The New America

Until very recently, I have avoided the news. It’s mostly political and it just pisses me off, watching these professional liars and thieves pretending to be honorable upstanding people. With a few individual exceptions, they are anything but honorable. Pumped up sales people in the pockets of corporate lobby groups with one eye on the polls and the other on the public trough.

I used to involve myself in political activities and parties. At some point, I have been involved in everything from the far nut bar left to the far nut bar right and several points between those extremes. I saw very little that would contradict my opinion of politicos, politicians, and would be politicians. As a group, they proved to be self-serving con artists dedicated to presenting themselves as dedicated, selfless public servants.

They oft make a public spectacle of dressing up and going to church on Sunday. I suppose to expiate the sins of the dirty work done the rest of the week. Or maybe it’s just part of looking like a good guy, hoping to pull votes from the pews.

I know there are some very fine individual exceptions to the rule. I’ve known a few. Not many, not nearly enough.

Fool that I am, I recently began paying attention the news media again. Particularly stories and reports coming out of my old alma mater, the USA. Yowsa! To my surprise, things have gotten much worse since the last time I really paid attention.

FOX is the worst, a virtual organ of the Republican Party. CNN, MS NBC, and that popular rag, USA Today, seem to be driven by the same pro-conservative editorial policy. Diversity in media is a thing of the past. But, what do you expect when it all belongs to the same small group of wealthy interests?

Absolute control of the media has been and is high on the corporate/conservative agenda. The Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, Hoover Institution and other right-wing foundations have invested over 300 million dollars in mass media distribution. That buys a lot of co-operation and the hearts and minds of many pundits and would-be pundits hoping to get part of the Republican propaganda budget.

No one outside the US has any trust in American media. Alternative papers have popped up in France and other European countries. Papers printing American writers who now have difficulty getting published in the ‘free’ press of American.

In the US, alternative media outlets such as Democracy Now are gaining audiences seeking an alternative to the government sanctioned reporting that fills the main stream media.

The corporate/conservative bias in American media is so pervasive that any real questions will label a writer or a paper as liberal or even leftist, regardless of where they actually sit on the political compass. In the minds of many politically confused Americans, the conservative right is now seen as the political middle.
Strange to behold.

To this expatriate looking back at the US, this new version of America the Corporate Homeland looks weird, ugly, and dangerous to itself and the rest of the world.