Word Soup

Amy Goodman interviews Naomi Klein, whose books No Logo and Shock Doctrine are must reads to help look beyond simplistic Dem/Repub rhetoric and understand the modern age of corporate branding, image control, disinformation and government influence. They discuss how corporations (and the politicians who are paid to love them) use moments of crisis (9/11 (Iraq/oil), Katrina (privatization of Louisiana schools) or high gas prices (offshore drilling)) as an opportunity not to correct this nation's shortcomings, but instead to exploit the American public further.

"There really is a kind of a tsunami of shocks facing not just the economy but people's lives, people's real lives. They're all intersecting. They're making each other worse. And I think we really are seeing some very live examples of what a write about in the book, which is how there is a strategy. And this is what I mean by "the shock doctrine." There is a clear political strategy, and has been for several decades, to exploit these moments when people are desperate for quick-fix solutions and more inclined to believe in a kind of a magical cure, to push through very, very unpopular policies that don't actually solve the crisis at hand, that don't actually help people, but are incredibly profitable for multinational corporations."

I wrote an article on just this subject yesterday for Broadband Reports, concerning how the nation's largest ISPs (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon) are taking advantage of growing concerns that we lack rural broadband coverage to pass their version of a "national broadband strategy" that runs completely contrary to the interests of the public.

Of course this would be far more difficult to accomplish if the nation's media (tech or otherwise) wasn't so utterly devoid of critical and independent thought and remembered their job is to report the TRUTH, not to report some vague, nebulous version of the truth watered down in a misguided effort to strike a cross-ideological balance that won't offend advertisers, sources, or radical partisan asshats.

The majority of the reporters and bloggers out there bob and chirp their fawning and unquestioning approval for nearly every corporate policy or product, and suffer from the same subjective delusions we witnessed with embedded reporters during the Iraq war. And the results are comparable domestically.