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If I were a business consultant I would tell the corporate media what consultants are telling companies in every industry: evolve or die.
If I were making historical predictions I would say the major media will not die, they will change. They are self-correcting systems from a financial standpoint (and only from a financial standpoint). As they increasingly fail to communicate with their audiences, it will affect their bottom lines, and probably already has.
As organs of the corporate state, the major media must bend over backwards to avoid letting certain ugly truths become widely known. As income disparities become ever greater, corporate corruption of the government becomes increasingly pronounced, and human rights violations become ever more extreme, the ugly truths that must be hidden become large and larger, until it becomes almost impossible to hide them.
As the outrages grow in number and intensity and an ever larger number of people become victims of the insatiable greed of the corporate state, the gap between what is reported and what is real continues to widen. As the 5,000-year-old Chinese Book of Changes says, continuing increase inevitably leads to decrease. In all processes there is a breaking point.
Now that the Internet provides an alternative medium of communication, the major media can no longer monopolize information. Increasingly, people have alternatives. This is the death knell of the major media as we know them.
The major media now are in a situation analogous to the clerks in the 12th Century who were an extension of the church, which proved its dignity by its resistance to change, or to the secular writers of the 17th Century who wrote only for the elite governing classes, reflecting back to them their own unshakable religious ideology and belief in the divine right of kings.
Those closed systems were eventually broken by external forces, such as the rise of printing, the spread of education, the growth of a middle class, and eventually the flowering of democracy.
When advertising was introduced into newspaper publishing in the early 19th century, it subsidized production costs and made it nearly impossible for a publication that did not take advertising to compete with one that did. Advertising kept the price for the reader low. But over time it also had a tendency to restrict the content of the publication. Having the publication become more accountable to its advertisers than to its readers subtly changes its ultimate mission. Over time it has changed the character of publishing.
Today most magazines and papers and broadcast media are thought of primarily as business enterprises. They are targeted to the affluent because that is who the advertisers stand to make the most money from. The whole communications environment has been tilted toward the affluent minority for so long people barely notice it. No one alive has seen much else. That segment of the population is protected from the harsher aspects of life, and the corporate media shield it from knowledge of harsher things the government spends the public's money on.
The concentration of wealth and power that has taken place in recent decades has created widening disparities that must eventually exert social pressure. People do not die willingly. The affluent and privileged sector to which the media cater, is becoming more a more concentrated minority. The media are losing touch with a larger and larger part of the population that is being left out of economic prosperity.
Enter the Internet.
The Web creates a democratizing force that stands in opposition to the massive power of today's global corporations to centralize and accumulate wealth and power -- and quite possibly the equal of that force. Perhaps its nemesis.
To an extent, the Web levels the playing field. While monopolistic corporate power has concentrated to a greater degree than ever before, the Internet makes it possible for people with limited capital to play with big guys, in some ways. To some degree, it reduces the advantage given by money in almost every field of activity.
A Web site can be maintained for a modest amount of money, which allows a single entrepreneur the opportunity to stand on an equal footing in some ways to CBS or ABC.
Since the major media have more or less abdicated the responsibility of seriously talking about many of the most pressing issues of the time, that job has fallen to a vital network of independent media that is driven more by politics and passion than selling products. This is not a small distinction.
Of course a small enterprise doesn't have the means of promoting itself and making its message heard that the major corporations have, but smallness has advantages as well. A major corporation is unshakably tied to the profit-seeking imperative. A corporation exists only to maximize shareholder wealth. It cannot act in any way that runs counter to that purpose. That severely restricts what it can say, and on a more fundamental level, shapes its world view. It is a viewpoint that is increasingly alien to its audience.
A medium of communication that is primarily motivated by profit cannot risk alienating its advertisers, who are the source of much more of its income than its readers. So while the small enterprise may not be much of a threat to the major media in commercial terms, in terms of ideas and information, in terms of social history, it has a distinct advantage.
Though there are exceptions, an establishment publication or broadcast medium today cannot speak in plain terms, for example, about the connection between the slaughter of innocents in the Palestinian territories by Israel and the weapons that are provided for the purpose by U.S. taxpayers. As a commercial enterprise it is too tightly bound up within the system itself. A few major advertisers pulling their ad schedules can put the paper in trouble. The entity seeks primarily to succeed as a business, but fails as a medium of communication that could enable its public to make informed decisions about financing mass murder.
When the slaughter makes so much noise it can't be ignored, the networks must acknowledge it. But when it is mentioned on the news it must be slurred around, obfuscated, hidden behind technical terms and cliches that turn it into mush, that filter out the human suffering that is underlying the reality the words represent. Then quickly it is interrupted with an upbeat commercial message to take your mind off the gruesomeness and on to some quick pleasure.
The major media have long since failed as the constitutionally designated fourth estate, which is essential to the healthy functioning of democratic government. They are increasingly failing to address themselves to the vital interests of their readers. They continue to be successful as commercial enterprises, dispensers of entertainment, distraction, and as means for selling products.
They are now in danger of losing their audiences in an erosion as rapid as the Bush regime's rollback of the civil rights of Americans.
It is yet to be seen how rigid these media systems are, and how well they will adapt to the lightning pace of change of the 21st Century. The present situation is in some ways historically unprecedented. Many have speculated that the Web will have more impact on culture than the printing press. Some have gone much farther and said the Web will change human society more than anything since the invention of agriculture.
For the purposes of a discussion about media, the invention of the printing press is quite momentous enough. It drastically transformed human society. It changed reading from a monopoly of the elites, to a more general practice. It unleashed information, gradually placing knowledge and power in the hands of the general population and laying the groundwork for democracy.
Gradually the writer was freed from being a servant of the governing elite, whose only purpose was to reinforce that elite's world view. Knowledge and power flowed out of the church and the monarchies.
Today's corporate media are like the clerks of the court whose purpose was to bolster and protect the dogma of the church and the divine right of kings. They cannot allow a free flow of new ideas into their systems because the ideas would be destructive to the systems themselves. Originality is ruled out by definition. It is a tight system of rules that keep the thinking within very limited categories. They may be successful in the market system, but in the system of ideas, they are constricted. The public will not allow themselves to be dumbed down if they know there is an alternative. It's getting harder and harder to contain harmful information. Some say that was what broke the Soviet Union. It is certainly putting some pressure on the corrupt bureaucracies of Washington. As Orwell pointed out, the rise of tyranny is closely bound up with the decay of language. If you can control the language, you've won the game. There is no way for an idea that is outside the system of ideas of the major media cartel to surface on their programs. The venerable New York Times -- the most important paper in the empire -- adheres so rigidly to tradition that a reporter in that paper cannot refer to a person in a second reference without a title such as Mr., Mrs., Miss., or Ms. If the paper refers to Ringo Starr for example, it says "Mr. Starr," even though "Ringo Starr" is a stage name, hardly at home in a formal setting that hearkens back to the men's clubs of the early 20th Century. In a second reference to Sid Vicious, the reporter would presumably be required to say "Mr. Vicious," which is probably as good a reason as any why you don't see much coverage of such people in the New York Times.
As the Paper of Record, the Times is the keeper of history, so every morning it must theoretically proclaim and document the most important events of the previous day, even if its entire audience has heard those events in a hundred TV and radio broadcasts and several editions of tabloids already the day before.
Just as its editorial style encumbers its ability to talk about contemporary events, it is handicapped in its ability to accommodate a broad range of events in the 21st century for which there are no precedents. How does, for example, the Times deal with a stolen presidential election? More or less by denial.
Since the Times and its brethren cannot discuss the stolen election as a stolen election, it must talk about it as though it were legitimate, and then fall into its standard patterns of language to refer deferentially to "the president" exactly the same as if he had actually been elected, or worse -- ordained. When its own research shows that the operation was a heist, it must be polite to the extent of entirely avoiding anything that would be embarassing to the perpertrators, who just happen to be wearing titles like "the president" now. As events become ever more extreme, it puts the Times at a greater distance from the real world of its readers.
In the past, the major media has been very successful in enforcing ideas upon the public. If the polls commissioned by the major TV networks and newspapers tell us that a huge majority "approve" of "the job the president is doing," that judgment the becomes the accepted reality. But it is not at all sure how long the major media will retain its perceived authority as the gap between what they report and what the population can see for itself widens.
Under the Bush administration, the corporate state's drive to seize power and nullify democratic power has been unleashed and gone into runaway. A corresponding reaction is taking place in the population, a change that is not reflected in the major corporate media because the self-consciousness of that social change would be anathema to the corporations that own the media.
That changing awareness, which is little more than a natural reaction to the pressures of the corporate state to marginalize the majority, is finding a channel for expression on the Internet.
As Mussolini said explicitly, fascism IS corporatism. That is the process we are now witnessing: the ever increasing accumulation of wealth by an ever decreasing number of corporate entities; the turning over of the government to these entities; and their use of it as an instrument of war, by which they further enhance their profits and power.
We should come down off our high horses about it, drop our pretensions and get over our naive belief that it can't happen here. It is happening. Call it what you will, this is the process Mussolini called fascism. It played out in Italy and Germany and Japan and it is now playing out in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world. If we don't like it, we can oppose it. If we ignore it, and deny its existence we are sitting ducks.
The major media have already ceased to exist as much more than some kind of background drone we've all become accustomed to. As they become more and more remote from their audiences, they become like a deaf and blind person speaking to an empty room.
In his essay "Why Write?", Jean Paul Sartre said that writing is essentially a joint process requiring at minimum two people, a writer and a reader. The reader is as essential as the writer, because a writer cannot write for himself alone, cannot possibly read his own writing. He knows what he meant, cannot know what it is like for the reader. "The results which we have obtained on canvas or paper never seem to us objective. We are too familiar with the processes of which they are effects," he said. "In reading one foresees; one waits. One foresees the end of the sentence, the following sentence, the next page."
Sartre called the writing/reading process an act of generosity between two free people. People are not forced to become writers or readers as they may be forced to plow fields or operate machines in factories. It is a process that is inherently free and democratic. In history, the rise of printing and the spread of reading into the masses is inseparably intertwined with the rise of democracy. It is essentially one process.
When a newspaper becomes an organ of an oppressive state, it has sown the seeds of its own destruction, not necessarily as a dispenser of products or as a propaganda vehicle, but as a true medium of communication. The creative process can only exist in a free environment. A writer who identifies with oppressors, will kill his own creative spark, cut himself off from his source.
Sartre cites a historical example, one Drieu la Rochelle who agreed to produce a Nazi review for the Nazi government during the occupation of France.
Sartre says: "The first few months he reprimanded, rebuked, and lectured his country-men. No one answered him because no one was free to do so. He became irritated; he no longer felt his readers. He became more insistent, but no sign appeared to prove that he had been understood. No sign of hatred, nor of anger either; nothing. He seemed to have lost his bearings, the victim of a growing distress. He complained bitterly to the Germans. His articles had been superb; they became shrill. The moment arrived when he struck his breast; no echo, except among the bought journalists whom he despised. He handed in his resignation, withdrew it, again spoke, still in the desert. Finally, he said nothing, gagged by the silence of others. He had demanded the enslavement of others, but his crazy mind he must have imagined that it was voluntar-y, that it was still free. It came; the man in him congr-atulated himself mightily, but the writer could not bear it. While this was going on, others, who, happily, were in majority, understood that the freedom of writing implies the freedom of the citizen. One does not write for slaves. The art of prose is bound up with the only régime in which prose has meaning, democracy. When one is threatened, the other is too."
--by David Cogswell
The Los Angeles Times reports that in an interview with a German magazine,
Bush was asked about his flights around the country on Sept. 11 and he said,
in effect, that they were an effort to save his ass. Totally understandable
of course, isn't it what most of us would do in the event of a disaster? Or
would we? I guess we know, starting with the firemen and the policemen and
many of the people on the street and in the area, that saving one's own ass
was not the only thing that was on everyone's minds that day. It's a
perfectly normal reaction, and he is, after all, a perfectly normal
president.
That's how he presented himself in the campaign, remember? Just a normal guy.
Not even a politician, he said. A really likable guy, a guy with great people
skills. In reality a politician of uncanny ability, but he sold himself as a
regular guy whom Joe Sixpack would like to party with, certainly much more
than that nerdy wonk Al Gore. So that's what we got. So what does a
cheerleader do when disaster hits?
If you search out Bush's behavior that day, it is illuminating. I heard
someone say that character is what is demonstrated by the actions of people
under pressure. When the most colossal disaster ever hit the U.S., how did
George W. Bush behave? Like a leader, a protector? He behaved like a valuable
jewel, which must be saved at all costs, no matter if the world should be
destroyed, this above all things must be protected.
You couldn't blame him if that was the way he thought, that's the way he has
been treated. And in a very literal sense, that's what he is. He is the
hottest property out there. A great act. He does magic for the Fortune 500
companies. As Jim Hightower said, Bush is a corporate wet dream. They are
falling all over themselves there is so much money to steal. It's open season
on the treasury for major corporations. Not for poor folk though. Nah. Times
are tough, budgets are tight. You know. Recession.
So Bush -- the hottest property around to the richest 5% of the population --
and useless to the rest of us - falls as usual into the arms of his handlers
and lets them tell him what to do. They will protect him against any odds,
against any danger. He is worth way too much money for them to let anything
happen to him. So they flew him all over the country, and wound up in Nebraska.
What is missing in this whole situation? No one seems to know what to do.
It's a chain of command that runs in a circle. There is no leadership. This
would be bad if the talent being handled was John Travolta or Madonna. But in
this case the property being handled was the president of the United States,
the man who is supposed to be the prime mover for the whole country, and he's
just like some scared puppy dog that is waiting to be told what to do.
The trouble is, the Bush machine pulled off a marvelous heist taking over the
government, but when the country is in crisis, it is in need of leadership,
and there is no trace of leadership in the Big Money politics game. George
Bush portrayed by the desperate efforts of the major media as a leader isn't
credible and no one really believes it. Everyone, even the people who work
closely with him, know he's not a particularly bright bulb, but it doesn't
matter. He serves a purpose. He's a poster boy. An actor, not much more.
Bush reads some lines with something that looks enough like conviction to
convince a lot of people of his sincerity. That is fine for soundbite
production, for maintaining a propaganda campaign. But when it comes to
leading your country out of crisis, what is needed is something
extraordinary.
Anyone who has looked even casually at Bush's history - even the public,
scrubbed version - knows that the lack of substance he seems to project on
camera is no illusion. No profile in courage this boy. So when disaster
struck - it's no great mystery -- he ran like a chicken with its head cut
off.
Now here is one final thought, a world away. The man who coined the phrase
"Profiles in Courage," knew there were threats on his life when he went to
Dallas, yet he went through the entire city with no shield, from getting off
the airplane until the moment he was shot. He walked along beside the car for
a while. He knew he could be shot. He had spoken of the possibility of being
shot. He was a fatalistic sort of man. He was vigorous, but physically
failing. His mortality was very real to him already. He had suffered severe
physical ailments. He had been in action in World War II.
He knew there was danger, but he did not run from it. He went forward with
what seemed to be the honorable thing to do. Though millions cried that he
did not take more pains to protect himself, and he was lost to the world, his
destiny was one of honor and of dignity. His place in history will always
rise to mythical proportions because he did not blow his cool. He did not
falter when things got tough. No matter what his detractors say about his
sexual behavior, he was a man of honor. Certainly not perfect, but
essentially a man who came through when he had to.
The needed phrase came to me this afternoon as if in someone else's voice, and when
I heard it I knew it to be true....Bush wouldn't know honor if it bit him. --
David Cogswell
David Cogswell's commentary about Bush's ignoring global warming and the oil interests that create that position (see below) was a really wonderful piece. Many fine writers and journalists have also made similar comments, but I thought his had more punch. However, there is always something missing in the analysis on the subject, noteably why the oil companies would fight tooth and nail to impede the move to sustainable energy. The obvious explanation, that they're clinging to their profits and power, doesn't make sense. Think about it this way. Most of the world is dependent on oil. We're talking for mobility, food production, factory operation, household products, etc., etc. down the line. We know we have a finite amount of oil in the earth, so these oil tycoons also know they can't continue their oil profits forever. To move the planet's economy from an oil dependent economy to one of an alternative fuel (or fuels), will be a most enormous undertaking, costing trillions of dollars and requiring millions of new jobs and hundreds of new industries. There will not be a single person on this planet who now requires pretroleum products who will not need to invest currency in these new products and energy sources. That means companies will stand to profit in the trillions of dollars. Now who in this world has the resources and capital to fund the coming shift into the Second Industrial Revolution? Not the average middle class worker. Not the small business owner down the street. It will be the wealthy corporations already in the business of providing energy, who already have deep pockets. It seems to me that these energy companies would be licking their chops thinking of supplying the entire world with new cars, factories, power plants and all the thousands of household products contained within each and every home on this planet, instead of fighting to hold on to a system they know is dying. Everything these companies do comes down to money. The smart wager for future payoffs is alternative energy. The fact that they're not betting tells me we must have their motives figured wrong. Are they hoping for a total economic meltdown? Is this some twisted attempt at population control? Because if we run out of oil before alternatives are up and running, millions (and maybe billions) of people will die as a result. I would love to know what Mr. Cogswell, or anyone else for that matter, thinks about this. --Matt Schweder I think Matt Schweder has it dead wrong. If the oil tycoons had an ounce of ability for thinking forwardly, they would understand that their environmentally and socially destructive habits will lead the world in which they, their families, and their descendents will live into a meltdown. Obviously, as we all know, the only thing on their minds is profit, but not just any profit, the maximum short term profit. They want money, they want it now, and investing in renewable energy sources would cut into the money that is available here and now. Besides, not only won't the oil run ouy until ptobably long after the current crop of mega-billionaires is dead, by which time their families will have so much money that they can little do whatever they want, but introducing a new system will allow for the chance, however small, that some new player could enter the game, unbalancing the current group of power holders. These guys don't play the numbers. Oil is where the safest money is, so that's where they are. -~Adam Schneider
Bush Is Blind To Icecaps Melting
On March 20, The Guardian of London reported that a piece of ice the size of Wales just broke off from Antarctica. This is an iceberg that weighs "500 million billion tonnes", according to the article. A quick Internet search shows that scientists say this has been happening with increasing frequency as a result of global warming. Wales is small for a country but very large for an iceberg. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey, who are not known for a penchant for drama, called the speed of the disintegration "staggering." On March 1, the Guardian referred to a report from the US National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The report said that if the present global warming trend continues, the process could soon reach a threshold at which it would dramatically accelerate. In that scenario the temperature would rise drastically in a few years, leaving no time for ecosystems to adapt. The earth could suddenly be ruled by a "new climatic regime" qualitatively different from what we know. The change would be so fundamental its effects would be felt for thousands of years. The report said it would be more catastrophic than any cataclysm in recorded history. The same article refers to a report issued a year ago by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It forecasted that the global average surface temperature will rise by 1.4 to 5.8 degrees centigrade between now and 2100. If that projection holds up, it says, the change in temperature in the next 100 years will be larger than any climate change on earth in more than 10,000 years. Five degrees centigrade is the difference between now and the last ice age, when most of North America was covered by thousands of feet of ice. These are grave issues, though the free market religion of America makes it almost illegal to consider anything that doesn't bolster the profits of the richest corporations. As CNN concluded its report after an iceberg 10 times the size of Manhattan broke off from Antarctica last September, "None of the icebergs are currently in the path of heavily used shipping paths." Of course there's nothing to worry about then. What's good for business is good for America. But regarding the future implications of the melting of the polar icecaps, where does our leadership stand? Bush has said nothing about this latest proof of global warming. Bush Incorporated, which behaves more and more like an agent of the oil cartel, broke the Kyoto agreement. It was the one feeble little attempt the nations of the world had managed to organize among themselves to try to help postpone the global disaster that may be on its way as a result of the emissions in the atmosphere from burning petroleum products. Given Bush's base of support and what we have seen in the way Enron literally wrote most of Bush's energy policy, it's not unreasonable to consider that the policy is simply an extension of the wishes of the oil industry. Those wishes are single-minded, like those of most corporations: to pull in a good quarterly return for the shareholders. For one quarterly report after another, we are sustaining a system of energy consumption that should have been phased out starting 30 years ago when Nixon was president. But then, the oil companies might not be as rich as they are today. Having the United States so desperately dependent on oil in 2000 is a situation that cannot be good for anyone, except of course the oil companies who control the supply of one of the world's most essential commodities. That dependence increasingly leads to brutal wars engaged in by the country that uses 60% of the world's oil. And even now the administration has shown little concern for developing alternative energy sources, or conserving the fossil fuel reserves that are left. The oil world is dying. America must find a new way to fuel our society. And it can certainly be done. But it is not being done. Our leadership is making no meaningful preparations to move to a sustainable energy source. The administration appears to be functioning like "an oil company with a flag," wholly consumed with controlling oil resources and turning them into profit. The scientific communities of the world have long understood the importance of finding new sources of energy, new systems that are not dependent on rapidly diminishing fossil fuels. The vast majority of working people want a peaceful, habitable world; appreciate environmental beauty and don't want it destroyed; are not set on being the richest and most powerful people on the planet. The only people who have a vested interest in the ongoing maintenance of the present dinosaur energy system are the tycoons who hire the politicians to run the system for their benefit. In the case of the Bush administration, the capacity to thwart the will of the people on behalf of the ruling corporate elite seems virtually unrestrained. What has happened is that the battle against the corporate oligarchy Bush represents has truly become a battle for survival, and not just for the poor, but for the planet. The Bush administration is out of touch with the realities of the needs of the 21st century. And the power they now control is no joke. They are not merely the comic idiots some think they are. They are the front men for a vicious, destructive agenda. It is time to take them very seriously, and to take traditional, nonviolent democratic action to limit their power and unseat them in the coming elections. It is time for Americans to wake up. It is time to fight for what you believe in. The fight today will be a fight to tell the truth against a colossal barrage of lies. Americans have to look beyond the lies the Republicans use to win votes and see that they are not on the side of the vast majority of Americans. They represent little that matters to most Americans. The positions they support in practically every issue demonstrably favor the interests of a small corporate elite over those of the vast majority. --David Cogswell
Deconstructing the 911 Cover-up By David Cogswell Practically every act of the clowns who now control the White House is an outrage and an insult to intelligence, but Bush and Cheney's attempt to put the squeeze on the investigation of 911 is the most egregious of many loathsome acts. This may be even more outrageous than their thuggish seizure of the White House after losing the election. CNN reported (http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/01/29/inv.terror.probe/index.html) That both Bush and Cheney personally gave Daschle a leaden tap on the shoulder and warned him to back off. Daschle, wisely, made the requests public, saying, "The vice president expressed the concern that a review of what happened on September 11 would take resources and personnel away from the effort in the war on terrorism." Newsweek reported the incident at http://stacks.msnbc.com/news/694812.asp?cp1=1. Investigating the attack would take resources AWAY from the war on terrorism? This is such an affront to the most rudimentary logic it defies comprehension. The Bushes have gotten tremendous mileage out of being incomprehensible, but this may go beyond the limit of acceptability even from a previously docile public. You have to stop still for a minute to appreciate the colossal arrogance of suggesting a limit to the inquiry into the most horrific assault ever perpetrated on U.S. citizens. How could anyone dare to suggest that an investigation into the failures that led that catastrophe would "divert resources from the war on terrorism"? It should be the foundation of that effort. It is no use tiptoeing around it, these guys have manipulated 911 from Day One to push their same old agenda. "The war on terrorism," like everything else the Bushes claim disingenuously to be doing, is nothing more than a front for doing exactly what their corporate controllers want, no matter how detrimental it is to the vast majority. Any war on terrorism that does not incorporate a thorough public investigation is a fraud. Ashcroft and George W. would say, "We didn't say no investigation. We'll have an investigation all right, but we'll be in charge of it. And we'll keep the information we uncover secret, for National Security, of course." This administration, which is transparently an extension of the old gang led by the former CIA director, is inherently anti-democratic, seeking at every turn to thwart democratic processes, to centralize, privatize and monopolize power and resources. Covert action is its stock in trade, a family tradition. The CIA cult of secrecy is the antithesis of democratic processes. The Bush administration maintains its assault on the rights of the majority at a furious pace on many fronts at once, but the Republican elite are always consistent in their preferences: all power and wealth to the richest one percent; let the rest make do with what trickles down, if we're feeling generous. Since the idea that an all-out investigation would divert resources from the war on terrorism is a ludicrous, desperate ploy, we are left with the question: Why do Bush and Cheney want to limit the investigation? Why indeed? Logic leads inescapably to the proposition that they would not like what such an investigation would uncover. What then might that be? Is it possible that when the disaster is closely examined, and Americans for the first time are able to soberly contemplate how such a mountain of simultaneous security breaches took place, they may cease to lionize the commander in chief who presided so gaily over the failure? To select one fact out of that mountain of dysfunctions: It was 35 minutes from the second crash at the World Trade Center to the attack on the Pentagon. Thirty-five minutes since millions of average Americans knew the crashes were no accident, and yet the nation's capital, the center of the world's most powerful military, only moments from Andrews Air Force Base where fighters fly in and out at all hours, was defenseless. We were sitting ducks. A quarter of a trillion dollars spent on the military every year and there was no defense of Washington. The first attack in New York may be called a surprise, even though air traffic controllers knew about the hijackings for a long time before the crashes. But the Pentagon attack was no surprise. The average 10-year-old knew by then an attack was underway and had known about it long enough for fighters to fly from Andrews to the Pentagon and back many times over. Even in the absence of an investigation, basic logic leads to the conclusion that a great many things had to go wrong that day. Many of the reports that have come out raise more questions that the public needs answered, if we are to consider ourselves a democratic nation. Among the most intriguing of a myriad of disturbing reports were those of FBI agents complaining that the Bush administration took steps to limit investigations into Bin Laden before Sept. 11 too. (See the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4293682,00.html and the Sydney Morning Herald http://www.smh.com.au/news/0111/07/world/world100.html ) What can be said in the face of such an outrage? The time for talking is over. Let the investigations begin.
The President and the PretzelHere's a good one. In this one we are told that the Leader of the Free World was lounging on a couch watching football on TV and he choked on a pretzel and fainted, falling off the couch onto a coffee table so hard that he suffered a wound on his face that looked as severe as if he'd been hit by a baseball bat. A coffee table is not usually much lower than a couch, but somehow the President built up enough force to suffer a rather severe blow to the head. The President of the United States has been felled by a pretzel. Allegedly.The New York Daily News said, "The President has a lower-than-normal pulse rate, which doctors attribute to his rigorous workout regime. But [White House physician Dr. Richard] Tubb said that low heart rate made him more prone to fainting when the pretzel stimulated a nerve after it got caught in his throat." Now we are being told that our President is more prone to fainting because he's in such great shape, because those manly workouts lowered his heart rate so much. His duties as president hardly even work up a heartbeat. I don't want to be called a "conspiracy theorist," but doesn't that story sound a little weird? In this case it's hard to imagine anything particularly sinister going on behind this bash on Bush's face. But if it is really just an innocuous, meaningless event, that means the administration's media wonks are working up a really weak, contradictory story about nothing. If The President's men (and woman) tell stories like this about something that has no significance, it makes you wonder if they ever tell the truth at all. It recalls Harry Truman's statement that Nixon lied so incessantly that he wondered if "the sonofabitch even knows the difference [between the truth and a lie]." Periodically -- in fact quite often -- The White House gets caught in an embarrassing web of lies. There were the allegations about vandalism being committed in the White House by departing Clinton staff, which later had to be admitted to be false when the General Accounting Office's records showed no such damage. There were the strange travels of Bush on Sept. 11, when he spent a few hours flying around the country, which The White House said was a response to threats which were later admitted to have never been received. If we get into listing all the times the Bush people have been caught in a lie you'd be stuck in a process with virtually no end; the point is they are committed to telling lies as a matter of policy. That is the practice Karl Rove has made into an art form, and that's what makes him one of the most powerful people behind Bush. Rove learned it working with the greatest dirty tricksters of all, the Nixonians, including the legendary scum doctor Lee Atwater. Remember, in New Hampshire (a state that is small enough that the democratic process can work from the ground up), McCain trounced Bush in the primaries. Bush recovered his status as "front runner" in the cooperative media by winning South Carolina. The Bush people accomplished that by slandering McCain in "push polls" all over the state, planting rumors that characterized McCain as everything from insane to some kind of pervert. It was a blitzkrieg, too close to the election for McCain to effectively set the record straight. Headlines from the mainstream media at the time talked mostly about how Bush "worked hard" to win that election and showed he was a tough politician, painting the most sordid acts in noble coloring. These guys know how to lie and it has served them well. Now they do it so brazenly they don't even bother to make the stories sound real. They seem to be celebrating the fact that they can get away with almost any lie. Bush's recent story that he had seen the first plane hit the WTC on television before he went in to read to the kids at school was one of the most bizarre stories yet. And after saying it at a town meeting in Florida, he repeated its basic points in another town meeting in California. In fact, the two "town meetings" were so identically scripted, they even had another little boy ask the question again, "Mr. President, what was your first reaction when you found out about the World Trade Center?" The questioners on those things are not just plants, they act like animatronic figures. So it gets back to this troubling fact that they lie even when it doesn't seem to matter. Or maybe the material their damage control efforts are trying to suppress is so massive, there is no incident that is trivial, that could not lead to some damaging information if it were ever really followed up or investigated. Or if the media even asked the obvious questions. It seems that the propaganda system constantly feeds the public confusing and contradictory information to train people to accept confusing and contradictory information. Now maybe we'll have The Pretzel Threat, or a War on Pretzels.
-- by David Cogswell, 01.23.02
Braving the New World Order
by david cogswell"A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all-powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present-day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers.... The greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth."
Aldous Huxley
O'Brien to Winston
Adolph Hitler during World War II
President George Bush
Albert Speer
Adolph Hitler
Doublethink is a form of paradox that stymies logical processes and conditions the mind not to think: "War is peace; freedom is slavery; ignorance is strength," were the slogans of the Party in Orwell's 1984. And in 2001, they tell us that in order to fight for freedom and democracy, we must abolish freedom and democracy.
When the real year 1984 came, a huge media blitz proclaimed that "Orwell was wrong! The year 1984 is here and his prediction didn't come true!!" I was never sure what part of his prediction they were referring to that didn't come true. Surely not every detail of his fictional world was played out in real life America, but the essential principles of population control portrayed so artistically by Orwell were being employed in a most sophisticated fashion by the U.S. government under Reagan.
Perhaps one could argue that the Orwellian world had not yet been consummated in 1984. The process of concentrating wealth and power among a tiny elite was in a relatively early phase, compared to where we have come since. Franklin Roosevelt's efforts to refine the barbarous form of American capitalism of the early 20th century with social reforms were not yet entirely reversed, buried and forgotten. But huge strides were made in that endeavor on many fronts during the Reagan years. Perhaps the most spectacular of those were in the realm of media control. Once information control is consolidated, taking power is a natural progression. Once the mind of the country is enslaved, the bodies follow. It was George Bush I who introduced the term "New World Order" into the American political culture at the time of his great Gulf War and began the effort of conditioning the public into liking the idea. Recently the New York Times published a special edition incorporating the phrase "New World Order" into the title. It seemed as if the Newspaper of Record were proclaiming the official arrival of Bush Senior's vision. It seemed to be an aknowledgment, even an endorsement, or acquiescence. But it would be useful to remind ourselves that the phrase was used by Adolf Hitler to describe his vision of the Thousand Year Reich. The Bush family's affinity with Nazism is as old as Nazism itself, established by George I's father Prescott Bush and his maternal grandfather George Herbert Walker, who as managing partners of the Union Banking Trust funneled $5 million into the Nazi arms buildup in the '20s, '30s and '40s until it was closed down under the Trading with the Enemy Act during World War II. The present George Bush has expressed many times his appreciation for dictatorships, most recently during his trip to China when he told the Chinese dictator how much he admired the Communist Chinese government's authoritarian approach to press conferences. Very funny George. Armageddon The 21st Century arrived September 11 with the horror of the World Trade Center destruction. It is indeed a brave new world (a phrase borrowed by Huxley from Shakespeare's "The Tempest"). It's a world like a Philip K. Dick novel, in which you don't know who your friends are and who your enemies are - you don't even know what is real. In fear and panic, Americans traded away their constitutional freedoms for the illusion of security. And it is certainly an illusion. Does anyone believe that the American government has an effective way of defending the people against Anthrax in the post office? The government no more has it together to really "combat terrorism" than the Keystone Cops. They are winging it, and putting up a good front. Or not such a good one really. But people truly want to believe they can trust their leaders to protect them. It's a sadly misguided notion, and the trade off is a tragic deception. The people won't get security, but they will get a new country in which their civil rights exist only to whatever extent is convenient for the state. The Homeland Security people are going to be checking your ID if you dare to drive around the country, pretty much like they used to in the Soviet Union. The FBI can search your apartment secretly. They can detain you without due process. They can seize your property without having to say why. Your civil rights been traded away in the name of the war on terrorism. If Americans want their rights back, they are going to have to start over from scratch and earn them. The primary threat to freedom in America is not in Afghanistan. It's right here in America. What is in Afghanistan is access to oil. The Bush family didn't mind the Bin Laden family when it came to doing business with them through George W.'s Arbusto Oil company, which received a $50,000 investment from James Bath, the American representative of Salem bin Laden, the brother of Osama. George Senior likes the Bin Laden family enough to do business with them through his work as a consultant to the Carlyle Group. The Bush administration didn't mind the Taliban regime a few months ago when it sent $43 million in aid to it. The threat to American freedom is in the giant multinational corporations who control the politicians who are rapidly dismantling the constitutional system to replace it with a corporate hierarchy. It's not in some religious cult in the Middle East. If Osama bin Laden is a danger to the American people, then he is only added to the list of dangers. Our biggest threats are from the corruption of our constitutional system. Bush and Bin Laden, if they are indeed enemies, are adversaries drawn together in a conflict that springs from their affinity of temperament and interest, as much as from any strategic or material conflict. And both families will profit from war while the sons of poor families will die in the battle. With the bombing of The World Trade Center, the Bush regime did not suddenly, miraculously transform into a trustworthy bunch of people who have the best interests of the mass of Americans at heart. No way on earth. These are the same people who stopped the vote count, pulled off an inside job to seize power in a way that was clearly in defiance of the most fundamental principles of a democratic republic. And they are now wasting no time exploiting the current situation to further the agenda they have pushed on the American people in spite of the fact that the vast majority of Americans are opposed issue by issue to their initiatives. They misrepresented their agenda during the election, and they did not receive a majority of the votes cast, even in Florida. In spite of the fact that they cynically thwarted democratic principles to seize control, they made no effort to represent the majority once they took power. Right down the line, issue by issue, the Bush agenda serves the 10 percent or so that he works for, and no one else. The Bush II administration represents a grab by the 10 percent that controls 90 percent of the wealth for as much more as it possibly can get, and hell with what all the polls say the vast majority of the people want. Nothing happened to suddenly turn the Bush regime into noble leaders. It didn't happen. The polls that showed Bush jumping from under a 50 percent approval rating to a 92 percent are saying one thing only: We are uniting as one people behind our leader to defend our country and our free society. It would be the same no matter who was president or how he became president - at that moment, after the shock of the attack. The sudden doubling did not measure a sudden increase in Bush's stature, it measured the magnitude of the atrocity inflicted upon America when the World Trade Center towers were obliterated. But people aren't stupid. They caught on eventually that Poppy Bush's beloved Gulf War was a fraud. His mismanagement of the economy was not just ineptness of economic management skills, or even that he was too busy playing geopolitical control games to notice that things were falling apart at home. The main focus of a Bush government is to set the stage for the aristocracy to stuff their pockets with as much as time will allow, and eventually there isn't much left for the remainder of the population to divvy up. The richest 10 percent control 90 percent of the wealth now in the U.S. What kind of a society is that? A close look at the polls that are constantly taken by a great many political and marketing agencies will reveal that what Americans really believe is not nearly what the corporate media tell us we believe. It can be clearly discerned in a very empirical fashion by studying real polls and comparing them with what the major media portrays as the middle of the political spectrum. At a recent anniversary celebration of the end of the Vietnam War, Noam Chomsky described how polls of the American people about Vietnam showed that something like 85 percent of the population held an opinion that was completely off the screen in the media portrayal of the range of opinion on the matter. In the mainstream media (including the New York Times, as well as the network news programs) the opinions on Vietnam ranged from the "hawks," who say, "It was a just cause and we could have won if we hadn't had our hands tied behind us by the peace queers back home," to the "doves." The doves are portrayed as saying, "It was a just cause, but the government made some mistakes." The American people, on the other hand, by a huge majority, believe simply that it was an immoral war and the United States should have never waged war in Vietnam. The disadvantage of the greedy few who control most of the wealth in the U.S. and who are so insatiable they cannot restrain themselves from relentlessly pushing for more, is that they make themselves more and more of a minority. Gradually they actualize their barbaric, fearful world view by creating enemies of practically everyone. Back when Oliver North was cowboying around with the full authority of the U.S. government behind him, the Reagan-Bush administration set up contingency plans for suspending the Constitution, declaring martial law and interning large numbers of people. With George W.'s record in Texas as the most prodigious executor of people since the death penalty was pulled back into the "Constitutional" column in the early '70s, we know that he won't stop with internment. These are very serious concerns and the only thing that will keep martial law from destroying constitutional rights will be the spirit of the American people. Bush said that the perpetrators of the WTC atrocity underestimated the spirit of the American people. But he and his regime may have made the same mistake. Americans have gone along with a lot. But when someone seriously limits their personal liberties, it can only go so far before the sleeping giant's ire is raised. Totalitarian control up close Watching a series of events in the U.S. that parallels the Nazi takeover of Germany in the '20s and '30s -- the corruption of political processes by money, the suppression of the unions, the super-concentration of wealth, the sell-out of government to big business, the internment of certain ethnic groups or economic classes, the building of a military machine that fuels big industry, the use of electronic media for propaganda, etc. -- convinced me that I should bone up on the literature about living in a totalitarian society because I believe we are already in one, relatively speaking. I pulled out Huxley's "Brave New World" and Orwell's "1984," which I dearly love, and also pulled out a book called "We" by the Russian Eugeni Zamiatin, which I had never read before. Published in the early '20s, it is a portrayal of a technologically sophisticated totalitarian world in which people are utterly brainwashed into thinking that "freedom" was some kind of primitive state of beast-like ancestors of ancient history. The history of mankind traced a contour from nomadic societies to more sedentary ones, it was reasoned, so the so the most highly evolved society would be the most sedentary. Their cities are encircled by walls -- built with garbage. As I was gathering all these dystopian novels, part of me was thinking, "Are you crazy? Do you want to drive yourself crazy, to suicidal depression? Do you like self torture? Do you want to wallow in the most depressing aspects of the world?" At the same time there was a part of me that was drawn irresistibly to the study. It was an impulse akin to the compulsion to glare at a car wreck. It is a morbid aspect of human nature, but it is paired like eros and thanatos with the instinct for survival. One needs to know what it is that threatens one's survival. I do not subscribe to the simple Reagan-Bush fairy tale world populated with such mythic forces as "The Evil Empire" and a series of Bad Guys like Noriega, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, who all happened to been propped up in their rise to power, or somehow involved in transactions with Bush & Co. before they achieved the status of The Latest Satan. I don't for a moment get worked up over Baby Bush's attempt at stirring war rhetoric. But I see the signs. Cheney recently said the war "may not end in our lifetimes," and that is precisely the scenario portrayed in "1984." So I felt compelled to study all these books for whatever insight I could derive from them. Oddly enough, as I dug into "We," I found myself not getting depressed, but feeling liberated. Zamiatin's use of a journal form to portray the subject's mental processes, provides a fascinating glimpse into the mind of someone who is deeply brainwashed, and in a disturbingly familiar way. In the journal form, the storyteller does not implicitly know the end of the story at the beginning, as in a typical narrative. He experiences the changes along with the reader. We watch the character's mind transform as his conditioning is shaken loose and his inner nature surfaces. At the beginning he writes, "…I shall try to record only the things I see, the things I think, or, to be more exact, the things we think. Yes, 'we'; that is exactly what I mean, and 'We', therefore, shall be the title of my records. But this will only be a derivative of our life, of our mathematical, perfect life in the United State." He is a mathematician, he worships order, venerates non-freedom. Under the conditioning of the United State, freedom is considered a primitive, animalistic state of existence from which humankind was saved by the state. Artistic inspiration is seen as a form of epilepsy. The disorder of life in the ancient world, in which people had different color homes, wore different clothes and followed their own whims, is seen as horrifying. In the United State everything is regimented. People all dress alike. Their glass dwellings are all alike. They all rise at the same hour, go to work at the same hour, have a specified time for walking, and even certain times designated as "sexual hour," strictly controlled. It is an encounter with a woman that disrupts the conditioning of the main character. At first he says she "had a disagreeable effect upon me, like an irrational component of an equation which you cannot eliminate." Gradually she puts a spell on him and he is wrenched out of his perfectly rational world. He experiences jealousy for the first time, a primitive emotion supposed to be eradicated in a world where all children are raised by the state. He discovers an individuality he never knew existed. His conditioning begins to unravel. What was most liberating in reading it was the way it portrays how freedom is in the mind. It reminded me of Sly Stone's song "Stand," when he says, "Don't you know that you are free? Well at least in your mind if you want to me." Ultimately, if you are not free in your mind, nothing exterior can free you. Conversely, if the power mongers have convinced you that their vision of reality is The Reality, then again, you have lost the battle for your own freedom before it has begun. That's why, as John Judge says, the powers spend so much money trying to control what Orwell called "the space between your ears." While the American people have been asleep at the wheel, the politician-thugs legally and politically dismantled their constitutional rights and power. But power on paper and power in the real world are two different things. The politicians can get away with almost any plunder they want to most of the time. But there is only so far the public will be pushed. This isn't just a matter of the American spirit, it is really about the human spirit and the inherent love of freedom. In America, this tradition has taken root and grown. The republic formed by an elite through the American revolution gradually evolved into a more democratic country in which the rights referred to in the Declaration of Independence applied to a broadening spectrum of the population. But democracy's opposite impulse has developed in parallel, the culture of nobility, feudalism, slavery, dictatorship and it has found a new power base in the growth of corporations that are so huge, they can override government by the people. The tension between the poles continues. There was some progression of Civil Rights, growth of the middle class and economic opportunity in the '50s and '60s, but today we find ourselves in a world of such massive wealth concentration it is growing to resemble a technologically sophisticated feudal society. Now that the New Barons have locked down the political system and are moving to consolidating their takeover (do they ever stop?) - the battle moves from the political stage. It is now a culture war. Whenever anyone exercises freedom of expression, individuality, creativity, charity, or kindness; whenever someone speaks up for justice for the downtrodden or simply tells the truth, that person is engaging in a kind of dissent against the oppressive world being forced upon us by the new aristocracy. So if music be the food of love, play on! --David Cogswell
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