Today's world which embodies unimaginable suffering of billions of humans and other beings — with its sixth major extinction, devastating endless wars, crushing poverty, redistribution of wealth into the hands of the very few, with nuclear weapons and other critical threats to all of life on Earth, and more — can all be traced to asking and answering this essential question: How did thinking that benefited the few gain acceptance of the many? May we all be passionate in our quest of answering this question and for the truth that is to be found on the other side of our illusions, ignorance, and indoctrination. The truth holds the potential to set us all free. We humans can evolve beyond our infancy. The time is now. — Molly
For manipulation to be most effective, evidence of its presence should be nonexistent.... It is essential, therefore, that people who are manipulated believe in the neutrality of their key social institutions.
Capitalism cannot be reduced to one or a few features, but it does possess one relationship, central to its existence and operation, that constitutes the essence of inequality and ineradicable instability: the wage-labor-capital connection that dwells at the heart of the system.
But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.
How can a democratic discourse exist in a corporate owned informational system? Who, for example, possesses freedom of speech in such a society?
The content and forms of American communications — the myths and the means of transmitting them — are devoted to manipulation. When successfully employed, as they invariably are, the result is individual passivity, a state of inertia that precludes action.
Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.
The "cumulative effects" of unbridled commercialism, however difficult to assess, constitute one key to the impact of growing up in the core of the world's marketing system. Minimally, it suggests unpreparedness for, and lack of interest in, the world that exists outside the shopping mall.
In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade."
Deregulation has been, above all else, a means of reducing corporate business's accountability to the public.
With deregulation, one sector of the economy after another is "liberated" to capital's unmonitored authority. The very notion that there is a public interest is contested.
Behind all the hype shaping the electronic highway are corporate interests. These huge companies are doing the most natural thing in the world to them; following their own corporate interest.
The flow of information it promotes is free in one respect only. The flow is expected to be freely admitted to all the spaces that its providers desire to transmit to. Otherwise there is nothing free about the information. Quite the contrary. Information and message flows are already, and will continue to be, priced to exact the highest revenues extractable.
Though some still see the Internet, for example, as a democratic structure for international individual expression, it is more realistic to recognize it as only the latest technological vehicle to be turned, sooner or later, to corporate advantage — for advertising, marketing and general corporate aggrandizement.
Ultimately, each transnational firm strives for its own advantage, and is supported in that effort by the state power wherein it resides, or at least where its main shareholders are domiciled.
How well a posse policy will fare in a world with 3 billion people below the poverty line and nuclear warheads scattered around a dozen or more regions like melons in a field, is not easy to imagine.
One growing threat to the stability of the U.S. economy, and therefore to its capability to continue to direct the global order, paradoxically emerges from its success in establishing capitalism around the world.
Popular dissatisfaction seems to occur only when the shopping or the commercials are interrupted. In such an atmosphere, is there any reason to imagine that saturation shopping could be a source of instability to the U.S. world position?
I have never forgotten how the deprivation of work erodes human beings, those not working and those related to them. And from that time on, I loathed an economic that could put a huge part of its workforce on the streets with no compunction.
The actions and inactions of hundreds of millions of people and nearly 200 states, will affect what kind of world emerges in the time ahead.
Herbert Schiller
Quotes from Living In the Number One Country
*****
A review of Living In the Number One Country:
Reflections from a Critic of American Empire
Living in the Number One Country is Herbert I. Schiller's chronicle of the symbiotic relationship between post-WWII American Empire and the substance and technology of the communications businesses. Schiller traces how the State has supported corporatized information by pushing their products abroad both through phony pronouncements about "the free-flow of information," and by subsidizing research and development for new technologies. Schiller's refreshing account infuses elements of his own experience; growing up during the Great Depression in New York, as a bureaucrat in the civilian sector of the military occupation forces in Berlin after the war, and as a radical journalist and academic.
This intriguing book argues that the main pillar of today's U.S. economy—the ever-expanding communication sector—is also the most crucial element in keeping a 500-year social system, capitalism, alive. Capitalism's future relies not only on labor exploitation, but also on a steadily entertained, and hence diverted, populace. Therein lies the importance of challenging the overarching institutions of corporate information production.
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