The Liberal Media

Interesting that there are literally dozens of right wing pundits with highly visible soap boxes from where they regularly condemn the “liberal” media. The liberals they attack, like Joe McCarthy’s subversives, are pretty hard to find. I suppose to them liberal is anyone who doesn’t slavishly, hysterically, promote their issues, which ultimately reduce to: the wealthy don’t really rule and it is good that they do.

Left/Right

The terms left/right are loosely bandied about in mainstream political discussion. Reading Michael Parenti I’ve come to the idea that the Right can be defined as pro-capitalist and the Left anti-capitalist. The sub-group, the religious right, is a staunch ally of the Right and is manipulated or co-opted by the dominant group. This is accomplished by exploiting the sub-group’s insecurity-driven desire, like their fundamentalist brethren across all ‘faiths’, to force their religious beliefs on others. The religious left is a sub-group of the Left but it comes to that position not out of exploitation by the dominant group but through an over-lap in values.

The heart of the U.S. Right is the tiny percentage of multi-billionaires and their closest associates who live in high privilege thanks to capitalism. A necessary percentage of their resources, in their view, must be expended to persuade as many of the other (lower) class as possible to invest emotionally in the system that serves them so well. To this end they maintain tight control over the media (through ownership), the congress and administration (through campaign contributions) and other institutional life by sitting on boards, tax-deductible gifts and various other strategies.

In the U.S., alternatives to Capitalism are discouraged by excluding such movements from the corporate media and by misrepresenting them on the rare occasions when they do appear. Extreme measures are relatively rare and unnecessary due to the effectiveness of the propaganda system. The murder of Fred Hampton in 1969 Chicago is a home example of what is more common in what is euphemistically called U.S. foreign policy.

To the uninitiated this may sound harsh but in a nutshell, the government channels aid, particularly military aid, to governments and elites who in turn provide a proper business climate for U.S. corporations, meaning, low wages, no or controlled unions, a tame media, access to cheap natural resources, and a military/police presence to enforce these policies against all ‘threats’. The home corporate media portray this arrangement in a way that assures a misinformed and thus compliant home population.