February 28, 2017
Whoever controls information controls our minds
It used to very simple to explain. Until very recently, information was distributed by the Corporate Media, which was controlled by the Power Elites. The Power Elites were a small, tight group of selfish billionaires who wanted to preserve their control over the rest of us. Among their ranks were the owners of the Corporate Media, so those owners made sure the information that they distributed to the public preserved their elite group’s power and profits. Only the internet provided any competition to their information control.
But a year and a half ago the high-handed owners of the Corporate Media began to operate more and more independently of their fellow elites. They challenged their fellow elites by promoting a lunatic brat TV personality for the presidency of the United States, an immoral child who is obviously unqualified to hold down a job as a greeter at Walmart. They promoted the crazy brat every single day and night for months on end on throughout pretty much all of their information outlets, effectively drowning out all other political discourse and all other candidates.
To their surprise, and apparently to their horror, that unqualified idiot brat captured the presidency. Actually the brat didn’t win, but manipulations of the vote, in other words rigging, yielded for the brat the winning result that was meant for another Re-pub, another candidate that would have instead represented the interests of the usual Old Boy elites. But instead those Old Boy elites were cast aside. That usurpation wasn’t supposed to happen. Oops.
Laya
From talking to people who support President Pussygrabber, and from candid media interviews of Trump voters, I hear the same disturbing thing over and over. These folks appear to believe that the national elections really don’t matter, such things are far away and basically unreal, they don’t really effect our lives. They see it all as pure entertainment, no different form any other sport event or made for TV special. Meanwhile the country runs itself no matter who is in charge.
Of course I’m talking about regular folks, not the rich and powerful, not the controllers of national institutions. Nor am I talking about rabid Teabaggers or other mentally unstable radicals and flaming bigots. When I talk with the Trump voters that I know, people I’ve known for years, I find I can easily out argue them because the facts speak for themselves. But then they dismiss the facts.
Always the same thing. “None of it matters” or “It’s all just a big put-on” or “Nothing’s different, nothing’s gonna change” and more than anything else, “It’s all entertaining to watch anyway.” Where exactly did this attitude come from? How did so many people come to believe that their own country doesn’t matter, their own vote doesn’t matter, and that their government doesn’t mean anything?
Arkita, Younger
A big problem is that almost no one in America trusts our dominant institutions anymore, and for good reason. It’s not the institutions themselves, it’s the routine public behaviors of the people who have been dominating these institutions for so long. The wonder is that there is any trust left at all and that it has taken so long for people to lose faith in how these institutions are managed.
I wonder if this attitude that the elections don’t matter is a reaction caused by the loss of trust, a way of dealing with uncertainty caused by distrust. Of course the Corporate Media has been telling us for decades that elections are just sports events, carefully concealing substantive issues and real debate while loudly emphasizing blatant trivia. Up until the middle of the last decade, when the internet became ubiquitous, it was really difficult and often impossible to get around the mechanisms of information suppression and find out what was really going on.
But there’s more to it than that. It’s like people have wanted to be fooled, people wanted to be lied to. People wanted to hear that everything was just swell. People wanted someone to do their thinking for them. People wanted to be entertained. And the people got what they asked for.
Katekka As A Kitten
But now they’re not satisfied because they’re not getting what they want anymore. Reality has been intruding into their lives a little too much lately. So they retreated into a fantasy of electing an “upstart” who is “going to shake things up” and piss off all the sorts of people they don’t like. A fantasy that was presented to them through the same media full of lies that they had grown to not trust, sincerely believing that the fantasy had seized control of the media that had created it.
The loss of trust of our institutions comes from the widespread use of blatant lying as a political tool, a tool which the contemptuous elites have relied on more and more to control the American people and to advance their short term objectives. In my lifetime lying by the federal government goes back to the pointless War Against Vietnam. For the next three decades after that public satisfaction with institutional lying continued to dominate public discourse, and the persons who controlled and occupied those institutions were more than happy to lie to the public.
Eventually as happens to all unrestrained liars their lying became chronic, the standard default behavior for both government and corporations. And as the years passed their contempt for the public became increasingly deeper and wider, because lying is always a manner of showing contempt for the people who are being lied to. You don’t lie to someone if you think those lies will have negative consequences to yourself.
Dotika
But all that lying did have consequences. Eventually people stopped trusting the liars. Oh, it was good while it lasted, the lies made it easy to rob the public and take away their political power. But now the lies don’t seem to work very well anymore, not as well as they used to. So now the elites need a new media, or maybe they don’t need one at all anymore.
So suddenly we have a new media reality. The traditional Corporate Media represents the interests of the Old Boy elites. That traditional media is now at war with a new media coalition that represents the new upstart elites centered around Donald Pussygrabber Trump. And starting late in February some of the traditional Corporate Media purveyors, such as CNN and the NY Times have been barred from the White House. This is a power struggle happening in front of our eyes.
What’s happened is that we now have two media camps, both of which are peddling the corporate agenda. Each camp represents one side of a power struggle between two opposing sets of Corporatist elites in this country, the Old Boy elites and the Upstart Elites. The purpose of this power struggle is to decide which group of elites gets to control the minds of the citizens, that is, who gets the power to tell lies to you and me.
Katekka
Two Sundays after the disastrously rigged presidential election this past November, the local corporate owned newspaper that we have here in Albany, the Times Union, ran an editorial about the costs of health care. Normally I don’t read these opinion pieces because I consider them deliberately misleading and bogus, the real editorials are the headline stories that the editors choose. But for some reason I scanned this one, and about halfway through I almost fell out of chair.
You see, as a corporate outlet the Times Union has always been vehemently opposed to affordable health care. The local managers and content providers of the Times Union have even gone so far as to manufacture fake news designed in opposition to the Affordable Care Act, producing what can only be called politically correct lies that were immediately picked up and amplified by radical right fringe fake news sites. I strongly suspect that they did this to fulfill a directive handed them by their owners at the Hearst Corporation, but no matter.
As part of their Corporatist political orientation, the Times Union content providers have been, for many years, strictly prohibited from using the phrase “single payer health.” For those who don’t know, single payer would slash the cost of health care in this country by eliminating the swarm of competing corporate bureaucracies that are not only driving up costs but are also also restricting access to health providers. The downside of Single Payer is that combining all these parasitic corporate bureaucracies into one single bureaucracy will reduce some of the profits available to a small group of elite billionaire investors. Of course that can’t be allowed to happen.
Laya
So what do we make of this late November editorial from the Times Union? They start out the essay by waggling their fingers over the epi-pen scandal, which you may recall involved some outrageous monopolistic price hikes for a simple low cost device that is designed to prevent sudden death. But then halfway through the editorial comes this:
Rather than consider reasonable alternatives that would help keep down the cost of drugs to consumers – such as a single-payer system or a publicly-managed option – these lawmakers bow to the powerful health care, pharmaceutical and insurance industry lobbies. Those giant industries spend upwards of $400 million annually lobbying Congress. That’s one of the reasons the Affordable Care Act lacked the fundamental changes needed to better control the rapid rise in medical costs. A single-payer system or a public option – most Western nations have one of those features or the other – would allow the government to negotiate prices for drugs and medical devices, but Congress has been steadfast in its opposition.