Tuesday, October 16, 2007

The New Three Branches

The distinctions between the corporations, the media and the government have melted away. This is mainly due to the erosion of all checks and firewalls intended to prevent the cross-pollination of corruption between the institutions. Of course those firewalls have not been simply eroded over time like limestone formations in the wind, but they have been deliberately dismantled piece by piece, primarily by the corporations. The primary goal of any corporation is to simultaneously grow and maintain profit. Over recent decades, those who lead and manage these giant corporations have become more overtly political.

This is not necessarily due to these individuals' inherent partisanship, but more likely due to the simple idea that in order to maximize profits at all costs, political considerations should be factored into any business goal. And so the mentality develops among managers and in the boardroom that Republican control will DIRECTLY result in increased revenues and profits.

The mouthpieces like Rush, Coulter, O'Reilly and Hannity are not philosophers concerned about the state of the human soul. Rather, they are simply salesmen, working to create demand for rightwing products while at the same time working to frame the competition's products as defective and harmful. The rise in demand for conservative leadership had more to do with marketing than anything else. It has long been established on Madison Avenue that marketing creates demand for products that one would never think of purchasing. This is fact.

And so what has happened over time is that the giant corporations realized that acquiring news companies was worth far more in terms of overall market value than in whatever profits they could wring out of dead industries like radio and newspapers. Combine that with the infiltration of the government by pro-corporate forces or outright agents and you have domination of political opinion and promotion of the rightwing agenda.

Privatization is simply the attempt to substitute corporations for the government. And the media companies, whose duties used to be to provide a check on the government are now owned and operated by the same corporations who are attempting to seize permanent control of the government.

Which brings us to FISA. The Democrats are trying to pass RESTORE, an attempt to restore some of our legal protections against domestic spying. People seem to be missing the forest for the trees here. Bush is seeking to protect his corporate conspirators in illegally spying on U.S. citizens by pushing for immunity for those telecommunications companies who cooperated with him in handing over the phone and internet records of the entire country. I haven't seen any proof just yet, but I think it doesn't take much connecting the dots to realize that this is the government outsourcing the job of spying on the American citizens to the corporations. And the one thing I know about corporations is that they have some very sophisticated tools for data mining. It's not the mere fact that every single bit of digital information about you is being stored and archived, but how is that information being used. The government has used information in the past to blackmail it's political enemies. Do you think the Bush Administration would hesitate to use the advantage of knowing everything about you?

The internal politics of a corporation do not contain a shred of democracy in them - they are dicatorships. So when these same companies execute a takeover of the government, they're going to institute the methods and practices that keep the cash flowing.

The eradication of checks and balances, the control of information, the dissemination of propaganda and misinformation, the domestic spying and blinding loyalty to an all-powerful leader constitute the primordial ooze from which fascism evolves. But in the end, it's just business. And all three players in the dynamic - corporations, government and the media - seek to protect each other's interests and jobs as they are really three separate, but equal branches of the same ruling body: Finance (Corporations), Administrative (U.S. Government) and Public Relations/Marketing (Media).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is a great post.. So true.. And what could we possibly do about it?

Lefty said...

Without question the first step is simply to recognize this as a new reality. And then to get fellow citizens to realize this as well. It's similar to FOX - first we had to mainstream the very idea of what reality actually was - that FOX is not news but a government media and propaganda outlet.

They have so much power just in the fact that so many people still think the old model applies. Once the illusion is dispelled the consortium can be disconnected. But people really need to see this for what it is first.