things -- corporations, television and human spirituality.

World does not exist except through media. Is not a cultural history course. It is a real place with fast-developing disasters, economic and ecological collapse, cultural conditioning working against them. You are as conditioned as any trained chicken in a carnival. You have been generally indoctrinated and deeply conditioned to do -- mostly along class lines

20 percent coordinating and managing, the other 75 percent, the greater mass of working-class citizenry by the empire's approved methods, and toward the same end: Maximum profitability for a corporate-based state.

Seems so normal, psychologists have prescribed so much Prozac that it now shows up in the piss of penguins. A teacher has no objection to 20 percent of her fourth-graders being on Ritalin, in the name of "appropriate behavior," dupes or pawns of a corporate state a corporate-generated reality.

Financialization of all aspects of our culture and lives. True democracy is dead, and a corporate financial state has now arrived. An ever-merging global corporate system masquerading electronically and digitally as a nation called the United States. Or Japan

The corporation now animates us from within our very selves through management of the need hierarchy in goods and information. The American psycho-socio-medical complex, authorized to manage public consciousness. The entire pedagogy is itself immersed in a corporate financial state

This financialization of our consciousness under American-style capitalism has become all we know. We fear its loss. Hence the bailouts of the thousands of "zombie banks," dead but still walking, thanks to the people's taxpayer offerings to the money god so that banks will not die. We dare not let corporations die. Corporations feed us. They entertain us. They heal us when we are sick. Corporations feel like a friendly, benevolent entity in
American consciousness, are, of course, deathless and faceless machines and have no soul or human emotions
Makes us a corporate cult and makes corporations a fetish of our culture, like the weather -- just there. All of us live together in this corporate fetish cult. We agree upon and consent to its reality. Aztecs agreed upon Quetzalcoatl. Easter Island agreed that the great stone effigies had significance.

A population mass operating under unified corporate management machinery, most Americans believe they are unique individuals. Americans fear loss of uniqueness. Yet you and I are not unique in the least

Just because we come from the manufacturer equipped with individual consciousness, does not make us the center of any unique world, private or public, material, intellectual or spiritual.

We are all replaceable parts in the machinery of a capitalist economy. "Oh but we have unique feelings and emotions that are important," Psychologists specialize in this notion.
We are swimmers in an ancient rushing river of humanity, the child in Bangladesh, the millionaire frat boys who run our financial and governmental institutions with such adolescent carelessness. We will eventually be absorbed without leaving a trace.

We can meaningfully differentiate in the way we choose to employ our consciousness, to own our consciousness. We are either in charge of our own awareness, or we let someone else manage it. We nevertheless remain one of the most controlled peoples on the planet, especially regarding control of our consciousness, public and private. And the control is tightening. It doesn't feel like that, but therein rests the proof. Everything feels normal; everybody is doing the same things, so it must be OK. Stockholm Syndrome of the soul, the prisoner identifies with the values of his or her captors

In our case, the American corporate state and its manufactured popular culture. We feel life is normal and act accordingly, we become helpless. Learned helplessness. Americans believe there is little they can do in personally dealing with the most important moral and material crises ever faced, both in America and across the planet, beginning with ecocide, war making and the grotesque deformation of the democratic process we have settled for

Citizenship, simple consumer-group consciousness. 6 percent of the planet's population, we use 36 percent of the planet's resources, this we experience as normal and desirable, evidence of being the most-advanced nation in the world, reduced to a mere marketing demographic.

Digress outside the marketing demographic. Belize. True, it ain't Zimbabwe or the Sudan -- there are no dying people in the streets. But food security is easily the biggest problem, and growing by the day. Yet, despite much government corruption, people are still citizens, not marketing demographics

Citizens who struggle toward a just society, more progress than the United States, A level of free medical care for the poor. Maternity pay if either you or your spouse is employed. Retirement on Social Security at age 60. Worker rights, mandatory accrued severance pay, own their homes outright, entitled to a free piece of land upon which to build one. Employment is scarce, and that has a down side: Many folks waste a lot of valuable time having sex.

American and Canadian tourists drive by in their rented SUVs scared as hell of those barefooted black folks in the sand around them. A whole lot of very poor people trying to get by and make a decent society. North Americans live in a parallel universe conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and "safety," as defined by police control. Outside of the parameters of the cultural hallucination they call "the First World" represents fear and psychological free fall.

Yet, America is a Second World nation

We have no universal free health care (don't kid yourself about the plan under way), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status -- if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a "career" -- high infant-mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy. Even by our own definition we are a Second World nation.

But there is a shiny commercial skin that covers everything, a thin layer of glossy, throwaway technology that leads the citizenry to believe otherwise. The glossy branding of every item and experience, tangible evidence that the slick, conditioned illusion. The American Hologram. If it's bright and shiny and new, it must be better the complete opposite of tropical grunge.

So how is it that we Americans came to live in such a parallel universe? We prefer such things as Facebook, riding around the suburbs with an iPod plugged into our brain, looking for fried chicken in a Styrofoam box? Earth-destroying things over love and laughter with real people We suffer under a mass national hallucination. Now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a "theater state."

We know the world through media productions, which are edited and shaped to instruct us on how to look and behave and view the outside world. As in all staged productions and illusions, everyone we see is an actor. There are the television actors portraying what supposedly represents reality. Non-actors in Congress perform in front of the cameras as the American empire's cultural machinery weaves and spins out our cultural mythology.

Cultural myth production is an enormous industry in America. It is very similar to the national projects of pyramid building in Egypt or cathedral-building in medieval Europe. And in our obsession with violence and punishment, two characteristics of a consensual police state reality, we are certainly similar to prison-camp building in Stalinist Russia... one-fourth of all the incarcerated people on earth are in U.S. prisons -- U.S. citizens imprisoned by their own government.

The media culture's production of martyrs, good guys and bad guys, fallen heroes and concept outlaws, is not just big corporate business. It is the armature of our cultural behavior. It tells us who to fear (Middle Eastern terrorists, Mr. Chavez in Venezuela and foreign made pharmaceuticals), who to scorn (again, the same candidates, along with Britney Spears. Daily news is the modern version of Roman coliseum shows. Elections are personality combat, chariot races, not examinations of solutions being offered. None are offered. What are being offered are monkey models, mimics the behavior he sees around him. Real people or moving images of people, eye-to-brain to mimicry connection does not care. We know how to act and what things are because television and media tell us. Television is the software. Social realism for us is a television commercial for the American lifestyle: what's new to wear, what to eat, who's cool ([President Barack] Obama), what and whom to fear (that perennial evil booger, [Fidel] Castro) or who to admire (Bill Gates, pure American genius at work).

This societal media software tells us what music our digitized corporate complex is selling, but you never see images of ordinary families sitting around in the evenings making music together, because that music cannot be bought and sold and is not profitable

Managing mythology, so instead of a daily life in the flesh, we get 40-inch televisions, YouTube, cineplexes and the myths spun out by Hollywood

Now, for a national mythology to work it has to be accessible to everyone all the time, it has to be all in one bundle. In North Korea a single man, Kim. In America it is the media
Hollywood in particular accommodates imperial myths, melting-pot myths, hegemonic military masculinity myths and glamour myths. It articulates our culture's social imaginary: "the prevailing images a society needs to project about itself in order to maintain certain features of its organization." And the features of our media mythology are terrifying when you think about them. It is watching Man on Fire, with Denzel Washington's tragic pose, to protect us from The Evil. It is the absorption of that electronic mythology that allowed us to cosign the torture at Abu Ghraib. Abu Ghraib photos. Believe me; they picked the gentlest ones to release. Ray Hardy, lawyer. When the media and government people in power made that selection, they were managing your consciousness. Keeping you calmer by withholding the truth. Not upsetting little children so they will continue to quietly behave the way you want. Like children public got bored with the subject of torture. New evidence has been coming out for years short American attention span, created by our rapid-fire media, says, "Move on to the next hologram please
He result is that Americans cannot achieve the cathexis we need. Cathexis is the ground zero psychic and emotional attachment to the world that cannot be argued. It is "beyond ideological challenge, because it is called into existence affectively." Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. We remain mostly a nation of children. We never get to grow up. We tell ourselves that we are a great and compassionate people and that we are personally innocent of any of our government's horrific crimes abroad.
Guiltless as individuals. And we do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as we cannot see beyond the media hologram.

But it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. We are a nation of latchkey kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.


http://hobopoet.com/the-real-world/

“Severance from the noise and electronic hallucinations of modern existence”.
They believe that this electronic hallucination of human society is the sum total of “life” and “the world”. They live according to the programming presented to them.

Most modern people are asleep... hypnotized by media. A sure way to wake up…
Into the wilderness. Unplug

Electronic hallucination and media hologram

IRONY/HUBRIS ALERT: MEDIA DISAGREES WITH STONE AND THEN PROCEEDS TO PROVE HIS POINT

Oliver Stone told a reporter from London’s Sunday Times that Adolf Hitler, the subject of his upcoming documentary, did more damage to Russia than he did to the Jews. He also stated that the U.S.’s support for Israel is the result of Jewish domination of the media.

Israeli-American billionaire and media mogul Haim Saban isn’t buying Oliver Stone’s apology.

Saban, a major stakeholder in Univision and chairman of Saban Capital Group, said he is spreading the word among his Hollywood friends to avoid working with Stone.

A furious Haim Saban has mounted a campaign to get Showtime to cancel its planned airing of Oliver Stone’s 10-part series, “A Secret History of America,” in the wake of anti-Jewish remarks by the outspoken director.

The billionaire and outspoken media mogul told TheWrap he had contacted CBS chief Leslie Moonves to urge him to pull the series.

He said that WME chairman Ari Emanuel had also called CBS privately to urge the series be pulled. update: WME had no comment.

Why has the Post series created so little reaction?

Glenn Greenwald is one of the greats. In an honest world this is the kind of guy who would routinely be on the news hour. He is one of many unbiased, investigative reporters who are banned on the USG corporate media because he refuses to censor himself to their specifications. Thanks to the internet, we get him anyway. Here is Greenwald talking about the Washington Post's (WaPo) Secret Government article.

Remember how The Washington Post spent three days documenting on its front page that we basically live under a vast Secret Government -- composed of military and intelligence agencies and the largest corporations -- so sprawling and unaccountable that nobody even knows what it does? This public/private Secret Government spies, detains, interrogates, and even wages wars in the dark, while sucking up untold hundreds of billions of dollars every year for the private corporations which run it. Has any investigative series ever caused less of a ripple than this one?

RACHEL MADDOW: LEFT WING GATEKEEPER AND NOT EVEN SUBTLE ABOUT IT

Liberal television host Rachel Maddow solidarizes herself with US military in Afghanistan. Maddow is a principal voice of the liberal-left.

Maddow solidarized herself fully with the occupation and the US military, endorsing the bloody suppression of the insurgency. The ruling elite's propaganda was that the war had something to do with bringing terrorists and their Taliban sponsors to justice. ruling elite seized on the 9/11 to stepped up its drive for global domination

The war never had anything to do with democracy, freeing the Afghan people from oppression, or safeguarding the US population from future terrorist attacks.

But rather, vast energy reserves in the Caspian Sea, oil pipeline routes, to implant itself in the strategically critical Central Asian region, to thwart rivals in Europe, Russia, China

Maddow and American liberal-left accept the premise of the Bush and now the Obama administration’s argument that US forces are attempting to set Afghanistan on its feet.

She set the tone, she and her crew had come to Afghanistan “to try to figure ou
“One, If you take as given America’s goals here, is putting 105,000 troops here the right to way to achieve those goals?

second, what does all that mean for Americans who are here?”

Her broadcast exclude all critical thinking. Any investigation would begin with
“America’s goals,” deceit during the Vietnam War, and Iraq was launched on a gigantic lie?

Maddow buys the official propaganda, she is predisposed to do so by her class position and political outlook. She feels at one with the American imperial project
Maddow asserted, “You fight insurgents by killing and capturing them, sure.”, which is the manner of speaking of the semi-criminal elements who came to prominence in the Bush regime and continued under Obama. She went on: “But you also try to create an environment in which the insurgency can’t survive

nation-building… That‘s honestly what they‘re trying to do here. American forces
attempting to set up a “government, and law and order via the government, so that no one in the population wants what the Taliban is offering.” Maddow provided a platform for Brig. Gen. Ben Hodges, the head of the regional southern command in Afghanistan.. The unpopularity of the occupation among Afghans never arose as an issue during Maddow’s visit.

Maddow’s question, where the money to come from, Hodges states the incredible mineral wealth potential.”

Maddow’s endorsement of US prison facility near the Bagram airfield. law and order is locking people up.” Parwan Detention Facility, close to Bagram. “The US is trying,” “to make the world forget the alleged atrocity that took place here.” at Parwan the goals “is to educate the detainees so they will be able to earn a living and not be tempted to join the Taliban.” “another mission” is “to interrogate prisoners for information about the enemy in Afghanistan.”

Red Cross confirmed the US continuing to operate a secret “black jail” at its Bagram facility, prisoners at the site were abused, beaten, humiliated and subjected to sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and other forms of torture. BBC’s Hilary Andersson described Parwan facility what she saw prisoners moved around in wheelchairs with goggles and headphones on

Corrupt regime, “no infrastructure”

NBC’s foreign affairs correspondent Richard Engel admitted, of Kabul, “There is no infrastructure. There are open sewers over there.” after nine years of US occupation and tens of billions of dollars. misconception, he noted, “is that this is a narco state and that people here who are corrupt live off drug money.” No, he said, “by far, the biggest industry is the war… $5.5 billion a month… So anyone connected with the war has made much, much more money than anyone connected with drugs.”

Maddow labels herself as a “national security liberal.”

“I’m undoubtedly a liberal, which means that I’m in almost total agreement with the Eisenhower-era Republican party platform.” The New York Times terms her a “defense policy wonk,” who is writing a book on the role of the military in postwar American politics.

supporter of the American military and its operations around the world. She worries, like many left-liberals, that the Afghan war is unwinnable. Maddow, like the editors of the Nation opposes the immediate withdrawal.

part of the upper-middle-class liberal left, questions of personal identity, at the expense of social class, emerged as the major component of the American liberal outlook. striving for privileges by African-American and Latino petty-bourgeoisie, the elevation of gender and sexuality to world-historical political importance.

she is indifferent to the conditions of the working population. searches in vain for
“joblessness” or “the jobless,” or to “unemployment.” “social inequality” appear, or “inequality” by itself. The word “poverty” comes up once, but in relation to Mexico, and not uttered by Maddow.

In what sense then can Maddow be designated “left” or “progressive’?

she is gay. Just as Barack Obama’s ethnicity was enough

The world doesn’t function that way. The determinant division is not ethnicity, race or gender, but social class. By her support for a brutal, neo-colonial war, Rachel Maddow has identified herself in the most indelible fashion.

Bin Ladens Cave according to Rumsfeld

"Oh, you bet! This is serious business!! And there is not just one of those, there are many of those!!!"

LUNTZ AND LAKOFF

THE FOURTEEN WORDS NEVER TO USE

1. NEVER SAY Government INSTEAD SAY: Washington 2. NEVER SAY Privatization/Private Accounts INSTEAD SAY: Personalization/Personal Accounts 3. NEVER SAY Tax Reform INSTEAD SAY: Tax Simplification 4. NEVER SAY Inheritance/Estate Tax INSTEAD SAY: The Death Tax 5. NEVER SAY A Global Economy/Globalization/Capitalism INSTEAD SAY: Free Market Economy 6. NEVER SAY Outsourcing INSTEAD SAY: Taxation, Regulation, Litigation Innovation, Education 7. NEVER SAY Undocumented Workers INSTEAD SAY: Illegal Aliens

8. NEVER SAY Foreign Trade INSTEAD SAY: International Trade 9. NEVER SAY Drilling for oil INSTEAD SAY: Exploring for energy 10. NEVER SAY Tort Reform INSTEAD SAY: Lawsuit Abuse Reform 11. NEVER SAY Trial Lawyer INSTEAD SAY: Personal Injury Lawyer 12. NEVER SAY Corporate Transparency INSTEAD SAY: Corporate Accountability 13. NEVER SAY School Choice INSTEAD SAY: Parental Choice/Equal Opportunity in Education 14. NEVER SAY Health care “Choice” INSTEAD SAY: “The Right to Choose”

ROBERT SCHEER

This guy, Robert Scheer used to work at this place. He was fired after running his column for more than 12 years and working as a reporter for the paper 17 years, the Los Angeles Times ended a nearly thirty year relationship with Scheer for writing this column, among other related items. He currently runs this website. The corporate elites and their media are rapidly loosing control of the dominant story. Every computer is a printing press. Information is rapidly being decentralized.

SARAH PALIN AND NATHAN BEDFORD FORREST

FORREST, WALLACE AND PALIN

Sarah Palin as Nathan Bedford Forrest. This is an Jayne Lyn Stahl piece is an interesting article

This article matches up with one of my pet theories of history which goes like this:

People wonder why Robert E Lee basically countered the command of his own government and signed the peace treaty with Grant when the south could have gone underground and fought and won a guerrilla insurrection.



The fact is this is exactly what the South did. There is a quote I have failed to bookmark where Lee was asked to lead this insurrection and he declined, informing them that he wasn't the man for the job and he recommended they ask Nathan Bedford Forrest

The Ku Klux Klan was that insurrection and they succeeded in running the "north" out and took back their government. This scarcely known document is a major document in US history and is known as the Compromise of 1877. Some of how this came to be is here, here and here. It is the real peace treaty between the South and the North.



There was a racist component of the KKK and especially the 20Th Century KKK. but while the racism was there, it wasn't the main story.

The South shall Rise again, and again, and again, and again until the secession is recognized and codified.

Being the grandson of Joseph Eugene Bee Stonewall Jackson Robert E Lee Roberts, I can tell you for sure, these Southerners will never forget. The oil has done been pumped out of Texas, hell, give it to em and let em fight the Mexicans for it. This time they'll lose for sure, and won't that be funny.

WHO ARE THE NEOCONS

I recently found this definition of Neoconservative. This strikes me as being a pretty good definition and I think it would be hard to dispute this article/definition as it comes from something called Conservapedia.

Here are a couple of statements from this article:

Neoconservatives are often preferred by liberals to portray the conservative voice in the media, as in television talk shows, newspaper columnists, magazines, think tanks, and advisory positions in Republican Administrations.

This is not a new concept to me, although I don't think I have seen it stated this forcefully.

Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman, JFK, LBJ, Carter, Clinton, Obama, it is hard to look at this list and not see the architects and engineers of empire.

Glenn Greenwald is this era's chronicler of the process, see here,

Paleoconservatives, who dislike Neoconservatism intensely, have argued that it emerged from Trotskyite theories, especially the notion of permanent revolution. There are four fundamental flaws in the paleoconservatives' attack...

Paleoconservatives are basically what used to be called the Goldwater wing of the Republican Party, and before that, the Taft Wing. Their opinions are currently being "aggregated" here.

I think Gore Vidal summed up the process, found here:

There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party...and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt—until recently... and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.<sup>[41]

UPDATE: See here</sup>

THE AP FROM DETAIN THIS

What You Should Know about The Associated Press

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And What You’re Not Learning from Them

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1. The Associated Press is the largest mouthpiece for the U.S. government and the Military-Industrial Complex in their militaristic enterprise known as the “War on Terror.”

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2. The conscience of AP is its board of directors; on that board sits tabloid mogul Rupert Murdoch, president and CEO of News Corporation, which owns Fox News, among many other tabloids.

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3. AP’s West Jerusalem bureau is a mouthpiece for the hard-line, genocidal Israeli government and its illegal settler movement.

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4. AP perpetuates neocon-Likudnik lies about Iran’s nuclear program and the contrived “existential threat” Iran poses to Israel, the USA, and the world.

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5. AP habitually conceals the hideous illegality and immorality of U.S. and Israeli actions in Iraq, the IOPTs, Afghanistan, Syria, and Iran.

** Who Really Owns the Mainstream Media?? **

AMERICA MEDIA

ORWELL ROLLS IN HIS GRAVE

Orwell Rolls in His Grave is a 2003 documentary film written and directed by Robert Kane Pappas. It examines the current and past relationships between the media, the US government and corporations, analyzing the possible consequences of the concentration of media ownership. Making references to George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the film argues that reality has met and in some ways exceeded Orwell's expectations about a society dominated by thought control, which is made possible by the media. According to the film, the mass media no longer report news, but manage it, deciding what makes the headlines and what is conveniently ignored, thus ultimately defining the framework upon which most other issues are discussed by the society. As an example, it is claimed that since the late 1980s there's been an agenda pursued by the major media corporations regarding the deregulation of the media market, by which news reports sell all its benefits while neglecting its disastrous results.

The film features discussions from, amongst others, Bernie Sanders, Charles Lewis, Michael Moore, Danny Schechter, Robert W. McChesney, Mark Crispin Miller, Mark Lloyd, Greg Palast, Aurora Wallace and Vincent Bugliosi. Covered topics include political corruption, the controversy over the US presidential election of 2000 and the October Surprise Conspiracy.

The film has previously aired on Free Speech TV.

THE INFORMATION BUBBLE

The American information bubble prevents the populace from recognizing the world around it. Iran's leader, constantly demonized in the “bubble,” “is not a pariah everywhere on earth, no matter how much American press and politicians fume and fuss.” It becomes increasingly clear that the United States is fooling no one but its own citizens, who are victimized by their ignorance. “Military prowess seems to be the only power the United States has left. It apparently has no ability to help its own people.”
As Barack Obama prepares to accept the Nobel Prize for Peace, he is also preparing to escalate war. He and the system he so loyally represents have little else to offer Americans or the rest of the world. Just in case there is anyone who didn’t get the memo, the announcement came straight from West Point.
There is no commitment to do anything else but keep the war machine humming.

Media Reform conference in Minneapolis:

By David Walsh
14 June 2008

...The prejudice against socialism, encouraged by decades of officially sponsored anticommunism, goes unchallenged in these circles. And a serious, deep-going critique of American society, including its monstrous media apparatus, is unthinkable without the revival of socialist thought within the intelligentsia and broad layers of the population. A socialist program in regard to the media has to be developed and popularized, involving the nationalization of the major media conglomerates and their transformation into public utilities, democratically controlled. Information, culture and entertainment have to be liberated from corporate control.

Anticommunism, as opposed to socialist opposition to the Stalinist regimes in the USSR and elsewhere, became virtually a state religion in the US in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This resulted in the systematic elimination of left-wing opinion, its subsequent unavailability to the public. This was not simply a right-wing undertaking. American liberalism and the Democratic Party, in alliance with the state, settled accounts with their opponents on the left in the purges. The consequences of that process for political, social and cultural life have been disastrous.

No one in these circles speaks of this history, especially of the role played by liberalism. The Democratic Party was widely discredited in the 1950s and 1960s, identified as it was with anticommunism, corrupt machine politics, Jim Crow in the South and, eventually, the Vietnam War. The angry, mass protests outside the Democratic convention in 1968 did not come out of the blue. The repackaging of the Democrats, their respectability on the ‘left’ is of relatively recent origin.

...“The American people can handle a broad discourse, from left to right, from libertarian to socialist. Unfortunately, our media denies that to them and as a result, I think, causes a stilted discourse which makes it far less likely that we will solve real problems in this country.”

McChesney put in, “I’d like to add one thing. It’s worse than that. The media serves to police the borders of what is legitimate opinion and that’s always the thing that makes you angriest, they’re the border cops ...”

These are critical issues, facing not only the media reform movement, but the population as a whole. The question remains: to what extent will the media reform movement itself function as a “border cop” for the Democratic Party and official politics?

THE CORPORATE MEDIA

MATTHEWS: Tom, we're going to have to go back and figure out the methodology, I think, on some of these [polls].

BROKAW: You know what I think we're going to have to do?

MATTHEWS: Yes sir?

BROKAW: Wait for the voters to make their judgment.

...does not and cannot even occur to Chris Matthews. That -- the most elementary nuts and bolts of standard, healthy journalism -- is way, way beyond the scope of what our media stars are able to do or want to do.


Petty personality-based gossip and speculative, worthless chatter is all they know. Drudge, after all, rules their world. He's their Walter Cronkite. And they wallow exclusively in the Matt Drudge currency, what two of their most revered members -- Mark Halperin and John Harris -- described as their fixation with the "attacked-based, personality-obsessed politics" pioneered by their Ruler.

Are Gloria Borger and Chris Matthews and Howard Fineman and Wolf Blitzer suddenly going to abandon their desire to impose shallow, melodramatic narratives on our elections and spend their time, instead, analyzing the candidates' responses to:

• Charlie Savage's questionnaire on presidential power, or

• the dominant, corrosive role lobbyists and large corporations play in our political culture, or

• the widening rich-poor gap, or

• the strain and stain on our country from our imperial policies?

The question is so absurd, so laughable, that to ask it is to answer it. None of them could remotely do that even if they wanted to, even if they were allowed to, and they don't and aren't.

Our entire media edifice is structured to operate the Drudgian Freak Show and its stars are the ringleaders, chosen for their affinity for it. In that sense, Matthews really is right and Brokaw absurdly wrong, almost delusional.

If our media stars ceased spewing the type of worthless (though destructive) chatter that (when directed at Hillary Clinton) has been more apparent in the last week than it has been for a long time, they'd be left with nothing to do. As Matthews says, if they didn't do that, they might as well stay home. It's who they are.

SCREW GUSTAVO CISNEROS AND RUPERT MURDOCH AND TURN YOUR RADIO ON

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IN A TIME OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT - GEORGE ORWELL

TRUTH IS ON THE SIDE OF THE OPPRESSED - MALCOLM X


Today Sunday (December 2, 2007) the day of the election we are broadcasting 24 hours live from the streets of Caracas! Bringing you the latest news and analysis all day long. We will be broadcasting in various languages, mainly english but also spanish, french and portuguese. So stay tuned and listen to RADIO VENEZUELA EN VIVO!



RADIO VENEZUELA EN VIVO
Server 1: CLICK HERE- CLIQUEZ ICI- CLIQUE AQUI

Radio Mission Statement

Venezuela En Vivo is a live web-streaming internet radio based in Caracas, Venezuela, and broadcast in English, French and Portuguese by a group of Venezuelan and international journalists, academics and activists living and working in Venezuela. The radio will report on the latest breaking news in and around the day of Venezuela´s December 2nd Constitutional Reform Referendum; cover the destabilization attempts against the democratic electoral process; put the events in to context with interviews and analytical content; and act as an alternative source of news to the mainstream media, which has proven time and again unable to report independently and unbiased on Venezuela.

DONT SERVE THE KOOL-AID!!

'a censored press' leads to 'hypocrisy', the greatest of vices...the government hears only its own voice...surrenders to the illusion that it hears the voice of the people...The people on its side falls either into political superstition or else into indifference, and so turns completely away from the life of the state

-C. Wright Mills

DISMANTLING STRUCTURES OF DISCEPTION

In his view such powerful forces as official propaganda and state coercion distort human psychology and relationships and thus stifle intellectual development and social life in general.

"It is no easy task to gain some understanding of human affairs. In some respects, the task is harder than in the natural sciences. Mother Nature doesn't provide the answers on a silver platter, but at least she does not go out of her way to set up barriers to understanding. In human affairs, such barriers are the norm. It is necessary to dismantle the structures of deception erected by doctrinal systems. . . ."

He seeks to uncover how indoctrination systems work to prevent people from gaining a real and practical understanding of the major questions of our world, and how they enable intellectuals to exempt their government from criticism of the very same evils for which they easily (and rightly, but safely) condemn other governments.

Washington is well aware that Americans would not accept the real purposes of its policies and have to be fooled into accepting immoral acts of violence.

As Mark Twain wrote in 1900, those missionary idealists who have gone to convert the Chinese to Christianity should return home at once to save their own desperate countrymen from the sin of participating in the lynching of blacks:

VENEZUELA COMUNITY RADIO: RECLAIM THE MEDIA

Caricuao is one of the outer western parishes of Caracas. As the subway train from the center of Caracas approaches the parish, we pass by precarious ranchos, or flimsy tin and board houses, nestled in the sides of the looming hills and large project-like buildings with bars across the windows. Radio Perola is located on the ground floor of one of these “projects” or popular blocks, known as Canagua. The broadcasting studio is a small room, painted bright yellow and covered with posters from the social justice movement and community radios. On one large corner table there is a mixer, microphone and computer, and at a round table in the center there are several mikes and chairs.

Like other community radio stations in Venezuela, Radio Perola began as a clandestine station nearly nine years ago, and activists have fought for it to be legally authorized by the state. Under the hip-hop inspired slogan, “Maximum Respect!,” community journalists at Radio Perola are creating spaces for new voices, such as those of the young women, to be heard.

a community activist who works with Radio Perola, a Caracas independent radio station that means "Radio Can,"a reference to the string can telephones that many of us know from childhood. In the context of Caracas, where five elite TV stations have long dominated the flow of information, Radio Perola is an example of how the grassroots, in picking up tin can and some string, can take back the media.

Radio Negro Primero, otro Medio Comunitaria de radio. Socios de PCASC, yo tambien, visitaron la estacion en Enero, 2006 cuando 23 personas que viven en Portland asistaron el Foro Social Mundial).

(PHOTO: near Caricuao, Distrito Federal (Venezuela) by Orlando Leiva
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