We’ve lived so long under the spell of hierarchy—from god-kings to feudal lords to party bosses—that only recently have we awakened to see not only that “regular” citizens have the capacity for self-governance, but that without their engagement our huge global crises cannot be addressed. The changes needed for human society simply to survive, let alone thrive, are so profound that the only way we will move toward them is if we ourselves, regular citizens, feel meaningful ownership of solutions through direct engagement. Our problems are too big, interrelated, and pervasive to yield to directives from on high.
—Frances Moore Lappé, excerpt from Time for Progressives to Grow Up

Tuesday, January 22, 2019

The Fetishization of the Corporate Media

Click here to access article by C. J. Hopkins from his blog Consent Factory, Inc.

There are so many insightful gems in this piece that I only want to urge you to read it. So, I will try to keep my commentary short. 

Hopkins uses his masterful gift of satire to ridicule our rather desperate masters (or overlords) in the ruling capitalist class while he provides serious reasons why we shouldn't listen to these purveyors of "horseshit". Yet, media corporations remain a fetish for most ordinary Americans who daily tune in to find out what is going on in the world. 

His attack of media corporations is only one step away from urging us to establish our own media in one big, powerful, bottom-up based authority structure to take down their media corporations; and along with them, to take down their domestic and foreign policies and actions that are literally and figuratively killing us and so many people across the world!

To demonstrate the latter truth, I will only quote his and critically important, final paragraph--and urge you to read the article.
If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they have disseminated during the last two years, you’d have to be a total moron or a diehard neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official narrative of its ruling classes).